:: America's Caesar ::

Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff
by Reinhard H. Luthin

The controversy between "high-tariff" and "low-tariff" groups has remained constant in American history.⁽¹⁾ Following the Civil War, the protective tariff became a cardinal doctrine of the triumphant Republican party.⁽²⁾ Abraham Lincoln, the Republicans' patron saint, recognized that "the tariff question must be as durable as the government itself," that sharp differences of opinion would prevail among Americans "as to whether and how far the duties on imports shall be adjusted to favor home production."⁽³⁾ It is of historical relevance to trace the tariff struggle as it affected Lincoln's career.
Lincoln as a young man was originally attracted to the Whig party by his admiration for Henry Clay.⁽⁴⁾ At this time Clay united East and West on his "American System" — a program championing internal improvements and a protective tariff.⁽⁵⁾ As Lincoln grew to manhood in a pro-Clay region of Indiana,⁽⁶⁾ Clay's creed of internal improvements and protectionism constituted the basis of the anti-Jacksonian cause.⁽⁷⁾ When Lincoln left the Hoosier state for Illinois in 1830, he was a Whig at heart. In 1832 he case his first presidential vote for Clay.⁽⁸⁾ In this same year, as a candidate for the state legislature, he told the electorate: "My politics can be briefly stated. I am in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles."⁽⁹⁾
During the presidential campaign of 1840 the Illinois party brethren, led by Lincoln, declared for a protective tariff. On the stump for William Henry Harrison he called for a rise in import rates.⁽¹⁰⁾
Throughout the 1840's, as an ardent Whig on the Illinois hustings, Lincoln fought against free-trade influences.⁽¹¹⁾ In 1844, on speaking tours advocating the election of Clay to the presidency, he emphasized the benefits of a high tariff.⁽¹²⁾ As a member of Congress from 1847 to 1849, he supported measures to raise the rates of the low Walker Act, which had meanwhile been passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress.⁽¹³⁾ Ending his term in Congress, Lincoln returned to his profession of the law, intermittently dabbling in Illinois politics. In 1856 he forsook the anemic Whig party and belatedly entered the Republican ranks.⁽¹⁴⁾
During Lincoln's first years as a Republican there was little to indicate his party's future role as the champion of home industry. In his region of Illinois, hostility to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which had precipitated the organization of the Republican party, was grounded deeply in resistance to the threat involved in that measure to the common man's interest in "free land": the tradition of a land free from competing Negro slave labor and the hope of land free in price.⁽¹⁵⁾ The Kansas-Nebraska legislation was more likely to affect a Jacksonian Democrat than an erstwhile Clay Whig like Lincoln. Economic conditions under the existing low Walker schedules were generally good. Lincoln and other champions of the American System, who had claimed a close relationship between the superseded high tariff of 1842 and prosperity, were silenced. The trend toward "free trade" was reflected in the enactment of the "low" tariff of 1857,⁽¹⁶⁾ a measure made possible by a coalition of Democrats, woolen manufacturers who wanted raw wool placed on the free list, and railroad interests who wanted tariff-free iron from abroad.⁽¹⁷⁾ The Republicans in Congress, imbued with Whig doctrines and anxious to combat the Democrats, voted against the tariff. But it was futile. Northern Democrats joined their Southern brethren in passing the measure, and President Franklin Pierce approved it before turning over the presidential office to James Buchanan.⁽¹⁸⁾
No sooner had Buchanan been installed in the executive mansion than the Panic of 1857 cast its shadow over the land.⁽¹⁹⁾ Immediately Republican editors and orators, particularly in Pennsylvania, blamed the existing tariff for the nation's economic distress. In the election of 1858 the Republicans combined with other opponents of the Democrats to carry Pennsylvania on a protectionist issue.⁽²⁰⁾
During this same year, 1858, Lincoln campaigned against Stephen A. Douglas for United States Senator. Since Illinois was not yet a manufacturing state, the Republicans deemed it expedient not to stress the tariff issue. To have done so would have offended free-soil Democrats who were deserting to the Republican ranks. Lincoln made no mention of the tariff in his historic verbal tilts with Douglas.⁽²¹⁾ "For the present," writes Lincoln's biographer Albert J. Beveridge, "the protective tariff appeal was left to the East."⁽²²⁾
The elections of 1858 were a prologue to the presidential campaign of 1860. Sagacious Republican leaders recognized that antislavery as an exclusive issue could not assure national victory. The defeat of John C. Fremont by Buchanan in 1856 had demonstrated to the leaders of Lincoln's party that hostility to slavery extension was insufficient.⁽²³⁾ Pennsylvanians, knowing their own power, impressed upon influential Republicans that their state, second in electoral votes to New York, could be carried in 1860 only on a protectionist platform.⁽²⁴⁾
In August, 1859, therefore, Representative Justin S. Morrill, Republican of Vermont, sponsored a bill raising the tariff rates in order to "force the [Democratic-controlled] Senate to accept or defeat it."⁽²⁵⁾ Morrill's bill was sponsored by the Republicans in order to attract votes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.⁽²⁶⁾ The wool rates were to be raised n order to lure the West. Western Republicans, realizing the necessity of carrying Pennsylvania, were impressing upon their agrarian constituents the expediency of accepting a protective tariff plank in the national platform. Moreover, isolated Western sections with mineral deposits would be benefited by excluding European products.⁽²⁷⁾ An Indiana Republican leader assured his audience that a high tariff would "afford just encouragement and protection to the agricultural and manufacturing interests."⁽²⁸⁾ The talented Illinois editor Joseph Medill preached the same gospel in his Chicago Press and Tribune.⁽²⁹⁾ This journal was confident that the coming national convention would adopt a tariff plank that would be "satisfactory alike to Pennsylvania and Illinois, to Massachusetts and Minnesota."⁽³⁰⁾
There was good reason for Medill to emphasize the tariff issue: he realized only too well that the Republicans could not win the presidency in 1860 without the electoral vote of Pennsylvania.⁽³¹⁾ In October, 1859, the Chicago Press and Tribune editor became interested in Lincoln as presidential timber;⁽³²⁾ he preached that Lincoln "was an old Clay Whig, is right on the tariff and he is exactly right on all other issues. Is there any man who would suit Pennsylvania better?"⁽³³⁾ In this same month Lincoln's relative by marriage, Dr. Edward Wallace of Pennsylvania, desiring to sound the Illinoisan on the tariff issue in anticipation of offering him an endorsement for vice president, wrote Lincoln a letter. Lincoln replied:

