rm of this system was also a product of the war of 1812. Hamilton
had proposed it twenty years before; and the first American tariff act
had declared that its object was the encouragement of American
manufactures. But the system had never been effectively introduced until
the war and the blockade had forced American manufactures into
existence. Peace brought competition with British manufacturers, and the
American manufacturers began to call for protection. The tariff of 1816
contained the principle of Protection, but only carried it into practice
far enough to induce the manufacturers to rely on the dominant party for
more of it. This expectation, rather than the Federalist opposition to
the war, is the explanation of the immediate and rapid decline of the
Federal party in New England. Continued effort brought about the tariff
of 1824, which was more protective; the tariff of 1828, which was still
more protective; and the tariff of 1830, which reduced the protective
element to a system.

The two sections, North and South, had been very much alike until the
war called the principle of growth into activity. The slave system of
labor, which had fallen in the North and had survived and been made
still more profitable in the South by Whitney's invention of the cotton
gin in 1793, shut the South off from almost all share in the new life.
That section had a monopoly of the cotton culture, and the present
profit of slave labor blinded it to the ultimate consequences of it. The
slave was fit for rude agriculture alone; he could not be employed in
manufactures, or in any labor which required intelligence; and the
slave-owner, while he desired manufactures, did not dare to cultivate
the necessary intelligence in his own slaves. The South could therefore
find no profit in protection, and yet it could not with dignity admit
that its slave system precluded it from the advantages of protection, or
base its opposition to protection wholly on economic grounds. Its only
recourse was the constitutional ground of the lack of power of Congress
to pass a protective tariff, and this brought up again the question
which had evolved the Kentucky resolutions of 1798-9. Calhoun, with
pitiless logic, developed them into a scheme of constitutional
Nullification. Under his lead,

South Carolina, in 1832, declared through her State Convention that the
protective tariff acts were no law, nor binding on the State, its
officers or citizens. President J