reëlection in 1832 and of "Little Van" as a candidate for the vice
presidency--and, by all tokens, for the presidency four years
later--was the last straw. Broken and desperate, Calhoun sank back
into the role of an extremist, sectional leader. There was no need of
further concealment; and in midsummer, 1831, he issued his famous
_Address to the People of South Carolina_, and this restatement of the
_Exposition_ of 1828 now became the avowed platform of the
nullification party. The _Fort Hill Letter_ of August 28, 1832,
addressed to Governor Hamilton, was a simpler and clearer presentation
of the same body of doctrine.

Matters were at last brought to a head by a new piece of tariff
legislation which was passed in 1832 not to appease South Carolina but
to take advantage of a comfortable state of affairs that had arisen in
the national treasury. The public lands were again selling well, and
the late tariff laws were yielding lavishly. The national debt was
dwindling to the point of disappearance, and the country had more
money than it could use. Jackson therefore called upon Congress to
revise the tariff system so as to reduce the revenue, and in the
session of 1831-32 several bills to that end were brought forward. The
scale of duties finally embodied in the Act of July 14, 1832,
corrected many of the anomalies of the Act of 1828, but it cut off
some millions of revenue without making any substantial change in the
protective system. Virginia and North Carolina voted heavily for the
bill, but South Carolina and Georgia as vigorously opposed it; and the
nullifiers refused to see in it any concession to the tariff
principles for which they stood. "I no longer consider the question
one of free trade," wrote Calhoun when the passage of the bill was
assured, "but of consolidation." In an address to their constituents
the South Carolina delegation in Congress declared that "protection