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Carolina nullification controversy. The Nullification Crisis of 1832 was targeted around Southern protests against a chain of protective tariffs. The tariffs taxed all foreign goods to help expand the sales of manufactured products in the United States. The goal was to protect the northern manufacturers from the competitive British goods. The Southern economy would be at a great disadvantage, because of their reliance on both the North and foreign countries for finished goods. Though many people who supported the taxes were centralized in the North and were mostly Whig industrialists. The southern poor farmers, who were more likely to be Democrats, loathed the tariffs. They saw them as unconstitutional and there for wanted them to be nullified more.

Nullification was also a states rights issue that helped create the divide of the parties. South Carolina was to use the Doctrine of Nullification, which was principle first used by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. After John C. Calhoun examined the tariffs, and a special convention met in South Carolina with more than two-thirds agreement, South Carolina decided to make the “unconstitutional” and North favoring tariffs null and void in the state. This did not make democratic president, Andrew Jackson very happy. Defiance and disunion in the nation is something he would not handle. Even though he did not support the tariffs, he used his military ways and made threats to the state, saying they would invade and hang the nullifiers.

The Whigs and Democratic parties split for support of Clays American System, specifically on the constitutionality of internal improvements being controlled by the national government. The Whigs supported the stronger central government, while Jackson and the democrats had a strict interpretation of the constitution, believed that Congress did not have the power to decide on the internal improvements. Jackson believed that the roads and other improvements should be left up to the states. He also believed that their funding should be left up to the states. Like Madison vetoing the roads and canals as unconstitutional, Jackson vetoed the Maysville road project of Kentucky, and other infrastructure projects.

The citizens of the United States were pulled in two different directions, through out the “Era of Good Feelings”, where the definition of the federal governments power over the states began to crystallize. Generally those who believed in a more centralized and powerful government fell in with the Whig Party and those who believed in greater state power leaned Democratically. The formation and maintenance of the United States bank, which became the Federal Reserve, was part of the struggle and divide of the two parties. State abilities to nullify tariffs and laws set by the federal governments were growing pains of the forming nation, and construction of the Whig party and Democratic party.