Furthermore, the Three-Fifths Compromise, more familiarly known at the time as the "federal ratio," allowed slaves to count as three-fifths of free men for the purposes of representation and taxation. The compromise secured Southern votes for ratification of the Constitution and ensured disproportionate influence to Southerners for the first 50 years of the Constitution's history. Calhoun and nullification During the first half of the 19th century, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina revived and expounded upon the concurrent majority doctrine. He noted that the North, with its industrial economy, had become far more populous than the South. As the South's dependence on slavery sharply differentiated its agricultural economy from the North's, the difference in power afforded by population threatened interests that Calhoun considered essential to the South. His theory of the "concurrent majority," elaborated in his posthumous work of political theory A Disquisition on Government (1851), argued a method for protecting voting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. In life, Calhoun had been a leading proponent of the concept of nullification, as he most forcefully articulated in the 1828 South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which was published anonymously while he was vice president, in response to the protectionist Tariff of 1828, also called the "Tariff of Abominations." Nullification, an outgrowth of Jeffersonian compact theory, held that any state, as part of its rights as sovereign parties to the Constitution, had the power to declare specific federal laws void within its borders if it considered the law to be unconstitutional. Therefore, under Calhoun's schema, a law required two forms of majorities: a majority of the federal legislature and a concurrent majority of the legislatures of each state. It was on that authority in 1832 that South Carolina passed the Ordinance of Nullification on the Tariff of 1828 and its successor, the Tariff of 1832, thus beginning the Nullification Crisis. Andrew Jackson responded with the Force Bill, but armed conflict was avoided after the Tariff of 1833 was passed, the compromise being largely the work of Calhoun. References Sources Brown, Guy Story. "Calhoun's Philosophy of Politics: A Study of A Disquisition on Government" (2000) Cheek, Jr., H. Lee. Calhoun And Popular Rule: The Political Theory of the Disquisition and Discourse. (2004) online edition Ford Jr., Lacy K. "Inventing the Concurrent Majority: Madison, Calhoun, and the Problem of Majoritarianism in American Political Thought," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 60, No. 1