Clinton, October 11, 1859.

My dear Sir: I am here just now attending court. Yesterday, before I left Springfield, your brother, Dr. William S. Wallace, showed me a letter of yours, in which you kindly mention my name, inquire for my tariff views, and suggest the propriety of my writing a letter upon the subject. I was an old Henry Clay-Tariif-Whig. In old times I made more speeches on that subject than any other.
I have not since changed my views. I believe yet, if we could have a moderate, carefully adjusted protective tariff, so far acquiesced in as not to be a perpetual subject of political strife, squabbles, changes, and uncertainties, it would be better for us. Still it is my opinion that just now the revival of that question will not advance the cause itself, or the man who revives it.
I have not thought much on the subject recently, but my general impression is that the necessity for a protective tariff will ere long force its old opponents to take it up; and then its old friends can join in and establish it on a more firm and durable basis. We, the Old Whigs, have been entirely beaten out of the tariff question, and we shall not be able to reestablish the policy until the absence of its shall have demonstrated the necessity for it in the minds of men heretofore opposed to it. With this view, I should prefer to not now write a public letter on the subject. I therefore wish this to be considered confidential. I shall be very glad to receive a letter from you.⁽³⁴⁾

That Lincoln was indeed interested in Pennsylvania was indicated by his correspondence with Jesse W. Fell. A Pennsylvania-born journalist of Illinois, and soon to become secretary of the Republican State Central Committee of Illinois, Fell in 1858 had toured the East, where he discovered an interest in the Springfield lawyer who was then so effectively opposing Stephen A. Douglas for the Senate. In December, 1859, Lincoln furnished Fell a short autobiography, which the latter forwarded to his friend Joseph J. Lewis of West Chester, Pennsylvania. Lewis expanded this material into a lengthy article for the Chester County Times of February 11, 1860. Lewis wrote that Lincoln had been Clay's friend and master of "the principles of political economy that underlie the tariff.... Mr. Lincoln had been a consistent and earnest tariff man from the first hour of his entering public life."⁽³⁵⁾
Meanwhile, protectionist sentiment mounted to fever heat in Pennsylvania. And no individual contributed so much to make the state tariff-minded as the renowned political economist Henry C.Carey of Pennsylvania. Carey flooded the Republican press — particularly Morton McMichael's Philadelphia North American and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune — with articles detailing how the low tariff had been responsible for the Panic of 1857.⁽³⁶⁾ A critic correctly termed him the "Ajax of Protection."⁽³⁷⁾ In mid-April, 1860, Carey wrote Morrill, "Nothing less than a dictator is required for making a really good tariff. Would to heaven you or I could fill the place for a week."⁽³⁸⁾ Carey was likewise active in lobbying for Morrill's bill. On April 30 he received a letter from George W. Scranton, congressman from Pennsylvania, founder of the city of Scranton, and a prosperous coal and iron producer:

We hope to get the [Morrill] Tariff Bill to a vote this week.... I have written to one of my friends, a delegate to Chicago from Pa. stating to him in substance the views you expressed when here [in Washington] in relation to the proposed conference between the N.J. and Pa. delegations before they meet in Chicago. He is personally acquainted with two or three of the N.J. delegates and will be likely to meet some or all of them several times before Convention.
...Coal stocks and estates well located are improving in value and have touched the lowest points; if we can carry the Tariff Bill through, you may safely mark up your coal interests.⁽³⁹⁾

The tariff did indeed loom large at the Republican National Convention, which assembled in Chicago on May 16, 1860. The party leaders clearly foresaw that antislavery as an exclusive issue was not enough to assure victory in November. Horace Greeley, who as proxy from Oregon severed on the committee on resolutions at the Chicago conclave, had only recently confided to an associate: associate: "Now about the Presidency: I want to succeed this time, yet I know the country is not Anti-Slavery. It will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening. An Anti-Slavery man per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River and Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery."⁽⁴⁰⁾
Indeed, what river and harbor improvement was to the Great Lakes region, what a proposed Pacific railroad and a daily overland mail were to California and Oregon, and what homestead was to the Northwest, the tariff was to Pennsylvania⁽⁴¹⁾ and, in a lesser degree, to New Jersey.⁽⁴²⁾ A Harrisburg correspondent had recently written: "The opposition [anti-Democratic] politicians here say you may cry nigger, nigger, as much as you please, only give us a chance to carry Pennsylvania by crying tariff. Without this state you can not elect your President."⁽⁴³⁾ Now, from the Chicago gathering, one delegate wrote home: "Penn. demands a tariff plank in the platform. Her delegation is active and urgent."⁽⁴⁴⁾ Delaware Republicans, with growing industrial interests, supported Pennsylvanians in their demands.⁽⁴⁵⁾ So, too, did the delegates from western Virginia, a wool-growing region with vast mineral deposits;⁽⁴⁶⁾ Republicans of Wheeling assailed the Democrats as a "Southern-British-Antitariff-Disunion" party."⁽⁴⁷⁾ Republicans of Lincoln's own Illinois and of distant Oregon, eager to conciliate Pennsylvania, agreed to accept higher import duties as the price of national Republican victory.⁽⁴⁸⁾
The platform makers at Chicago, however, faced the dilemma of catering to Pennsylvania while recognizing free-trade sentiment among the former Democratic members in their ranks.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Thus the out-and-out protectionists found it impossible to obtain a frank endorsement of their principle. The most militant fighters for a high-tariff declaration on the Committee on Resolutions were the New Jersey member, Thomas H. Dudley, who hailed from the industrial center of Camden, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia,⁽⁵⁰⁾ and Horace Greeley, sitting as proxy member from Oregon. But the former Democrats had to be considered, and the tariff declaration ultimately adopted was mild. According to Gustave Koerner, the Illinois member of the platform committee at the Chicago convention:

The only trouble was given us by Greeley, who insisted upon a strong protective plank. We did not consider the tariff question at this particular time as one of primary importance, and we humored him by declaring that "while providing revenue for the support of the general government by duties upon imports, sound policy requires such an adjustment as to encourage the development of the industrial interests of the whole country." This amounted to no more than the establishment of a revenue tariff bill with incidental protection, and did not differ essentially from former Democratic declarations on the same subject.⁽⁵¹⁾

The tariff resolution constituted the twelfth plank of the platform. Political expediency prevented an unequivocal protectionist declaration, since the Democratic element of the Republican party leaned toward free trade or "tariff-for-revenue only." But the Pennsylvanians and other protectionists considered what they received as the best obtainable under the circumstances.⁽⁵²⁾ A Democratic journal commented critically: "A protective tariff is cautiously advocated."⁽⁵³⁾ The twelfth plank was enthusiastically acclaimed at Chicago. One observer reported: "The Pennsylvania and New Jersey delegations were terrific in their applause over the tariff resolution, and their hilarity was contagious, finally pervading the whole vast auditorium."⁽⁵⁴⁾ Another eyewitness confided to his diary: "The scene this evening upon the reading of the 'Protection to Home Industries' plank in the platform was beyond precedent. One thousand tongues yelled, ten thousand hats, caps, and handkerchiefs waving with the wildest fervor. Frantic jubilation."⁽⁵⁵⁾
The day following the adoption of the platform the convention proceeded to ballot for a presidential candidate. Pennsylvania, casting fifty-four convention votes and second only to New York in delegate strength, became the prize for which the managers of all candidates contended. Lincoln's strategists conceded that the Empire State was unbendingly behind Senator William H. Seward. Pennsylvania's favorite son, Senator Simon Cameron, did not have united support in his own state; moreover, Cameron's main stock in trade, the tariff, was a paramount issue only in the Keystone State and in New Jersey.⁽⁵⁶⁾ In courting Pennsylvania, Lincoln's floor strategists stressed his devotion to the ancient Clay doctrine. Joseph Medill had long hammered away on the theme that "Lincoln was safe on protection, homesteads, rivers and harbors, and the Pacific railroad."⁽⁵⁷⁾ And only four days before the Chicago convention assembled, Lincoln was again in correspondence with Dr. Edward Wallace of Pennsylvania. Lincoln wrote Wallace:

Springfield, Illinois, May 12, 1860.

My dear Sir: Your brother, Dr. W.S. Wallace, shows me a letter of yours in which you request him to inquire if you may use a letter of mine to you in which something is said upon the tariff question. I do not precisely remember what I did say in that letter, but I presume I said nothing substantially different from what I shall say now.
In the days of Henry Clay, I was a Henry-Clay-tariff man, and my views have undergone no material change upon that subject. I now think the tariff question ought not to be agitated in the Chicago convention, but that all should be satisfied on that point with a presidential candidate whose antecedents give assurance that he would neither seek to force a tariff law by executive influence, nor yet to arrest a reasonable one by a veto or otherwise. Just such a candidate I desire shall be put in nomination. I really have no objection to these views being publicly known, but I do wish to thrust no letter before the public now upon any subject. Save me from the appearance of obtrusion, and I do not care who sees this or my former letter.⁽⁵⁸⁾

In this second letter to Wallace, Lincoln, while reiterating his soundness on the tariff, made certain not to make himself too obnoxious to the Democratic "free-trade" element within the Republican ranks; therefore, "the tariff question ought not to be agitated in the Chicago convention," and a candidate should be nominated whose antecedents indicated that he would support a "reasonable" tariff.
Finally Lincoln received the support of almost the entire Pennsylvania delegation — partly through the efforts of doctrinaire protectionists such as Morton McMichael, Henry C. Carey's friend and publisher of Philadelphia's Bible of protectionism, the North American, who was a delegate at Chicago.⁽⁵⁹⁾
It is difficult to conceive of the Illinois man being nominated Republican standard-bearer without Pennsylvania support.⁽⁶⁰⁾ It is equally difficult to imagine the Keystone State agreeing to accept Lincoln without becoming convinced that he was sound on the tariff. Indeed, McMichael emphasized, "Mr. Lincoln was, throughout, well known for his firm and unwavering fidelity to Henry Clay, and the great policy of protection to American industry."⁽⁶¹⁾ A colleague of McMichael portrayed Lincoln in Pennsylvania as "the great champion of protection in the Northwest."⁽⁶²⁾
Lincoln, in accepting the presidential nomination, endorsed the Chicago platform and, in effect, went on record as favoring a rise in tariff rates.⁽⁶³⁾ Later in the campaign, in answer to a query, he wrote confidentially:

