Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

Calhoun afterwards explained the attitude of the southern representatives as follows: [Footnote: Calhoun, Works, III., 49; cf. Houston, Nullification in S. C., 34, for similar explanations by Mitchell and McDuffie; Clay, Works (Colton's ed.), II., 13; Jenkins, Wright, 53.] Having before them the option of joining New England in securing amendments satisfactory to the section, or, by resisting all amendment, to force New England to join with the south in rejecting the bill, which would involve Adams in the responsibility for its defeat, they chose the latter alternative. Assurances were given them by Jackson men that the two tariff interests would not be united by mutual concession in the last stages of the discussion to insure the passage of the bill; and so the south consistently threw its weight against the passage of amendments modifying this designedly high tariff. "We determined," said McDuffie later, "to put such ingredients in the chalice as would poison the monster, and commend it to his own lips." At the same time the Jackson men in Pennsylvania, New York, and the west shifted their votes so as to deprive New England of her share in the protective system. When an amendment was proposed, striking out the duty on molasses—an article essential to the rum distilleries of New England, but obnoxious to the distillers of whiskey in Pennsylvania and the west- -Pennsylvania and a large share of the delegation from Ohio, New York, Indiana, and Kentucky voted with most of the south against the amendment. On the motion to substitute the proposals of the Harrisburg Convention with respect to wool and woolens, almost all of the delegation of Pennsylvania, and a large portion of that of New York and Kentucky, as well as the members from Indiana and Missouri and the south, opposed the proposition. Thus the interests of the seaboard protectionists were overcome by the alliance between the middle states and the south, while the west was divided.

Bitter as was the pill, it was swallowed by enough of the eastern protectionists to carry the act. The vote, 105 to 94, by which the measure passed in the House [Footnote: See map.] (April 22, 1828) showed all of the south in opposition, with the exception of certain districts in Maryland and the western districts of Virginia, while the great area of the states of the Ohio Valley and the middle region was almost a unit in favor. The lower counties of New York along the Hudson revealed their identity with the commercial interests by opposing the bill. New England broke in two; Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut voted almost unanimously in favor of the proposition; while Maine cast a unanimous vote in opposition. Rhode Island was divided, and in Massachusetts only two districts— that of the Berkshire wool-growing region and the Essex county area- -supported the bill.

In the Senate, an amendment was passed making the duty on woolens an ad valorem rate of forty-five per cent., but retaining the minima. Various considerations induced some New England friends of Adams to support the measure. Webster defended his action in voting for the bill by declaring that New England had accepted the protective system as the established policy of the government, and after 1824 had built up her manufacturing enterprises on that basis. Nevertheless, in the final vote in the Senate, the five northern members who opposed were all from New England.

Thus the "tariff of abominations," shaped by the south for defeat, satisfactory to but a fraction of the protectionists, was passed by a vote of 26 to 21 in the Senate, May 13, 1828, and was concurred in by the House. John Randolph did not greatly overstate the case when he declared that "the bill referred to manufactures of no sort or kind, but the manufacture of a President of the United States"; for, on the whole, the friends of Jackson had, on this issue, taken sides against the friends of Adams, and in the effort to make the latter unpopular had produced a tariff which better illustrated sectional jealousies and political intrigues than the economic policy of the nation. [Footnote: Register of Debates, 20 Cong., I Sess., IV., pt. ii., 2472; Niles' Register, XXV., 55-57, analyzes the votes to show the political groupings; cf. Taussig, Tariff History, 101, 102.]

The tariff agitation of 1827 and the passage of the act of 1828 inflamed the south to the point of conflagration. John Randolph's elevation of the standard of revolt in 1824 now brought him credit as the prophet of the gospel of resistance. "Here is a district of country," he had proclaimed, in his speech on the tariff in that year, "extending from the Patapsco to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Allegheny to the Atlantic; a district… which RAISES FIVE-SIXTHS of all the exports of this country that are OF HOME GROWTH…. I bless God that in this insulted, oppressed and outraged region, we are as to our counsels in regard to this measure, but as one man. We are proscribed and put to the ban; and if we do not feel, and feeling, do not act, we are bastards to those fathers who achieved the Revolution." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., I Sess., II., 2360.]

