pay double the
sum for which they might have purchased it, had its manufacture, before
that period, been encouraged by proper protecting duties."

Sugar cane, at that period, had become an article of culture in
Louisiana, and efforts were made to persuade her planters into the
adoption of the Free Trade system. It was urged that they could more
effectually resist foreign competition, and extend their business, by a
cheap supply of food, than by protective duties. But the Louisianians
were too wise not to know, that though they would certainly obtain
cheap provisions by the destruction of Northern manufactures, still,
this would not enable them to compete with the cheaper labor supplied by
the slave trade to the Cubans.

The West, for many years, gave its undivided support to the
manufacturing interests, thereby obtaining a heavy duty on hemp, wool,
and foreign distilled spirits: thus securing encouragement to its hemp
and wool-growers, and the monopoly of the home market for its whisky.
The distiller and the manufacturer, under this system, were equally
ranked as public benefactors, as each increased the consumption of the
surplus products of the farmer. The grain of the West could find no
remunerative market, except as fed to domestic animals for droving East
and South, or distilled into whisky which would bear transportation.
Take a fact in proof of this assertion. Hon. Henry Baldwin, of
Pittsburgh, at a public dinner given him by the friends of General
Jackson, in Cincinnati, May, 1828, in referring to the want of markets,
for the farmers of the West, said, "He was certain, the aggregate of
their agricultural produce, finding a market in Europe, would not pay
for the pins and needles they imported."

The markets in the Southwest, now so important, were then quite limited.
As the protective system, coupled with the contemplated internal
improvements, if successfully accomplished, would inevitably tend to
enhance the price of agricultural products; while the free trade and
anti-internal improvement policy, would as certainly reduce their value;
the two systems were long considered so antagonistic, that the success
of the one must sound the knell of the other. Indeed, so fully was Ohio
impressed with the necessity of promoting manufactures, that all capital
thus employed, was for many years entirely exempt from taxation.

It was in vain that the friends of protection appealed to the fact, that
the duties levied on f