last few years to 6 or 8,000 lbs. In the mean time our manufactories were growing up; and having no supply of indigo at home, they had to import from abroad. In 1826 this importation amounted to 1,150,000 lbs., costing a fraction less than two millions of dollars, and had to be paid for almost entirely in ready money, as it was chiefly obtained from places where American produce was in no demand. Upon this state of facts, Mr. B. conceived it to be the part of a wise and prudent policy to follow the example of the British parliament in the reign of George II. and provide a home supply of this indispensable article. Our manufacturers now paid a high price for fine indigo, no less than $2 50 per pound, as testified by one of themselves before the Committee on Manufactures raised in the House of Representatives. The duty which he proposed was only 40 per cent. upon that value, and would not even reach that rate for four years. It was less than one half the duty which the same bill proposed to lay instanter upon the very cloth which this indigo was intended to dye. In the end it would make all indigo come cheaper to the manufacturer, as the home supply would soon be equal, if not superior to the demand; and in the mean time, it could not be considered a tax on the manufacturer, as he would levy the advance which he had to pay, with a good interest, upon the wearer of the cloth. vote for it to secure the life of the American System; to give a proof of their regard for the South; to show that the country south of the Potomac is included in the bill for some other purpose besides that of oppression. The South itself, although opposed to the further increase of duties, should vote for this duty; that the bill, if it passes, may contain one provision favorable to its interests. The West should vote for it through gratitude for fifty years of guardian protection, generous defence, and kind assistance, which the South had given it under all its trials; and for the purpose of enlarging the market, increasing the demand in the South and its ability to purchase the horses, mules, and provisions which the West can sell nowhere else. For himself he had personal reasons for wishing to do this little justice to the South. He was a native of one of these States (N. Carolina)—the bones of his father and his grandfathers rested there. Her Senators and Representatives were his early and his hereditary friends. The venerable Senator before him (Mr. Macon) had been the friend of him and his, through four generations in a straight line; the other Senator (Mr. Branch) was his schoolfellow: the other branch of the legislature, the House of Representatives, also showed him in the North Carolina delegation, the friends of him and his through successive generations. Nor was this all. He felt for the sad changes which had taken place in the South ́ in the last fifty years. Before the Revolution it was the seat of wealth as well as of hospitality. Money, and all that it commanded, abounded there. But how now? All this is reversed. "Mr. B. then went into an exposition of the reasons for encouraging the home production of indigo, and showed that the life of the American System depended upon it. Neither cotton nor woollen manufactures could be carried on without indigo. The consumption of that article was "Wealth has fled from the South, and settled prodigious. Even now, in the infant state of our in the regions north of the Potomac, and this in manufactories, the importation was worth two the midst of the fact that the South, in four staples millions of dollars: and must soon be worth alone, in cotton, tobacco, rice and indigo (while double or treble that sum. For this great sup- indigo was one of its staples), had exported proply of an indispensable article, we were chiefly duce since the Revolution, to the value of eight indebted to the jealous rival, and vigilant hundred million of dollars, and the North had enemy, of these very manufactures, to Great Bri- exported comparatively nothing. This sum was tain herself. Of the 1,150,000 lbs. of indigo im- prodigious; it was nearly equal to half the coinported, we bring 620,000 lbs. from the British age of the mint of Mexico since the conquest by East Indies; which one word from the British Cortez. It was twice or thrice the amount of government would stop for ever; we bring the the product of the three thousand gold and silver further quantity of 120,000 lbs. from Manilla, a mines of Mexico, for the same period of fifty Spanish possession, which British influence and years. Such an export would indicate unparaldiplomacy could immediately stop: and the re- leled wealth; but what was the fact? In place mainder came from different parts of South Ame- of wealth, a universal pressure for money wal rica, and might be taken from us by the arts of felt; not enough for current expenses; the price diplomacy, or by a monopoly of the whole on the of all property down; the country drooping and part of our rival. A stoppage of a supply of in-languishing; towns and cities decaying; and the digo for one year, would prostrate all our manu- frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge factories, and give them a blow from which they of universal self-denial, for the preservation of would not recover in many pears. Great Britain their family estates. Such a result is a strange could effect this stoppage to the amount of three and wonderful phenomenon. It calls upon statesfourths of the whole quantity by speaking a sin- men to