In his first annual message President Jackson referred to the general dissatisfaction with the manner ofdealing with the question of internal improvements which had prevailed to that time, and proposed that the general Government should abandon the subject entirely and should distribute the surplus of the revenue, above the wants of the Government, among the Commonwealths, and leave to them the expenditure of the money upon internal improvements.
The Congress, however, paid no regard to the President's recommendation. In May, 1830, it sent up to the President for his approval a bill authorizing and requiring the Government to take stock in a Kentucky turnpike, running from Maysville on the Ohio River to Lexington, some sixty miles inward.
The President vetoed the bill, May 27th. His special reason was that the road was not a national, but a local, matter. He did not attack the Monroe principle upon the general subject of internal improvements, but he referred to the recommendation contained in his annual message as still expressing his view of the manner in which the Government should rid itself of the embarrassments into which it was being farther and farther drawn by the practice of voting national money for internal improvements. He argued that the subject must be considered upon its own merits, and not brought into connection with the tariff policy. He thus saw the prospect of the expenditure of millions of national money upon internal improvements in order to relieve the protectionists of the embarrassment of a great surplus, and denounced it. He contended that the Government should adopt its policy upon each of these subjects as if the other did not exist. He urged, finally, that, if the people wanted the general Government to undertake internal improvements, they shouldso amend the Constitution as to give the Government sufficient jurisdiction over the roads and canals, which it might build, to protect them against wanton injury, and to collect the tolls necessary to keep them in repair. This he declared to be necessary to any satisfactory exercise of powers upon the general subject by the Government.
The veto certainly exerted some influence upon the minds of the Representatives. A majority still voted for the bill, but it was a much reduced majority. The vote upon the vetoed bill stood ninety-six to ninety. The bill was therefore lost.
The exact question at issue was not, as we have seen, the general policy of internal improvements, but it was whether the Maysville road was a national improvement. An analysis of the vote upon the subject may not, therefore, have any significance, from the point of view of the general question. Roughly, we may say that a majority of the Representatives from the South voted against the bill, a large majority of those from the Northwest voted for it, a majority of those from Pennsylvania and New Jersey voted for it, while a majority of those from New York voted against it, and, lastly, the Representatives from New England were divided. It thus appears rather far fetched to ascribe the attitude of the opponents of the bill, in any section, to the influence of the slavery interest. Those who voted against the bill said they did so because the object for which the appropriation was sought was a local affair, managed by a private corporation, for private gain. That uncompromising enemy of slavery, Mr. John W. Taylor, of New York, was prominent among those who took this position and voted against the bill. He even pronounced it unconstitutional, and was inclined to theview, as we have seen, that internal improvements generally were left by the Constitution for the Commonwealths to construct and control.
It is usual to attribute to the veto of this bill the overthrow of the policy of internal improvements by the general Government. This proposition will hardly bear close examination. Congress continued to make appropriations for internal improvements, which the President usually vetoed, if they were in separate bills, and usually approved, if they were included in the general appropriation bills. It is calculated that while Adams signed appropriations for internal improvements to the amount of less than two millions and a half of dollars, Jackson approved disbursements for these purposes to the amount of more than ten millions of dollars.
The fact is that the building of railways was the chief force which put an end to road- and canal-making by the general Government. The construction of the Mohawk and Hudson Railroad, the parent of the New York Central system, was begun in 1825. In 1827 the survey of the Boston and Albany line was begun. The same year the Pennsylvania system had its origin. One year later the Baltimore and Ohio system was founded. The year of the veto of the Maysville road bill forty-one miles of railroad were being operated in the United States, and at the close of the decade more than two thousand miles. As the railway system spread over the country, through private enterprise, the appropriations of national money for internal improvements became more and more confined to the specific improvements of rivers and harbors. The roads and canals of a national character were being made unnecessary by the extension ofthe railways. It is undoubtedly, then, far more plausible and natural to attribute the overthrow of the policy of internal improvements by the general Government to the growth of the railways, constructed and operated by private corporations under Commonwealth charters, on the one side, and, on the other, to the settled conviction that the general Government did not have the constitutional powers adequate to the successful establishment and protection of a system of works based upon that policy, and to the unsatisfactory experience which the country had had in attempting to distinguish local from national enterprises and to confine appropriations to those of the latter character.
