It’s time for me to own up to something: I possess a much larger than average collection of books and notes about the Indian Removal Act, the Early National Period, and the Nullification Crisis. Like Louis P. Masur, I think 1831 was one of the most interesting years in American history. Through a variety of contemporaneous events, we can start to see a nation moving beyond its revolutionary zeal, becoming something like the America we know today while also sowing the seeds (in the Nullification Crisis) of extralegal struggles over state rights and eventually war.

(And I guess it’s time for me to admit that when I sat on a Bahamian beach soaking up the warm winter sun in December 1999, I was reading a 1924 copy of Benjamin H. Hibbard’s A History of the Public Land Policies. Yep, it was a strange time for me.)

One of the things I love about studying American history is seeing the evolution of the “American Character” — which I believe actually exists, for better or worse (mostly for the better) — or at least the expression of various recurring aspects of an ever-changing character. It’s something I can’t satisfactorily explain even to myself as I stare dimly across the unbridgeable void to the past; but at times I feel like it wouldn’t be much harder to relate to a Midwesterner of the early 19th century than one from today.

Yet, despite being a Westerner who knew militia folks and who thought for a while that federal laws made by D.C. bureaucrats and Northeastern elites were at best advisory when applied to a wild place like Wyoming, I still have trouble grasping the fire and passion in the mid-18th century over states’ rights conflicts, abolition, and Indian Removal. I can understand but not feel the ardor of the Second Great Awakening, which helped inspire the latter two. (For that matter, I can barely understand 1968 and am pretty sure I would have been a conservative square.)

Anyway, let’s bring this rambling reminiscence to a halt and get to the point. In 2000 I wrote a paper that examined Andrew Jackson’s differing reactions to the Marshall Court’s 1832 ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (in which he nullified the Supreme Court’s decision to exert Federal supremacy over states’ right regarding so-called “Indian removal”) and the Nullification Crisis (when he was ready to send federal troops to South Carolina to enforce an act of Congress.)

I never got around to revising it when I applied to grad schools in 2002, opting instead to go with a paper I was writing at the time about the western journeys of Major Stephen H. Long. (Perhaps I would have had better results if I had.) But if you can stand a few rough edges, you might be interested in reading To Raise Up an Interesting Commonwealth: Jackson’s Reaction to Worcester and Nullification.