be urged against the system. In his opinion "the liberty and the union of the country were inseparably united; that as the destruction of the latter would most certainly involve the former, so its maintenance will with equal certainty preserve it;" and he closed with an impressive warning to the Nation of a "new and terrible danger" which threatened it, to wit: "disunion." Nobly as he stood up thenduring the last term of his service in the House of Representatives for the great principles of the American System of Protection to manufactures, for the perpetuity of the Union, and for the increase of "National strength," it seems like the very irony of fate that a few years later should find him battling against Protection as "unconstitutional," upholding Nullification as a "reserved right" of his State, and championing at the risk of his neck that very "danger" to the "liberties" and life of his Country against which his prophetic words had already given solemn warning!

Strange was it also, in view of the subsequent attitudes of the South and New England, that this essentially Protective Tariff Act of 1816 should have been vigorously protested and voted against by New England, while it was ably advocated and voted for by the South-the 25 votes of the latter which secured its passage being more than sufficient to have secured its defeat had they been so inclined.

The Tariff Acts of 1824 and 1828 followed the great American principle of Protection laid down and supported by the South in the Act of 1816, while widening, increasing, and strengthening it. Under their operation-especially under that of 1828, with its high duties on wool, hemp, iron, lead, and other staples-great prosperity smiled upon the land, and particularly upon the Free States.

In the cotton-growing belt of the South, however, where the prosperity was relatively less, owing to the blight of Slavery, the very contrast bred discontent; and, instead of attributing it to the real cause, the advocates of Free Trade within that region insisted that the Protective Tariff was responsible for the condition of things existing there.

A few restless and discontented spirits in the South had indeed agitated the subject of Free Trade as against Pro

tected manufactures as early as 1797, and, hand in hand with it, the doctrine of States Rights. And Jefferson himself, although, as we have already seen, attached to the American System of Protection and believing in its Constitutionality, unwittingly played into the hands of these Free Traders by drawing up the famous Kentucky Resolutions of '98 touching States Rights, which were closely followed by the Virginia Resolutions of 1799 in the same vein by Madison, also an out-and-out Protectionist. It was mainly in condemnation of the Alien and Sedition Laws, then so unpopular everywhere, that these resolutions were professedly fulminated, but they gave to the agitating Free Traders a States-Rights-Secession-weapon of which they quickly availed themselves.

Their drift may be gathered from the first of the Kentucky Resolutions of '98, which was in these words: "Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government, but that, by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States, and of amendments thereto, they constituted a General Government for special purposes-delegated to that Government certain definite powers, reserving, each State to itself, the residuary mass of right to their own selfgovernment; and that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force; that to this compact each State acceded as a State, and as an integral party, its co-States forming, as to itself, the other party; that the Government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers; but that, as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress."

The Resolutions, after enumerating the Alien and Sedition and certain other laws as in point, conclude by calling upon the other States to join Kentucky in her opposition to such

Federal usurpations of power as thus embodied, and express confidence: "That they will concur with this Commonwealth in considering the said Acts as so palpably against the Constitution as to amount to an undisguised declaration that that compact is not meant to be the measure of the powers of the General Government, but that it will proceed in the exercise over these States, of all powers whatsoever; that they will view this as seizing the rights of the States, and consolidating them in the hands of the General Government, with the power assumed to bind the States (not merely as to the cases made federal (casus fœderis) but) in all cases whatsoever, by laws made, not with their consent, but by others against their consent; that this would be to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority; and that the co-States, returning to their natural rights in cases not made federal, will concur in declaring these Acts void and of no force, and will each take measures of its own in providing that neither these Acts, nor any others of the General Government, not plainly and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised within their respective territories."

