A sufficient number of partisans were won by Monroe's exposition to change their votes and so prevent the passage of the measure over his veto. But the "toll-gate question" remained for several years to perplex statesmen and cause long debates, while Congress made appropriations directly for the repair of the Cumberland Road. Monroe had made public improvements the fruit of Tantalus to the hungry people by suggesting in his veto message that he would have no objection to such enterprises being undertaken by the National Government provided an amendment were added to the Constitution permitting such action. It was not a new suggestion. Jefferson, in various presidential messages, had suggested this way of meeting the demand for these paternalistic benefits. Madison twice at least followed his example. In the sessions of 1813 and the following year, two amendments were considered, one giving Congress power to make roads, and the other to make canals in any State, with the consent of the State; but no action followed. President Monroe, in his first message, called attention to the desirability of such an amendment and a week later a bill to that effect was introduced. It was unique in providing that appropriations were to be distributed among the States according to population, a prophecy of the Confederate States constitution decades later. No less than six attempts to secure such an amendment followed Monroe's "exposition" and suggestion. Not one succeeded in passing either House.
The failure to secure this constitutional remedy for the public improvement fever was a cause of anxiety to Jefferson in the closing days of his life. In 1824, an amendment of this kind was pending, together with others limiting the term of the Presidency and abolishing the electoral system. "If I can see these three great amendments prevail," said the aged statesman, "I shall consider it as a renewed extension of the time of the lease, shall live in more confidence, and die in more hope." He complained of the "irresistible torrent of general opinion"; thought national appropriations for constructing roads and canals such a breach of the national compact as would warrant withdrawal from it; and wrote out for the Virginia Legislature a protest, as he had done for Kentucky during the Alien and Sedition laws a quarter of a century before. He also drew a general law to be passed by all State Legislatures rendering legitimate all national money previously spent within the State. Its adoption would have been a singular confession of unconstitutional action. Several State Legislatures in the South resolved to protest. Their representatives in Congress were resisting national appropriations, while the Northern and Western States were getting the advantage of them. Thus did political theory supplement the work of nature in directing the larger portion of these appropriations to the northern part of the country. Years after, this unequal distribution was to constitute a Southern grievance.
This internal improvement contention, arraying the Eastern and Western States against each other, partly nullified the permanent sectionalism between the North and the South, and so made for unionism. Louisiana and Ohio, uniting for improvement appropriations, forgot their differences of opinion upon constitutional powers, upon home rule or nationalism, upon freedom or slavery. South Carolina and Massachusetts, joining hands to prevent these drains upon the treasury for public works far removed from their borders, forgot for the nonce their differences upon the question of a tariff. But all such affiliations and truces were only temporary. Sooner or later the combat was bound to be renewed between North and South, between peoples alienated by inheritance, temperament, and products.
Contemporaneous with the debate on national surveys for improvements, a spirited debate arose on the tariff. It soon showed an unfortunate tendency to North and South sectional lines, especially when compared with the post-war-tariff debate of eight years before. Protection in those intervening years had begun to assume a sectional aspect, although as yet only in a formative state. The Southern people had begun to realise that their slave labour was not applicable to factories, and that they must depend for their goods upon Europe and upon the Northern States. Under the theory that the consumer pays the duty, the burden was thought to fall equally upon all parts of the country, unless the duty should grow into a discrimination upon one kind of goods or those consumed exclusively in one section. Massachusetts was singular among Northern States, being opposed to this tariff measure of 1824 because of the high duty on canvas and other ship-building materials. Some Southern speakers thought that the duties on cheap dry goods used by their slaves rather discriminated against them. They pointed to the fact that New England manufacturers scarcely needed protective legislation, when the stock in their cotton mills was selling at sixty-five per cent. above par and was paying heavy dividends. This conviction grew steadily among certain Southern States for four years, until a change in the tariff schedule brought one of them to open revolt.
A comparison of the votes on the tariff measures of 1816 and 1824 exhibits this sectional tendency. In 1816, a protective tariff in the House gained sixty-three Northern votes to fourteen against it. Eight years later there were eighty-eight votes for a higher tariff and nineteen opposed to it. If it had not been for the duty on canvas, Massachusetts would have viewed the measure favourably and would have made the vote one hundred to seven. The North was evidently beginning to appreciate the value of protection. The Southern members in the House, in 1816, stood less than two to one as opposed to protection. In 1824, they stood nearly four to one against the policy. The South was beginning to see that a tariff benefits the manufacturer of goods more than the producer of raw materials. The Senate shows this sectional bias even more clearly. The reversal of the vote of the Southern senators is particularly noticeable.
SENATE VOTES ON THE TARIFF MEASURES
1816 1824
Northern Senators /For……..16……19
\Against…..2…….6
Southern Senators /For………9…….4
\Against…..5……17
The advocates of the measure in the second debate made use of the national spirit as they had in the first. Clay's "American system," as the protective policy began to be called, was declared a remedy for the commercial depression under which the country suddenly found itself suffering. Petitions, asking such relief, poured into Congress. The economic conditions of Europe had become adjusted to peace, a condition which had not existed since the Constitution had been first put into execution. The United States began to realise the force of competition. The distress which prevailed in European countries a few years before was suddenly transferred to the United States. A barrier to keep out European goods and secure American interdependence seemed necessary.
Clay came down from the Speaker's chair to the floor of the House to plead his policy of home production and home consumption, a principle for which he had fought a duel in his early Kentucky days, when he had been pronounced a demagogue for advocating dressing in homespun. He was now accused by the opposition of aiming at a total prohibition of foreign goods regardless of the resulting distress to the consumer. "Protection in 1816 has grown to prohibition in 1824," exclaimed a speaker. "This is the consummation of the 'American policy,'" said Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina, whose brilliant oratory was making him the rival of Calhoun as the Southern spokesman. "A policy foreign in all its features, confessedly borrowed from Great Britain, and Chinese in its character, the policy of kings and tyrants, of restriction and monopoly." If Britain has at any time since complained of American protective policy, she must remember that it was inherited by British colonies, and was fostered by a desire to retaliate on her with her own methods before she became a freetrader.