Legislative language adopted nearly verbatim from lobbyists’ drafts. Speeches written for scoring points in the media read to a sea of empty seats in Congress. Industry groups taking sides and forming alliances to lobby and fund politicians willing to do their bidding. Tensions between party loyalties and local economic priorities. Sweeteners added to legislation to gain specific votes, and poison pills inserted for the purpose of spiking it. Public outrage over Washington aslosh with money. Amendments proposed to force potential presidential candidates to cast a vote that, either way, would offend a major bloc. The power of concentrated and well-funded interests amplified over those of more general but less focused constituencies. Whether this describes our current national political legislative process is up to the beholder, but it is the world that Daniel Peart has expertly unearthed in this well-written, extensively researched, and logically structured monograph. Peart thus reinvigorates our consideration of tariffs, one of the preeminent political controversies that deeply affected American businesses from the 1810s to the 1860s, but that historians have nonetheless largely ignored as a subject of inquiry unto itself for over a century.
From the 1810s until the passing of the nation's first income tax during the Civil War, tariffs constituted the federal government's largest source of revenue. Historians have primarily considered either the party politics, sectional interest, or the political economy of the debate to be paramount: whether federal policy would protect industry, increasingly a northern Whig interest, or free trade, favoring mostly Democratic slaveholding staple exporters. Peart's monograph does not ignore the rhetoric, but elevates the actual tariff bills—failed and passed—from subtext to text. Rates could be set for each commodity, at absolute levels or sliding scales. Revenue bills could be exceedingly complex. Subtle differences could determine which industries or even which players in which economic sectors would be favored or disadvantaged—rendering tariff bills especially ripe for manipulation and log-rolling. Peart expertly sifted through legislators’ and lobbyists’ papers and correspondence, demonstrating conclusively that the real action occurred in committee, over private dinners, and in the boarding houses that lobbyists often shared with members of Congress. Peart's book is therefore less in conversation with previous studies dedicated to this topic—long fallow and much consumed with romanticized, high-principled Congressional rhetoric—than with recent studies illuminating the interplay of business, politics, and policy at the state level. Like these, Peart concentrates on the interactions among legislators, constituents, and lobbyists, and the contingencies involved in policy generation.
The monograph's six chapters proceed chronologically, each examining one or a pair of the eleven major tariff bills Congress took up between the close of the War of 1812 and the first year of the Civil War. For only the first and last of these debates did the United States face serious fiscal challenges. Chapter 1 analyzes the successful efforts of a few politically active industrialists, in league with outside advocates like printer Mathew Carey and including the inside personal lobbying of polymath textile manufacturer Isaac Briggs, to get enacted the nation's first explicitly and functionally protectionist tariff in 1816. The Panic of 1819 allowed Carey and others to mobilize more popular support, which Henry Clay brought to bear on Congress, as Chapter 2 argues, failing to raise rates in 1820, but accomplishing that aim in 1824. Chapter 3 highlights how a combination of fractures among protectionists and party politics doomed the failed 1827 attempt of one sector—New England mill owners—to leverage national attention and wool producers, but more horse-trading put their 1828 measure over the top. Southerners' outrage over what they derided as the “Tariff of Abominations” led to the 1832 law lowering rates, Chapter 4 explains; protectionists reluctantly agreed to further adjustment in 1833 that lowered rates over time and could be interpreted as calling for future duties to be levied only for the purpose of generating revenue, rather than protection. Chapter 5 illuminates the increased tensions between party and region, with the high protectionist Tariff of 1842 carried primarily by Whigs, only to be modified toward revenue generation by the mostly Democratic-backed Tariff of 1846. Even the protectionist lobby eventually split, as Chapter 6 notes, as some industrialists forged a transregional alliance with free traders in 1857 to reduce rates on selected raw materials—thus padding their own profit margins—a move proving unnecessary in 1861, when, after secession, industrial interests held enough sway over the remaining members to ram through a tariff reaffirming protectionism as national policy.
Despite Peart's readable prose, this is a book for specialists. It assumes a level of knowledge, especially of political history, that might send all but the most knowledgeable (or uncurious) to consult reference works. Following the byzantine machinations around particular bills that Peart so admirably exhumed sometimes requires backtracking. Nonetheless, through attention to the arcane legislative details and the negotiations from which they emerged, Peart convincingly argues that these bills’ many amendments and the slim margins by which their fate was decided resulted, with some exceptions, less from party or regional loyalties than from the calculations of political operatives—elected and self-appointed—concerning exactly what metaphorical and literal prices they were willing to pay or to externalize to get what they wanted. In doing so, he demolishes the notion of nineteenth-century politicians as more elevated from interest than today's variety, the canard that businesses did not engage with the legislative process, and the assumption that the combination of the two did not occur until after the Civil War. This book is a strong contribution to our understanding of the intersection of business and policymaking, not just from 1816 to 1861, but also in our consideration of the long arc of American history.
