TARIFFS OF 1824-28.
In 1824, protection to our domestic industry was again forced on the country by necessity. The manufactures of the country were disintegrating under the process of foreign rivalry, our people were reduced to the standard of foreign labor, with which they were forced to compete; and not only were they compelled by free trade to the status of the starving and crowded millions of Europe, from which they had endeavored to escape by emigration, but they were forced to pit their bone and muscle against the steam-engines and labor-saving machinery of England.
During the semi-free-trade period, from 1816 to 1824, the public finances had been so much reduced as to compel a resort to loans in a time of peace to save the credit of the country; while our agriculture and commerce suffered from the same causes which dried up the sources of both public and private revenue.
The total value of dutiable imports during the four years ending with 1824 were $264,962,457, and the duties thereon, $90,430,612, being an 'average of thirty-five per cent. The new tariff enacted in 1824 raised the average rate of duty to forty and a half per cent., which yielded during the next four years $121,637,942 on an importation of $301,558,885. But this increase in duty, though we should now consider it high, and which was, in fact, adequate to the protection of established branches of domestic manufactures, was not sufficient to resuscitate the dead spirit of our ruined industry. Let us notice woollen goods, for example, the duties on which had been increased from twenty-five to thirty-three and one-third per cent.; and on the strength of this increase, woollen manufacturers started their mills, and new mills were erected; but as soon as this duty on imported woollen goods went into operation, Great Britain reduced the duty upon foreign wool from sixpence to a halfpenny per pound, for the acknowledged purpose of enabling her woollen manufacturers to retain and control the woollen trade of the United States.
The cheap labor and labor-saving machinery of England, her long-established factories, great improvements, and vast capital, proved too much for our domestic manufactures, notwithstanding this high duty. Absolute prohibition was required to resuscitate our
manufactures, or bring into existence new branches of industry, open to European com petition. From this absolute want sprang the highly protective and almost prohibitory tariff of 1828, which resulted in "good times," high prices for labor and the products of labor, and both public and private prosperity, not only North, but South.
The planting interests of the South, however, always blind to an enlightened policy, and governed by short-sighted and selfish motives, remonstrated against the Tariff Act of 1828 as "unjust, oppressive, and unconstitutional." They were willing to pay tribute to England, but they were not willing to advance the best interests of their common country by bearing a temporary ill to prevent permanent disease,—a disease which has since nearly resulted in disruption, and which has been only cured by the most severe suffering, the most cruel treatment.
South Carolina—always poor, little, discontented, and miserable—passed her famous Nullification Act in 1832; but President Jackson's "hemp remedy" then produced better results than President Buchanan's "cordial" since. In the face, however, of Southern arro gance, ignorance, and croaking, the country prospered ; the public debt was paid, principal and interest; manufactures flourished; and many of our most profitable branches of domestic industry were then firmly established,—enabling us to compete with England in her own markets for the peculiar goods whose manufacturing had been encouraged.
The continual hue and cry from the South, coming from those who were anxious to sell the English a pound of cotton for a shilling and buy back an ounce at twenty-five cents, who racked their generous soils and permanently impoverished the inheritance for a "mess of pottage,"—a few paltry dollars to spend in idleness and selfish luxury-, —at length overcame the prudence of our statesmen, and led them to commit the fatal error of repudiating the "American system," and dwarfing the growth of our manu factures, which, otherwise, to-day might have been able to compete with the world.