Springfield, Illinois, September 22, 1860

My dear Sir: Your letter asking me "Are you in favor of a tariff and protection to American industry?" is received. The convention which nominated me, by the twelfth plank of their platform, selected their position on this question; and I have declared my approval of the platform, and accepted the nomination. Now, if I were to publicly shift the position by adding or subtracting anything, the convention would have the right, and probably would be inclined, to displace me as their candidate. And I feel confident that you, on reflection, would not wish me to give private assurances to be seen by some and kept secret from others. I enjoin that this shall by no means be made public.⁽⁶⁴⁾

In the Republicans' campaign to elect Lincoln President over Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and John Bell, the tariff figured as a minor issue in Northwestern regions. Greeley strove valiantly to demonstrate how the agrarian Northwest's interests were tied to the industrial East, even circulating a Tribune tract entitled American Agriculture and Its Interest in the Protective Policy.⁽⁶⁵⁾
Western Republicans' acceptance of the tariff plank in the Chicago platform on which Lincoln stood was a compound of several ingredients. There was much of staunch old Whiggery, rejoicing in the revival of the former party dogmas. There were interests which had suffered under the downward revision of 1857, such as the iron groups in Ohio and those in the lead districts of Wisconsin, who now saw a chance to regain their protected position. There were regions in the upper Mississippi Valley where, in a period of depression, the tariff was looked to for the stimulus of manufactures to balance an agricultural economy. Also, there was a widespread disposition to accept the tariff as a dose which must be swallowed to obtain the reward of homestead legislation. Most of all, there was a belief, steadily urged upon all loyal Republicans, that Pennsylvania could be won, and with it the presidency, by a gesture toward upward tariff revision.⁽⁶⁶⁾ True, the West made a gesture toward protectionism. When Lincoln made a brief appearance at a Republican rally in his home town of Springfield, a local woolen mill took part in the procession, with an immense wagon containing a power loom driven by a steam engine. Several yards of jeans cloth, from which a garment was fashioned for Lincoln, were publicly made. The wagon bore the significant motto "Protection to Home Industry."⁽⁶⁷⁾
Some Republicans in the East, like those in the Northwest, acquiesced in the tariff plank of the Chicago convention primarily because Pennsylvania politicians demanded it — and Lincoln needed that state's electoral vote. New England woolen manufacturers were generally satisfied with the existing tariff of 1857, inasmuch as it provided them with low duties on imported raw wool.⁽⁶⁸⁾ A New England delegate to the Chicago convention, alluding to the Pennsylvania delegates at Chicago, exclaimed, "Dam[n] their iron and coal."⁽⁶⁹⁾
With the woolen manufacturing interests apathetic toward the Republican creed of a higher tariff, the party strategists, concerned with electing Lincoln, sought to persuade them that the Morrill bill, passed by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and awaiting action by the Senate, was beneficial to Massachusetts interests. The pro-Lincoln Boston Daily Advertiser explained that the duty would be raised on incoming woolen manufactures.⁽⁷⁰⁾ Toward the end of the campaign Andrew G. Curtin, governor-elect of Pennsylvania and an ardent protectionist, was brought to Boston to speak. Action on the Morrill bill having meanwhile been blocked by the Democratic-dominated Senate, Curtin maintained that this was a blow at the interests of the laboring man.⁽⁷¹⁾
Regardless of the popularity or unpopularity of the Morrill bill in the Northwest and New England, the tariff proved a decisive issue in Pennsylvania.
Not only did Pennsylvania cast twenty-seven electoral votes — second only to New York — but it was long considered "doubtful." The state had been carried by the Democrat James Buchanan over Fremont in 1856 and had decided the presidential contest in favor of the former. Moreover, it was an "October" state, holding its gubernatorial contest one month before the presidential election. Republicans and Democrats strained every nerve to carry the 1860 Pennsylvania state election.⁽⁷²⁾
McMichael's Philadelphia North American made protectionism the paramount issue in the Keystone State. Between September 1 and November 6, it printed only six editorials of consequence relating to slavery, whereas between September 3 and October 11, sixteen lengthy editorials relevant to the tariff appeared.⁽⁷³⁾ Republican journals in other regions of the state also portrayed Lincoln as a stout champion of protection.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Lincoln, remaining in Springfield, Illinois, confidentially referred his correspondents to the national platform and pointed to the Whig papers of 1844 to prove his adherence to Clay's policy. To one he wrote on October 2:

To comply with your request to furnish extracts from my tariff speeches is simply impossible, because none of those speeches were published. It was not fashionable here in those days to report one's public speeches. In 1844 I was on Clay's electoral ticket in this State (i.e., Illinois) and, to the best of my ability, sustained, together, the tariff of 1842 and the tariff plank of the Clay platform. This could be proven by hundreds — perhaps thousands — of living witnesses; still it is not in print, except by inference. The Whig papers of those years all show that I was upon the electoral ticket; even though I made speeches, among other things about the tariff, but they do not show what I said about it. The papers show that I was one of the committee which reported, among others, a resolution in these words: "That we are in favor of an adequate revenue on duties from imports so levied as to afford ample protection to American industry."
But, after all, was it really any more than the tariff plank of our present platform? And does not my acceptance pledge me on that? And am I at liberty to do more, if I were inclined?⁽⁷⁵⁾

