FOOTNOTES:
[8] Speech of Alexander H. Stephens at Savannah on March 21, 1861, after his election to the rebel Vice-Presidency.
[9] Of this speech the New York Courier and Enquirer said: "The speech of Mr. Chandler on the 12th places him among the first debaters of the country. No more unanswerable exposition of the usurpation in Kansas has been made." The Chicago Tribune said: "Mr. Chandler made his first formal speech in the Senate to-day. That body paid him the compliment of unwavering attention through the whole of his able and effective speech. The passage in which he described the murder of Brown, Barbour and Gay ... excited the sympathies and passions of his audience to a pitch rarely observed in parliamentary debate."
[10] The Hon. James M. Edmunds, for many years Commissioner of the Land Office, and afterward postmaster of the Senate and of Washington City.
[11] The Springfield Journal of October 18 said: "Senator Chandler, of Michigan, made yesterday one of the best speeches to which our citizens have had the pleasure of listening during the campaign.... The meeting was a magnificent one and the greatest enthusiasm prevailed."
CHAPTER IX.
SERVICES TO THE CAUSE OF THE PROTECTION OF HOME INDUSTRY.
Zachariah Chandler as a Republican Senator was a thorough Whig in both his advocacy of an enlightened national system of Internal Improvements and his constant and efficient championship of the cause of the Protection of American Industries. It has been justly said that "the Great West of to-day owes its unequaled growth and progress, its population, productiveness and wealth, primarily, to the framers of the federal constitution, by which its development was rendered possible, but more immediately and palpably to the sagacity and statesmanship of Jefferson, the purchaser of Louisiana; to the genius of Fitch and Fulton, the projector and achiever, respectively, of steam navigation; to De Witt Clinton, the early, unswerving and successful champion of artificial inland navigation; and to Henry Clay, the eminent, eloquent, and effective champion of the diversification of our national industry through the Protection of Home Manufactures." No man knew better or acknowledged more fully the truth of this analysis than Mr. Chandler. His own State abounded with evidences of its justice, and his firm faith in the protective principle was also strengthened by the teachings of his practical mercantile experience and by his general commercial sagacity. No State presents to-day more abundant proofs of the beneficence of "the American system" than Michigan, and no personal contributions to the protection of its interests and the diversification of its industries equaled those given on every possible occasion by Mr. Chandler throughout his prolonged Senatorial service.
Political economy has been well defined as "the science of labor-saving applied to the action of communities, its aim being to save labor from waste, from misapplication, and from loss through constrained idleness." The objects of Protection are the ennobling of labor and the enhancing of its productiveness, and its method is interdicting an unwholesome competition which looks no farther than securing mere cheapness of production at whatever cost of human energy, comfort and enlightenment. There has never been an intelligent and sincere protectionist without a thorough faith in the vast importance and inherent nobility of Labor. On this as on all great questions Mr. Chandler's convictions were radical, and he was right fundamentally. He had been himself a laborer. The store, the farm, the factory, the work-shop, are all one in this—their duties are labor. Mr. Chandler knew the worth of free labor. He had witnessed its seed-planting and wonderful fruitage of development in Michigan, and he honored the strong, hardy, intelligent and self-reliant race who were the laborers there, and of whom he was one. He had early opportunity to make this plain in the Senate. Hammond of South Carolina, a true representative of that turbulent, rebellious State and of the embodied insolence of its master class and of the man-owner's contempt for free labor, made at this time his notorious "mud-sill" speech. "There must be laborers in every community, a low, degenerate class, who hew the wood and draw the water, ... the mud-sills of society, in effect they are slaves;" this was its idea. It was a frank avowal of the estimate put by the slaveholding oligarchy upon the Northern laborers, upon the men who have made this country what it is. Mr. Chandler was then young in the Senate, and had spoken but rarely, but to this insult to his constituency he was quick to reply. In his speech of March 12, 1858, the first in which he addressed the Senate at any length, he said:
It is an attack upon my constituents. Under the Senator's version, under his exposition of slavery, nine-tenths of the people of the North are or have been at some time slaves; for nine-tenths of the people of the North have at some time been hirelings and laborers. We do not feel degraded by being laborers. We believe it to be respectable.... Travel on any road in the State of Michigan, and you will find flourishing farms on almost every 160 acres, with comfortable dwellings, and a high state of improvement and cultivation.... You will find the owners of these farms with four or five sons of their neighboring farmers hired out by the day or the month or the year.... These young men go to service or labor until they get money enough to buy a farm; then they, too, become the employers of labor.... These men are never degraded by labor.... They are the foundations of society there. Some of these men who are at work by the month during the summer on farms are in the Legislature making laws for us in the winter.
