the
Louisiana purchase should be forever free. The pledge was indeed broken
in 1854, but not until such a sense of its sacredness had been impressed
upon the country that the breach availed slavery nothing.

CHAPTER IV.

THE GREAT NULLIFICATION

[1816-1828]

The tariff rates of 1816 on cottons and woollens were to be twenty-five
per cent. for three years, after that twenty. Instead of this the cotton
tariff was in 1824 replaced at twenty-five per cent., the same as that
upon woollens costing thirty-three and a third cents or less per square
yard; woollens over this price bearing thirty per cent. Wool, which by
the tariff of 1816 was free, now bore, some grades fifteen, some twenty,
some thirty per cent. Iron duties were put up in 1818 and again in 1824,
from which date for ten years they ranged between forty and one hundred
per cent. The whole tendency of tariff rates was strongly upward. The
duty upon all dutiables averaged between 1816 and 1824 only twenty-four
and a half per cent; from 1824 to 1828 the average was thirty-two and a
half per cent. Importation remained copious, notwithstanding, which made
the cry for protection louder than ever.

[1828]

From Quincy Adams's presidency the tariff question becomes on the one
hand political, dividing Whigs from Democrats about exactly, which had
never been the case before, and on the other, sectional, the West, the
Centre, and now also the East, pitted against the solid South, except
Louisiana. The year 1824 heard Webster's last speech for free trade and
saw Calhoun's and Jackson's last vote for protection. However, so strong
was the protectionist sentiment in the XXth Congress, though democratic,
that free-traders could hope to defeat the new tariff bill of 1828 only
by rendering it odious to New England. They therefore conspired to make
prohibitive its rates for Smyrna wool, and nearly so those on iron,
hemp, and cordage for ship-building; also on molasses, the raw material
for rum, whereon no drawback was longer to be allowed if it was
exported.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
John Quincy Adams. From a picture by Gilbert Stuart.

The Whigs had arranged, to be now passed, a series of minimum rates on
woollens, by which all costing over fifty cents a square yard were to
pay as if costing $2.50, and all over this as if costing $4.00. The rate
was to be forty per cent. the first year, forty-five the second, and
fifty thereafter.

This illustrates the famous