It is difficult to see any special connection of the interests of slavery with the decline of the policy. It is true that the slaveholders were becoming strict constructionists generally. They had learned from the Missouri struggle that Congress must not be allowed to magnify its powers when forming the Territories into Commonwealths, and they had learned from the tariff struggles that Congress must not be allowed to magnify its powers in regard to the regulation of foreign commerce and the raising of revenue, but, as to internal improvements, no reliable evidence of a consciousness, on the part of the slaveholders, of any particular connection between their peculiar interest and a policy upon this subject by the general Government is discoverable.
On the contrary, in the struggle for the repeal of the Tariff of 1828 the influence of the slavery interest is easily remarked, and is clearly seen to have been controlling.
On February 10th, 1829, Mr. William Smith, the senior Senator from South Carolina, presented to the Senate the protest of the legislature of SouthCarolina against Congressional protection to domestic manufactures. This memorial pronounced all such acts to be unconstitutional, except as incidental to raising the revenue or regulating commerce, and impolitic even then, when their operation would be unequal upon the different sections of the country, and felt by any section to be oppressive. The language of the paper was respectful, moderate, dignified, and forcible, and it contained no threats of disunion, or of violent or unlawful resistance. The legislature asked that the protest should be entered on the journal of the Senate. The Senate, however, only ordered it to be printed.
The South Carolinians promised themselves, nevertheless, some measure of relief from what they supposed would be the policy of the newly elected President. Being a Southern man, it was naturally supposed that he would recognize Southern interests in the policy upon this subject which he would recommend. But, while Jackson had not committed himself to protection for the sake of the manufacturers or of the producers of raw material, he was a strong Union man and an American, and the argument for the tariff from the point of view of national industrial independence exercised a prevailing influence in determining his attitude toward the subject.
In his message of December 8th, 1829, he wrote that the Tariff of 1828 had not proved itself so beneficial to the manufacturers or so injurious to commerce and agriculture as had been anticipated; that he regretted that all nations would not abolish restrictions, and refer the management of trade to individual enterprise; that since, however, they would not do so, a tariff was the necessary policy of the United States; but that in theface of the fact that the national debt would soon be paid, and the sinking fund would not be much longer required, a modification of the existing tariff in the direction of a reduction of duties would soon be the true and necessary policy; and that the principle to be followed in making such a modification ought to be to reduce the duties upon such articles as might come into competition with home products no further than would leave to the latter a fair chance in such competition; and that from the general principle of a reduction to this point must be excepted the duties on the implements and prime necessities of war, all of which should enjoy a higher protection than that accorded to other articles. Evidently, according to this doctrine, the chief reductions should fall upon articles not coming into competition with home products, such articles as tea, coffee, etc., at that time termed the unprotected articles. Jackson had thus anticipated Clay's American system of the tariff by nearly three years, as we shall see.
The South Carolinians were greatly disappointed by this expression of the President's views, although they claimed that the message recommended substantial tariff reduction. This part of the message was referred to the committee on Manufactures, according to the rule of procedure which had prevailed in the House of Representatives for nearly a decade, and which showed that the matter of the tariff was not regarded as something purely incidental to the raising of revenue.
