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Nullification   /nˌələfəkˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Nullification

noun
1.
The states'-rights doctrine that a state can refuse to recognize or to enforce a federal law passed by the United States Congress.
2.
The act of nullifying; making null and void; counteracting or overriding the effect or force of something.  Synonym: override.






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"Nullification" Quotes from Famous Books



... democratic ideals, and Jefferson could have asked for nothing better. He immediately drafted his famous Kentucky Resolutions, and the obedient Madison did a like service for Virginia. The Resolutions of Madison, although containing all the seeds of nullification and secession, are tame indeed compared with the performance of a man who, enveloped in the friendly mists of anonymity, was as aggressive and valiant as Hamilton on the warpath. These Resolutions protested against the unconstitutionality of the Federal ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... essentially the party of "liberal ideas," and he was much praised by the anti-Hearst newspapers for this consoling description; but it can hardly be considered as an illustration of Mr. Jerome's "intellectual veracity." If by "liberal ideas" one means economic and political heresies, such as nullification, "squatter" sovereignty, secession, free silver, and occasional projects of repudiation, then, indeed, the Democracy has been a party of "liberal ideas." But heresies of this kind are not the expression of liberal thought; ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... in congress to pass the bankrupt law—to lay a duty on imports for the encouragement of manufactures—to appropriate money for the relief of the poor of the district of Columbia: and in Mr. John Quincy Adams's, the Cherokee treaty—the nullification doctrine—the power of appointing public officers, together with several of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... is the only period of altogether healthy political life. Until 1832 there was only one party in the state, the Democratic, but the question of nullification caused a division that year into the (Jackson) Democratic party and the State's Rights (Calhoun Democratic) party; about the same time, also, there arose, chiefly in those counties where the proportion of slaves to freemen was greater and the freemen were most aristocratic, the Whig party. For ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Massachusetts testify. Let his own declaration, a month after the peace measures were adopted, that the Union was passing through a fiery trial, testify.[4] How far the work of the two days has fortified the Constitution, let the recent law of Vermont, denounced as an utter nullification of the Constitution, because it rescues the alleged fugitive from the hands of the commissioner, and gives him a jury trial before a State court, testify. When rumors were rife that Mr. Webster intended to repudiate his own thunder, the ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock

... the nullification of his marriage; and as the courts did not proceed fast enough for his impatience, he killed his companion, Benedicte, with a pistol-shot, at the moment when she was biting and tearing ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... Jefferson's influence became uppermost, and Madison swung over to the extreme of the state rights view, and drew the resolutions of the Virginia legislature declaring the Alien and Sedition laws "utterly null and void and of no effect," so that he has also been called the "Father of Nullification." However unstable his opinions may have been, there is no questioning his patriotism or the purity of ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... attacks naturally resulted in a chronic condition. Charleston was the scene of his brief, though not wholly unsuccessful, career as a play-wright. In Charleston he edited the Daily Gazette in the exciting tunes of Nullification, taking with all the strength that was in him the unpopular side of the burning question. In the doorway of the Gazette office he stood defiantly as the procession of Nullifiers came down the street, evidently ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett

... unexpected. The steamboat had come to be used, so that he seemed to be transported from place to place by magic; and on a near view the politics of America seemed not less interesting than those of Europe. The nullification battle was set; the currency conflict still raged; it was a time of inflation and land speculation; the West, every day more explored and opened, was the land of promise for capital and energy. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

... and defence by the young nation of that principle which is known as the Monroe Doctrine that European despotism should make no further progress in the Western Hemisphere. It is in the great argument of Webster replying to Hayne and the stout declaration of Jackson that he would treat nullification as treason. It was the compelling force of the Civil War, expounded by Lincoln in his unyielding purpose to save the Union but "with malice toward none, with charity for all," which General Grant, his greatest soldier, put into practice at Appomattox when he sent General Lee back with his sword, ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge

... the "nullification" crisis. In 1828 a new protective tariff had been passed, which was regarded in the South, especially in South Carolina, as extremely unjust and injurious. The New England States had been averse to ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... was an arbitrary and unreasonable interference with the right of women to contract for the sale of their labour. When, therefore, this year a ten-hour bill was tried, W.C. Ritchie, who had secured the nullification of the act of 1893, again protested. The decision of the Court, rendered April 21, 1910, is an excellent proof of the great advance made within two decades in the position of women. Reversing completely its judgment of 1895, the Court left far behind it mere technicalities ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... complaints, raised the scale of tariff duties in the years 1824 and 1828, and recognized anew the principle on which it was founded. A doctrine was then proclaimed, or rather revived, in the south, which took the name of nullification. ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... returning to the Kentucky Resolutions of 1799, affirmed the right of any State to declare null and void any act of Congress which the State Legislature deemed unconstitutional. This was the doctrine of nullification which grew ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... violent talk, followed, however, during the summer, and in the autumn the Legislature of the State put forth the famous "exposition and protest" which emanated from Mr. Calhoun, and embodied in the fullest and strongest terms the principles of "nullification." These movements were viewed with regret and with some alarm throughout the country, but they were rather lost sight of in the intense excitement of the presidential election. The accession of Jackson then came to absorb the public ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... Republic of Rome was transformed into the Empire of the Caesars. In modern times attention may be directed to the speech of James Otis on the Writs of Assistance, to Burke's speech on Conciliation with America, to Fisher Ames' speech on the Jay Treaty, and to Webster's speech on Nullification. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... their teeth and snarl, they are jist ready to fall to. The Protestants and Catholics begin to lay back their ears, and turn tail for kickin'. The Abolitionists and Planters are at it like two bulls in a pastur'. Mob-law and Lynch-law are working like yeast in a barrel, and frothing at the bung hole. Nullification and Tariff are like a charcoal pit, all covered up, but burning inside, and sending out smoke at every crack, enough to stifle a horse. General Government and State Government every now and then square off and sparr, and the first blow given will bring a genuine set-to. ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... numbers in all the States, but even a late President of the United States seriously recommended that the contracts and affairs of all corporations at least (and the bulk of modern business is done in corporate form) should be so submitted to the control or dictation, or even the nullification, of such an administrative board or commission, and this again with no appeal to the courts. So audacious an upsetting of all Anglo-Saxon ideas of the right to law, it may be said without exaggeration, has ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... denied the binding authority of acts of Congress, and even States have proposed to nullify such acts upon the ground that the Constitution was the supreme law of the land, and that those acts of Congress were repugnant to that instrument; but nullification is now aimed not so much against particular laws as being inconsistent with the Constitution as against the Constitution itself, and it is not to be disguised that a spirit exists, and has been actively at work, to rend asunder this Union, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... and in 1832 South Carolina claimed the right to "nullify" the tariff imposed by the general government. The leader of this party was John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who in his speech in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on Nullification and the {425} Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the "Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly a great orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer and a strict constitutionalist, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... its own option, whenever the people supposed they had sufficient cause. We used to discuss these things at our own mess-tables, vehemently and sometimes quite angrily; but I am sure that I never feared it would go further than it had already gone in the winter of 1832-'33, when the attempt at "nullification" was promptly suppressed by President Jackson's famous declaration, "The Union must and shall be preserved!" and by the ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman



Words linked to "Nullification" :   neutralisation, vitiation, cancellation, states' rights, neutralization, change of state, nullify, counteraction



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