ullify’) the law. This concepts dated back to the Articles of Confederation. President Andrew Jackson felt the federal government was the highest authority (Article VI, Section 2) and the states had to abide by its law” (Causes 1).
In an effort to promote nationalism, the federal government took legislative measures to promote the North’s growing industrialization. One such effort was to attempt the creation of a national market which had been occurring long before the war. One such measure was the enacting of tariffs upon foreign goods in order to make it cheaper for the South to buy goods produced in the North than overseas. Jackson was on President who placed many tariffs on foreign goods if they were available from Northern manufacturers. The depression in 1837 had already served to create a disparity of wealth between the South and the North. The South was less harmed because the economic disaster did not affect their cotton economy because they sold so much of it to foreign buyers, “Southern cotton sold abroad totaled 57% of all American exports before the war. The panic of 1857 devastated the North and left the South virtually untouched. The clash of a wealthy, agricultu
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