That there were grave embarrassments in the business of the country could not be denied. Five hundred thousand men, young men at that, had been taken permanently from the ranks of breadwinners by the war—and those dependent upon them were now the country’s wards. Immigration to which the government had looked for reënforcements for labor was falling off. The tremendous demand which a great army makes upon manufactures of all kinds was at an end. Particularly did the iron mills, the woollen factories, the railroads, the produce merchants, feel this sudden cessation of trade. Prices were probably 90 per cent higher than before the war, although wages were not over 60 per cent higher. But these embarrassments were the inevitable results of war—as logical as the debt or the disabled soldier. Somehow the transition from the abnormal condition of war to the normal one of peace had to be made; somehow for the artificial demand and cost the natural must be substituted. It meant economy, curtailment, lower prices, lessened output; hard times, in short, for a period. There was no class in the country from whom patient endurance of the difficulties of the situation could be more fairly asked than the manufacturers. They had for the most part enjoyed four as fat years as ever fell to the lot of man. It is doubtful indeed if any industry at any period of the world’s history had reaped so great rewards in so short a time as that of iron in the Civil War.
The difficulty now was that these manufacturers were not willing to pay their share of the cost of the war. They demanded higher protection that they might make their prices higher, and thus ease as much as possible the necessarily hard transition state. Congress was to do for them what economy and patience should have done.
As it happened the demands for a higher protection were made on a Congress under the dictatorship of a man for whom no tariff could ever be too high—that was Thaddeus Stevens. When the first tariff bill was presented to the House in June, 1866, by Mr. Morrill, everybody knew Stevens was near his end, but emaciated, white, and suffering as he was, his nerve was still superb. Too weak to walk up the Capitol steps, two stalwart negroes carried him. “Who will carry me when you are dead, boys?” he said to them one day with a chuckle. The fight between Congress and President Johnson over Reconstruction had developed, and Johnson had already singled out Stevens as his chief enemy. He was soon to begin to ask as he “swung around the circle,” “Why not hang Thad Stevens?” Johnson was not mistaken in placing the responsibility. Stevens had always disliked him. “Can’t you find a candidate for vice-president of the United States without going down to one of those damned rebel provinces to pick up one?” he had asked Colonel McClure in 1864. His dislike had grown to open opposition, and he was now leading the Congressional fight with spirit, ability, and bitterness. Yet weak as he was, and absorbed as he was in the undoing of the sullen suffering man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, no measure escaped his dictation, least of all a measure which touched a doctrine so dear to his heart as the protection of American industry.
The bill was not in before it was evident Stevens was dissatisfied with it. It was, he declared vehemently, a free-trade measure. As a matter of fact no bill the United States Congress had seen up to this date had less consolation for the free-trader in it than the one Mr. Morrill now introduced. Although just before the bill was reported $75,000,000 had been taken from the internal revenue taxes, no compensating reduction had been made in the tariff. Not only did it preserve the average of 47 per cent, which the bill of 1864 imposed, but it increased many duties, notably those on copper, iron, steel rails, wool and woollen goods, salt, all articles which touched the mass of consumers. Many purely protective duties which could yield no revenue were added—such were the duties proposed on grindstones and on nickel. So inconsistent was the bill with the former professions of the party, so evident was it that it was going to make the price of many essential articles higher, that Mr. Morrill, candid gentleman that he was, apologized rather pathetically for it. He had hoped, he said in course of debate, that at the close of the war the tariff had reached its maximum, and that the earliest business of Congress after taking off internal taxes on manufactures would be to reduce duties by the full compensating amount. That this could not be done with safety was due in his mind entirely to the failure of Congress to redeem the currency. As long as there was $917,000,000 of paper money in circulation Mr. Morrill thought the tariff could not be lowered, but ought rather to be raised. His argument was not particularly clear or convincing, but it was obvious that he believed what he said, and that he was greatly worried over the situation.