The claim was now put forward, however, that the subject properly belonged to the domain of the committee on Ways and Means. Mr. George McDuffie, of South Carolina, was at this moment the chairman of this committee. He was a man of keen intelligence, strongcourage, and great persistence. He was the political economist of the slave-labor system, as Calhoun was its political scientist and constitutional lawyer. It is to be surmised, at least, that he learned much of his political economy from the notorious, if not famous, Dr. Thomas Cooper, the British President of South Carolina College. It is true that Mr. McDuffie's college days had passed before Dr. Cooper taught in the institution, but the Doctor wrote and published much upon economic and political subjects between 1820 and 1830. In fact, he set the direction of thought upon such subjects in South Carolina and throughout a large portion of the South during that period. As has been already mentioned, he was an Englishman by birth. He had spent a part of his earlier life in France, and had imbibed the doctrines of French republicanism. For this reason he was disliked and shunned by conservative men in England to such a degree as to make longer residence in his native country uncomfortable to him. He came to the United States in the last decade of the eighteenth century. His radical views and his violent expressions of them soon drew attention to him here. He was one of the men prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798. He made his way to South Carolina about the beginning of the third decade of this century, and found there a well prepared soil for his Girondist views of federal Government and his free-trade views in political economy. A true estimate of responsibilities for the events of 1832 in South Carolina would probably hold him more culpable than Calhoun himself. It was from such a thinker, and he was a keen and vigorous thinker, that Mr. McDuffie received impulse, if not actual instruction, in his reasoning.
Mr. McDuffie argued that the power to impose a tariffwas not expressly vested by the Constitution in the Government; that, therefore, if it existed at all, as a power of the Government, it must be incidental to some express provision; and that it could be incidental only to the power for raising the revenue. He, therefore, contended further that all tariff bills must originate in the House of Representatives, and in the regular revenue committee of that House, the committee of Ways and Means.
Congress had disregarded the protest of the South Carolina Legislature of the previous February. It was well known that the committee on Manufactures in the House was favorable to the maintenance of the existing duties. It seemed, therefore, to Mr. McDuffie, and those who thought with him, both natural and necessary that the committee of Ways and Means should claim their constitutional prerogative, and make an effort to get the ear of Congress to their representations. Consequently, on February 5th, 1830, Mr. McDuffie reported a tariff bill from his committee, without having had the subject specifically referred to them by the House. The bill provided for a moderate reduction of the tariff all around, but still left a duty of thirty-three and one-third per centumad valoremupon woollen fabrics.
The interest attaching to this proposition lies in the fact that it contains substantially the terms upon which the South Carolinians were willing to compromise the tariff question. It shows them to have been still moderate tariff men, rather than out and out free-traders. To the unprejudiced mind of the present day it certainly appears to have been an offer which merited some consideration, but, after a single reading, it was ordered to lie on the table, from which it was never taken up.
Meanwhile the committee on Manufactures were very deliberately maturing a measure. It was reported to the House early in April, and taken up for consideration on the 15th. It was nothing more than an administrative measure for the purpose of securing a stricter execution of the existing tariff.
Mr. McDuffie made another effort to move the House to consider a reduction of duties, in the form of an amendment to this bill. He offered such an amendment, which provided for a return to the duties imposed before 1824 upon woollens, cottons, iron, hemp, etc.
It was in support of this amendment that he made his famous argument of April 29th, 1830, in which he developed, for the first time, the doctrine in regard to the final payment of the duties which furnished the economic basis of nullification. That doctrine was that the producers of the exports, which are exchanged in the foreign markets for the imports, pay, finally, the duty upon the imports. His course of reasoning in the establishment of this doctrine was as follows: He reduced all trade ultimately to barter between producers, and then declared it to be self-evident that when a producer of exports should be obliged to pay a duty of twenty-five per centum upon the imports, which he had received in pay for his exports, before he could bring them into the country of his residence, he had received finally twenty-five per centum less for his exports than he would have received had he not been compelled to pay any duty upon his imports.
Mr. McDuffie then drew from the statistics of the foreign trade of the United States the fact that the sections cultivating cotton and rice, constituting less thanone-fifth of the Union, both in territory and population, produced thirty of the fifty-eight millions' worth of annual exports; and finally drew the conclusion from these premises that one-fifth of the people, the population of the planting sections, paid more than one-half of the duties on the imports of the country.
