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The Great Conspiracy. John Alexander Logan
Читать онлайн.Название The Great Conspiracy
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isbn 4064066052867
Автор произведения John Alexander Logan
Жанр Документальная литература
Издательство Bookwire
It will thus be seen—singularly enough in view of subsequent events—that we not only mainly owe our first steps in Protective Tariff legislation to the almost solid Southern vote, but that it was thus secured for us despite the opposition of New England. Nor did our indebtedness to Southern statesmen and Southern votes for the institution of the now fully established American System of Protection cease here, as we shall presently see.
That Jefferson, as well as Washington and Madison, agreed with the views of Alexander Hamilton on Protection to our domestic manufactures as against those of foreign Nations, is evident in his Annual Message of December 14, 1806, wherein—discussing an anticipated surplus of Federal revenue above the expenditures, and enumerating the purposes of education and internal improvement to which he thinks the "whole surplus of impost" should during times of peace be applied; by which application of such surplus he prognosticates that "new channels of communication will be opened between the States; the lines of separation will disappear; their interests will be identified, and their Union cemented by new and indissoluble ties"—he says: "Shall we suppress the impost and give that advantage to foreign over domestic manufactures. On a few articles of more general and necessary use, the suppression in due season, will doubtless be right; but the great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them." But his embargo and other retaliatory measures, put in force in 1807 and 1808, and the War of 1812-15 with Great Britain, which closely followed, furnished Protection in another manner, by shutting the door to foreign imports and throwing our people upon their own resources, and contributed greatly to the encouragement and increase of our home manufactures—especially those of wool, cotton, and hemp.
At the close of that War the traders of Great Britain determined, even at a temporary loss to themselves, to glut our market with their goods and thus break down forever, as they hoped, our infant manufactures. Their purpose and object were boldly announced in the House of Commons by Mr. Brougham, when he said: "Is it worth while to incur a loss upon the first importation, in order by the glut to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures in the United States which the War had forced into existence contrary to the natural course of things." Against this threatened ruin, our manufacturers all over the United States—the sugar planters of Louisiana among them—clamored for Protection, and Congress at once responded with the Tariff Act of 1816.
This law greatly extended and increased specific duties on, and diminished the application of the ad valorem principle to, foreign imports; and it has been well described as "the practical foundation of the American policy of encouragement of home manufactures—the practical establishment of the great industrial system upon which rests our present National wealth, and the power and the prosperity and happiness of our whole people." While Henry Clay of Kentucky, William Loundes of South Carolina, and Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia supported the Bill most effectively, no man labored harder and did more effective service in securing its passage than John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. The contention on their part was not for a mere "incidental protection" —much less a "Tariff for revenue only"—but for "Protection" in its broadest sense, and especially the protection of their cotton manufactures. Indeed Calhoun's defense of Protection, from the assaults of those from New England and elsewhere who assailed it on the narrow ground that it was inimical to commerce and navigation, was a notable one. He declared that:
"It (the encouragement of manufactures) produced a system strictly American, as much so as agriculture, in which it had the decided advantage of commerce and navigation. The country will from this derive much advantage. Again it is calculated to bind together more closely our wide-spread Republic. It will greatly increase our mutual dependence and intercourse, and will, as a necessary consequence, excite an increased attention to internal improvements—a subject every way so intimately connected with the ultimate attainment of national strength and the perfection of our political institutions."
He regarded the fact that it would make the parts adhere more closely; that it would form a new and most powerful cement far outweighing any political objections that might be urged against the system. In his opinion "the liberty and the union of the country were inseparably united; that as the destruction of the latter would most certainly involve the former, so its maintenance will with equal certainty preserve it;" and he closed with an impressive warning to the Nation of a "new and terrible danger" which threatened it, to wit: "disunion." Nobly as he stood up then—during the last term of his service in the House of Representatives—for the great principles of, the American System of Protection to manufactures, for the perpetuity of the Union, and for the increase of "National strength," it seems like the very irony of fate that a few years later should find him battling against Protection as "unconstitutional," upholding Nullification as a "reserved right" of his State, and championing at the risk of his neck that very "danger" to the "liberties" and life of his Country against which his prophetic words had already given solemn warning.
Strange was it also, in view of the subsequent attitudes of the South and New England, that this essentially Protective Tariff Act of 1816 should have been vigorously protested and voted against by New England, while it was ably advocated and voted for by the South—the 25 votes of the latter which secured its passage being more than sufficient to have secured its defeat had they been so inclined.
The Tariff Acts of 1824 and 1828 followed the great American principle of Protection laid down and supported by the South in the Act of 1816, while widening, increasing, and strengthening it. Under their operation—especially under that of 1828, with its high duties on wool, hemp, iron, lead, and other staples—great prosperity smiled upon the land, and particularly upon the Free States.
In the cotton-growing belt of the South, however, where the prosperity was relatively less, owing to the blight of Slavery, the very contrast bred discontent; and, instead of attributing it to the real cause, the advocates of Free Trade within that region insisted that the Protective Tariff was responsible for the condition of things existing there.
A few restless and discontented spirits in the South had indeed agitated the subject of Free Trade as against Protected manufactures as early as 1797, and, hand in hand with it, the doctrine of States Rights. And Jefferson himself, although, as we have already seen, attached to the American System of Protection and believing in its Constitutionality, unwittingly played into the hands of these Free Traders by drawing up the famous Kentucky Resolutions of '98 touching States Rights, which were closely followed by the Virginia Resolutions of 1799 in the same vein by Madison, also an out-and-out Protectionist. It was mainly in condemnation of the Alien and Sedition Laws, then so unpopular everywhere, that these resolutions were professedly fulminated, but they gave to the agitating Free Traders a States-Rights-Secession-weapon of which they quickly availed themselves.
Their drift may be gathered from the first of the Kentucky Resolutions of '98, which was in these words: "Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government, but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes—delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and as an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."
The Resolutions, after enumerating the Alien and Sedition and certain