THE TARIFF OF ABOMINATIONS AND THE SOUTH CAROLINA EXPOSITION (1827-
1828)
While the slavery agitation was inflaming the minds of South
Carolina and her sister states of the cotton region, and while
Georgia, half a frontier state, was flinging defiance at the general
government when it checked her efforts to complete the possession of
her territory, the reopening of the tariff question brought the
matter of state resistance to a climax.
The tariff of 1824 was unsatisfactory to the woolen interests. In
the course of the decade there had been an astonishing increase of
woolen factories in New England, [Footnote: See chap. ii., above.]
and the strength of the protective movement grew correspondingly in
that section. By a law which took effect at the end of 1824, England
reduced the duty on wool to a penny a pound, and thus had the
advantage of a cheap raw material as well as low wages, so that the
American mills found themselves placed at an increasing
disadvantage. Under the system of ad valorem duties, the English
exporters got their goods through the United States custom-house by
such under valuation as gravely diminished even the protection
afforded by the tariff of 1824; and the unloading of large
quantities of woolen goods by auction sales brought a cry of
distress from New England. This led to an agitation to substitute
specific duties in place of ad valorem, and to apply to woolens the
minimum principle already applied to cottons. At the same time
sheep-raisers were demanding increased protection.
Early in 1827, therefore, Mallory, of Vermont, a state which was
especially interested in wool-growing, brought into the House of
Representatives a report of the committee on manufactures, proposing
a bill which provided three minimum points for woolen goods, with
certain exceptions, those that cost less than 40 cents a square yard
were to be rated as though they cost 40 cents in imposing the
tariff; those which cost between 40 cents and $2.50 were reckoned at
$2.50; and those which cost between $2.50 and $4, at $4. Upon
unmanufactured wool, after 1828, a duty of forty per cent, was
imposed, and all wool costing between 10 and 40 cents a pound was to
be rated at 40 cents. [Footnote: Stanwood, Tariff Controversies, I.,
255.]
The political situation exercised a dominant influence upon the
tariff legislation at this time. As the campaign between Adams and
Jackson was approaching its end, the managers of Jackson faced the
problem of how to hold together the forces of the south, which were
almost to a man opposed to tariff legislation, and those of
Pennsylvania and New York, where protection was so popular. Jackson
himself, as we have seen, announced his belief in the home-market
idea, and, although with some reservations, committed himself to the
support of the protective system.
While the forces of Jackson were not harmonious on the tariff,
neither was there consistency of interests between the friends of
protection in New England, the middle states, and the west. If New
England needed an increased tariff to sustain her woolen factories,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and parts of New York were equally interested in
extending the protection to wool, the raw material of the New
England mills. If the New England shipping interests demanded cheap
cordage, on the other hand, the Kentucky planters were ever ready to
plead for an increased duty upon the hemp which made the ropes. If
iron foundries were developing among the towns of the New England
coast, where ships brought in the raw material from Sweden and from
England, the Pennsylvania forges found an opposite interest in their
desire for an increased duty on pig-iron to protect the domestic
product.
The history of the tariff has always been the history of the
struggle to combine local and opposing interests into a single bill.
Such conditions furnished opportunity for the clever politicians who
guided Jackson's canvass to introduce discordant ideas and jealousy
between the middle states, the west, and New England. The silence of
the New England president upon the question of the tariff, the
"selfishness of New England's policy," and the inducements offered
to the middle region and the west to demand protection for their
special interests were all successfully used to break the unity of
the tariff forces. Even protectionist Pennsylvania, and Kentucky,
home of the champion of the American system, gave a large share of
their votes against the bill. Although it passed the House (February
10, 1827), the Senate laid it on the table by the casting-vote of
Vice-President Calhoun, who was thus compelled to take the
responsibility of defeating the measure, [Footnote: See the account
of Van Buren's tactics at this time, in Stanwood, Tariff
Controversies, I., 258; and Calhoun, Works, III., 47.] and to range
himself permanently with the anti-tariff sentiment of his section.
Hardly had the woolens bill met its fate when the rival forces began
to reorganize for another struggle. From the south and from the
shipping interests of New England came memorials in opposition to
the tariff and in support of the theory of free-trade. [Footnote:
Am. State Papers, Finance, V. passim.] At a convention which met in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, July 30, 1827, a hundred delegates from
thirteen states met to promote the cause of protection. Finding it
necessary to combine the various interests, the convention
recommended increased duties both upon wool and woolen goods, and
the establishment of the minimum system. This combination was made
possible by the proposal of effectively counterbalancing the
prohibitory duties on wool by such use of the minimum device as
would give a practical monopoly of the American market to the
domestic manufacturers in the class of goods in which they were most
interested. To conciliate other sections, the convention adopted the
plan of an additional duty on hammered bar-iron, hemp and flax, and
various other products. [Footnote: Stanwood, Tariff Controversies,
I., 264; Niles' Register, XXXII., 369, 386, XXXIII., 187; Elliott,
Tariff Controversy, 239.]
