I searched for other posts like this but the one that I found had commenters making fun of the OP for “not doing his own APUSH homework”. In case anyone wanted to say the same thing to me, I’m only asking because I didn’t pay attention when I was learning about it in high school and I don’t understand all the legal and political jargon on the Wikipedia page.
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The US federal government created a tariff that primarily harmed southern states while protecting northern states.
Southern states complained, but nothing was done about it even by the southern friendly President Jackson.
South Carolina finally got so fed up they declared the tariff unconstitutional in the state, which ‘nullified’ the tariffs in the state giving birth to the crisis’ name.
Whether or not it was constitutional for South Carolina was up for debate, but never got argued outside theoreticals as the federal government lowered the tariff in a deal with South Carolina shortly after.
This represented the first major state government vs federal government crisis before the Civil War, where slavery/secessionist states would eventually make similar arguments that South Carolina used in their nullification.
If the crisis occurred today, South Carolina would be entirely in the wrong as states cannot nullify federal laws, but back then it was heavily debated whether or not states could nullify federal laws.
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