with our planters. Southern
men, therefore, could not conceive of any thing but ruin to themselves,
by any considerable advance in duties on foreign imports. They
understood the protective policy as contemplating the supply of our
country with home manufactured articles to the exclusion of those of
foreign countries. This would confine the planters, in the sale of their
cotton, to the American market mainly, and leave them in the power of
moneyed corporations; which, possessing the ability, might control the
prices of their staple, to the irreparable injury of the South. With
slave labor they could not become manufacturers, and must, therefore,
remain at the mercy of the North, both as to food and clothing, unless
the European markets should be retained. Out of this conviction grew the
war upon Corporations; the hostility to the employment of foreign
capital in developing the mineral, agricultural, and manufacturing
resources of the country; the efforts to destroy the banks and the
credit system; the attempts to reduce the currency to gold and silver;
the system of collecting the public revenues in coin; the withdrawal of
the public moneys from all the banks as a basis of paper circulation;
and the sleepless vigilance of the South in resisting all systems of
internal improvements by the General Government. Its statesmen foresaw
that a paper currency would keep up the price of Northern products one
or two hundred per cent. above the specie standard; that combinations of
capitalists, whether engaged in manufacturing wool, cotton, or iron,
would draw off labor from the cultivation of the soil, and cause large
bodies of the producers to become consumers; and that roads and canals,
connecting the West with the East, were effectual means of bringing the
agricultural and manufacturing classes into closer proximity, to the
serious limitation of the foreign commerce of the country, the checking
of the growth of the navy, and the manifest, injury of the planters.

CHAPTER IX.

Character of the Tariff controversy--Peculiar
condition of the people--Efforts to enlist the
West in the interest of the South--Mr.
McDuffie--Mr. Hamilton--Mr. Rankin--Mr.
Garnett--Mr. Cuthbert--the West still shut out
from market--Mr. Wickliffe--Mr. Benton--Tariff of
1828 obnoxious to the South--Georgia
Resolutions--Mr. Hamilton--Argument to Sugar
Planters.