The Great Conspiracy, Complete

by John Alexander Logan

At the close of that War the traders of Great Britain determined, even at a temporary loss to themselves, to glut our market with their goods and thus break down forever, as they hoped, our infant manufactures. Their purpose and object were boldly announced in the House of Commons by Mr. Brougham, when he said: "Is it worth while to incur a loss upon the first importation, in order by the glut to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures in the United States which the War had forced into existence contrary to the natural course of things." Against this threatened ruin, our manufacturers all over the United States—the sugar planters of Louisiana among them—clamored for Protection, and Congress at once responded with the Tariff Act of 1816.

This law greatly extended and increased specific duties on, and diminished the application of the ad valorem principle to, foreign imports; and it has been well described as "the practical foundation of the American policy of encouragement of home manufactures—the practical establishment of the great industrial system upon which rests our present National wealth, and the power and the prosperity and happiness of our whole people." While Henry Clay of Kentucky, William Loundes of South Carolina, and Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia supported the Bill most effectively, no man labored harder and did more effective service in securing its passage than John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. The contention on their part was not for a mere "incidental protection" —much less a "Tariff for revenue only"—but for "Protection" in its broadest sense, and especially the protection of their cotton manufactures. Indeed Calhoun's defense of Protection, from the assaults of those from New England and elsewhere who assailed it on the narrow ground that it was inimical to commerce and navigation, was a notable one. He declared that:

"It (the encouragement of manufactures) produced a system strictly American, as much so as agriculture, in which it had the decided advantage of commerce and navigation. The country will from this derive much advantage. Again it is calculated to bind together more closely our wide-spread Republic. It will greatly increase our mutual dependence and intercourse, and will, as a necessary consequence, excite an increased attention to internal improvements—a subject every way so intimately connected with the ultimate attainment of national strength and the perfection of our political institutions."

He regarded the fact that it would make the parts adhere more closely; that it would form a new and most powerful cement far outweighing any political objections that might be urged against the system. In his opinion "the liberty and the union of the country were inseparably united; that as the destruction of the latter would most certainly involve the former, so its maintenance will with equal certainty preserve it;" and he closed with an impressive warning to the Nation of a "new and terrible danger" which threatened it, to wit: "disunion." Nobly as he stood up then—during the last term of his service in the House of Representatives—for the great principles of, the American System of Protection to manufactures, for the perpetuity of the Union, and for the increase of "National strength," it seems like the very irony of fate that a few years later should find him battling against Protection as "unconstitutional," upholding Nullification as a "reserved right" of his State, and championing at the risk of his neck that very "danger" to the "liberties" and life of his Country against which his prophetic words had already given solemn warning.

Strange was it also, in view of the subsequent attitudes of the South and New England, that this essentially Protective Tariff Act of 1816 should have been vigorously protested and voted against by New England, while it was ably advocated and voted for by the South—the 25 votes of the latter which secured its passage being more than sufficient to have secured its defeat had they been so inclined.

The Tariff Acts of 1824 and 1828 followed the great American principle of Protection laid down and supported by the South in the Act of 1816, while widening, increasing, and strengthening it. Under their operation—especially under that of 1828, with its high duties on wool, hemp, iron, lead, and other staples—great prosperity smiled upon the land, and particularly upon the Free States.

In the cotton-growing belt of the South, however, where the prosperity was relatively less, owing to the blight of Slavery, the very contrast bred discontent; and, instead of attributing it to the real cause, the advocates of Free Trade within that region insisted that the Protective Tariff was responsible for the condition of things existing there.

A few restless and discontented spirits in the South had indeed agitated the subject of Free Trade as against Protected manufactures as early as 1797, and, hand in hand with it, the doctrine of States Rights. And Jefferson himself, although, as we have already seen, attached to the American System of Protection and believing in its Constitutionality, unwittingly played into the hands of these Free Traders by drawing up the famous Kentucky Resolutions of '98 touching States Rights, which were closely followed by the Virginia Resolutions of 1799 in the same vein by Madison, also an out-and-out Protectionist. It was mainly in condemnation of the Alien and Sedition Laws, then so unpopular everywhere, that these resolutions were professedly fulminated, but they gave to the agitating Free Traders a States-Rights-Secession-weapon of which they quickly availed themselves.

Their drift may be gathered from the first of the Kentucky Resolutions of '98, which was in these words: "Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government, but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes—delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own self-government; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and as an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."

The Resolutions, after enumerating the Alien and Sedition and certain other laws as in point, conclude by calling upon the other States to join Kentucky in her opposition to such Federal usurpations of power as thus embodied, and express confidence: "That they will concur with this Commonwealth in considering the said Acts as so palpably against the Constitution as to amount to an undisguised declaration that that compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the General Government, but that it will proceed in the exercise over these States, of all powers whatsoever; that they will view this as seizing the rights of the States, and consolidating them in the hands of the General Government, with the power assumed to bind the States (not merely as to the cases made federal (casus foederis) but) in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent; that this would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority; and that the co-States, returning to their natural rights in cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these Acts void and of no force, and will each take measures of its own in providing that neither these Acts, nor any others of the General Government, not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised within their respective territories."