If this were true it was indeed a grievous burden. And if the people of the South, or that part of the South devoted to the production of these staples, believed it to be true, then would the reason for one great scruple against resistance to the execution of the tariff laws be removed, namely, the general belief theretofore prevailing, from the doctrine that the consumers of the imports ultimately pay the duties, that the burden of the duties fell nearly equally upon the different sections. So long as this belief was general the sense of oppression in any particular part or section of the country could not become very keen. Substitute for this old idea, however, the new doctrine advanced by Mr. McDuffie, and, under the existing distribution of the articles of export, there could not fail to be developed a most bitter sense of wrong and oppression on the part of the producers of the Southern staples.
The Southerners, especially the South Carolinians, did embrace the new doctrine, apparently, at least, with all sincerity. It was utterly futile that Mr. Gorham and Mr. Everett pointed out to them the fact that they consumed only a comparatively small portion of the imports received in exchange for their exports, and sold the rest to the people of the other sections with the duties added on, thus shifting the duties upon the other sections. They clung to the new doctrine as if it were something for which they had long been seeking, and to which theirhearts were already too much attached to be drawn away by argument.
It was in this speech, furthermore, that Mr. McDuffie abandoned his former view of the capacity of slave labor for manufacturing industry, and embraced and enounced the doctrine held before this by Colonel Hayne upon that subject, which was that slave labor could only be employed successfully in agriculture. This was, of course, another necessary element in the consolidation of the interests of the South against the tariff.
It was in this speech, also, that Mr. McDuffie, for the first time, pronounced the tariff unconstitutional. He did not yet declare any and every tariff unconstitutional, but only such a tariff as sacrificed one interest to another, or the interests of one section to those of another. This he claimed the existing tariff did do. The belief in the unconstitutionality of the tariff was, of course, another necessary element in the preparation for resistance to its execution.
Finally, Mr. McDuffie uttered, in this speech, the threat of resistance to the execution of the tariff laws, the threat of nullification. It was ill timed, as threats generally are, and it had the effect of producing the large majority by which Mr. McDuffie's amendment was voted down.
The bill suffered some modification in the course of its passage, but its principle remained the same. It reduced the duty on no article whatever, but only provided for a stricter enforcement of the existing laws.
By another bill, which received the President's approval on May 20th (1830), eight days before this administrative bill was signed, the duties on tea, coffee, and cocoa had been reduced. This meant that the protectionists were verywilling to free those articles from duty which did not come into competition with home productions, in order to preserve and increase the duties on those that did. This was the direction in which the tariff system was growing. It became, two years later, the pronounced principle of the "American system," as we shall see.
In the message of December 7th, 1830, President Jackson defended the constitutionality of the protective system, said that the existing tariff needed some corrections in details, and expressed the opinion that no law reducing duties could be made which would be satisfactory to the American people that would not leave a considerable surplus in the Treasury. He suggested the employment of such surplus upon internal improvements under the direction of the legislatures of the several Commonwealths.
This was a stunning blow to the hopes of the Southerners. The extinction of the debt and the existence of an unemployed surplus were the conditions to which they had looked forward as necessitating in all conservative minds the reduction of the duties. But here was a plan, suggested by a Southern President, for relieving the Treasury of any amount of surplus for an indefinite period, without the reduction of a single penny of duty upon a single article. Thus encouraged the protectionists in both Houses of Congress refused, during the session of 1830-31, to consider any propositions looking toward a reduction of duties.
It is hardly a cause of wonder that the South Carolinians began to despair of obtaining through Congress any relief from what they regarded as dire oppression, and that some of them were reviewing the Constitution, and the political principles upon which it was founded, withthe purpose of finding other means with which to meet the great emergency. It was in this part of the work that Mr. Calhoun took the lead.
