1827.

HARRISBURG CONVENTION CALLED.

247

How is this debt paid? We answer, by remittance to Europe of a great part of our public and private securities; by the mortgaging of the country, as it were, for the discharge of an unnecessary debt, and by the taxing of our laborers two million dollars annually to meet the interest on that debt.

The tariff of 1824 it was expected would remedy much of this, would build up manufactures and establish a home market. But in the case of the wool and woollens industry it had signally failed, and unless the original intent of the tariff was carried out by a new duty sufficient to shut British woollen cloths from the market, both the farmer and the manufacturer would be driven into other occupations. The seven millions of people engaged in sheep-farming would go to swell the number of cultivators of the soil, and the fifty millions of capital invested in manufacturing woollen goods would be directed to cotton spinning, to the serious injury of that industry. When these things were considered, the society felt impelled to make a solemn appeal to the Middle, Western, and Eastern States, not from sectional motives, but because they were most deeply interested in the policy of protection.*

A hearty response met this appeal, and before the end of June State conventions and county conventions were held all over the Middle and Eastern States, and delegates appointed to attend the Harrisburg meeting. In South Carolina this action of farmers and manufacturers was a new cause of offence. The merchants of Charleston in their address had asked for the co-operation of towns in the interior of the State, and, moved by the call, the people of Columbia and the planters around about it met and listened to a speech, famous in its day, by Dr. Thomas Cooper. "It is high time," said he, "that we should' up and be doing..' We thought it hard enough

to have to combat the tariff in favor of the cotton manufacture, the woollen manufacture, the iron manufacture; but now there is not a petty manufacturer in the Union, from the owner of a spinning factory to the maker of a hobnail, who is not pressing forward to the plunder; who may not be expected

The address is given in full in Niles's Weekly Register, June 9, 1827, pp. 238-240.

to worry Congress for permission to put his hand into the planter's pocket." At this stage in his speech the doctor read from the newspapers accounts of the election of delegates to the Harrisburg Convention, and, having done so, said: “You see, then, that this is a combined attack of the whole manufacturing interest. The avowed object is to tax us for their own emolument; to force us to cease to buy of our most valuable customers; to force on us a system which will sacrifice the South to the North, which will convert us into colonies and tributaries.

"We had fully hoped that by yielding continually during ten years' discussion of the tariff principle, the pretensions of the manufacturer would erelong come to a close. But our hopes were in vain. We found, as we still find, that the voracious appetite of monopoly is insatiable; that the more we give up, the more are we required to abandon. The motto of a manufacturer, now and always, here and everywhere, is monopoly; his purpose is to put down all competition, to command exclusively every market, to compel every one to buy at his prices and sell at his prices. This is far from a republican system, least of all is it an American system. I had always supposed that equality of rights, equality of duties, equality of burdens, equality of protection, equality of laws, constituted the prevailing features of our happy institutions. But I am now to learn for the first time that in the canting, cheating, cajoling slang of these monopolists, the American system is one by which the earnings of the South are to be transferred to the North; by which the many are to be sacrificed to the few; by which unequal rights, unequal burdens, unequal protection, unequal laws, and unequal taxes are to be enacted and made permanent; that the farmer and the planter are to be considered inferior beings to the spinner, the bleacher, and the dyer; that we of the South are to hold our plantations as the serfs of the North, subject to the orders of the master minds of Massachusetts, the lords of the spinning jenny, the peers of the loom, who have a right to tax our earnings in order to swell their riches! We shall erelong be forced to calculate the value of our union; to ask of what use is this unequal alliance by which the South has always been the

1827.

SOUTH CAROLINA ON THE TARIFF.

249

loser and the North always the gainer? Is it worth our while to continue this union of States where the North demands to be our master? The question is fast approaching the alternative of submission or separation. Most anxiously do we wish to avoid it, but if the monopolists are bent on forcing the decision on us, with them be the consequences." *

When Dr. Cooper finished his speech he moved the adoption of a set of resolutions which had been previously prepared and published. These declared that equality of rights was the pervading principle of the American Union; that any law which infringed this principle was not constitutional; that fostering or protecting one class of citizens at the expense of the rest was such an infringement; that all investments of capital that do not yield a reasonable profit are unworthy of protection; that if they do yield such a fair return they need no protection; that the only American system Americans ought to support was that of equal liberty, equal rights, and equal laws-a system prostrated by that of taxing the productive industry of one man to support the unproductive industry of another. The resolutions closed with a flat denial of the right of Congress to levy taxes for the purpose of protection, and with the assertion of the principle "millions for defence, but not a cent for tribute."