The doctrine of States Rights as formulated in these Resolutions, including the assumed right of a State to nullify laws of the General Government, naturally led up, as we shall see, not only to threats of disunion, but ultimately to a dreadful sectional War waged in the effort to secure it. That Jefferson, when he penned them, foresaw the terrible results to flow from these specious and pernicious doctrines, is not to be supposed for an instant; but that his conscience troubled him may be fairly inferred from the fact that he withheld from the World for twenty years afterward the knowledge that he was their author. It is probable that in this case, as in others, he was a victim of that casuistry which teaches that "the end justifies the means;" that he hoped and believed that the assertion of these baleful doctrines would act solely as a check upon any tendency to further centralization of power in the General Government and insure that strict construction of the Constitution which

—though afterward violated by himself at the same time that he for the moment threw aside his scruples touching African slavery, when he added to our domain the great French Slave Colony of Louisiana-was none the less the great aim of his commanding intellect; and that he fatuitously believed in the "saving common sense" of his race and country as capable of correcting an existing evil when it shall have developed into ill effects.*

Be that as it may, however, the fact remains that the seeds thus sown by the hands of Jefferson on the "sacred soil" of Virginia and Kentucky, were dragon's teeth, destined in after years to spring up as legions of armed men battling for the subversion of that Constitution and the destruction of that Union which he so reverenced, and which he was so largely instrumental in founding-and which even came back in his own life to plague him and Madison during his embargo, and Madison's war of 1812-15, in the utterances and attitude of some of the New England Federalists.

The few Free Traders of the South-the Giles's and John Taylor's and men of that ilk-made up for their paucity in numbers by their unscrupulous ingenuity and active zeal. They put forth the idea that the American Protective Policy was a policy of fostering combinations by Federal laws, the effect of which was to transfer a considerable portion of the profits of slave labor from the Slave States to other parts of the Union where it was massed in the hands of a few individuals, and thus created a moneyed interest which avariciously influenced the General Government to the detriment of the entire community of people, who, made restive by the exactions of this power working through the Federal Government, were as a consequence driven to consider

* Mr. Jefferson takes this very ground, in almost the same words, in his letter, 1803, to Wilson C. Nichols in the Louisiana Colony purchase case, when, after proving by his own strict construction of the Constitution that there was no power in that instrument to make such purchase, and confessing the importance in that very case of setting “an example against broad construction,” he concludes: "If, however, our friends shall think differently, certainly I shall acquiesce with satisfaction; confiding that the good sense of the country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects."

a possible dissolution of the Union, and make "estimates of resources and means of defense." As a means also of inflaming both the poor whites and Southern slave-holders by arousing the apprehensions of the latter concerning the "peculiar institution" of Slavery, they craftily declared that "If the maxim advanced by the advocates of the protecting duty system will justify Congress in assuming, or rather in empowering a few capitalists to assume, the direction of manufacturing labor, it also invests that body with a power of legislating for the direction of every other species of labor and assigning all occupations whatsoever to the care of the intelligence of mercenary combinations "—and hence untold misery to labor.

They charged as a further means of firing the Southern heart, that this moneyed power, born of Protection, "works "upon the passion of the States it has been able to delude by computations of their physical strength and their naval superiority; and by boasting of an ability to use the weakening circumstance of negro slavery to coerce the defrauded and discontented States into submission." And they declared as fundamental truths upon which they rested that "The Federal is not a National Government; it is a league between nations. By this league, a limited power only over persons and property was given to the representatives of the united nations. This power cannot be further extended, under the pretext of national good, because the league does not create a national government."

It was the passage of the Tariff of 1824 that gave these crafty Free Traders their first great success in spreading their doctrine of Free Trade by coupling it with questions of slave labor, States Rights, and nullification, as laid down in the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. These arguments created great excitement throughout the South-especially in South Carolina and Georgia—which was still further increased by the passage of the Tariff of 1828, since declared by eminent authority* to have been "the highest and most protective ever adopted in this country. Prior to the passage of this Tariff Act, excited assem

* Mr. Greeley, in his "History of the American Conflict,” 1864.