There was more of it to the same effect—honest, indignant words in defense of free Northern labor, and in eulogy of the men who toiled. And the tone of these portions of the speech was wholesomely defiant, without a shade of truckling to Southern insolence. Nine years later, in discussing proposed tariff amendments in 1867, Mr. Chandler said in the Senate, "I thank God we are able to pay good prices to our laborers." These utterances indicate the vein in which he always made his voice heard and influence felt whenever the interests and rights of labor were challenged either by speech or attempted legislation.
The tariff controversy in the United States dates back half a century. This republic in its colonial days was agricultural. There were no mines nor manufactures. Each house did its own spinning and weaving. There were small shops for the making and repairing of a few articles, and luxuries and fine goods for the rich were imported from the factories of Europe. The great labor-saving appliances of the nineteenth century did not exist even in imagination. The water power of the country was unused and its boundless wealth of minerals unknown. The people were farmers or traders. For them the government was founded, and apparently there was no contemplation of anything beyond. It was years before a change came, but, once begun, it hurried with rapid stride, until to-day more than one-twentieth of the entire population of the United States are engaged in manufacturing, as many more are employed in occupations connected with and dependent upon such enterprises, and the capital invested in productive industries exceeds by millions of dollars the entire national debt.
These changes as they progressed made new demands upon the government. After the development of the steam engine, and after later inventions and contrivances had cheapened the production of cotton, woolen and other goods, household spinning-wheels and looms were silent, and the United States imported nearly every manufactured article needed by its people, sending out in return the products of its farms and plantations, its tobacco, cotton and grain. Year after year this draining process went on, the manufacturing towns of Europe growing great and prosperous, the United States widening and increasing in population, but adding little to its wealth. The mill-owners of Europe bought their cotton in South Carolina or Georgia, transported it across the Atlantic, made it into cloths, and returned them to New York or Charleston. The American purchaser paid the cost of both transportations, the cost and profit of manufacture abroad, all the profits of middle-men who handled the goods, and all the cost of exchanges. By this process America toiled, while England and the other manufacturing States of Europe reaped the harvest. Thoughtful people, knowing that capital employed in production feeds, clothes and lodges the industrious workman, adds to the wealth of the nation, adds to its strength, adds to its power of resistance, and lessens the individual burden of taxation, and comprehending the inevitable result of the drain in progress, asked, Is there no way of preventing this? They saw the raw material produced in bountiful profusion, saw the water power of the country running away to the sea unvexed by use, and naturally asked, Is it not possible to bring the miners and smelters, the founders, machinists and laborers, the mechanic and manufacturer of every description, here, to place them beside the raw material, to utilize this wasted power, and to save the losses and attrition that are impoverishing the country? When these thoughts took shape in the active brains of Americans, the change began. Mills and factories sprang up by the water-courses. Tall chimneys, clouds of smoke and glowing furnaces came after. Thus American manufacturing was born.
