DANIEL WEBSTER FOUND himself in a predicament. He had seen one political cause sink beneath him: Federalism, which foundered off the New England coast in the years after the War of 1812. He thought he discovered a sturdier ship in the principle of free trade, which he defended against the broadsides of Henry Clay’s protectionism. As the last stones were being placed in the walls of the locks of the Erie Canal, Webster delivered one of the best speeches of his life, in rebuttal to Clay, whom he accused of misconceiving, or misrepresenting, the nature of commerce. “Commerce is not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others,” Webster said. “It has not the tendency necessarily to impoverish one of the parties to it, by which it enriches the other. All parties gain, all parties make profits, all parties grow rich, by the operations of just and liberal commerce.” Protectionists obsessed over the concept of the balance of trade, contending that if America bought more from a country than it sold to that country, something was amiss and must be remedied. This was far too simplistic, Webster said. “If the world had but one clime and but one soil, if all men had the same wants and the same means, on the spot of their existence, to gratify those wants—then, indeed, what one obtained from the other by exchange would injure one party in the same degree that it benefitted the other.” But this was not the world humans lived in. “We inhabit a various earth. We have reciprocal wants, and reciprocal means for gratifying one another’s wants.”
Commerce between nations was simply commerce between individuals writ large. “Cannot two individuals make an interchange of commodities which shall prove beneficial to both, or in which the balance of trade shall be in favor of both? If not, the tailor and shoemaker, the farmer and the smith, have hitherto very much misunderstood their own interests.” Consider commerce between different regions, Webster asked. “Do we ever hear that because the intercourse between New York and Albany is advantageous to one of those places, it must therefore be ruinous to the other?” Of course not. The same principle applied to nations. Americans sold certain goods to Britain, and purchased other goods from Britain. Both sides benefited.
Yet what about countries that sold to the United States but did not buy a comparable value of goods from the United States? Was that imbalance not injurious? By no means, said Webster. Americans bought much more from Russia than they sold to Russia. But commerce was not mere bilateral trade. “We send our own products, for example, to Cuba or to Brazil, we there exchange them for the sugar and coffee of those countries, and these articles we carry to St. Petersburg and there sell them.” Other American cargoes went to Holland or Hamburg, where a similar exchange was made for goods that then went to Russia. “What difference does it make, in sense or reason, whether a cargo of iron be bought at St. Petersburg, by the exchange of a cargo of tobacco, or whether the tobacco has been sold on the way, in a better market, in a port of Holland, the money remitted to England, and the iron paid for by a bill on London?”
The protectionists professed a desire to foster new American industries. Webster spoke on behalf of American industries that already existed. Navigation and commerce were industries fully as legitimate as manufacturing, and they currently employed many thousands of workers. These workers would be sacrificed in the name of the notional manufacturing workers of the protectionists’ dreams. The protectionists spoke as though every dollar paid by an American for a foreign item went to foreign producers; rather, much of that dollar paid the wages of American sailors, shipbuilders, dockworkers and the like. “Is not every such article the product of our own labor as truly as if we had manufactured it ourselves?”
The protectionists appealed to American security. Americans must produce what they consumed, the protectionists said, lest they be cut off by foreign rivals. These advocates mistook the nature of American power, Webster said. What was it that caused nations to respect America? It was the power that flowed from American prosperity. The protectionists asked: What nation had attained wide prosperity without encouraging manufacturing? Webster rejoined: “What nation ever reached the like prosperity without promoting foreign trade?” Again, the protectionists dreamed of an uncertain world to come; Webster defended the world as it existed, a world in which the United States was doing very well.
WEBSTER JUDGED THAT he had rarely spoken better. As with the other speeches he thought most highly of, he made sure his remarks on free trade soon circulated in printed form. He wrote out his speech and provided it to newspaper publishers and pamphleteers. Before long, though, he wished he could get every copy back.
