The Middle Period, 1817-1858

nvitation-Opposition in the Senate to the sending of Representatives to Panama-Popular Sympathy in the United States for the South-American States-The President's Nominations Confirmed-The Haytian Que

-The Tariff Bill of 1827-Development of the Industrial Antithesis between the North and the South-Hostility to the Measure in South Carolina-The Tariff of 1828-The Character of the Bill as Reflected in the Analysis of the Vote Upon It-The Tarif

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views, placed a liberal construction upon the Constitution, and insisted upon the employment of all the powers vested by it in the general Government to the highest point of their usefulness in the promotion of the general

mocratic party, as the Administrationists and the Anti-administrationists were soon termed, took its rise largely in the personal hostility of the leaders

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of Europe in American affairs by any resistance necessary to defeat it. They were also acquainted with the fact that both Mr. Adams and Mr. Clay were more pronounced than President Monroe in favor of going to the support of the new republics of South and Middle Am

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ember 20th, 1825, the Republic of Colombia had established a military confederation between these five states, and had pledged them to send plenipotentiaries to a "general assembly of American states ... with the charge of cementing, in the most solid and stable manner, the intimate relations which ought to exist between all and every o

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ates send representatives to this proposed congress; but before giving the formal invitation they asked to know if it would be accepted. They stated to Mr. Clay that they did not

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ld be accepted by the United States. The President, however, proceeded rather cautiously. He was, indeed, very friendly in his feelings toward the Spanish-American states, and was ready to aid their cause in any manner consistent with the duties of a neutral. But he had a calmer way of regarding things than his brilliant Secretary of State, and, moreover, upon him rested the ultimate responsibility. He required Mr. Clay to procure from Messrs. Salazar and Obregon some information in regard to the subjects which would

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tory to the President. The ministers were informed, however, that the President had resolved to send commissioners to the congress at Panama, in case the Senate, which was to

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hird questions entirely unanswered, they suggested a joint resistance of all the American states to European interference in American affairs, and to any further European colonization upon the American continents, as the principal subjects in the disc

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825, asking the Senate to approve his nominations of Richard C. Anderson and John Sergeant as ministers from the United States to the "Assembly of American Nations at Panama," a very strong opposition to the project was dev

6th, 1826. The Senate debated, in secret session, the questions involved in the report during the latter half of February and the first half of March. The view held by those who favored the report was that the Panama congress was to have the character of a military confederation, and that membership in it would be inconsistent with a status of neutrality toward Spain and her revo

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the spirit of neutrality, and the influence of this sympathy upon the Senators and Representatives in Congress was very disturb

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tion was that slavery threw aside its municipal character, its character as a Commonwealth institution, and demanded to prescribe both the internal and external policies of the nation. This sounds dramatic, but if it means, as it appears to mean, that when, in a federal system of government, any interest or institution regulated by Commonwealth law asks protection from the general Government against foreign influence and interference it thereby asserts command over the nation, it is a proposition which also sounds decidedly outré t

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tates did not wish their own homes to be made the scenes of any such ruin and savagery, or themselves or their families to be made subject to any such fate; and, it may be confidently hazarded, that no Northerner, at that day, viewed such possibilities with anything but aversion and horror. It required a quarter of a century of radical abolition recklessness, the blunder-crime of secession, and the desperation of long-continued, and at first unsuccessful, war, to make the men of the North regard without sympathy such danger

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court for the cessation of hostilities on the part of Spain against the revolting American colonies, on the ground that Spain could never resubjugate them, and would by a continuance of hostilities exasperate them and excite them to attack Cuba and Porto Rico with the purpose of expelling the Spanish power from these islands, and was urging the Spanish-American states, on the other side, to refrain from such an attack, on the ground that if they did attempt to seize these islands the

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Administration. From the merits of the question the former would seem the more likely. It was certainly, to any candid mind, a sufficient reason. On the other hand, an expression uttered by Mr. Van Buren as he left the Senate chamber, after having just made a most earnest appeal against the mission and cas

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ppeared. Spain ceased to wage war against her former colonies. The Holy Alliance did not interfere. The Spanish-American states suspended th

d the mission to Panama. It is certainly most fortunate that these results were attained without the attendance of the representatives of the United States upon the congress. All poss

erty, fulfilled. But these things were all premature, to say the least, and none of them would, probably, have been helped onward by any discussion in the congress of the American nations. With the exception of the United States, those nations were altogether too immature to deal with such problems; and the United States itself was not sufficiently consol

nts is by no means transitory, the question of the Panama mission was so, at least so much so as not