inquire into the cause; and if they ingle word, and of the remainder by a slight exer- quire upon the theatre of this strange metamortion of policy, or the expenditure of a sum suffi-phosis, they will receive one universal answer cient to monopolize for one year, the purchase of from all ranks and all ages, that it is federal what South America sent into the market. legislation which has worked this ruin. Under this legislation the exports of the South have been made the basis of the federal revenue. The "Mr. B. said he expected a unanimous vote in favor of his amendment. The North should in the tariff. This indigo clause must have the singular and unprecedented honor of an unanimous voice in its favor. The South must vote for it, to revive the cultivation of one of its most ancient and valuable staples; the West must vote for it through gratitude for past favors-through gratitude for the vote on hemp this night*--and to save, enlarge, and increase the market for its own productions; the North must vote for it to show their disinterestedness; to give one proof of just feeling towards the South; and, above all, to save their favorite American System from the deadly blow which Great Britain can at any moment give it by stopping or interrupting the supplies of foreign indigo; and the whole Union, the entire legislative body, must vote for it, and vote for it with joy and enthusiasm, because it is impossible that Americans can deny to sister States of the Confederacy what a British King and a British Parliament granted to these same States when they were colonies and dependencies of the British crown." twenty odd millions annually levied upon im- the goods; from whom he levies, with a good ported goods, are deducted out of the price of interest on the price of the cloths, all that he extheir cotton, rice and tobacco, either in the dimi-pends in the purchase of materials. For once, nished price which they receive for these staples said Mr. B., I expect a unanimous vote on a clause in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay for the articles they have to consume at home. Virginia, the two Carolinas and Georgia, may be said to defray three fourths of the annual expense of supporting the federal government; and of this great sum annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of government expenditure. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction; it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted and perennial stream; it takes the course of trade and of exchange; and this is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this; it does it by the simple process of eternally taking away from the South, and returning nothing to it. If it returned to the South the whole, or even a good part of what it exacted, the four States south of the Potomac might stand the action of this system, as the earth is enabled to stand the exhausting influence of the sun's daily heat by the refreshing dews which are returned to it at night; but as the earth is dried up, and all vegetation destroyed in regions where the heat is great, and no dews returned, so must the South be exhausted of its money and its property by a course of legislation which is for ever taking from it, and never returning any thing to it. Mr. Hayne, of South Carolina, seconded my motion in a speech of which this is an extract: "Mr. Hayne said he was opposed to this bill in its principles as well as in its details. It could assume no shape which would make it accepta"Every new tariff increases the force of this ble to him, or which could prevent it from opeaction. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, rating most oppressively and unjustly on his the two Carolinas, and Georgia, within its pro- constituents. With these views, he had detervisions, except to increase the burdens imposed mined to make no motion to amend the bill in upon them. This one alone, presents the oppor- any respect whatever; but when such motions tunity to form an exception, by reviving and re- were made by others, and he was compelled to storing the cultivation of one of its ancient sta- vote on them, he knew no better rule than to ples, one of the sources of its wealth before the endeavor to make the bill consistent with itself. Revolution. The tariff of 1828 owes this repara-On this principle he had acted in all the votes he tion to the South, because the tariff of 1816 contributed to destroy the cultivation of indigo; sunk the duty on the foreign article, from twentyfive to fifteen cents per pound. These are the reasons for imposing the duty on indigo, now proposed. What objections can possibly be raised to it? Not to the quality; for it is the same which laid the foundation of the British manufactures, and sustained their reputation for more than half a century; not to the quantity; for the two Carolinas and Georgia alone raised as much fifty years ago as we now import, and we have now the States of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and the Territories of Florida and Arkansas, to add to the countries which produce it; not to the amount of the duty; for its maximum will be but forty per cent., only one half of the duty laid by this bill on the cloth it is to dye; and that maximum, not immediate, but attained by slow degrees at the end of four years, in order to give time for the domestic article to supply the place of the imported. And after all, it is not a duty on the manufacturer, but on the wearer of had given on this bill. He had