As the election drew near, the fight to carry Pennsylvania became keener. Republicans in Congress, with an eye to the Keystone State vote, kept the tariff to the fore. On May 10 they succeeded in jamming the Morrill bill through the House. Their efforts were partially blocked, however, when Robert M.T. Hunter, Democrat of Virginia and chairman of the Senate finance committee, succeeded in having the Democratic-controlled Senate pass his amendment calling for postponement of the bill's consideration until the next session of Congress — after the election!⁽⁷⁶⁾ Meanwhile, throughout Pennsylvania, Lincoln orators hammered away at the Democrats' hostility to the state's interests. Curtin, Republican gubernatorial candidate, gave a greater portion of his time to the discussion of the tariff and financial issues than to all others combined.⁽⁷⁷⁾ One Democratic leader complained to Senator Douglas: "The Republicans, in their speeches, say nothing of the nigger question, but all is made to turn on the Tariff";⁽⁷⁸⁾ later he appealed to Douglas to say kind words for protection to home industry when the latter took the stump in Pennsylvania.⁽⁷⁹⁾ At Harrisburg in September, Douglas, an erstwhile low-tariff advocate, supported protection.⁽⁸⁰⁾ The Republicans assailed the Little Giant's insincerity and, in their final election manifesto, appealed: "Every voter in Pennsylvania who desires to-day to emphasize his vote in favor of protection to American industry and to the best interests of this State, should give it to Abraham Lincoln."⁽⁸¹⁾
The Lincolnites' strategy proved fruitful. Aided by the low-tariff record of most Democrats and by the split in the Democratic party, they elected Curtin governor in October and won the state's twenty-seven electoral votes for Lincoln in November. Republican and Democratic campaign managers agreed that the tariff issue enabled Lincoln to carry pivotal Pennsylvania.⁽⁸²⁾
As in Pennsylvania, so, too, in New Jersey did the Republicans present Lincoln as the champion of American industry. They assured the voters, "Mr. Lincoln is in favor of a Protective Tariff, because he earnestly desires to see all our mills and factories in successful operation, making music along our rivers and booming amid the hills." As in the Keystone State, the Republicans, in their effort to carry New Jersey for Lincoln, made the most of the Democrats' pigeonholing of the Morrill bill in the Senate, contrasting it with their party's pledge to pass it in the House.⁽⁸³⁾ Lincoln's "high-tariff" past proved a strong attraction to erstwhile Whigs. One Republican leader reported from Bergen County: "Mr. [Joseph] Hoxie commenced [the rally] by reviewing the acts of the present [Buchanan] administration... and closed with an appeal to those who had fought with him under the banner of 'Protection to American Industry,' to come forth and battle for one of Clay's noblest friends, 'Honest Abe' of Illinois."⁽⁸⁴⁾ Dr. Thomas M. Pitkin has concluded: "It is certain that the issue of protection, ably presented and persistently urged, helped materially in winning four of the votes of a state which had, in 1856, gone solidly Democratic."⁽⁸⁵⁾
In estimating the role of the tariff in the election of Lincoln, it must be recognized that any serious study of political events and party organization in the United States from 1854 to 1860 will reveal the wide variety of issues involved and the divergent emphases placed on them by Republican strategists in different regions of the North. Opposition to the leaders and policies of the Democratic party, national, state, and local, was the common ground on which Lincoln's party stood. The Republicans also reaped the rewards from the split within the Democratic ranks into Buchanan and Douglas factions — a split over personalities, patronage, and "Bleeding" Kansas.⁽⁸⁶⁾ In New York⁽⁸⁷⁾ and Massachusetts⁽⁸⁸⁾ the major issues were Know-Nothingism, temperance, and opposition to slavery extension; the pope, John Barleycorn, and the "slavocrats" Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Stephen A. Douglas were the main targets of the anti-Democratic attack started by the declining Whig party and then carried on by the Republicans. In winning the Northwest, Lincoln was aided not only by the Democratic split but also by his party's promise to give free land — homestead — to actual settlers.⁽⁸⁹⁾ In sweeping the Great Lakes region he was helped by the plank in the Chicago platform calling for Federal funds for the improvement of rivers and harbors.⁽⁹⁰⁾ In carrying California and Oregon by a small margin, the Democratic schism and Republican demand for construction of a railroad to the Pacific and a daily overland mail combined to tip the scales in his favor.⁽⁹¹⁾ In achieving success for Lincoln in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the foregoing pages indicate that the promise of a protective tariff and the Democratic rupture were the decisive factors. Pennsylvania's twenty-seven electoral votes, given to any other candidate, would have reduced Lincoln's majority to three. The additional loss of New Jersey's four electoral votes would have thrown the election into Congress with unpredictable results.⁽⁹²⁾ The forces, economic, political, and moral, which elected Lincoln were summarized by McMichael's protectionist Philadelphia North American:

The people have elected Abraham Lincoln President of the United States. This result was clearly foreshadowed when Pennsylvania decided by her great majority.... Pennsylvania, particularly, demanded that the principle of protecting American industries should be recognized and avowed.... Economy in the conduct of the government, homesteads for settlers on the public domain, retrenchment and accountability in the public expenditures, appropriations for rivers and harbors, a Pacific Railroad, the admission of Kansas, and a radical reform in the government, all entered into the canvass and contributed to the election of Lincoln. No one issue controlled it.... We have thus seen that slavery was not the dominating idea of the Presidential contest, as has been assumed, but that various national influences co-operated to produce the result which has been witnessed.⁽⁹³⁾

Following Lincoln's triumph, certain elements within the Republican ranks — particularly the former Democrats who had gone over to Lincoln on the antislavery and "free land" issues — resented their new party's tendencies toward protectionism. Now that victory had come, they did not remain seduced by the beauties of the "Whiggish" American System.⁽⁹⁴⁾ But President-elect Lincoln did not flinch. Endeavoring to live up to the platform on which he had campaigned, he considered his election a mandate to shield the home market from competition of European goods. In an address at Pittsburgh in mid-February, 1861, while en route to Washington for his inauguration, he read the twelfth plank of the Chicago platform. Then he continued:

As with all general propositions, doubtless there will be shades of difference in construing this. I have by no means a thoroughly matured judgment upon this subject, especially as to details: some general ideas are about all. I have long thought to produce any necessary article at home which can be made of as good quality and with as little labor at home as abroad would be better made at home, at least by the difference of the carrying from abroad. In such a case the carrying is demonstrably a dead loss of labor. For instance, labor being the true standard of value, is it not plain that if equal labor gets a bar of railroad iron out of a mine in England and another out of a mine in Pennsylvania each can be laid down in a track at home cheaper than they could exchange countries, at least by the cost of carriage.
If there be a present cause why one can be both made and carried cheaper in money price than the other can be made without carrying, that cause is an unnatural and injurious one, and ought gradually, if not rapidly, be removed. The condition of the treasury at this time would seem to render an early revision of the tariff indispensable. The Morrill tariff bill now pending before Congress may or may not become a law. I am not posted as to its particular provisions, but if they are generally satisfactory, and the bill shall now pass, there will be an end of the matter for the present.⁽⁹⁵⁾

Meanwhile, as Lincoln prepared for his inaugural, South Carolina had led several Southern states out of the Union. Pennsylvania's Democratic senator, William Bigler, appealed to the South: "The most potent influence that caused many Northern men to aid the Republican party was the tariff question. Manufacturers and miners believed the Democratic party prejudiced to their protection; and therefore had gone over to the Republicans. No man is warranted in saying that the State of Pennsylvania will adhere to the [antislavery] doctrine of the Republican party."⁽⁹⁶⁾
Bigler's hopes that his state might forsake Lincoln were not to be realized. For influential Republicans, subordinating the slavery extension issue, were determined to hold the Keystone State in line by paying the campaign debt. Morrill, wanting the raw wool of his own Vermont protected, had revived his bill raising the import duties.⁽⁹⁷⁾ The Pennsylvania appeal went to Republican congressmen: "Pass it [the Morrill bill] and we can permanently hold the State.... 'Protection' as a principle of Republicanism is worth to us 100,000 votes at least any day."⁽⁹⁸⁾ And Henry C. Carey exhorted: "Without it, Mr. Lincoln's administration will be dead before the day of inauguration."⁽⁹⁹⁾
Lincoln had no opportunity to act on the Morrill bill. Before he took the oath of office as President, Congress passed the measure on a party vote. Democratic "low-tariff" senators having withdrawn to follow the road of secession, the Democratic majority was transformed into a Republican majority in the upper branch of Congress; the House was already Republican.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Morrill, John Sherman of Ohio, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania steered the bill through the House;⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania and James F. Simmons of Rhode Island, a wealthy textile millowner,⁽¹⁰²⁾ guided it through the Senate.⁽¹⁰³⁾ On March 2, 1861 — two days before Lincoln's inauguration — President Buchanan, himself a Pennsylvanian, signed the bill.
Historians are not unanimous as to the relative importance which Southern fear and hatred of a high tariff had in causing the secession of the slave states, but there has been a growing tendency to lay more emphasis on it than formerly.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ This much seems evident: except among a minority of Pennsylvania manufacturers,⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ there was little widespread demand for the Morrill act, first important legislative milepost marking the journey of industrial and financial capitalism to a dominant position in the nation. Morrill himself admitted that his measure "was not asked for, and but coldly received by manufacturers, who always and just fear instability."⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ Rather, the demand for protection had been incorporated into the Chicago platform almost exclusively to cater to Pennsylvania.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ And even the Keystone State coal and iron producers did not work too energetically to aid the passage of the Morrill bill. While it was pending in Congress, the Washington correspondent of McMichael's Philadelphia North American, James E. Harvey, diligently lobbying for its passage, complained: "Iron gentlemen stay at home, & saddle us who are toiling for bread day & night, as is my case, with the care of their interests. They make periodical excursions here & talk, but expect us to drum up votes, button-hole members, and argue their cases for patriotic considerations.... I will try & see the Morrill bill through."⁽¹⁰⁸⁾
That certain elements within Lincoln's party harbored "low-tariff" views was all to well known to that renowned "high-tariff" doctrinaire Henry C.Carey, who had eulogized the Morrill act as "the most important measure ever adopted by Congress."⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ In alarm Carey concluded that the Treasury Department, charged with administering tariff legislation, was filled with "free traders" who were unsympathetic toward the new tariff.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ Lincoln was a reader of Carey's works on political economy, and evidently Carey was aware of this.⁽¹¹¹⁾ Accordingly, it was not surprising that the President should be visited by Carey. Lincoln agreed to appoint Carey's friend and fellow warrior in the protectionist crusade, Dr. William Elder, to an important post in the "Tariff Region" of the Treasury Department, which was charged with administering the Morrill act.⁽¹¹²⁾ Dr. Elder was "the man to teach them,"⁽¹¹³⁾ Carey commented. Carey now attempted to persuade Lincoln to lean farther toward the protectionist side. In June, 1861, he wrote the President: "Had the policy advocated by Mr. Clay, as embodied in the tariff of 1842, been maintained, there could have been no secession, and for the reason, that the southern mineral region would long since have obtained control of the planting one."⁽¹¹⁴⁾
Just how far under normal conditions Lincoln would have gone along with Carey's views cannot be said. The necessity of financing the war against the Confederacy forced the President to favor a rise in import duties as a source of revenue. In a message to Congress shortly after the firing on Fort Sumter, he pointed to the reports of the Secretaries of the Treasury, War, and Navy, as giving the information necessary for deliberation and action.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, a low-tariff man throughout his career,⁽¹¹⁶⁾ reluctantly recommended a rise in import duties as part of his program to finance the war.⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Soon he was consulting with Morrill, who, in league with Carey, had plans afoot to boost the tariff rates still higher.⁽¹¹⁸⁾ Congress accordingly passed the tariff act of August 5, 1861, which raised the Morrill levels. Lincoln signed the measure.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ Morrill's tariff legislation of March 2 and August 5, 1861, nearly doubled the rates of import duties that were exacted by the tariff of 1857.⁽¹²⁰⁾
Under the stress of war, high tariffs were easily passed by successive Republican majorities in Congress and approved by Lincoln. The President's call on July 1 for three hundred thousand additional troops was a harbinger of the increased demands which in the future would be made upon the Treasury. Moreover, the Pacific Railway Act, with its Federal land grant and loan to aid the construction of a line between the Missouri River and California, and the Agricultural College Act (also sponsored by Morrill) further burdened the Federal Treasury at this time. Ostensibly to meet some of these additional needs, the Tariff Act of July 14, 1862, was passed — and approved by Lincoln. Designed to increase duties to offset the previously enacted internal taxes, the measure aided the home manufacturer. Customs duties were raised to an average of 37 per cent, and the free list established by Morrill's act of 1861 was cut down by nearly one half. These upward changes became the basis for the even higher duties of the 1864 tariff.⁽¹²¹⁾
Congress supported Lincoln in his insistence on means for finishing the war. In June, 1864, a new tariff bill was passed by both houses of Congress. Lincoln approved it on June 30, and it went into effect at once. Under it duties rose from the 37 per cent of the bill of 1862 to over 47 per cent, which added its quota to an appalling high cost of living. But the majority of the public endured it, grimly convinced that there was no other way to end the war.⁽¹²²⁾
The wartime tariff acts did indeed enable Lincoln to raise funds with which to vanquish the Confederacy.⁽¹²³⁾ In the process, however, manufacturers, desirous of shielding their products from foreign competition, found their opportunity in the financial needs of the government. They secured a high degree of protection.⁽¹²⁴⁾ While the main reasons for the war tariffs, which Lincoln approved, were the need of revenue for the government and the desire to compensate the various interests imposed upon by the internal imposts,⁽¹²⁵⁾ the final shape of the tariffs enacted during the war was largely owing to the endeavors of protected manufacturers to gain each for himself the greatest possible advantage irrespective of the other's interests. Above all, the habits engendered during this period of comprehensive protection to almost everything led to a crystallization of the sentiment in favor of national economic exclusion and isolation. For many decades American commercial policy was molded by the feelings and habits generated during Lincoln's wartime administration.⁽¹²⁶⁾
After he reached Washington to assume the presidency in 1861, Lincoln rarely considered the tariff other than as a method to raise money.⁽¹²⁷⁾ Certain it was that Henry C. Carey, who had repeated consultations with Lincoln during the war,⁽¹²⁸⁾ was keenly disappointed at the lack of attention manifested toward the question by the President, who was always so deeply absorbed in the political and military aspects of the war. And early in February, 1865, Carey gave vent to his feelings: "Protection made Mr. Lincoln president. Protection has given him all the success he has achieved, yet has he never, so far as I can recollect, bestowed upon her a single word of thanks. When he and she part company, he will go to the wall."⁽¹²⁹⁾
What Lincoln's course would have been toward the tariff had he lived cannot be determined. For decades following his death, however, protectionists, in summoning testimony from "the Fathers," made full use of Lincoln's high-tariff record to bolster their claims that huge duties on imports were economically sound and socially desirable; at times the more zealous, in combating free trade, misquoted Lincoln and even concocted orations which they attributed to him.⁽¹³⁰⁾ Nevertheless, under him the American nation went definitely on a high-tariff program, and to Lincoln's party Henry C. Carey's principles became an act of faith.

