War was at hand. Upstairs in his White House study over the long winter of 1832-33, President Andrew Jackson stood strong against a distant state that posed, he believed, an all too imminent threat to the Union. South Carolina was defying him, and he hated it: he believed to his core that the state was putting the nation in jeopardy. Four hundred and fifty miles down the Atlantic seaboard in Charleston, radicals were raising an army to defend South Carolina's right to nullify the federal statutes it chose not to accept.

Speaking in Boston, Senator Daniel Webster, a usually staunch opponent of the president, rallied to Jackson's defense by denouncing nullification with the eloquence that had made him a lion of Capitol Hill: "It is resistance to law by force, it is disunion by force, it is secession by force: it is civil war." The Constitution that Jackson had sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend in the oath first taken by George Washington in 1789 was only 43 years old; the nation itself, dating from the Declaration of Independence, was just 56. "I expect soon to hear that a civil war of extermination has commenced," said Jackson. Though he tried to contain his anger, he failed: "I will meet all things with deliberate firmness and forbearance, but woe to those nullifiers who shed the first blood."

What unfortunately came to be known as the Nullification Crisis a bland name for an epic struggle—is largely forgotten now, confined to the memories and imaginations of historians. The events of 1832-33, however, were critical to the course of American history by postponing the Civil War. Lincoln drew inspiration from Jackson's handling of the crisis, consulting a copy of Old Hickory's Nullification Proclamation while drafting his own first inaugural address in Springfield in 1860-61. Like Lincoln, Jackson had been determined to keep the country together, no matter what the cost. Jackson drafted orders for Gen. Winfield Scott to lead federal troops against the radical forces. Jackson, the old general, would see that Scott got whatever he needed. If the rebel leaders—who included Jackson's former vice president, John C. Calhoun—raised 12,000 men, Jackson promised to muster double the force.

Though the immediate issue centered on economics—the largely agrarian South Carolina felt burdened by a federal tariff on manufactured goods that grossly increased the price of Yankee products—the real question, everyone knew, was about power. If Washington could carry the day on this, what next? Could slavery fall victim to federal law? The South believed so. For Jackson, the task before him stretched beyond statecraft. It was personal. His father had died the year he was born; the Revolutionary War had claimed the lives of his mother and his brothers, losses that left him alone in a brutally hard world as little more than a child. Jackson sought to identify his life with his country's. The United States, he once said, was "one great family," and he believed it was his destiny to preserve it. At moments