We reaffirm our belief in the protective tariff to extend needed protection to our productive industries. We believe in protection as a national policy, with due and equal regard to all sections and to all classes. It is only by adherence to such a policy that the well being of the consumers can be safeguarded that there can be assured to American agriculture, to American labor and to American manufacturers a return to perpetrate American standards of life. A protective tariff is designed to support the high American economic level of life for the average family and to prevent a lowering to the levels of economic life prevailing in other lands.
In the history of the nation the protective tariff system has ever justified itself by restoring confidence, promoting industrial activity and employment, enormously increasing our purchasing power and bringing increased prosperity to all our people.
The tariff protection to our industry works for increased consumption of domestic agricultural products by an employed population instead of one unable to purchase the necessities of life. Without the strict maintenance of the tariff principle our farmers will need always to compete with cheap lands and cheap labor abroad and with lower standards of living.
A protective tariff had a different impact in 1860 than it does in the income tax era.
In the 1800s the tariff was the sole means of collecting taxes. This meant that the majority of the tax burden fell on the agricultural states of the southern United States.
The 1828 “Tariff of Abominations” nearly erupted in open war between Andrew Jackson and South Carolina. Civil war 30 years earlier. It became a moot issue when the 1833 compromise tariff was passed.
But the grievance of the agricultural states didn’t die and the high Morrill Tariff of 1861 was one of the factors leading to war.
The novelist Charles Dickens was publisher of an English journal at the time and he wrote that the tariff was the reason that Lincoln chose war instead of recognizing Confederate independence.