But as the first mills and factories were established, these discoveries were made: In building a mill in England the laborers and mechanics could be hired at wages from twenty to forty per cent. lower than prevailed on this continent. The cost of machinery, most of it being brought from Europe, was also greater. Foreign manufacturers could hire their capital from the immense reservoir of Europe, where it had been accumulating for centuries, at from four to six per cent. interest. Here the borrower must pay eight or ten per cent. or even higher. There was another and even graver matter presented to the consideration of the pioneer manufacturer. Labor in Europe was cheap—so cheap that, combined with abundant capital and low interest, it enabled the foreign manufacturer to pay two ocean transportations and yet undersell an American competitor at the very door of his own mill. Should the American mechanic be asked to toil for the pauper wages of Europe? Should it be the policy of this government to gather about its factories the hungry-eyed, ill-clad, impoverished, ignorant and hopeless crowds which are found in the manufacturing towns of the old world? Could American institutions endure this? Where the people are all agriculturists, except under very extraordinary circumstances they need never want for food, and such circumstances are rarely chargeable to misgovernment or to bad laws. The farming classes are widely scattered; they are conservative and self-reliant, not given to mobs and outbreaks, nor to obeying the will of self-constituted leaders as do men gathered in great masses. But the men of mills and shops and factories, unless they are well paid, must suffer; and when they suffer their discontent threatens society itself. Despotic governments may apply the gag of a bayonet or the silence of a musket ball, but this is not possible in a republic resting upon the uncompelled support of all the people. Plainly, if a government, constituted as is this, is to be preserved, the mechanics, the laborers in mills and mines, in shops and factories, must be paid enough to support themselves and their families in comfort, to educate their children and to permit the thrifty to make savings. If the time ever comes when the millions of American workers upon whose assent this government exists are reduced to the condition of the pauper labor of Europe, this republic and its golden promises of freedom will most certainly ignobly perish from the face of the earth. From such circumstances and ideas as these sprang the doctrine, accepted by almost all of the earlier statesmen of the republic, that the revenue system of the United States must be so modeled as to stimulate domestic manufactures, protect them from ruinous foreign competition, and promote that diversification of industry which is so essential to the prosperity and independence of free labor.
The first tariff measure (passed by the First Congress and approved by George Washington) imposed but low duties, but in some of its details practically recognized the protective principle, and in its preamble declared one of its purposes to be "the protection and encouragement of Domestic Manufacture." From 1807 to 1815 the United States was in a great degree driven from the ocean. A part of that time it was involved in a war with Great Britain, with an embargo laid upon its ports. During these years the home manufacturer had no foreign competition to fear, and factories sprang up to meet the local demands, drawing about them laborers and their families, making a quick market for the productions of the soil, and placing consumer and producer side by side. But this was the result of accident and not of deliberate policy. The scene changed when the raising of the embargo brought into the country a flood of manufactured articles representing cheap labor, cheap interest and cheap capital. Then came the demand for the levying of such duties on the products of foreign labor as would protect the American manufacturer and enable him to pay a suitable compensation to the American workman. The first response to this was the tariff of 1816, justly styled "The Planters' and Farmers' Tariff," because it gave protection to coarser commodities which least required it, and withheld it from those articles in whose production others were to be used. Eight years afterward came a third tariff varying little in its general features, but with rates of duties slightly increased. Four years later (in 1828) was enacted the first thoroughly American protective tariff, but it was soon destroyed by the act of July 12, 1832 (the outcome of the Nullification controversy), which completely abolished its protective features. Within a few months, through the exertions of Mr. Clay, this measure was modified by what was known as the compromise tariff act, which continued in force until the passage of the protective tariff of 1842. This was in time displaced by the free-trade tariff, which went into force four years later, in June, 1847. It was followed in 1861 (March 23) by the Morrill tariff, a thoroughly protective measure, which with some modifications yet remains on the statute books.
In 1816, notwithstanding it had just emerged from war, the country's industrial condition was at least hopeful, but the consequences of the tariff of that year promptly manifested themselves. The American manufacturer was undersold at the door of his mill by the foreigner; factories closed, wages shrunk and the demand for labor diminished. Prices of all kinds of planter's and farmer's produce declined in turn, and to industrial prostration was speedily added agricultural depression. Henry Clay pronounced the seven years preceding 1824 the most disastrous this nation had ever known. But almost from the moment of its passage the country felt the impetus of the protective tariff of 1828. Furnace doors were thrown open; foundries were built; the cobwebs that had gathered about factory machinery disappeared in the whir of busy wheels; labor came again into demand; immigration increased; the products of farms and plantations brought good prices; and the public revenue grew until the national debt was extinguished. Prosperity thus became universal throughout the land. When this protective tariff of 1828 gave way to the gradual reductions in duties of the compromise measure of 1832, there followed a repetition of the scenes that succeeded the tariff of 1816. From 1837 to 1842 mills and furnaces were closed, wages were reduced, laborers sought in vain for employment, the poor-houses were filled and manufacturers, farmers and planters became bankrupts together. Even the public treasury was unable to borrow at home as small a sum as $1,000,000 at any rate of interest, and the great banking houses of Europe refused it credit, so that it was forced to the humiliation of selling its securities at ruinous discounts. The passage of the protective tariff of 1842 marks the date of another business revival. Old mines were re-worked and new ones were opened. Mill-fires were re-lighted and new mills sprang up in all directions. Money became abundant, and public and private incomes exceeded all precedent. Farmers and planters secured easy markets and ample prices for their produce, and laborers' homes grew bright with plenty. Then came the Free-Trade tariff of 1846 and the commercial decadence which culminated in the disasters of 1857. California and its gold delayed the catastrophe but could not avert it. From the moment of the repeal of the protective tariff, the inflow of British iron and cloth began and the receding tide carried back American gold, impoverishing the country. Industry was stricken to the earth, and day by day saw the dependence of the United States on foreign markets growing until when the crash came it was complete. The vast flood of gold from California had gone into European vaults and in its stead could only be shown receipts for foreign goods consumed and the wrecks of American industries. The Morrill tariff was followed by an unparalleled mercantile and manufacturing development, which not even the disastrous effects of an inflated currency (in 1873-76) could more than briefly check.
