II. RECIPROCITY AND PROTECTIONISM IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES

Henry Carey’s politics, by inheritance and studied conviction, were Whig under the Second Party System beginning in the mid- to late 1820s. They were Republican under the Third Party System from the mid-1850s until his death, at age eighty-five, in 1879. In relation to the controversies over the tariff and reciprocity, these affiliations are suggestive but do not indicate unambiguously either his position or his reasoning. The Whigs' position on the tariff admitted various degrees and defenses of protectionism. Their early position on reciprocity was even less unanimous and more tenuous. Republicans, at least in the first two decades of their party’s history, grappled with similar internal divisions.

During Henry Carey’s formative years, the Whigs (or proto-Whigs, considering their emergence in the mid- to late 1820s before the name was affixed) who were most prominent in shaping trade doctrine included Carey’s own father. Mathew Carey (1760–1839) was distinguished first as sole owner and later joint owner of the country’s leading publishing and distribution firm from the 1780s to the 1820s (Bradsher Reference Bradsher1912, p. vii). He was also one of the country’s leading exponents of political-economic thought, particularly what became known as the “American System” of protectionism. The elder Carey promoted the system as tirelessly with his pamphleteering and editorial entrepreneurship from his home in Philadelphia as Henry Clay did with his political speeches and maneuvers in the U.S. Senate, House, and Department of State (Rowe Reference Rowe1933, p. 68; Swain 1842, v. 1, p. 44).

Mathew Carey had little to say about reciprocity, but that little was suggestive. He had opposed vigorously the treaty of 1795 with Great Britain, known as the Jay Treaty, which put the United States on a most-favored-nation footing with other countries in regards to shipping in British and colonial ports but left in place Britain’s considerable discrimination in favor of its own ships. He denounced it, according to his biographer, for “containing only an appearance of reciprocity” (Rowe Reference Rowe1933, p. 41). The denunciation implied that, from a protectionist perspective, true reciprocity was at least conceivable.

Henry Clay advanced some steps beyond Carey toward linking protectionism with reciprocity. He demonstrated how reciprocity could be not only consistent with the American System, but also an indispensible tool for implementing it.

The system, as Clay conceived it, served foreign-policy objectives as much as domestic economic ones. The setting for those objectives included the European wars that had flamed since the last decade of the eighteenth century and the disintegration of the Spanish empire from the beginning of the nineteenth. Britain and the U.S. competed for influence in the American hemisphere amidst the disorder. To Clay, the American System was equally, and indeed originally, a means of drawing the rest of the hemisphere into the United States’ orbit and extracting it from Europe’s and Britain’s. In place of the “stupendous system of colonial despotism” that the Spanish-American provinces had long suffered, they would, as independent countries, be “animated by an American feeling, and guided by an American policy.”Footnote ³ They would “obey the laws of the system of the New World … in contradistinction to that of Europe.”Footnote ⁴

The protectionist pillar of the American System was not only consistent with the foreign-policy pillar. Each, as Clay saw it, bolstered the other. Although U.S. manufacturers required protection from British and European imports, Clay presumed they could export their products to Spanish America, where the U.S. had the advantage of proximity as well an active merchant marine—provided U.S. ships were allowed to enter their ports on equal terms with foreign rivals.Footnote ⁵ Besides, if the Spanish-American countries looked to the United States for models of their institutions, they could be expected to do the same for their imports. In return, Spanish America offered the United States precious metals, cocoa, coffee, cochineal, sugar, and assorted other articles—of which, by Clay’s calculations, less than 2% competed with U.S. products.Footnote ⁶ In short, Spanish America would be a bulwark against British and European anti-Republicanism as well as a “vent” for surplus manufactures and grain, trading in return raw materials and consumables that presented no threat to U.S. producers.