It was South Carolina, rather than Virginia, however, that led in violent proposals. [Footnote: Houston, Nullification in S. C.] Dr. Cooper, an Englishman, president of South Carolina College, had long been engaged in propagating the Manchester doctrines of laissez- faire and free-trade, and he was greeted with applause when he declared that the time had come to calculate the value of the Union. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XXXIII., 59+] Agricultural societies met to protest and to threaten. Turnbull, an aggressive and violent writer, in a stirring series of papers published in 1827, under the title of The Crisis, over the signature of Brutus, sounded the tocsin of resistance. He repudiated the moderation and nationalism of "Messrs. Monroe and Calhoun," and stood squarely on the doctrine that the only safety for the south was in the cultivation of sectionalism. "In the Northern, Eastern, Middle, and Western States," said he, "the people have no fears whatever from the exercise of the implied powers of Congress on any subject; but it is in the SOUTH alone where uneasiness begins to manifest itself, and a sensitiveness prevails on the subject of consolidation." "The more NATIONAL and the less FEDERAL the government becomes, the more certainly will the interest of the great majority of the States be promoted, but with the same certainty, will the interests of the SOUTH be depressed and destroyed."

On their return from the session of 1828, the South Carolina delegation added fuel to the fire. In a caucus of the members, held shortly after the passage of the tariff, proposals were even made for the delegation to vacate their seats in Congress as a protest, and in this temper they returned to their state. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XXXV., 184, 202.] McDuffie told his constituents that there was no hope of a change of the system in Congress; that the southern states, by the law of self-preservation, were free to save themselves from utter ruin; and that the government formed for their protection and benefit was determined to push every matter to their annihilation. He recommended that the state should levy a tax on the consumption of northern manufactured goods, boycott the live-stock of Kentucky, and wear homespun; and he closed by drawing a comparison between the wrongs suffered by the colonists when they revolted from Great Britain and that by which the south was now oppressed. [Footnote: Niles' Register, XXXIII., 339; cf. ibid., XXXV., 82, 131.]

Although South Carolina and all of the staple-producing section except Louisiana and Kentucky were in substantial agreement upon the iniquity of the tariff, yet, in respect to the remedy, they were widely at variance. Protest had proven ineffective; proposals of resistance by force, plans for a southern convention, and threats of disunion were rife. [Footnote: Houston, Nullification in S.C., 49- 52, 73-75.]

Such was the situation which confronted Calhoun when he returned from Washington and found that his section had passed beyond him. The same considerations that had aroused this storm of opposition also had their effect upon him. But he was still hopeful that, by the election of Jackson, a cotton-planter, the current of northern power might be checked; and he looked forward also to the prospect that he himself might eventually reach the presidential chair. Before him lay the double task of uniting himself to his friends in South Carolina, lest he lose touch with the forces of his own section, and of framing a platform of opposition that should be consistent, logical, and defensible; and, at the same time, of providing some mode of avoiding the forcible revolution that the hotheads of his section threatened as an immediate programme.

It was by the very processes of western growth that the seaboard south now found itself a minority section and the home of discontent. As the rich virgin soil of the Gulf plains opened to cotton culture, the output leaped up by bounds. In 1811 the total product was eighty million pounds; in 1821 it was one hundred and seventy-seven millions; in 1826 it was three hundred and thirty millions. Prices fell as production increased. In 1816 the average price of middling uplands in New York was nearly thirty cents, and South Carolina's leaders favored the tariff; in 1820 it was seventeen cents, and the south saw in the protective system a grievance; in 1824 it was fourteen and three-quarters cents, and the South-Carolinians denounced the tariff as unconstitutional. When the woolens bill was agitated in 1827, cotton had fallen to but little more than nine cents, and the radicals of the section threatened civil war.