Mr. Chandler, who knew well these facts, and had learned "the American doctrine" in the days of Clay, had taken his seat in the Senate when the crash of 1857 came, and was active in demanding and shaping that revolution in the revenue system which has made the United States one of the great manufacturing nations of the world. He was an ardent champion of the Morrill tariff (of 1861), and aided materially in perfecting its details, watching with special vigilance those of its provisions which affected the vast interests of the Northwest. He believed in the largest possible application of the protective principle, and favored aiding every American producer and every American manufacturer who could complain on valid grounds of foreign competition. Every demand for protection, which gave reasonable promise of increasing the yield of any staple or of developing a new industry, received his energetic support. To any revenue measure or proposition, which seemed to him calculated to advance foreign at the expense of American interests, he was uncompromisingly hostile. The abrogation of the Reciprocity treaty with Canada he labored most assiduously to bring about, and he resisted with all his characteristic pertinacity each successive effort to restore a compact which imposed such heavy burdens upon the lumbermen, salt manufacturers, and farmers of the Northwest. Throughout his Senatorial term all measures affecting duties in any form or proposing any modification in their schedules found him alert, well-informed, and determined to maintain the protective policy against any assault.[12] Very much the greater, and undoubtedly the most effective, part of his labors for an American tariff was put forth in committee-rooms and in the earnest use of argument and influence with fellow-Congressmen; he relied much more upon this work than upon speech-making for results—and results he always ranked far above display or mere publicity. Still he spoke not unfrequently on tariff questions, and a few quotations will illustrate satisfactorily his positions and methods. This passage shows how radical was his protectionism:
This nation to-day should be an exporter of iron instead of an importer. There is no valid reason why we should buy one single pound of iron from any other nation on the globe. Our mountains are filled with the purest ores on the face of the earth.... If I had my way I would absolutely prohibit the introduction of foreign iron.
The context does not sustain an absolutely literal construction of the last sentence. Mr. Chandler had seen Michigan when its copper mines were unworked, its limitless riches of iron undiscovered, its salt deposits unknown, and its pine forests unfelled. He had seen these industries passing through various stages of prosperity and disaster as they were affected by prevailing tariffs, now shielded by a wise policy of protection and now at the mercy of foreign producers, who at times (to use their own admission) "voluntarily incur immense losses in order to destroy American competition and to gain and keep control of American markets." He saw these industries grow from nothing, until the annual yield of Michigan's copper mines became 20,266 tons, of its iron mines 1,125,231 tons, and of its salt wells 1,885,884 barrels, and until its lumber product expanded to the enormous total of 2,700,000,000 feet in one season. They thus became powerful interests, employing a great host of laborers and offering support to thousands of families. These facts and the tone of what Mr. Chandler said on kindred topics make it plain that by the absolute prohibition of the introduction of foreign iron he meant not an embargo, but the affording of such ample protection to the iron industries of the entire country as would make it impossible for the products of foreign cheap labor to compete in its markets with those of American labor, and as would make the United States a seller and not a buyer of iron and its wares.