Mr. Morrill’s doleful apology for raising duties was entirely misplaced as far as the dominant factor in Congress was concerned. It was not the higher duties which stirred that body to protest against the bill, it was the lower; it was not the extravagant increases, it was the moderate ones; it was not the articles added, it was those omitted. Thus, among other items in the schedule was one making the duty on Nova Scotia coal 50 cents a ton, although the duty on coal from other points was $1.25 a ton. This discrimination was, of course, for the sake of New England manufacturers, who were cut off from using native coal by the freight charges of the long haul. Again, scrap iron was not protected at all and shoddy had a duty only four times what it had been formerly! These and other similar changes in the bill were not fairly before the House when Stevens broke out in anger at the moderation of the measure. “I look upon this bill as a free trade bill from beginning to end,” he stormed. Nova Scotia coal should pay the full tariff of $1.25, and that was not enough. There was not a word about scrap iron in the bill, shoddy should pay more. “It is a most extraordinary imposition upon the protective tariff of the country.” But Stevens was physically too weak to do justice to his indignation—more than once when he tried to address the House he sank back into his seat, exclaiming, “I am too exhausted,” but if he could not defend his doctrine, he had a Pennsylvania colleague who could, and far more cunningly, with far more knowledge and fairness than Stevens. This was William D. Kelley of Philadelphia. Kelley at once took hold of the debate on the bill, his whole weight being thrown in favor of the highest protection of any article which could be made or grown in the United States. His knowledge of the articles on which he spoke, and his eloquence, clearness, and conviction in presentation, were such as to mark him at once as the probable future leader of the high protectionists.
But bold, able, and determined as the protectionist sentiment in the House showed itself, it was not to go unchallenged. A species of three-cornered fight developed within the party. There was Mr. Morrill defending while deploring the bill, on the ground that paper currency made it necessary,—there were the high protectionists led by Mr. Stevens in spirit and Mr. Kelley in speech, and there was a most interesting body of moderate protectionists, led by three representatives from Iowa, John A. Kasson, James F. Wilson, and William B. Allison. These men were ably seconded by Frederick A. Pike of Maine (“tax-fight-emancipate Pike”) and Henry Raymond of New York. Ridicule, protest, argument, were in turn tried by this group. “It is well understood that there are many very worthy manufacturers of coffee in this country,” Mr. Pike said in disgust one day; “they make it of chicory, beans, peas, rye, wheat, dandelion root, and many other things. So there is reason for retaining a small duty on coffee in order to protect that worthy class of our manufacturers.”
Mr. Raymond, who was indignant over the increased duty on railroad iron—a duty which he declared would increase the annual expenses of the two roads in his state, the Erie and the Central, at least $2,000,000—exclaimed: “If the bill of 1865 is not sufficient protection, what in Heaven’s name will be? We were told at the beginning if we protected this infant industry it would soon stand alone. We have been doing it for thirty or forty years, and yet every session of Congress witnesses new demands for increased protection.”
It was Mr. Kasson who did perhaps the most effective service against the measure. He wished simply “to foster the incipient industries of America until they were able to take care of themselves without help, in fair competition with the industries of foreign countries.” To make the duties so high that foreign competition was removed, was, in Mr. Kasson’s judgment, to encourage monopoly. This was a bill “to prevent the diffused blessings of Providence from being enjoyed by the people of the United States,” he declared. Who were the handful of wool-growers in the country that 34,000,000 consumers should be taxed to support them? Mr. Kasson was especially bitter against the higher prices the bill would undoubtedly make for farmers. “What does this bill do?” he asked. “It raises the tariff on lumber, which is so necessary to the Western prairie farmer; on nails, without which he cannot drive his boards on his house or build his fence; on salt, without which he cannot preserve his beef and pork. There is hardly a thing he consumes which this bill forgets to raise the duty upon. Every prominent necessity of life, food, fuel, shelter, and clothing, is embraced and made more expensive to the consumer throughout the country. Even on boys’ pocket-knives the duty is increased about three times—600 per cent—one member of the committee tells me. And yet it is said this is a tariff for mere protection. Why, sir, you are protecting the American people until they will not be able to buy one solitary thing that is protected if this goes on.” It was unjust to the consumers, and, said Mr. Kasson, “Consumption represents millions, capital only thousands.”
The majority of the Western representatives were with him in the feeling that the bill was unjust to the farmer. “Long John” Wentworth of Illinois, a Republican of Democratic antecedents, did some sensible, pointed arguing against the higher duties on the ground that they were against the very men (the farmers) “who do most of the tax-paying in peace and most of the fighting in war.” He warned emphatically that not only was the bill a discrimination, but that it was certain to encourage interstate combinations—a warning which was repeatedly dropped during the debate, and to which the tendency to combination in the salt, iron, and copper industries gave particular force.
When Wentworth and the Westerners found that there was little chance of defeating the bill they declared that it must be made just all around—there must be protection for the farmer and they asked for 30 per cent on cattle, 50 per cent on fruit, more on grain, duties which raised strong protests from Pennsylvania and other manufacturing centres. This would take the necessaries of life from the reach of “their poor toiling millions.” Yes, said the Westerners, but you are taking the necessaries of labor from our “poor toiling millions.”