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ories, and to do any and every thing conducive to the improvement of the people. Clay himself, it is said, was a little staggered by the exceeding broadness of Mr. Adams' ideas. While Mr. Van Buren, the leader of the opposition in the Senate, offered a resolution in that body, a fortnight after the mes

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, plans, and estimates for national routes. The Administration and Congress simply put into practice the Monroe ideas upon the subject. Money was appropriated by Congress for the construction and repair of roads, and was expended under the supervision of the President, and stock was taken by the Governmen

nd powers of the Commonwealths, and they now began to watch and combat the movements of the Administration chiefly from this point of view. This attitude must not yet, however, be ascribed wholly or chiefly to the conscious influences of the slavery interest. Factional hostility to the Administration, and the general settling

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he people. Naturally every Congressman considered the roads of his district as matters of national concern; and, in spite of the law of 1824 vesting in the President and his board of engineers the l

ery in the attitude which the slaveholders would finally take toward the industrial policies of the nation, and which

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s were sold upon foreign account, and not by bona fide American merchants, and that the goods were thus undervalued by the fictitious parties to the importation, and the duty thus so largely avoided as to make the importation practically free. It was, therefore, contended that the agent of the foreign manufacturer or merchant was ruining the American manufacturer, on the one hand, and the American merchant, on the other. President Adams himself, in his message of December 5th, 1826, re

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practically to prohibit their importation. The bill proposed, however, to raise the tariff on wool to such a rate as would deprive the manufacturers very largely of the benefit to be secured by the system of minimal valuations. It was questionabl

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divided in the final vote on the bill. The protection phalanx from Pennsylvania was broken, too, by the defection of her two most important Representatives, Ingham and Buchanan. The attitude of Buchanan was a matter of especial note. He held that the constitutionality of the tariff and the policy of a moderate protection had been completely settled by the founders of the Co

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me entirely sectional, though an advance had been made since 1824 toward that result. The bill passed the Hous

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e Governor, Mr. Taylor, presided, and the principal orator of the occasion was the President of the College of the Commonwealth, Dr. Cooper, a man of rare powers and great learning, an Englishman by birth and education, a free-trader in his political economy, and a "States' rights" man in his political science. In his speech he suggested

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evoked no response whatsoever. The proposed tariff had, by the inaction of the Senate, been virtually abandone

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t changed the duty upon woollen goods costing less than $2.50 a square yard from an ad valorem to a specific duty, and increased the duty by about twenty per centum. It retained the ad valorem duty on woollens costing more than $2.50 a square yard, and increased the same by about twenty per centum, and in addition thereto it imp

man of the committee, felt so dubious about this that he dissented from the committee's report in regard to woollen fabrics, and offered an amendment to the bill for the purpose of curing this defect. He could not, however, bring the House to accept his proposition, but his opposition to the committee's report opened the

cotton. It would increase the price of woollen fabrics. It would increase the domestic demand for the products of Western agriculture, and thereby increase the price of these products to the Southern consumers of them. And it would discourage the importation of woollen goods. These were

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slave labor; while others, like Mr. McDuffie, threatened ruin to the Northern manufacturers if they succeed

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wool- and hemp-growing sections supported the bill; those from the manufacturing section were indifferent; those

pping interests of New England. He voted for the bill, however, while his colleague, Mr. Silsbee, voted against it. The vote in the Senate differed only slightly, as regards sectional distribution, from that in the House. It was finally passed by both Houses as amended by the Senate, and was signed by the President on the nineteenth day of May, 1828; and opposition to it there

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Southern wing of the Jacksonians, or of the Democratic party, as the Jacksonians now called themselves in distinction from the National Republicans, opposed the measure with something like unanimity. M

ship, and the organization of the two parties, which had now emerged from the all-comprehending

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the "Old Hero," the friend of the people, had been cheated, by a corrupt bargain between the two chiefs of the Administration, out of his rights in 1824, and that the whole pack of officials serving under them had been corrupted by the venality of their superiors. The peo

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h of Mason and Dixon's line, except Delaware and Maryland, gave its electoral vote entire to Jackson and Calhoun; and in addition thereto Pen

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e a combination of the South and West against the East. They had, however, secured the two most important Eastern Commonwealths through Van Buren's activity in New York and Jackson's own popularity in Pennsylvania. It was not yet, however, a socialistic uprising against the wealth of the East. It was a political u

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to the northeast boundary of the United States, and in regard to trade between the United States and the British colonies, and the dispute with France in regard to indemnity for the spoliations committed by the French upon American commerce in the first years of the centu

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sions. Of these, the Western division alone was a real democracy. The Southern and Eastern divisions were rather aristocracies. The Southern division was emphatically so. And when it came to policies, the Western division favored internal improvements, and the Eastern and Southern divisions opposed them; the Wester