The qualification that U.S. ships would have to enter Spanish-American ports on equal terms with foreign rivals was a crucial one. Under a treaty of 1810, Brazil had afforded Britain explicit and exclusive commercial privileges, and from nearly everywhere else the U.S. chargés d’affaires reported anxiously their suspicions that similar arrangements were being concocted (Rippy Reference Johnson1929, p. 128 and passim). The policy of the United States, therefore, articulated by John Quincy Adams as Secretary of State to President Monroe and pursued vigorously by Clay, beginning 1825, as Secretary of State to Adams, was to resist all such privileges. The U.S. disclaimed them for itself and insisted they should not be granted to anyone else. Thus Adams directed his chargé in Buenos Aires to “strenuously maintain the right of the United States to be treated in every respect on the footing of the most favoured; or as it is more properly expressed, the most friendly nation … and should you negotiate a Treaty of Commerce you will make that principle the foundation of all its provisions” (Manning Reference Manning1925, v. 1, p. 191). Having assumed Adams’ former office, Clay warned his chargé in Brazil that “France and Great Britain will probably strive to obtain for themselves peculiar advantages as those which her Commerce has so long enjoyed with Portugal.… You will resist, firmly, and constantly, any concessions to the Commerce or Navigation of either of those two powers, which are not equally extended to the Commerce and Navigation of the United States” (Manning Reference Manning1925, v. 1, p. 238). Reciprocal guarantees of most-favored-nation treatment in both shipping and merchandise trade, and wherever feasible the stronger guarantee of national treatment in shipping, achieved the aims articulated by Adams and Clay in a manner entirely concordant with protectionism.

During Clay’s four-year tenure at the State Department, and under his instructions, U.S. plenipotentiaries signed seven reciprocity treaties that were later ratified. The partners were Central America, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Great Britain, the Hanseatic Republics, Prussia, and Brazil. The pace was rapid: by comparison, the average rate over the entire nineteenth century was about one per year (Allen and Meardon Reference Allen and Meardon2007, pp. 48–51). In short, the connection between protectionism and reciprocity was well established in both doctrine and politics.

In the generation thereafter, while the Whig Party that sprang from the Adams–Clay faction remained committed to protectionist doctrine, its members’ enthusiasm for reciprocity waned. The reasons were multiple. Support for reciprocity arrangements was sometimes politically inexpedient when the administration initiating them was that of another party, as it was for most of the next thirty-two years; particular articles in a reciprocity arrangement apart from those stipulating most-favored-nation or national treatment were sometimes objectionable (as was the article of the Jay Treaty concerning the West Indies trade); and Whigs observed that some reciprocity arrangements, like that of 1846 with New Granada (formerly Colombia) permitting free passage over the Isthmus of Panama, would facilitate U.S. territorial expansion in areas where slavery would likely be permitted.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, Henry Carey’s observations from his youth into his early adulthood were that reciprocity and protectionism could, in principle and often in practice, fit together comfortably.

On the other hand, notwithstanding the influence of Mathew Carey, when Henry Carey began to study and write political economy in earnest he was not yet a protectionist.

III. CAREY’S EARLY SYSTEM: THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY

Before 1835, Henry Carey was first a superintendent, then a minor partner, then, beginning in 1821, the leading partner in the publishing firm his father built (Elder Reference Elder and Elder1880, pp. 31–32). He retired in 1835 to devote his energies to political economy. A short while later, in 1837, he published the first volume of his Principles of Political Economy (1837–40), a work he completed with the third volume in 1840. “Up to this time,” writes his biographer, “Mr. Carey had been, as he supposed, a Free Trader” (Elder Reference Elder and Elder1880, p. 26).

Carey’s free-trade orientation appears here and there in his Principles, but it is not the main line of argument. His purpose is to dismantle the distribution theory of British classical economics circa the first third of the nineteenth century. The theory, Carey averred, was wrong in holding the relation between the interests of land on one hand, and capital and labor on the other, to be antagonistic—and wrong again to suppose that, regardless of the rent paid for land, the long-term prospects for labor were no better than subsistence.

According to Carey, the long-run prospects for labor, and everyone else, depend on proximity and communication among people. This was Carey’s fundamental idea. “The tendency to association is natural to man”; the more extensively he associates with others, “the more advantageously can he devote his time to the production of those commodities which are included under the term wealth” (1837–40, v. 2, pp. 13–14). Although population growth impels people to cultivate poorer soils, as David Ricardo supposed, they are better off nonetheless because a larger population enables them to devote a smaller portion of their efforts to their collective security (v. 2, p. 15). Security is essential for capital accumulation; capital is essential for increasing labor’s productivity; labor’s productivity determines its rewards; and so, “consequently, as cultivation is extended, the labourer has it in his power to retain a constantly increasing proportion of the fruits of his labour” (v. 2, p. 18).

