To protect his region’s distinctive political economy, anchored in the treatment of black people as property, Calhoun had argued that state governments had the right to refuse to abide by those federal laws that they found odious. He based his case on the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, which specifies that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Fearing a rising national antislavery majority in the North and the West, Calhoun insisted that the authority for the U.S.
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