When the twentieth Congress met, in December, 1827, Stevenson, of
Virginia, defeated the administration candidate, Taylor, of New
York, for the speakership, and both branches of Congress and the
important committees were put in the hands of the opposition to
Adams. Rejecting the plan of the Harrisburg Convention, the House
committee brought in a bill framed to satisfy the producers of raw
material, wool, hemp, flax, and iron, and to deny the protection
desired by New England. [Footnote: Taussig, Tariff Hist., 89-92;
Dewey, Financial Hist. of the U.S., 178-181.] Protection was
afforded to raw material even where the producers did not seek it;
and in some important cases high duties were imposed on raw material
not produced in this country. The essential point of the provision
respecting woolens favored by the Harrisburg Convention was the
fixing of four minimum points, but the committee on manufactures
interposed between the minimum of 50 cents and that of $2.50 a
minimum of $1, which effectively withdrew protection from the woolen
goods most largely manufactured in New England. Moreover, the
committee refused to establish the increasing rate of duty asked for
at Harrisburg.
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.
Moreover, the price of slaves was increased by the demands of the
new cotton-fields of Alabama, Mississippi, and the rest of the
southwest, so that the Carolina planter had to apply a larger
capital to his operations, while, at the same time, the cheap and
unexhausted soil of these new states tended still further to hamper
the older cotton areas in their competition, and the means of
transportation from the western cotton-fields were better than from
those of South Carolina. By devoting almost exclusive attention to
her great staple, South Carolina had made herself dependent on the
grain and live-stock of the west and the manufactures of the north
or of England; and, when the one crop from which she derived her
means of purchasing declined in value, the state was plunged in
unrelieved distress. Nevertheless, the planters of the old south saw
clearly but two of the causes of their distress: the tariff, which
seemed to them to steal the profits of their crops; and internal
improvements, by which the proceeds of their indirect taxes were
expended in the west and north. Their indignation was also fanned to
a fiercer flame by apprehensions over the attitude of the north
towards slavery.
In the summer of 1828, Calhoun addressed himself to the statement of
these grievances and to the formulation of a remedy. After
consultation with leading men in his home at Fort Hill, he was ready
to shape a document which, nominally a report of a legislative
committee (since it was not expedient for the vice-president to
appear in the matter), put in its first systematic form the doctrine
of nullification. This so-called Exposition, [Footnote: Calhoun,
Works, VI., 1-59.] beginning with the unconstitutionality and
injustice of protection, developed the argument that the tax on
imports, amounting to about twenty-three million dollars, fell, in
effect, solely on the south, because the northern sections
recompensed themselves by the increased profits afforded to their
productions by protection; while the south, seeking in the markets
of the world customers for its staples, and obliged to purchase
manufactures and supplies in return, was forced to pay tribute on
this exchange for the benefit of the north. "To the growers of
cotton, rice, and tobacco, it is the same whether the Government
takes one-third of what they raise, for the liberty of sending the
other two-thirds abroad, or one-third of the iron, salt, sugar,
coffee, cloth and other articles they may need in exchange for the
liberty of bringing them home."
Estimating the annual average export of domestic produce at fifty-
three million dollars, the Exposition attributed to the planting
section at least thirty-seven million dollars--over two-thirds of
the total exports; the voting power of this section in the House of
Representatives was but seventy-six, while the rest of the Union had
one hundred and thirty-seven members. Thus, one-third of the
political Union exported more than two-thirds of the domestic
products. Assuming imports to equal exports, and the tariff of 1828
to average forty-five per cent., the south would pay sixteen million
six hundred and fifty thousand dollars as its share of contributions
to the national treasury. Calhoun then presented the ominous
suggestion that, if the staple section had a separate custom-house,
it would have for its own use a revenue of sixteen million six
hundred and fifty thousand dollars from foreign trade alone, not
counting the imports from the north, which would bring in millions
more.
"We are mere consumers," he declared, "the serfs of the system--out
of whose labor is raised, not only the money paid into the Treasury,
but the funds out of which are drawn the rich rewards of the
manufacturer and his associates in interest."
