Mr. Calhoun spoke with enthusiasm, and gave an interesting résumé of the condition of the country as affected by the war with Great Britain. He believed that the vital deficiency in our financial condition was the lack of manufactures, and to supply that deficiency he was willing to extend the protecting arm of the government. "When our manufactures are grown to a certain perfection, as they soon will be under the fostering care of the government, we shall no longer experience these evils. The farmer will find a ready market for his surplus products, and, what is almost of equal consequence, a certain and cheap supply for all his wants. His prosperity will diffuse itself through every class in the community." Not satisfied with this unqualified support of the protective system, Mr. Calhoun supplemented it by declaring that "to give perfection to this state of things, it will be necessary to add as soon as possible a system of internal improvements." Mr. Webster's opposition to protection was based on the fact that it tended to depress commerce and curtail the profits of the carrying-trade.
The tariff of 1816 was termed "moderately protective," but even in that form it encountered the opposition of the commercial interest. It was followed in the country by severe depression in all departments of trade, not because the duties were not in themselves sufficiently high, but from the fact that it followed the war tariff, and the change was so great as to produce not only a re-action but a revolution in the financial condition of the country. All forces of industry languished. Bankruptcy was wide-spread, and the distress between 1817 and 1824 was perhaps deeper and more general than at any other period of our history. There was no immigration of foreigners, and consequently no wealth from that source. There was no market for agricultural products, and the people were therefore unable to indulge in liberal expenditure. Their small savings could be more profitably invested in foreign than in domestic goods, and hence American manufactures received little patronage. The traditions of that period, as given by the generation that lived through it, are sorrowful and depressing. The sacrifice of great landed estates, worth many millions could they have been preserved for the heirs of the next generation, was a common feature in the general distress and desolation. The continuance of this condition of affairs had no small influence on the subsequent division of parties. It naturally led to a change in the financial system, and in 1824 a tariff Act was passed, materially enlarging the scope of the Act of 1816.
THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF OF 1824.
The Act of 1824 was avowedly protective in its character and was adopted through the influence of Mr. Clay, then Speaker of the House of Representatives. His most efficient ally on the floor was Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania who exerted himself vigorously in aid of the measure. Mr. Webster again appeared in the debate, arguing against the "obsolete and exploded notion of protection," and carrying with him nearly the whole vote of Massachusetts in opposition. Mr. Clay was enabled to carry the entire Kentucky delegation for the high protective tariff, and Mr. Calhoun's views having meanwhile undergone a radical change, South Carolina was found to be unanimous in opposition, and cordially co-operating with Massachusetts in support of free-trade. The effect of that tariff was undoubtedly favorable to the general prosperity, and during the administration of John Quincy Adams every material interest of the country improved. The result was that the supporters of the protective system, congratulating themselves upon the effect of the work of 1824, proceeded in 1828 to levy still higher duties. They applied the doctrine of protection to the raw materials of the country, the wool, the hemp, and all unmanufactured articles which by any possibility could meet with damaging competition from abroad.
It was indeed an era of high duties, of which, strange as it may seem to the modern reader, Silas Wright of New York and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania appeared as the most strenuous defenders, and were personally opposed in debate by John Davis of Massachusetts and Peleg Sprague of Maine. To add to the entanglement of public opinion, Mr. Webster passed over to the side of ultra-protection and voted for the bill, finding himself in company with Martin Van Buren of New York, and Thomas H. Benton of Missouri. It was an extraordinary commingling of political elements, in which it is difficult to find a line of partition logically consistent either with geographical or political divisions. Mr. Webster carried with him not more than two or three votes of the Massachusetts delegation. His colleague in the Senate, Nathaniel Silsbee, voted against him, and in the House such personal adherents as Edward Everett and Isaac C. Bates recorded themselves in the negative. There was a great deal of what in modern phase would be called "fencing for position" in the votes on this test question of the day. The names of no less than five gentlemen who were afterwards Presidents of the United States were recorded in the yeas and nays on the passage of the bill in the two Houses,—Mr. Van Buren, General Harrison, John Tyler, in the Senate, and Mr. Polk and Mr. Buchanan in the House.
