In the meanwhile the Administration measure, with McLane’s report, had been submitted, providing for the repeal of the existing tariff after March 3, 1833, and the reduction of the revenue to the financial requirements of the Government. This contemplated the reduction of the revenue to $12,000,000 a year, and the arrangement of the rates so as sufficiently to protect the great interests involved.

Using the Administration measure as a basis, Adams thereupon prepared his bill and report. In his statement the patriotic statesman, indifferent to the clamor of party, or class, or section, shines forth luminously. It may have been unnecessary to expose the protectionist’s fallacy that raising the duties lowers the price of the domestic product; equally unnecessary to warn the Southerners that a persistence in their course would lead to appalling consequences, but he made these points. In presenting his bill, Adams frankly explained that it was based on the Administration measure, with some changes as to details.

With the Adams bill before it, the House made short shrift of the McDuffie measure. The protectionists were in despair. The Legislatures of Pennsylvania and Connecticut passed condemnatory resolutions, and mass meetings were held protesting against reductions. An unsuccessful attempt was made to substitute the Clay Senate plan. And yet Clay himself was fairly well satisfied, and on its passage in the House wrote that “with some alterations it will be a very good measure of protection.”[413] At the time he wrote, however, he was convinced that the alterations would be made in the Senate and accepted by the House, and upon the failure of these plans to materialize hangs another story of politics.

The Senate lost no time making amendments, and as it was now July, with all anxious to adjourn, no time was wasted on unnecessary speeches, and the amendments, which were numerous, were hurried through. In a few instances, not many, the protectionists lost, but on the whole theirs was the victory when the bill went back to the House. There a few of the Senate amendments were accepted, but the majority were rejected and the bill was thrown into conference.

And here enters one of the comedy-tragedies of politics. Calhoun was absent, Tazewell in the chair, when the measure was returned to the Senate. The motion for a conference carried. And then it was, in the naming of the Senate conferees, that Tazewell either made a blunder or turned a trick. Hayne, named as the minority member, was expected to act badly, but the protectionists pinned implicit faith in Wilkins of Pennsylvania and Dickerson of New Jersey, the former a business man, manufacturer, banker from a protectionist State, the latter with a powerful protectionist constituency. Unhappily the friends of the Senate bill did not attach sufficient importance to the candidacy of both men for the Vice-Presidential nomination with Jackson—to the pull of personal ambition. Whatever their special motives in surrendering to the conferees of the House, they gave only a perfunctory support to the Senate amendments and capitulated.

The amazement and indignation of Clay and his followers were unbounded. Clay sharply cross-examined Wilkins and Dickerson upon the proceedings in the conference, and then had to content himself by joining Webster in a warm denunciation of the surrender. There was nothing to be done, however, but for the Senate to recede, and the bill was passed and promptly signed by Jackson.

Thus the tariff battle on which Clay relied to strengthen him in the pre-presidential contest was practically barren of party significance. By no sophistry or reasoning could the protectionist States of Pennsylvania and New York be turned against Jackson, who had promptly signed the bill that Adams had sponsored, and which had been supported by such Administration Democrats as Isaac Hill, Dickerson, Marcy, Wilkins, Grundy, White, and Benton.

The tariff issue was dead before the campaign was fairly begun.

VIII

If Clay had failed to embarrass the Administration on the tariff, the keen Jacksonian politicians were to be more successful in embarrassing Clay on the land question. This was a peculiarly delicate subject for Clay to touch in the midst of the campaign. In the Southern and Western States more than 1,090,000,000 acres remained the property of the National Government—a vast empire. The proceeds from the sale of these lands had been originally dedicated to the payment of the national debt; and now with the extinguishment of the debt in sight, all manner of schemes were advanced as to the future disposition of the lands and the proceeds. For a number of years Benton, with characteristic tenacity, had been urging his plan of graduated prices, with free grants to actual settlers, and he had won Jackson over to his theory with Edmund Burke’s proposition, advanced in his speech on the disposition of the crown lands in England, that the principal revenue to be had from uncultivated tracts “springs from the improvement of the population of the kingdom.” The sturdy Missourian looked with repugnance upon the idea of considering these uncultivated acres as sources of revenue, rather than as an opportunity for settlers, and he gradually converted the Democratic Party to his point of view.