As far back as 1828, just after the enactment of the tariff measure which was giving so much offence, Mr. Calhoun had started out in this direction in the paper which he furnished the South Carolina legislature, which served as the basis of the first pronunciamento from that body upon the subject, the so-called South Carolina Exposition. This document by Mr. Calhoun was comparatively temperate in its language and not very clear in its political doctrines and its constitutional interpretation. The great debate between Hayne and Webster on the floor of the Senate, over which body Mr. Calhoun, as Vice-President, presided, in regard to the fundamental principles of the Union, taught Mr. Calhoun several very important points in the evolution of his doctrine of "States' rights." Especially was he warned against the great error, made by Mr. Hayne, of representing the United States Government as one of the parties to the "constitutional pact" and the "States" as the other. Mr. Webster so completely demolished this theory that Mr. Calhoun was preserved from introducing this fallacy or any of its corollaries into his reasoning, if he had ever been inclined to do so. In his "Address on the Relations of the States and Federal Government," and in his "Address to the People of South Carolina," both published in the summer of 1831, he shows that he had maturely reflected upon all that had been said and written upon the fundamental question of the relation of the "States" to the Union and to the general Government. He had given up his hope both in the Congress and in the President. With him the question of the tariff had now,therefore, been removed from the domain of governmental policy into that of constitutional powers and political principle. This was the point of view which he took in the documents just mentioned.
He began, as innovators generally do, with the assertion that his interpretation of the Constitution was no new invention of his own, but was the ancient principle of the Constitution. That principle was, he contended, that the Constitution was made by the "States," as sovereign bodies, and that through it the "States" created only a governmental agent for their general affairs. The term or phrase United States was only the name of the general governmental agent of the "States." Sovereignty was in the "States" only. Consequently, when the United States assumed powers not conferred by the "States" in the Constitution, the "States," by virtue of the sovereign attribute, might and should interpose, interpose individually, not collectively as they, of course, might do constitutionally through the regular form of procedure for amending the Constitution.
Calhoun, like every other real statesman of his day, held that there is a domain of liberty secured not only to the minority, but to the individual, by the Constitution, upon which the majority shall not encroach. The practical question was how to prevent the majority, in possession of the powers and machinery of the Government, from doing so. The answer to this question developed by precedent, and formulated clearly by Webster at that very moment, was that it could be done only by invoking the aid of the judicial power of the United States. But Calhoun said in reply to this, that the United States courts were a part of the Government, substantially under the control of Congress and the President, through the power of Congress to constitute judgeships at pleasure, and of the President and theSenate to fill them, and that they were interested, therefore, in the usurpations of power by the Government. He further held that these courts could not decide political questions, although these questions might incidentally involve the most sacred rights of individuals, and that, anyhow, they were as much subject to the "States," acting in their sovereign capacities, as any other part of the Government. He could see no way for preserving the rights of the minority and of individuals, in last resort, against governmental usurpation, save through the power of "each of the partiesto the compact" to prevent the execution within the territory subject to its jurisdiction of such governmental measures as it might deem usurpations.
Down to the time of these utterances of Calhoun the party in South Carolina opposed to any resistance, by force, to the execution of the tariff laws, had been able to prevent the outbreak of nullification. The leaders of this party were among the most distinguished and influential men of the Commonwealth. They were Mr. Drayton, the member of Congress from the Charleston district, Judge Johnson of the United States Supreme Court, Mr. Petigru, Mr. Grimke, the Lowndes, and others of scarcely less note. In the first half of the year 1831 they still held control of the municipal government of Charleston, and of the legislature of the Commonwealth, although the "States' rights" men had obtained the governorship. Nearly all of the opponents of nullification denounced the tariff laws as unjust and oppressive to the South, but they also denounced the doctrine that the execution of any law of the United States could be constitutionally resisted, except by means of the judicial processes provided for the case by the Constitution itself. Resistance in any othermanner, they declared, would be rebellion at the outset, revolution if successful. They said that they were not willing to assume any such responsibilities in opposing the tariff laws, and that they regarded the blessings of the Union as too great and manifold to hazard disunion, even if it could be successfully and peaceably accomplished.
