Papers presented by Derek Shloss since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

""Economic Nationalism Without the Protective Tariff: how Albert Gallatin and Gulian Verplanck Reconciled Free Trade and the National Interest""

Abstract:

Which economic interests organized, argued, and voted against the protective tariff in the early national and antebellum eras? Most scholarship on the tariff controversies of the early US has focused on the protectionist movement or on Southern opposition to the tariff, connecting this opposition to sectional tensions over state rights and slavery. By contrast, my paper, predicated on the notion that the Northeast was in fact an important bastion of free trade sentiment and ideas, analyzes the antebellum free trade movement as essentially a cross-sectional coalition. Beginning in the embargo and War of 1812 periods and continuing through the tariff controversies of the 1820s, I examine how economic interests with a long history of contradictory priorities and opposing party affiliations – Southern agriculture and Northeastern maritime commerce – formed a tentative alliance built on opposition to tariffs intended to shelter the nation’s nascent manufacturing sector from foreign competition. Developments including the embargo, non-importation, war with Britain, passage of the nation’s first protective tariff in 1816, and the near passage of the more robustly protective Baldwin Bill in 1820, I argue, led merchants and farmers into an unexpected alliance with one another organized around their common interest in free trade and, more generally, opposition to the American System. To assess the dynamics of this cross-sectional coalition, I rely in large part on an analysis of the Randolph-Quincy Letters housed at the Library of Congress. These letters reveal how Massachusetts arch-Federalist Josiah Quincy and quintessential Old Republican John Randolph, both of whom served in Congress during the embargo and War of 1812 periods, jointly opposed recent political and economic developments such as rising anti-British Republican nationalism and a mushrooming manufacturing sector. A fascinating exchange of ideas, these letters reveal the opportunities and pitfalls of a free trade coalition made up of previously antagonistic interests.

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