After the Napoleonic wars, the "infant industries"of the United States sought and received "protection"against foreign competition in the form of high tariffs on imports.
A protective tariff was enacted in 1816 without serious controversy. But manufacturers in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania wanted still higher tariffs. In 1827 Daniel Webster of Massachusetts proposed a law to add an eighty-three-cent tax to every dollar's worth of imported woolen cloth. This would ensure that American woolen manufacturers, many of them located in Massachusetts, would dominate the market; it would also raise the price of woolen cloth to American consumers. The measure was tied in the
Senate; Vice President Calhoun cast the deciding vote against the woolen tariff.
Redoubling their efforts, the manufacturers convened at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They called for far higher duties on woolens and many other products. Their duties would double the price of most woolen goods. Once Congress got hold of the bill, however, it was transformed. Southerners, to ensure its defeat, attempted to drive a wedge between western farmers and northeastern manufacturers. The Southerners added high taxes on imports of raw materials, such as wool, hemp, and molasses;such measures pleased the sheep farmers and hemp growers of the Mid-Atlantic states and the Midwest, but harmed woolen manufacturers in New England as well as those engaged in shipping. When the final vote came, congressmen from the South voted against the Tariff of Abominations,
Passage of the "Tariff of Abominations," 1828 Note that the North-South split on the 1828 tariff paralleled the division between free and slave states; an exception was Kentucky, a slave state that endorsed the high tariff of 1828.
Westward Spread of Cotton, 1801 to 1860 The westward spread of cotton cultivation after 1820 intensified the division between North and South.
Joined by representatives from the woolen-producing and mercantile sections of eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and the New York City region. Nearly all other northeastern congressmen voted for it, as did nearly every congressman in the West.
The vote reflected a profound shift in the nation's political geography. Early in the national period, the most prominent division was often between the more prosperous peoples along the East Coast—tidewater planters and urban merchants—and the rough frontiersmen in the western hinterlands. But the vote on the tariff of 1828 was an early indication of the emerging political geography reflecting the South's isolation.
World History