endeavored to carry out to its legitimate consequences what gentlemen are pleased to miscall the 'American System.' With a fixed resolution to vote against the bill, he still considered himself at liberty to assist in so arranging the details as to extend to every great interest, and to all portions of the country, as far as may be practicable, equal protection, and to distribute the burdens of the system equally, in order that its benefits as well as its evils may be fully tested. On this principle, he should vote for the amendment of the gentleman from Missouri, because it was in strict conformity with all the principles of the bill. As a southern man, he would ask no boon for the South-he should propose nothing; but he must say that the protection of indigo rested on the same principles as every other article proposed "The vote on hemp this night." In rejecting Mr. Web ster's motion to strike out the duty on hemp, and a vote in which the South went unanimously with the West.-Note by Mr. B. to be protected by this bill, and he did not see about twenty per centum on the cost of the arhow gentlemen could, consistently with their ticle, and that only to be attained after a promaxims, vote against it. What was the principle on which this bill was professedly founded? If there was any principle at all in the bill, it was that, whenever the country had the capacity to produce an article with which any imported article could enter into competition, the domestic product was to be protected by a duty. Now, had the Southern States the capacity to produce indigo? The soil and climate of those States were well suited to the culture of the article. At the commencement of the Revolution our exports of the article amounted to no less than 1,100,000 lbs. The whole quantity now imported into the United States is only 1,150,000 lbs. ; so that the capacity of the country to produce a sufficient quantity of indigo to supply the wants of the manufacturers is unquestionable. It is true that the quantity now produced in the country is not great. "In 1818 only 700 lbs. of domestic indigo were exported. 'In 1825 "In 1826 9,955 do. do. "This proves that the attention of the country is now directed to the subject. The senator from Indiana, in some remarks which he made on this subject yesterday, stated that, according to the principles of the American System (so called), protection was not extended to any article which the country was not in the habit of exporting. This is entirely a mistake. Of the articles protected by the tariff of 1824, as well as those included in this bill, very few are exported at all. Among these are iron, woollens, hemp, flax, and several others. If indigo is to be protected at all, the duties proposed must surely be considered extremely reasonable, the maximum proposed being much below that imposed by this bill on wool, woollens, and other articles. The duty on indigo till 1816, was 25 cents per pound. It was then (in favor of the manufacturers) reduced to 15 cents. The first increase of duty proposed here, is only to put back the old duty of 25 cents per pound, equal to an ad valorem duty of from 10 to 15 per cent.—and the maximum is only from 40 to 58 per cent. ad valorem, and that will not accrue for several years to come. With this statement of facts, Mr. H. said he would leave the question in the hands of those gentlemen who were engaged in giving this bill the form in which it is to be submitted to the final decision of the Senate." The proposition for this duty on imported indigo did not prevail. In lieu of the amount proposed, and which was less than any protective duty in the bill, the friends of the "American System" (constituting a majority of the Senate) substituted a nominal duty of five cents on the pound -to be increased five cents annually for ten years—and to remain at fifty. This was only gression of ten years; while all other duties in the bill were from four to ten times that amount and to take effect immediately. A duty so contemptible, so out of proportion to the other provisions of the bill, and doled out in such miserable drops, was a mockery and insult; and so viewed by the southern members. It increased the odiousness of the bill, by showing that the southern section of the Union was only included in the "American System " for its burdens, and not for its benefits. Mr. McDuffie, in the House of Representatives, inveighed bitterly against it, and spoke the general feeling of the Southern States when he said: "Sir, if the union of these States shall ever be severed, and their liberties subverted, the historian who records these disasters will have to ascribe them to measures of this description. I do sincerely believe that neither this government nor any free government, can exist for a quarter of a century, under such a system of legislation. Its inevitable tendency is to corrupt, not only the public functionaries, but all those portions of the Union and classes of society who have an interest, real or imaginary, in the bounties it provides, by taxing other sections and other classes. What, sir, is the essential characteristic of a freeman? It is that independence which results from an habitual reliance upon his own resources and his own labor for his support. He is not in fact a freeman, who habitually looks to the government And I confess that nofor pecuniary bounties. thing in the conduct of those who are the prominent advocates of this system, has excited more apprehension and alarm in my mind, than the