ts was offered in 1826 to all non-colonial nations
that would open their ports within one year on terms of equality to
British ships. J.Q. Adams, now President of the United States, delayed
acceptance of this offer, preferring a treaty negotiation, and was
rebuffed by Canning, so that actual resumption of West Indian trade did
not take place until 1830, after the close of Adams' administration.
That trade never recovered its former prosperity.

Meanwhile the long period of controversy, from 1806 to 1830, had
resulted in a complete change in the American situation. It is not a
sufficient explanation of the American belief in, and practice of, the
theory of protection to attribute this alone to British checks placed
upon free commercial rivalry. Nevertheless the progress of America
toward an established system, reaching its highest mark for years in the
Tariff Bill of 1828, is distinctly related to the events just narrated.
After American independence, the partially illegal status of West Indian
trade hampered commercial progress and slightly encouraged American
manufactures by the mere seeking of capital for investment; the neutral
troubles of 1806 and the American prohibitions on intercourse increased
the transfer of interest; the war of 1812 gave a complete protection to
infant industries; the dumping of British goods in 1815 stirred
patriotic American feeling; British renewal of colonial system
restrictions, and the twelve-year quarrel over "retaliation" gave time
for the definite establishment of protectionist ideas in the United
States. But Britain was soon proclaiming for herself and for the world
the common advantage and the justice of a great theory of free trade.
America was apparently now committed to an opposing economic theory, the
first great nation definitely to establish it, and thus there resulted a
clear-cut opposition of principle and a clash of interests. From 1846,
when free trade ideas triumphed in England, the devoted British free
trader regarded America as the chief obstacle to a world-wide acceptance
of his theory.

The one bright spot in America, as regarded by the British free trader,
was in the Southern States, where cotton interests, desiring no
advantage from protection, since their market was in Europe, attacked
American protection and sought to escape from it. Also slave supplies,
without protection, could have been purchased more cheaply from England
than from the manufacturing North. In