Their views were so candid and reasonable that, in spite of the intense excitement which prevailed during the legislative session following the failure of the attempt to modify the tariff, they prevented the nullifiers from securing a sufficient majority in the legislature to order the call of a convention. The nullifiers had committed themselves to the doctrine that the nullifying power was a power of sovereignty, not of government, and that it resided, therefore, in the convention, not in the legislature. So long, then, as the assembly of the convention could be prevented, nullification could be certainly thwarted.
But the publication of Calhoun's new doctrine in the summer of 1831 gave great strength to the nullifiers, and in the municipal election of the latter part of the year they captured the mayorship of Charleston.
One of the strongest moral forces in the hands of the opponents of nullification against which the nullifiers had to contend was the generally received doctrine that the constitutional means for meeting Congressional usurpation in any given case was a process in the United States courts. Unless they could say that they had tried this means in vain, they would still have to suffer the imputation of too hasty action, if nothing more. In order to escape this, two Charleston lawyers imported a package of dutiable goods, gave bonds for the payment of the duty,refused payment, and were sued upon their bonds in the United States District Court. The plan was to have the question of the constitutionality of the tariff submitted to the jury, but the court refused to allow the jury to decide any question except that which pertained to the due execution of the bond.
The nullifiers could now declare that every means suggested by their opponents as regular and lawful had been tried and had failed, and that there now remained only submission to oppression, or nullification, or rebellion. They said that no true South Carolinian could accept the first, and that, therefore, the choice lay between nullification and rebellion. Calhoun taught that there was a vast difference between the two; that the former was a constitutional, as well as a sovereign, method of resistance. He asserted that it was the great conservative principle of the Constitution, and defined it to be that reserved right whereby a "State," in convention assembled, might suspend the operation of a Congressional act upon its citizens which it considered unconstitutional, until conventions in three-fourths of the "States" should pronounce the Congressional act to be constitutional. He did not claim that this right was reserved specifically, but by implication from the general language of the Tenth Amendment. He was doubtless sincere, or at least thought he was. Many of his followers certainly were, and the masses, who could not understand the doctrine, but took it on faith, were so certain of its truth that they were ready to risk anything for its vindication.
The Unionists, however, branded the doctrine as a deception. An editorial in one of their principal newspapers contained this sentence: "But this everlasting cant of devotion to the Union, accompanied by a recommendation to do those acts that must necessarily destroyit, is beyond patient endurance from a people not absolutely confined in their own mad-houses." It was clear to them, at the outset, that nullification was piecemeal secession and rebellion.
This was the state of things in South Carolina when Congress assembled on the first Monday of December, 1831. On the 6th the President's annual message was laid before the two Houses. It contained a much more distinct and decided recommendation for the reduction of duties than he had ever before expressed. He called attention to the prospect of the early extinguishment of the public debt, when the annual instalment to the sinking fund would be no longer needed, and recommended that Congress should at once deal with the question of the reduction of the duties to a point where they would produce no more revenue than would be necessary for an economical administration of the Government. He farther recommended the readjustment of the duties with a view to equal justice to all national interests, and said that the interests of both merchant and manufacturer required that the change should be prospective.
There was no suggestion in the message of increasing the expenditures of the Government for internal improvements, or for any other purpose. The plain inference from the message was that by March 4th, 1833, the debt would all be paid, and the revenue could then be reduced by ten or twelve millions a year, and should be.