Taking for granted that the price at which the south could afford to
cultivate cotton was determined by the price at which it received
its supplies, he argued that, if the crop could be produced at ten
cents a pound, the removal of the duty would enable the planter to
produce it at five and one-half cents, and thus to drive out
competition and to add three or four hundred thousand bales annually
to the production, with a corresponding increase of profit. The
complaints of the south were not yet exhausted, for the Exposition
went on to point out that, in the commercial warfare with Europe
which protection might be expected to engender, the south would be
deprived of its market and might be forced to change its industrial
life and compete with the northern states in manufactures. The
advantages of the north would probably insure it an easy victory;
but if not, then an attack might be expected on the labor system of
the south, in behalf of the white workmen of the north.
What, then, was the remedy? Calhoun found this, although in
fragmentary form, ready to his hand. The reserved rights of the
sovereign states had long been the theoretical basis of southern
resistance. In the argumentation of such writers as Taylor,
Turnbull, and Judge Roane, not to mention Madison and Jefferson in
the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, there was material for the
system; but as yet no one had stated with entire clearness the two
features which Calhoun made prominent in his Exposition. First, he
made use of reasoning in sharp contrast to that of the statesmen of
the days of the American Revolution, by rejecting the doctrine of
the division of sovereignty between the states and the general
government. [Footnote: McLaughlin, in Am. Hist. Rev., V., 482, 484.]
Clearly differentiating government from sovereignty, he limited the
application of the division to the powers of government, and
attributed the sovereignty solely to the people of the several
states. This conception of the unity of sovereignty was combined
with the designation of the Constitution as articles of compact
between sovereign states, each entitled to determine whether or not
the general government had usurped powers not granted by the
Constitution, and each entitled peacefully to prevent the operation
of the disputed law within its own limits, pending a decision by the
same power that could amend the Constitution--namely, three-fourths
of the states.
These doctrines were brought out with definiteness and with the
deliberate intention of creating from them a practical governmental
machinery to be peacefully applied for the preservation of the
rights of the states. In effect, therefore, Calhoun, the logician of
nationalism in the legislation that followed the War of 1812, became
the real architect of the system of nullification as a plan of
action rather than a protest. As it left his hands, the system was
essentially a new creation. In the Exposition, the doctrine was
sketched only in its larger lines, for it was in later documents
that he refined and elaborated it. It was intended as a substitute
for revolution and disunion--but it proved to be the basis on which
was afterwards developed the theory of peaceable secession. Calhoun
did not publicly avow his authorship or his adhesion to
nullification until three years later.
The rallying of the party of the Union in South Carolina against
this doctrine, the refusal of Georgia, Virginia, and other southern
states to accept it as the true exposition of the Virginia and
Kentucky resolutions, the repudiation of it by the planting states
of the southwest, all belong to the next volume of this series.
Yet the Exposition marks the culmination of the process of
transformation with which this volume has dealt. Beginning with
nationalism, the period ends with sectionalism. Beginning with unity
of party and with the almost complete ascendancy of republicanism of
the type of Monroe, it ends with sharply distinguished rival
parties, as yet unnamed, but fully organized, and tending to differ
fundamentally on the question of national powers. From the days when
South-Carolinians led in legislation for tariff and internal
improvements, when Virginians promoted the Colonization Society, and
Georgians advocated the policy of mitigating the evils of slavery by
scattering the slaves, we have reached the period when a united
south protests against "the American system," and the lower south
asserts that slavery must not be touched--not even discussed.
In various southern states the minority counties of the coast,
raising staples by slave labor, had protected their property
interests against the free majority of farmers in the interior
counties by so apportioning the legislature as to prevent action by
the majority. Now the same conditions existed for the nation. The
free majority embraced a great zone of states in the north and west;
the south, a minority section, was now seeking protection against
the majority of the Union by the device of state sovereignty; and
Calhoun made himself the political philosopher of the rights of this
minority section, applying to the nation the experience of South
Carolina. [Footnote: Calhoun. Works, I., 400-405.]
Still the great currents of national growth ran on. New England was
achieving unity and national feeling as a manufacturing region, and
Webster was developing those powers which were to make him the
orator of consolidation. While the leaders of the middle states
played the game of personal politics, their people and those of the
growing west were rallying around the man who personified their
passion for democracy and nationalism--the fiery Jackson, who
confused sectional opposition to the government with personal
hostility to himself. This frontiersman was little likely to allow
political metaphysics, or even sectional suffering, to check his
will. And on the frontier of the northwest, the young Lincoln sank
his axe deep in the opposing forest.