Endnotes

1. Orrin L. Elliott, The Tariff Controversy in the United States, 1789-1833 (Palo Alto, 1892); Carl W. Kaiser, Jr., History of the Academic Protectionist-Free Trade Controversy Before 1860 (Philadelphia, 1939); Robert R. Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840-1861 (Urbana, 1924), pages 37-40, 65-66, 151-56; John G. Van Deusen, Economic Bases of Disunion in South Carolina (New York, 1928), pages 19-21, 59-103, 328; Jesse T. Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority, 1789-1861 (New York, 1930), pages 19, 29-30, 56; Ulrich B. Phillips, The Life of Robert Toombs (New York, 1913), page 148; Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1942), pages 215-216, 224, 321, 401; James C. Ballagh, "Southern Economic History: Tariff and Public Lands," American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1898 (Washington, 1899), pages 223ff.

2. George E. Hunsberger, "The Development of Tariff Policy in the Republican Party," Ph.D. dissertation in manuscript form, submitted to the University of Virgini in 1934.

3. Lincoln's speech at Pittsburgh, Feb. 15, 1861, New York Daily Tribune, Feb. 16, 1861.

4. Louis A. Warren, "The Lone Whig of Illinois," Lincoln Lore, No. 580 (May 20, 1940); Reinhard H. Luthin, "Abraham Lincoln and the Massachusetts Whigs in 1848," New England Quarterly, XIV (Dec., 1941), page 619 n.; Henry B. Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abrham Lincoln (New York and London, 1916), pages 363-64.

5. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Boston, 1937), pages 57-60, 164-66, 215-16; E. Malcolm Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (Durham, 1925), pages 24-25, 37, 47, 173; Harold U. Faulkner, "The Development of the American System," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CXLI (Jan., 1929), page 12; E. Merton Coulter, "The Genesis of Henry Clay's American System," South Atlantic Quarterly, XXV (Jan., 1926), pages 45-54.

6. Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858 (Boston and New York, 1928), Volume I, pages 96-99.

7. J. Brown Ray to Dr. David G. Mitchell, Mar. 28, 1827, William H. English Papers, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indianapolis.

8. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, Volume I, pages 115ff.

9. Osborn H. Oldroyd, The Lincoln Memorial (New York, 1882), page 76; William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon's Lincoln (Chicago, 1889), Volume I, page 102.

10. Emanuel Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln (New York, 1938), page 383. Cf. Charles M. Thompson, The Illinois Whigs Before 1846 (Urbana, 1915), pages 73-74; Harry E. Pratt, "Lincoln — Campaign Manager and Orator in 1840," Bulletin of the Abraham Lincoln Association, No. 50 (Dec., 1937), pages 3-8. For a summary of tariff legislation in the ante-bellum decades, see F.W. Taussig, "The Tariff, 1830-1860," Quarterly Journal of Economics, II (Apr., 1888), pages 314-46.

11. Arthur B. Lapsley, ed., The Writings of Abraham Lincoln (Constitutional ed., New York and London, 1905), Volume I, pages 301-305; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, eds., Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln (Gettysburg ed., New York, 1894), Volume I, pages 300-15; Volume II, pages 55-56.

12. Harry E. Pratt, Lincoln, 1840-1846 (Springfield, 1939), pages 220-21, 232; Rockport (Indiana) Herald, Nov. 1, 1844, in Bess V. Ehrmann, The Missing Chapter in the Life of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago, 1938), facsimile opposite page 104; Hertz, page 79; Illinois State Register (Springfield), Mar. 22, 29, 1844; Springfield (Ill.) Sangamo Journal, Aug. 7, 1844, in New York Herald, Oct. 20, 1860.

13. Congressional Globe, 30 Cong., 2 sess., Appendix, page 26; D.W. Bartlett, The Life and Public Services of Hon. Abraham Lincoln ("Authorized ed.," New York, 1860), pages 36, 42.

14. Reinhard H. Luthin, "Abraham Lincoln Becomes a Republican," to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Political Science Quarterly.

15. Madison Kuhn, "Economic Issues and the Rise of the Republican Party in the Northwest," Ph.D. dissertation in manuscript form, submitted to the University of Chicago in 1940, pages 101-106, 108, 111-18, 136-44; Mildred C. Stoler, "Influence of the Democratic Element in the Republican Party of Illinois and Indiana, 1854-1860," Ph.D dissertation in manuscript form, submitted to Indiana University in 1938, page 26; Floyd B. Streeter, Political Parties in Michigan, 1837-1860 (Lansing, 1918), page 200; F.I. Herriott, "The Germans of Chicago and Stephen A. Douglas in 1854," Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblatter, XII (1912), pages 388-91.

16. Arthur C. Cole, The Era of the Civil War, 1848-1870, Volume III of The Centennial History of Illinois (Springfield, 1919), pages 101-102.

17. James H. Campbell to Carey, Dec. 4, 1856, Henry C. Carey Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Box 59.

18. Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century (Boston and New York, 1903), Volume II, pages 99-108; Roy F. Nichols, Franklin Pierce (Philadelphia, 1931), page 502; Cong. Globe, 34 Cong., 3 sess., Appendix, page 358.

19. George W. Van Vleck, The Panic of 1857 (New York, 1943), pages 60ff.

20. McQuaide to Covode, Aug. 11, 1858, John Covode Papers, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh; C. Maxwell Myers, "The Rise of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, 1854-1860," Ph.D. dissertation in manuscript form, submitted to the University of Pittsburgh in 1940, pages 179-210; Malcolm R. Eiselen, The Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism (Philadelphia, 1932), pages 244-49; Reinhard H. Luthin, "The Democratic Split During Buchanan's Administration," Pennsylvania History, XI (Jan., 1944), page 17.

21. Beveridge, Volume II, pages 524, 525, 571.

22. Ibid., page 571. With slightly more than four thousand plants, employing fewer than twenty-five thousand workers and turning out less than $57,000,000 worth of the "products of industry" for the year ending June 1, 1860, Illinois ranked only eighth among the thirty-three states of the Union; even California, one of the younger states, exceeded Illinois in manufactures. See Joseph C.G. Kennedy, "Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census, 1860," House Executive Document, No. 116, 37 Cong., 2 sess., serial 1137, page 190.

23. Greeley to George E. Baker, May 3, 1859, in The Republic (Washington, 1873), Volume I, page 200.

24. Simon Cameron to Carey, June 3, 1858, Carey Papers, Box 59; Lee F. Crippen, Simon Cameron: Ante-Bellum Years (Oxford, Ohio, 1942), page 196; Philadelphia Press, May 15, 1860; New York Herald, Sept. 13, 1859.

25. H. Winter Davis to Morrill, August 20, 1859, Justin S. Morrill Papers, Library of Congress.

26. Thomas M. Pitkin, “The Tariff and the Early American Party,” Ph.D. dissertation in manuscript form, submitted to Western Reserve University in 1935, page 185.

27. “Western Republicans and the Tariff in 1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXVII (December, 1940), pages 402-404.

28. Oliver P. Morton, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Indiana, quoted in the Indianapolis Daily Journal, March 16, 1860.

29. Chicago Press and Tribune, March 30, April 3, 1860.

30. Ibid., April 4, 1860.

This article was extracted from The American Historical Review (July, 1944), Volume XLIX, Number 4.