The argument about free trade and protection was never about free trade and protection only. It was about politics, about influence, about ambition and retribution. After John Quincy Adams, with Henry Clay’s help, snatched the presidency from Andrew Jackson, the Jacksonians scorched the earth around the new administration, denouncing Adams and Clay with every breath and every issue of the newspapers they founded for the purpose. They mobilized at once for the campaign of 1828. The caucus was dead as a vehicle for nominating candidates, with William Crawford’s failure in 1824 supplying the death rattle. But no one knew what would replace it, and until something did, nominations fell to whichever groups stepped forward. The Tennessee legislature nominated Andrew Jackson almost before Adams had been inaugurated, ensuring that every act of Adams’s tenure would be seen as a part of the next election campaign.
On no issue was this clearer than on the tariff, except that nothing was clear about the tariff. The opposing philosophical camps—the free traders and the protectionists—lost their coherence when tariff schedules began being written. Protectionists sought protection for their constituents and benefactors, not for industries or regions as a whole. Free traders wanted free trade in the articles produced by others, not in those they produced. Beyond this was the political maneuvering in the schedule writing; members of the House and Senate would swap protection for their constituents in exchange for protection for the constituents of other members. Confusing the matter further was the looming presidential election. The Jacksonians wrote schedules for the purpose of making Adams look bad; the Adams men tried to do the same to the Jacksonians. Members would introduce amendments intending to disown them after catching their opponents out. Through the murk and mire it became nearly impossible to discern definite principles in the positions of the opposing sides.
What eventually emerged was the tariff of 1828. Economically this revision of the duty schedules served the purposes of many manufacturers by raising rates on competing imports to as much as 50 percent of the value of the goods. It damaged consumers of those goods, who had to pay protected prices. Because the manufacturers were clustered in New England and some other states of the North, and because those manufacturers had louder voices in the lobbies than Northern consumers did, the tariff drew strong Northern support in the voting in Congress. Southerners felt badly used. As consumers they would pay the high prices, without an offsetting regional benefit to the few Southern manufacturers. There was also the prospect of foreign retaliation: Britain, in particular, might curtail its purchases of Southern cotton in response to the tariff.
Politically the tariff served its purpose of undermining the Adams administration. Tactical voting by members of the Jackson group in Congress, and equivocal statements by Jackson himself, allowed them to position their hero on both sides of the tariff question, as suited their purpose in various states. Adams’s only hope of holding the presidency against Jackson in 1828 lay in an alliance of New England with some of the Southern states, but the tariff so plainly favored the former over the latter as to render this axis impossible.
Daniel Webster’s political talents were oratorical rather than tactical. He got caught in the eddies of the tariff maneuverings and nearly drowned. His constituents cried for help. An early version of the bill offered insufficient protection to carpet making, declared a carpet maker. The industry faced ruin if the bill weren’t changed, and he would be among the victims. “I must stop if the bill now reported is passed in its present form,” he told Webster. A group of wool men met at Boston and sent Webster a petition demanding an increase in rates on wool products. “If the said bill should become a law,” they predicted, with alarmed specificity, “all the manufactories of coarse woolens in our country, such as baizes, bockings, negro cloths, carpets &c. would be completely ruined.”
The demands for protection contradicted Webster’s philosophy of free trade. But he was a politician rather than a philosopher, and his philosophy began to weaken. “I fear we are getting into trouble here about the tariff,” he wrote to a friend. “The House of Representatives will pass the bill; it will be a poor and inefficient aid to wool and woolens.” His turn would come when the bill reached the Senate. “What shall we do with it?” he asked uncertainly.
He received an answer from Abbott Lawrence, a powerful wool man who gave his family name to the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Friends of wool in the Senate sufficiently amended the bill that Lawrence found it acceptable. “As far as woolens are concerned the bill is very much improved,” he wrote to Webster. “New England would reap a great harvest by having the bill adopted as it now is.” Lawrence and other New Englanders had worried, during and after the War of 1812, that their region was being eclipsed. The tariff could remedy this injury. “This bill if adopted as amended will keep the South and West in debt to New England the next hundred years.”