With all his earnestness as a protectionist, he kept the interests of labor predominant in his consideration of this subject. For instance, in some remarks upon the lumber tariff, he said: "It is perfectly well known that the great value of lumber is in the labor and the transportation, and while we in the United States are paying our laborers (in lumber) $2 a day, they are in the British Provinces paying but from 75 cents to $1 per day." And he steadily voted for such protection of the lumber trade as would enable producers engaged in that business to pay large wages, and opposed every suggestion which looked to impoverishing or pauperizing the American artisan. He uniformly upheld American industry and labor of every kind against the competition of the world. He felt that the highest civilization can only be secured through that policy of industrial diversification which brings consumer and producer side by side, and he favored giving it the widest possible scope. He frequently declared, "I cannot vote to discriminate against any particular branch," and he firmly believed in protecting everything his country could produce. His vigilance in caring for all interests and his grasp of the practical details of tariff legislation will appear from one or two brief citations from speeches made in 1867 on proposed modifications of the Morrill tariff. The duty on pig-metal was then $9 per ton, and it was proposed in the new bill to admit scrap-iron on the payment of a duty of $3. On this proposition Mr. Chandler said:
The effect of this tariff will be to admit all the rails in the world into the United States at a duty of $3 a ton. We will become the recipients of all the scrap-iron in the world.... And the effect will be to put out every blast furnace in the United States, and stop the mining in every mountain in the country.... The expense of re-rolling bars is only about $30 a ton. You admit scrap-iron at this nominal duty, and the result will be to utterly destroy the revenue you now receive from iron—you will import nothing but at the duty of $3 per ton. This scrap-iron is worth two or three times as much as pig-metal. Pig-metal has to be puddled once. It costs to-day $28 per ton to put pig-metal into scrap, and yet you put a duty of $9 per ton on pig-metal and propose a mere nominal duty of $3 per ton on scrap.... This is absolutely abandoning the whole iron interests of the United States, save and excepting the rolling-mills.... The State of Pennsylvania takes about 300,000 tons of Lake Superior ore to mix with her inferior ore, and transports it by water 700 or 800 miles, and afterward by land carriage—a very expensive carriage—from 50 to 300 miles. This ore is mixed with the Pennsylvania ores, and transported then a long distance at very great expense. The demand for pig-iron is for rolling.... Calling material nothing, it costs the manufacturers $60 per ton of scrap-iron to take the ore and the coal from the mine and deliver at the works, every cent of which is labor.... There are in the world 100,000 miles of railroads, of which 36,000 are in the United States, and 64,000 in the rest of the world. These railroads are laid, on an average, with rails weighing 56 pounds to the yard, and use 49,000 tons net to the mile. This gives the 64,000 miles abroad 3,136,000 tons of iron. This has to be re-rolled on an average once in ten years; consequently one-tenth of this amount is let loose upon some country every year in the shape of scrap-iron. That would make the amount of railroad scrap alone 313,600 tons per annum, which it is proposed to admit at a duty of $3 a ton, and which it costs to-day $60 a ton to put in the form of scrap in the United States. This is Free Trade in the broadest sense. It is worse than that.... It will build up rolling-mills, but it will break down every forge in the United States.... It will stop our mines in Michigan that yield ores richer than any other in the world.... It will make this country the entrepôt for the scrap-iron of the world.
He would not build up the rolling-mill at the expense of the mine and the blast-furnace. He would not build up one industry upon the ruins of any other. His many speeches and his more numerous votes in the Senate all indicated the same clear purpose to avoid discrimination against home interests where possible, and to protect everything American against everything of foreign production.
One phase of this many-sided question which made a deep impression upon Mr. Chandler remains to be mentioned. In common with all thoughtful Americans, during the course of the rebellion he realized the priceless value of the large-brained, energetic and highly-skilled American mechanic. He had marked these men in every brigade, upon every field of the war, enabling commanders to overcome obstacles which without them would have been insurmountable. He had seen mills and factories and shops pouring into the storehouses of the government the multitudinous articles without which a successful prosecution of the war would have been impossible, and that, too, with a rapidity which was as amazing as it was unexampled. He was from his early manhood a strong protectionist. But when he realized what the American working-men had done for the country and for freedom, and how its protected trades had served the government in its hour of trial, he was still more confirmed in the wisdom of the system which fosters American industry and secures to the country the priceless heritage of prosperous and intelligent laborers and mechanics.