constant efforts made by all of them, from the Secretary of the Treasury down to the humblest coadjutor, to impress upon the public mind, the idea that national prosperity and individual wealth are to be derived, not from individual industry and economy, but from government bounties. An idea more fatal to liberty could not be inculcated. I said, on another occasion, that the days of Roman liberty were numbered when the people consented to receive bread from the public granaries. From that moment it was not the patriot who had shown the greatest capacity and made the greatest sacrifices to serve the republic, but the demagogue who would promise to distribute most profusely the spoils of the plundered provinces, that was elevated to office by a degenerate and mercenary populace. Every thing became venal, even in the country of Fabricius, until finally the empire itself was sold at public dency of the system we are discussing? It bears auction! And what, sir, is the nature aud tenan analogy, but too lamentably striking, to that which corrupted the republican purity of the Roman people. God forbid that it should con- turning event. The year 1816 was the starting summate its triumph over the public liberty, by point: 1820, and 1824, and now 1828, having a similar catastrophe, though even that is an event by no means improbable, if we continue to successively renewed the measure, with succeslegislate periodically in this way, and to connect sive augmentations of duties. The South bethe election of our Chief Magistrate with the lieved itself impoverished to enrich the North question of dividing out the spoils of certain by this system; and certainly a singular and States-degraded into Roman provinces-among the influential capitalists of the other States of unexpected result had been seen in these two this Union! Sir, when I consider that, by a sections. In the colonial state, the Southern single act like the present, from five to ten mil- were the rich part of the colonies, and expected lions of dollars may be transferred annually from to do well in a state of independence. They had one part of the community to another; when I the exports, and felt secure of their prosperity: consider the disguise of disinterested patriotism under which the basest and most profligate am- not so of the North, whose agricultural resources bition may perpetrate such an act of injustice were few, and who expected privations from the and political prostitution, I cannot hesitate, for a loss of British favor. But in the first half cenmoment, to pronounce this very system of inditury after Independence this expectation was rect bounties, the most stupendous instrument of corruption ever placed in the hands of public reversed. The wealth of the North was enorfunctionaries. It brings ambition and avarice mously aggrandized: that of the South had deand wealth into a combination, which it is fearful clined. Northern towns had become great cities: to contemplate, because it is almost impossible to Southern cities had decayed, or become stationresist. Do we not perceive, at this very moment, the extraordinary and melancholy spectacle of ary; and Charleston, the principal port of the less than one hundred thousand capitalists, by South, was less considerable than before the means of this unhallowed combination, exercising Revolution. The North became a money-lender an absolute and despotic control over the opin- to the South, and southern citizens made pilions of eight millions of free citizens, and the fortunes and destinies of ten millions? Sir, I grimages to northern cities, to raise money upon will not anticipate or forebode evil. I will not the hypothecation of their patrimonial estates. permit myself to believe that the Presidency of And this in the face of a southern export since the United States will ever be bought and sold, the Revolution to the value of eight hundred by this system of bounties and prohibitions. But I must say that there are certain quarters of this millions of dollars!—a sum equal to the product Union in which, if a candidate for the Presidency of the Mexican mines since the days of Cortez ! were to come forward with the Harrisburg tariff and twice or thrice the amount of their product in his hand, nothing could resist his pretensions, in the same fifty years. The Southern States if his adversary were opposed to this unjust sys-attributed this result to the action of the federal tem of oppression. Yes, sir, that bill would be a talisman which would give a charmed existence to the candidate who would pledge himself to support it. And although he were covered with all the "multiplying villanies of nature," the most immaculate patriot and profound statesman in the nation could hold no competition with him, if he should refuse to grant this new species of imperial donative." government-its double action of levying revenue upon the industry of one section of the Union and expending it in another-and especially to its protective tariffs. To some degree this attribution was just, but not to the degree assumed; which is evident from the fact that the protective system had then only been in force for Allusions were constantly made to the combi- a short time-since the year 1816; and the renation of manufacturing capitalists and poli-versed condition of the two sections of the Union ticians in pressing this bill. There was evident- had commenced before that time. Other causes ly foundation for the imputation. The scheme must have had some effect: but for