The maintenance of such a system required money, and a high tariff of duties on imports was a necessary concomitant to Internal Improvements.  The germ of this system was also a product of the war of 1812.  Hamilton had proposed it twenty years before; and the first American tariff act had declared that its object was the encouragement of American manufactures.  But the system had never been effectively introduced until the war and the blockade had forced American manufactures into existence.  Peace brought competition with British manufacturers, and the American manufacturers began to call for protection.  The tariff of 1816 contained the principle of Protection, but only carried it into practice far enough to induce the manufacturers to rely on the dominant party for more of it.  This expectation, rather than the Federalist opposition to the war, is the explanation of the immediate and rapid decline of the Federal party in New England.  Continued effort brought about the tariff of 1824, which was more protective; the tariff of 1828, which was still more protective; and the tariff of 1830, which reduced the protective element to a system.

The two sections, North and South, had been very much alike until the war called the principle of growth into activity.  The slave system of labor, which had fallen in the North and had survived and been made still more profitable in the South by Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, shut the South off from almost all share in the new life.  That section had a monopoly of the cotton culture, and the present profit of slave labor blinded it to the ultimate consequences of it.  The slave was fit for rude agriculture alone; he could not be employed in manufactures, or in any labor which required intelligence; and the slave-owner, while he desired manufactures, did not dare to cultivate the necessary intelligence in his own slaves.  The South could therefore find no profit in protection, and yet it could not with dignity admit that its slave system precluded it from the advantages of protection, or base its opposition to protection wholly on economic grounds.  Its only recourse was the constitutional ground of the lack of power of Congress to pass a protective tariff, and this brought up again the question which had evolved the Kentucky resolutions of 1798-9.  Calhoun, with pitiless logic, developed them into a scheme of constitutional Nullification.  Under his lead,

South Carolina, in 1832, declared through her State Convention that the protective tariff acts were no law, nor binding on the State, its officers or citizens.  President Jackson, while he was ready and willing to suppress any such rebellion by force, was not sorry to see his adherents in Congress make use of it to overthrow protection; and a “compromise tariff,” to which the protectionists agreed, was passed in 1833.  It reduced the duties by an annual percentage for ten years.  The nullifiers claimed this as a triumph, and formally repealed the ordinance of