In Carey’s view, Ricardo’s errors were to suppose, first, that the portion of land last employed is less productive due to the necessity of cultivating ever poorer soils; second, that rent was a payment for lands whose “original and indestructible powers” are comparatively large when the poorer soils are brought into use. Carey claimed to the contrary, first, that as poorer soils are taken under cultivation, “‘the portion last employed’ is more productive,” because the same population growth that impels its cultivation also fosters the accumulation of capital, which makes the land and the labor employed upon it more useful (Carey Reference Carey1837–40, v. 1, p. 202); second, that rent is not paid for “original and indestructible powers” at all, but rather for “advantages of situation” where people associate numerously and effectively (v. 1, pp. 187–212). Such advantages are not “original” but circumstantial. And due either to bad luck or bad policies (or better policies elsewhere), they are indeed destructible. “The natural advantages of the site of Carthage, of Alexandria, of Venice, are as great now as at any former period, but they cannot command rents, nor have they value. … While labour and capital were employed [there], they were valuable, but that value is transferred to the cities of those countries where labour is most advantageously employed—where capital accumulates—and where the inferior soils are cultivated—the United States and England” (v. 2, p. 191).

Rent, therefore, is not to be regretted by anyone. It is “but a sign of value” (1837–40, v. 1, p. 202). Where rent is highest, capital and labor can bear it easily, because it comprises a smaller share of a higher income. Population growth, likewise, is not a bane but a boon: “it is precisely as population increases, and as cultivation is extended over inferior soils, that the proportion of the landlord diminishes, and that the labourer becomes free and independent, and is enabled to live as becomes a man” (v. 1, p. 195).

Carey offered up his Principles as an attempt “to controvert doctrines supported by the authority of Malthus, Ricardo, McCulloch, and Torrens” to the end of illuminating “the laws by which the operations of man are governed” (1837–40, v. 1, pp. v, xii). The work does not appear on its face to be polemical. It amounts nevertheless to an excellent theoretical justification of the Whig program in opposition to the second Jackson and the Van Buren administrations of 1833 to 1841. Carey’s portrayal of harmony among the interests of landowners, capitalists, and laborers was consistent with the Whigs’ hold on the votes of the economic and social elite even as they campaigned (most famously in the “log cabin and hard cider” presidential campaign of 1840) for the votes of Americans of more humble means (Holt Reference Holt1999, pp. 116, 107). His celebration of “association” and the market transactions it entailed dovetailed with the Whigs’ embrace of the winners and aspirants in the market sector. Democrats, by contrast, appealed to a coalition of those who stood apart from the market, were prostrated by it, or otherwise feared its expansion (p. 115). To those tempted to join the coalition, Carey warned that “restraining the employment of labor and of capital” could only “impair their power of their physical, moral, intellectual, and political condition” (1837–40, v. 3, p. 256).

The general policy recommendation of the Principles was for “maintenance of perfect security of person and property, and of perfect freedom in the employment of both” (1837–40, v. 2, p. 465). Accordingly, “existing restraints upon action or upon the employment of capital, should be abated” (v. 2, p. 465)—with the important qualification that “violent action, even in the removal of restraints, tends to produce disturbance and insecurity” (v. 2, p. 466), and should be avoided. Two particular questions to which both the recommendation and the qualification pertained were slavery and the tariff.

Regarding slavery, the desirability of “perfect security of person” (if not of property) implied the undesirability of treating people like chattel. In that sense, Carey opposed slavery; but like most Americans circa 1840, including the majority of the Whig Party, he did not seek its abolition by political means. The reason lay in his admonition against “violent action.” Emancipation by means of government “interferences,” whether immediate or gradual, would be “positively injurious” to the “physical, moral, and political condition of the slaves” (1837–40, v. 3, p. 197). Indeed, at least for the present, “the man who really desires to benefit the race, must retain his control over them” (v. 3, p. 204).