the present of it had been conceived in a convention of man- we look to the protective system; and, without ufacturers in the State of Pennsylvania, and had admitting it to have done all the mischief of been taken up by politicians, and was pushed as which the South complained, it had yet done a party measure, and with the visible purpose enough to cause it to be condemned by every of influencing the presidential election. In fact friend to equal justice among the States-by these tariff bills, each exceeding the other in its every friend to the harmony and stability of the degree of protection, had become a regular ap- Union-by all who detested sectional legislation pendage of our presidential elections-coming-by every enemy to the mischievous combinaround in every cycle of four years, with that re- tion of partisan politics with national legislation. And this was the feeling with the mass of the democratic members who voted for the tariff of 1828, and who were determined to act upon that feeling upon the overthrow of the political party which advocated the protective system; and which overthrow they believed to be certain at the ensuing presidential election. CHAPTER XXXV. Thus would fall an expensive agency, with all the influence which attends it." I do not know how old, or rather, how young I was, when I first took up the notion that sales of land by a government to its own citizens, and to the highest bidder, was false policy; and that gratuitous grants to actual settlers was the true policy, and their labor the true way of extracting national wealth and strength from the soil. It might have been in childhood, when reading the Bible, and seeing the division of the promised land among the children of Israel: it might have been later, and in learning the operation of the feudal system in giving lands to those who THE PUBLIC LANDS-THEIR PROPER DISPOSITION would defend them: it might have been in early -GRADUATED PRICES-PRE-EMPTION RIGHTS- ABOUT the year 1785 the celebrated Edmund Burke brought a bill into the British House of Commons for the sale of the crown lands, in which he laid down principles in political economy, in relation to such property, profoundly sagacious in themselves, applicable to all sovereign landed possessions, whether of kings or republics-applicable in all countries-and nowhere more applicable and less known or observed, than in the United States. In the course of the speech in support of his bill he said: life in Tennessee, in seeing the fortunes and respectability of many families derived from the 640 acre head-rights which the State of North Carolina had bestowed upon the first settlers. It was certainly before I had read the speech of Burke from which the extract above is taken; for I did not see that speech until 1826; and seventeen years before that time, when a very young member of the General Assembly of Tennessee, I was fully imbued with the doctrine of donations to settlers, and acted upon the principle that was in me, as far as the case admitted, in advocating the pre-emption claims of the settlers on Big and Little Pigeon, French Broad, "Lands sell at the current rate, and nothing can sell for more. But be the price what it may, and Nolichucky. And when I came to the then a great object is always answered, whenever any Territory of Missouri in 1815, and saw land exproperty is transferred from hands which are not posed to sale to the highest bidder, and lead fit for that property, to those that are. The mines and salt springs reserved from sale, and buyer and the seller must mutually profit by such a bargain; and, what rarely happens in rented out for the profit of the federal treasury, matters of revenue, the relief of the subject will I felt repugnance to the whole system, and dego hand in hand with the profit of the Exchequer.termined to make war upon it whenever I should The revenue to be derived from the have the power. The time came round with my election to the Senate of the United States in 1820: and the years 1824, '26, and '28, found me doing battle for an ameliorated system of disposing of our public lands; and with some * * * * sale of the forest lands will not be so considerable as many have imagined; and I conceive it would be unwise to screw it up to the utmost, or even to suffer bidders to enhance, according to their eagerness, the purchase of objects, wherein the expense of that purchase may weaken the capital to be employed in their cultivation. * *The principal revenue which I propose to draw from thes uncultivated wastes, is to spring from the improvement and population of the kingdom; events infinitely more advantageous to the revenues of the crown than the rents of the best landed estate which it can hold. * * * It is thus I would dispose of the unprofitable landed estates of the crown: throw them into the mass of private property: by which they will come, through the course of circulation and through the political secretions of the State, into well-regulated revenue. * success. The pre-emption system was established, though at first the pre-emption claimant was stigmatized as a trespasser, and repulsed as a criminal; the reserved lead mines and salt springs, in the State of Missouri, were brought into market, like other lands; iron ore lands, intended to have been withheld from sale, were rescued from that fate, and brought into market. Still the two repulsive features of the federal land system-sales to the highest bidder, and donations to no one-with an arbitrary minimum |