You know how when you are really little, you listen to your parents without questioning too much? Sure, there's a complaint here and there, but their authority was iron-clad. Then you hit your preteens/teens and you start pushing those buttons and pushing limits.

That's the United States around 1798.

When the colonies defeated the British and became an independent nation, they did so without any example to follow. They just thought to themselves, "What can be so hard about getting several sovereigns states together under the authority of a federal government and have it stay true to democratic values? Easy-peasy."

No, not so much.

It didn't take long for those in charge to disagree about how much power the federal government should have in relation to the states. The first signs of teenage rebellion arose after the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798. These expanded the federal government's power on the topic of immigration and gave the president the power to imprison and deport. But did the federal government have the right to do that?

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison didn't think so. Abuse of power, they said. Unconstitutional, they said. Well, they didn't say it. They secretly wrote resolutions on behalf of the states of Kentucky and Virginia, who didn't want to enforce the law.

This would be the first time that the concept of nullification pops up in U.S. history. John C. Calhoun was reading this like mad crazy when he wrote his Exposition. Jefferson and Madison believed that the Constitution granted the federal government very limited powers and that the Union existed purely as something that the states created and agreed on. Not the other way around.

Eventually the Alien and Sedition Acts fell out of fashion and no other states really wanted to jump on the nullification bandwagon with Kentucky and Virginia. But the idea was planted, and people like Calhoun would take notice.