In this Carey saw no paradox. His premise was that slavery was essentially labor in a degraded condition—different only in degree, not essence, from the condition of low wages. Given the premise, his logic followed the same lines as his critique of Ricardo. Real emancipation of slaves required “rendering them more valuable” (v. 3, p. 204). Like conventional labor, slave labor is more valuable inasmuch as it is combined with capital. Any threat to the security of the slave owner diminishes his incentive and ability to accumulate capital; if he is allowed to retain control unmolested, the accumulation of capital continues. Slaves thereby become more productive. The more productive they become, the more their marginal productivity depends on the exercise of their own discretion. They are prepared and permitted to take “early steps” to emancipation (v. 3, p. 202), graduating eventually to wage labor and sharecropping. “Let the United States continue at peace, and the growth of capital continue at its present rate,” Carey concluded, and “the slaves will be gradually prepared for freedom” (v. 3, p. 207).

Regarding the tariff, Carey was less expansive. There was, after all, no immediate reason to dwell on it. Henry Clay’s Compromise Tariff of 1833 had provided for a gradual reduction, over nine and a half years, of the system of high protection first put in place in 1824. Numerous goods would be added to the free list, and all others would be reduced by stages to 20% ad valorem in 1842. The outcome was largely satisfactory to free traders—and while it was not so to protectionists, including Clay himself, they “would not dare to disturb it through fear of a worse fate” (Stanwood Reference Stanwood1903, v.1, pp. 398–399).

Another reason for Carey’s reserve on the tariff question, however, may be that up to 1840 he had not given it much thought. Although he rejected most of Ricardo’s distribution theory, he accepted the Ricardian trade doctrine whole cloth, applying its conclusions without inquiring much into its foundations.Footnote ⁸ The only substantial difference on the subject between him and Ricardo was that Carey supposed free trade would allow the laborer, in the very long run as well as the short, to reap the rewards of his greater efficiency—Ricardo’s notion of a “natural rate of wages” sufficient for bare subsistence having fallen together with the rest of his distribution theory (Ricardo 1821, pp. 52–53; Carey 1837–40, v. 1, pp. 187–212).

Carey’s qualified agreement with Ricardo in trade doctrine extended to their common eschewal of “violent action.” Ricardo, of course, had devoted an entire chapter to “Sudden Changes in the Channels of Trade,” warning of the “considerable distress” caused by compelling people and capital to change their employments (1821, pp. 175–176). Some capital could not change its employment even with difficulty: “it is often impossible to divert the machinery which may have been erected for one manufacture to the purposes of another” (p. 177). The same conservative temperament that led Carey to disclaim the political abolition of slavery led him to a similar disclaimer in trade policy. To his fellow advocates of free trade, especially the more devout ones, he admonished that “justice, as well as the interest of the nation at large, requires that all changes be gradual, in order that the desired improvement be attained with the least destruction of existing capital” (1837–40, v. 3, pp. 256–257).

Carey’s remarks on trade up to 1840 signaled, in that one area, his disagreement with Henry Clay. But it was one of only a very few inconsistencies between Carey’s Principles and Clay’s platform, and a minor one at that. Clay professed to be a protectionist while Carey, through the 1830s, was a free trader; but they agreed on the expediency of the Compromise Tariff of 1833, and neither would entertain tampering with it. In 1837, Clay wrote that he “supposed and hoped that the Compromise Act settled and terminated all our unhappy disputes,” that he wished it “faithfully executed,” and that he had “no purpose of disturbing its provisions.”Footnote ⁹ In the same vein Carey wrote in his Principles, “Happily, the question of protection is now settled forever” (1837–40, v. 3, p. 224).

The claim that Carey’s Principles was a theoretical justification of the Whig program from the Compromise Tariff to the election of 1840 may be sharpened. In relation to a party riven by sectional differences—most enduringly between the Northern faction that cast a jaundiced eye at slavery, stood solidly for protection, and favored Daniel Webster, and the Southern and border-state faction that accommodated competing views on the slavery and tariff questions and favored Clay—the Principles was oriented toward the Clay faction. But politics change and so do the economic doctrines that serve them. Not long after the turn of the decade, as Northern abolitionism grew more restive, Carey’s reaction to it became more determined. The moment also soon arrived to reconsider the Compromise Tariff. Then the trajectories of the Clay–Whig political program and Carey’s economic thought grew even nearer.

Those converging trajectories of politics and ideas are most evident in a subsequent book that proved to be Carey’s true magnum opus. It was also, for the rest of his life, his point of departure for thinking about reciprocity—no matter which conclusion he reached.