There was a general feeling that the Act of 1828 marked a crisis in the history of tariff discussion, and that it would in some way lead to important results in the fate of political parties and political leaders. Mr. Calhoun was this year elected Vice-President of the United States, with General Jackson as President, and Mr. Van Buren was transferred from the Senate to the State Department as the head of Jackson's cabinet. When by his address and tact he had turned the mind of the President against Calhoun as his successor, and fully ingratiated himself in executive favor, the quarrel began which is elsewhere detailed at sufficient length. In this controversy, purely personal at the outset, springing from the clashing ambitions of two aspiring men, the tariff of 1828, especially with the vote of Mr. Van Buren in favor of it, was made to play an important part. The quarrel rapidly culminated in Mr. Calhoun's resignation of the Vice-Presidency, his leadership of the Nullification contest in South Carolina, and his re-election to the Senate of the United States some time before the expiration of the Vice-Presidential term for which he had been chosen. The result was a reduction of duties, first by the Act of July, 1832, and secondly by Mr. Clay's famous compromise Act of March 2, 1833, in which it was provided that by a sliding-scale all the duties in excess of twenty per cent. should be abolished within a period of ten years. It was this Act which for the time calmed excitement in the South, brought Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Clay into kindly relations, and somewhat separated Mr. Webster and Mr. Clay,—at least producing one of those periods of estrangement which, throughout their public career, alternated with the cordial friendship they really entertained for each other.
THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF OF 1842.
During the operation of this Act,—which was really an abandonment of the protective principle,—the financial crisis of 1837 came upon the country, and a period of distress ensued, almost equal to that which preceded the enactment of the tariff of 1824. Many persons, still in active business, recall with something of horror the hardships and privations which were endured throughout the country from 1837 to 1842. The long-continued depression produced the revolution against the Democratic party which ended in the overthrow of Mr. Van Buren and the election of General Harrison as President of the United States in 1840. The Whig Congress that came into power at the same time, proceeded to enact the law popularly known as the tariff of 1842, which was strongly protective in its character though not so extreme as the Act of 1828. The vote in favor of the bill was not exclusively Whig, as some of the Northern Democrats voted for it and some of the Southern Whigs against it. Conspicuous among the former were Mr. Buchanan of Pennsylvania and Mr. Wright of New York, who maintained a consistency with their vote for the tariff of 1828. Conspicuous among Southern Whigs against it were Berrien of Georgia, Clayton of Delaware, Mangum of North Carolina, Merrick of Maryland, and Rives of Virginia. The two men who above all others deserve honor for successful management of the bill were George Evans, the brilliant and accomplished senator from Maine, and Thomas M. T. McKennan, for many years an able, upright, and popular representative from Pennsylvania. John Quincy Adams, in a public speech delivered in 1843 in the town of Mr. McKennan's residence, ascribed to that gentleman the chief credit of carrying the Protective Tariff Bill through the House of Representatives. The vote showed, as all tariff bills before had, and as all since have shown, that the local interest of the constituency determines in large measure the vote of the representative; that planting sections grow more and more towards free-trade and manufacturing sections more and more towards protection.
The friends of home industry have always referred with satisfaction to the effect of the tariff of 1842 as an explicit and undeniable proof of the value of protection. It raised the country from a slough of despond to happiness, cheerfulness, confidence. It imparted to all sections a degree of prosperity which they had not known since the repeal of the tariff of 1828. The most suggestive proof of its strength and popularity was found in the contest of 1844 between Mr. Polk and Mr. Clay, where the Democrats in the critical Northern States assumed the advocacy of the tariff of 1842 as loudly as the supporters of Mr. Clay. Other issues overshadowed the tariff, which was really considered to be settled, and a President and Congress were chosen without any distinct knowledge on the part of their constituents as to what their action might be upon this question. The popular mind had been engrossed with the annexation of Texas and with the dawn of the free-soil excitement; hence protection and free-trade were in many States scarcely debated from lack of interest, and, in the States where interest prevailed, both parties took substantially the same side.
A deception had however been practiced in the manufacturing States of the North, and when the administration of Mr. Polk was installed, the friends of protection were startled by the appointment of a determined opponent of the tariff of 1842, as Secretary of the Treasury. Robert J. Walker was a senator from Mississippi when the Act was passed, and was bitterly opposed to it. He was a man of great originality, somewhat speculative in his views, and willing to experiment on questions of revenue to the point of rashness. He was not a believer in the doctrine of protection, was persuaded that protective duties bore unjustly and severely upon the planting section with which he was identified; and he came to his office determined to overthrow the tariff Act, which he had been unable to defeat in the Senate. Mr. Walker was excessively ambitious to make his term in the Treasury an era in the history of the country. He had a difficult task before him,—one from which a conservative man would have shrunk. The tariff was undoubtedly producing a valuable revenue; and, as the administration of Mr. Polk was about to engage in war, revenue was what they most needed. Being about to enter upon a war, every dictate of prudence suggested that aggressive issues should not be multiplied in the country. But Mr. Walker was not Secretary of War or Secretary of State, and he was unwilling to sit quietly down and collect the revenue under a tariff imposed by a Whig Congress, against which he had voted, while Buchanan in directing our foreign relations, and Marcy in conducting a successful war, would far outstrip him in public observation and in acquiring the elements of popularity adapted to the ambition which all three alike shared.