States. It was in an immediate attempt to respond to the necessities of the Northwest that the cry for internal improvements went up directly after the war. Facilities for reaching the West were demanded and the General government was the accessible power and agency to provide them. Thus the people of the new West became broad constructionists, quite oblivious to the fine-spun constitutional arguments of President Monroe when he vetoed the bill for the Cumberland Road, May 4, 1822. The question of intercommunication, the East with the West, began to assume national proportions and found a friend and leader in Henry Clay. Such improvements at national expense he had advocated as early as 1807, but the agitation, the excitement, the thinking among the people which a war causes seems to have been necessary before Clay's policy of internal improvements could get a national hearing. That hearing was readily granted after the War of 1812, but to build internal improvements necessitated an adequate revenue for the purpose, and this in turn called for taxation. Thus arose the struggle over the tariff. Clay's policy-often a variable star -called for money which he believed could most easily, abundantly and satisfactorily be raised by a duty on imports: but at once the question arose-A duty for revenue only? Or also for protection and the encouragement of American manufactures?

In 1791, Hamilton, in compliance with a request of Congress, made his famous report on manufactures, in which may be found the whole argument for a protective tariff. Washington, on July 4, 1789, affixed his signature to the first tariff law of the United States, which was primarily to raise revenue but was slightly protective. During the next twenty-five years, seventeen tariff laws were passed and in all the tendency was toward higher duties. Passing by the arguments for and against the protective system, it is sufficient to record that the tariff act of 1816 made the government at least a protective partner with the manufacturing class and was the beginning of the reliance of that

class from that day to this on Congressional legislation to make their business safe and profitable. The General government thus began its alliance with American manufacturers. The War of 1812 stimulated manufactures and the tariff act of 1816 was supported by Calhoun and other Southern representatives so that the owners of factories should not be ruined, their workmen dispersed or turned to other pursuits and the country suffer great loss: this was Calhoun's argument. Webster, who was not at the outset of his career a protectionist said that the tariff of 1816 was a Southern measure.

New England was not at this time protectionist; the South was protectionist; but the manufacturers speedily demanding higher protection, new tariff measures were proposed and that of 1824 was passed. At this time England was halting in her protective system and about to repeal the corn laws. The panic of 1825 due to over-production, the abuse of credit, the expansion of paper circulation, stirred the protectionists to demand yet higher duties and New England began transforming herself from an agricultural into a manufacturing community, with consequent conjunction with the protectionist forces. Webster too abandoned his free-trade opinions and became spokesman for New England protectionism. It was at this time that the South demurred and entered into what proved to be a course of opposition to the tariff, culminating in 1860, in the declaration, by South Carolina, that the tariff laws were a cause of its secession from the Union.

At Harrisburg, in July, 1827, there assembled a convention of American manufacturers-though the South was not represented-who demanded a new tariff act and higher duties. Out of this demand, which at once became a political question, grew the tariff of 1828, known as "the tariff of abominations." The legislature of South Carolina protested against the passing of the bill, and the law became the immediate cause of the nullification movement at the South.

A.

The South was slaveholding and agricultural, not manufacturing, and the tariff of 1828 was enacted for the advantage of manufacturers. Of course, advocates of the law assured the country that its operation would protect all American interests, producer, manufacturer, consumer. The South construed the law as a special tax contrived for the exclusive benefit of the North, and therefore discriminating against the South. The slaveholding system of the South shut that section off from the rest of the world and prevented it from competing with manufacturing communities. At the North slavery had disappeared and free labor was inventive and profitable. There was no profit to the South in protection; in order to profit by the protective system she must abandon slavery: she preferred slavery and went into bitter and hostile opposition to the protective systemutilizing the theory of State sovereignty and its product, nullification, in defense of her new position. Jefferson had devised nullification, and the Hartford Convention had cited it as a remedy for Federal violation of State constitutional rights; but now, driven along by slavery, the Southern leaders, Calhoun at their head, fell back on nullification as the proper remedy to attack the tariff-that is, to defend slavery by attacking the tariff.

During the summer of 1828, Calhoun wrote the most elaborate account and defense of nullification extant, which was adopted by the South Carolina legislature and formally reported the following winter by a committee of that body as the "South Carolina Exposition." The hostility of the South, and particularly of South Carolina, led the protectionists, through Henry Clay, to bring forward a compromise tariff bill, the act to go into effect March 3, 1833. Meanwhile, in November, of the preceding year, South Carolina assembled in convention at Columbia and formally passed the ordinance of nullification which declared that the tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 were null and void, that they were not law and were not binding on the officers or the citizens of the State; the ordinance prohibited the payment