A set of resolutions adopted at Georgetown, South Carolina, set forth that whenever Government by a course of partial legislation makes one branch of industry subsidiary to another, whenever it causes taxation direct or indirect to fall unequally on the people, there is in such action not only a departure from, but a deliberate violation of the social compact; that the late attempt of the National Legislature to pass a tariff bill was an attack on the rights of agriculturists, was an effort to impose unequal burdens on the people, and a deliberate violation of the Constitution.

While the people of South Carolina were thus denouncing the North and uttering threats of disunion, a hundred delegates from thirteen of the Eastern, Middle, and Western States

*Niles's Weekly Register, September 8, 1827. The Columbia meeting took place July 2d.

assembled at Harrisburg. As originally planned, the convention was to be a meeting of wool-growers and wool manufacturers for the purpose of considering how best to promote their own particular interests. But when the people chose delegates to the State conventions, which were in turn to appoint representatives to the Harrisburg meeting, demands were made for protection for many industries which it was supposed had been amply provided for by the tariff of 1824. A presidential election was near at hand, the candidates were already in the field, voters and politicians were rallying about Adams or Jackson, and when the State conventions met they fell more or less under the control of the friends of the one or the other candidate. To Harrisburg, as a consequence, came men of all sorts, representing many interests and bent on many aims. In the chair, as presiding officer, sat Joseph Ritner, Governor of Pennsylvania. Before him, in the crowd of delegates, were members of the United States Senate, such as Samuel Bell, of New Hampshire, and Ashur Robbins, of Rhode Island; members of the House of Representatives, such as John C. Wright, of Ohio, Walter Forward, of Pennsylvania, and Rollin C. Mallory, of Vermont, soon to be made chairman of the Committee on Manufactures; party leaders, such as Gideon Wells and Thomas Ewing, Secretary of the Treasury under Harrison, Charles J. Ingersoll, a candidate for the Vice-Presidency in 1812; Judge Enos T. Throop, soon to be Governor of New York; Peter Sharpe, who led the People's Party against Tammany in New York city; and Francis Granger, an anti-Mason and leader of the Adams men; political economists, such as Matthew Carey and Hezekiah Niles; and great manufacturers, such as Abbot Lawrence, of Massachusetts.

After a session of five days the convention ended its labors by appointing a committee to write an address to the people of the United States, and by adopting a memorial to Congress to which ninety-seven members affixed their names. It called on Congress "to save, to protect, and promote what has uniformly been treated by Government as one of the principal

* July 30, 1827.

1827.

REVISION OF THE TARIFF.

251

elements of independence, prosperity, and greatness of the Republic," named the duties on wool and woollens necessary to afford such protection, and recommended a further advance on hammered bar iron and steel, on flax, hemp and their prod ucts, and on plain and printed cotton goods.

The House of Representatives to which this memorial was to be presented had been elected in 1826, when the old party divisions of 1824 were breaking down, when the new lines were yet to be drawn, and contained many members whose position was so ill-defined that to the day of organization it was a matter of some doubt which party would be in control.

On that day, however, a Jackson Democrat from Virginia was elected Speaker, and by him the Committee on Manufacturers was so constituted that a majority of its eight members were friends of Jackson, while the minority, including the chairman, Rollin C. Mallory, were supporters of Adams and protection. To this committee were now referred the tariff and anti-tariff memorials as they came pouring in from all parts of the country; but no action was taken till after the Speaker sent it the memorial from the Harrisburg Convention.* Led on by Silas Wright, of New York, the majority of the committee refused to accept this as the basis of a bill, and forced their chairman to move in the House for power to send for persons and papers, a request which the House promptly granted.

While the committee was summoning manufacturers and conducting an investigation of its own as to the condition of the woollen industry, memorials of a very serious kind began to come in from the Legislatures of the States. Those from Rhode Island,+ New York,+ and Pennsylvania" approved of a revision of the tariff, and instructed their senators and requested their representatives to endeavor to secure adequate protection for cotton, wool, hemp, flax, and iron.

In North Carolina so much of the Governor's message as related to the Woollens Bill was sent to a joint select commit

*December 24, 1827. Journal of the House of Representatives, Twentieth Congress, First Session.

+ Executive Documents, Twentieth Congress, First Session, vol. iii, No. 98. # Ibid., vol. iii, No. 97.

Ibid., vol. iii, No. 123.