The contrast was
painful to Southern men, and to most of them it was mysterious.
Southern politicians came to the conclusion that the cause at once of
Northern prosperity and Southern poverty was the protective tariff and
the appropriations for internal improvements, but chiefly the tariff.
In 1824, when Mr. Calhoun went home, the tariff on some leading
articles had been increased, and the South was in a ferment of
opposition to the protective system. If Mr. Calhoun had been a wise
and honest man, he would have reminded his friends that the decline of
the South had been a subject of remark from the peace of 1783, and
therefore could not have been caused by the tariff of 1816, or 1820,
or 1824. He would have told them that slavery, as known in the
Southern States, demands virgin lands,--must have, every few years,
its cotton-gin, its Louisiana, its Cherokee country, its _something_,
to give new value to its products or new scope for its operations. He
might have added that the tariff of 1824 was a grievance, did tend to
give premature development to a manufacturing system, and was a fair
ground for a national issue between parties.
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