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.
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