This was all that the South Carolinians had asked, and it would have been the height of folly for them to have pursued extraordinary means to relieve themselves when regular methods promised at last a prospect of success. This part of the message was referred to the committee on Manufactures, of which ex-President John Quincy Adams was then chairman. Mr. Adamshad far more moderate views in regard to the tariff than the majority of his protectionist brethren, and it could be reasonably hoped that he would report a bill from his committee which would be conciliatory in character. The Southerners were not quite willing, however, to rest entirely on his own good will, and raised the contention that the subject of the tariff ought to be referred either to the committee on Ways and Means, or to the committee on Commerce, since the power to impose duties was incident either to the raising of revenue or to the regulation of commerce. The result of the contention was that a resolution was introduced, and taken up, requesting the committee on Commerce to make a report on the working of the tariff, and the committee on Ways and Means was allowed to report a tariff bill, which was read twice and referred to the committee of the Whole House.
The bill from the committee on Ways and Means provided for the reduction of the duty to twelve and one-half per centumad valoremon all articles; on some, immediately and totally, but on the more important articles gradually, and in a period of a little more than three years.
This was undoubtedly an ill digested measure. It was not only a radical reduction of duties, but it was an indiscriminate reduction. Mr. McDuffie's own committee were not unanimous in recommending it.
On May 23rd Mr. Adams reported the bill from the committee on Manufactures. Mr. Adams based his bill on the report of the Secretary of the Treasury, of December 7th, 1831, and proposed the repeal of the existing system of minimal valuations and the duty on coarse wool altogether, and a slight reduction of the duties on fine wool and woollen fabrics.
It was calculated that Mr. Adams' bill would reduce the receipts from the customs by about five or six millions of dollars, leaving thus still an annual surplus of some five or six millions after the extinguishment of the debt.
Mr. McDuffie's bill was taken up first in the committee of the Whole House. Mr. McDuffie defended it with his argument, already stated, that the producers of the exports pay finally the duties on the imports for which the exports are exchanged in the foreign markets, and cited recent utterances of Professor Senior, the noted political economist of Oxford University, in support of his position. He could not, however, convince the House, and his bill was finally disposed of in less than a week. Mr. Adams' bill was then taken up. It was understood as proposing a slight reduction all around. It was intended to do so. But Mr. McDuffie made an argument against it, in which he undertook to prove, and declared that he did prove, that it discriminated still further against the South, and imposed a heavier burden upon that section than it was even then bearing, grievous as that was. He declared, finally, that he would not submit to it.
The House, however, was neither convinced by his argument nor intimidated by his threat. It passed the bill on June 28th, by a large majority, a majority of more than two to one.
Meanwhile the Senate had been occupying itself with an exhaustive discussion of the principle of the tariff. On January 9th, 1832, Mr. Clay introduced the famous resolution for making the tariff upon articles coming into competition with home manufactures a system of permanent high duties, and for abolishing, or greatly reducing, the duties upon all other articles.
Senator Hayne immediately grasped the import of this proposition. He declared that it marked a new era in the tariff system. He demonstrated that down to that time the protection of manufactures had been regarded by all persons and parties as a temporary policy and had been justified as such, while this proposition looked to its establishment as a permanent principle of the policy of the country, which neither revenue surplus nor manufacturing experience should affect.
Mr. Clay, who had himself spoken of protection before this as only a temporary policy, acknowledged the truth of Colonel Hayne's criticism, and proceeded, in his famous three days' speech, to develop the arguments for the permanent protective system, the "American System," as he termed it, which made up the text-book for the later supporters of that system. His idea was simply to collect the duties from those foreign products which come into competition in the home markets with domestic products, and prevent the accumulation of a Treasury surplus by fixing the duties so high in rate as to make them largely prohibitory. As we have seen, this idea had been already foreshadowed in one of President Jackson's earlier messages. It now received its complete formulation and its economic justification.
But it was a sad prospect for the South. The South had looked forward to the extinguishment of the debt as necessarily bringing in its train the decrease of duties to the gross amount of at least ten millions of dollars per annum, and now it was called upon to consider the plan for a decrease of revenue by an increase of duties. It is hardly astonishing that the disappointment should have been bitter, and that passionate men should have thought of resistance to what appeared to them so grievously unjust.