The statesman who had contributed most to the framing of the Constitution, Charles Pinckney, in his effort to secure its ratification by his own State, had made among other things this remarkable statement:
“‘Foreign Trade’ is one of the enemies against which we must be extremely guarded, more so than against any other, as none will ever have a more unfavorable operation. I consider it as the root of our present public distress, as the plentiful source from which our future national calamities will flow, unless great care is taken to prevent it.”[84]
Thirty years later he warned Congress along similar lines, “that a country mainly agricultural and without mines of the precious metals, could not have its imports greatly in excess of its exports, without financial disaster.”[85]
From the time of the Union to the first embargo and the war of 1812, the immense preponderance of the value of imports had been greatly reduced from nearly treble to an excess of but twenty-five per cent; but in the two years which followed the peace they had increased to almost double the value of the exports. Under Lowndes’s tariff of 1816 they again fell to an excess of only about twenty per cent by 1821.[86]
From that period until the Compromise of 1833, they still further fell to an excess of about eight per cent; the value of the exports for these twelve years being $934,287,320, and that of the imports $1,007,853,830, a total excess of value for imports in the twelve years amounting to $73,566,502.
Considering the States through which this commerce moved, we find, with regard to Massachusetts, for this period, the value of exports, $125,378,462; imports, $182,861,825. Pennsylvania, exports, $86,062,157; imports, $139,891,027. Maryland, exports, $53,048,043; imports, $56,860,616. New York, exports, $267,371,444; imports, $473,671,382. An excess of imports at Northern ports of the value of $321,000,000.
Now taking the Southern States for the same period, we find Virginia, exports, $47,535,525; imports, $7,093,499. South Carolina, exports, $93,018,377; imports, $20,625,049. Georgia, exports, $56,167,842; imports $5,828,581. Alabama, exports, $14,897,425; imports, $1,631,343. Louisiana, exports, $138,670,081; imports, $68,321,568. An excess of exports amounting to $247,000,000.[87]
While, therefore, a great amount of money from the South may have been expended for Northern manufactures, a great deal also went out for importation of goods through Northern markets.
The revision of the tariff was to correct both wrongs.
But the result was simply that in a period half as long, six years, the excess of the value of imports over exports for the whole country doubled and this without any appreciable gain in the exports of Virginia and but a slight gain, considering the agitation, for South Carolina; or totally a condition which, with even the greater gain of Georgia, still left the South Atlantic States in both import and export trade far behind the Gulf States, more rapidly developing, and fed by the great waterway of the Mississippi.