In the early years of the nineteenth century, the Yankees had bent their energies toward building and operating ships to carry produce from America to Europe and manufactures from Europe to America.  For this reason, they had opposed the tariff of 1816 calculated to increase domestic production and cut down the carrying trade.  Defeated in their efforts, they accepted the inevitable and turned to manufacturing.  Soon they were powerful friends of protection for American enterprise.  As the money invested and the labor employed in the favored industries increased, the demand for continued and heavier protection grew apace.  Even the farmers who furnished raw materials, like wool, flax, and hemp, began to see eye to eye with the manufacturers.  So the textile interests of New England, the iron masters of Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, the wool, hemp, and flax growers of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and the sugar planters of Louisiana developed into a formidable combination in support of a high protective tariff.

The Planting States Oppose the Tariff.—­In the meantime, the cotton states on the seaboard had forgotten about the havoc wrought during the Napoleonic wars when their produce rotted because there were no ships to carry it to Europe.  The seas were now open.  The area devoted to cotton had swiftly expanded as Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were opened up.  Cotton had in fact become “king” and the planters depended for their prosperity, as they thought, upon the sale of their staple to English manufacturers whose spinning and weaving mills were the wonder of the world.  Manufacturing nothing and having to buy nearly everything except farm produce and even much of that for slaves, the planters naturally wanted to purchase manufactures in the cheapest market, England, where they sold most of their cotton.  The tariff, they contended, raised the price of the goods they had to buy and was thus in fact a tribute laid on them for the benefit of the Northern mill owners.

The Tariff of Abominations.—­They were overborne, however, in 1824 and again in 1828 when Northern manufacturers and Western farmers forced Congress to make an upward revision of the tariff.  The Act of 1828 known as “the Tariff of Abominations,” though slightly modified in 1832, was “the straw which broke the camel’s back.”  Southern leaders turned in rage against the whole system.  The legislatures of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama denounced it; a general convention of delegates held at Augusta issued a protest of defiance against it; and South Carolina, weary of verbal battles, decided to prevent its enforcement.