South Carolina, oppressed by onerous duties and stung by the injustice
of a refusal to allow her the ordinary remedy against unconstitutional
legislation, asserted the right, as a sovereign State, to nullify the
law. This conflict between the authority of the United States and one of
the States threatened for a time such disastrous consequences as to
excite intense feeling in all who loved the Union as the fraternal
federation of equal States. Before an actual collision of arms occurred,
Congress wisely adopted the compromise act of 1833. By that the fact of
protection remained, but the principle of duties for revenue was
recognized by a sliding scale of reduction, and it was hoped the
question had been placed upon a basis that promised a permanent peace.
The party of protective duties, however, came into power about the close
of the period when the compromise measure had reached the result it
proposed, and the contest was renewed with little faith on the part of
the then dominant party and with more than all of its former bitterness.
The cause of the departure from a sound principle of a tariff for
revenue, which had prevailed during the first quarter of a century, and
the adoption in 1816 of the rule imposing duties for protection, was
stated by Mr. McDuffie to be that politicians and capitalists had seized
upon the subject and used it for their own purposes--the former for
political advancement, the latter for their own pecuniary profit--and
that the question had become one of partisan politics and sectional
enrichment.
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