IV. CAREY’S MATURE SYSTEM: THE PAST, THE PRESENT, AND THE FUTURE

When Henry Clay disclaimed any intention of disturbing the Compromise Tariff, he meant that he would honor the timetable of reduced duties through its full term to the summer of 1842. Beyond that, the compromise required that “such duties should be laid for the purpose of raising such revenue as might be necessary for an economical administration of the government.” When 1842 arrived, the large differences of interpretation of that requirement came clearly into view. Clay contended, “with entire confidence, that it is perfectly consistent with the provisions of the compromise act, to impose duties to any amount whatever, thirty, forty, or more per cent. subject to the single condition of an economical administration of the government” (Swain Reference Swain1843, v. 2, p. 536). Under the circumstances, he did not think the provisions called for “the revival of a high protective tariff” (p. 548), but they called unquestionably for an increase. The protection afforded by the increase would be an incidental and happy advantage (p. 549).

The circumstances in question were the precipitous decline of federal government revenue in the wake of the crisis of 1837. Revenue had fallen from over $50 million in 1836 to under $17 million by 1841. The budget deficit of the latter year, nearly $10 million, was over one-third of the value of government expenditures.Footnote ¹⁰ Democrats did not believe that “economical administration” called for an increase, but Whigs, who had taken control of the House, did. In August 1842, they passed a tariff act with a scale of duties resembling approximately that of 1832, just prior to the Compromise Act (Stanwood Reference Stanwood1903, v. 2, pp. 27–30).

Carey’s conversion to protectionism began shortly after. It happened, apparently, in three stages over five years. Within a few months of the passage of the tariff of 1842, Carey suggested to John Calhoun that “there must be some great law that would explain the fact that we always grew rich under Protection, whereas we always ended in bankruptcy under Free Trade” (quoted in Elder Reference Elder and Elder1880, p. 26). One or two years later, when the revival of business and the government’s fiscal position were beyond doubt, “there came to him as with a flash of lightning the conviction that the whole Ricardo-Malthusian system is an error, and that with it must fall the system of British Free Trade” (ibid.).Footnote ¹¹ Finally, in 1847, Carey beheld the true system that should supplant the Ricardo–Malthusian one and reconcile economic theory with his new protectionist convictions. According to his nephew and intellectual heir, Henry Carey Baird, it came to him in a daydream.

Before the daydream, of course, and even before the lightning flash, Carey had believed Ricardo’s system was erroneous. (It may even be said, given his early emphasis on the “principle of association,” that he had believed in the “importance of bringing the consumer to the side of the producer.”) The difference between before and after was that, even so, he had accepted parts of the system: the premise that people cultivate ever less fertile land as their numbers increase, for instance (although he had denied that the burden of rent on workers and capitalists would increase correspondingly), and the doctrine that free trade, by permitting specialization, increases the productivity of labor (although he had denied that the long-run benefits would accrue only to the rentier). By 1847 Carey apprehended that the whole of Ricardo’s system was erroneous, even the foregoing parts.

The timing was propitious, in part because the Walker Tariff Act of July 1846 had just overturned the act of 1842 and set trade policy on a liberal course from which it did not deviate until the Civil War. “Strangely enough,” remarks Dorfman (1946–59, v. 2, p. 799) dryly, Carey’s “inspiration came just as the tariff was being reduced.” In fact, the important legislation of the moment was not just the tariff reduction. Liberalization of trade was one part of the program of President Polk and his allies in Congress. Another was territorial expansion. Congress had declared war on Mexico in May 1846, a month and a half before passing the tariff act. To its opponents, including Carey, the Mexican war was tainted indelibly by the slavery question. When Carey took up his pen in 1847 to repudiate entirely Ricardo’s system and articulate the theoretical grounding of protectionism, he did so, as he had done in the Principles, in a manner that also showed the relevance of his system to the slavery debate. Such was the intensity of his inspiration and the urgency of the moment that this massive task took him just ninety days (Dorfman Reference Dorfman1946–59, v. 2, p. 799). The result was The Past, the Present, and the Future ([1847] 1872), the work that was the foundation for his thought in the remainder of his career.

In it, Carey’s critique of Ricardo grew more comprehensive and more heated. Ricardo was a “demagogue,” his system “one of discords.” As for the system’s lessons, “the sooner they shall come to be discarded, the better will it be for the interests of landlord and tenant, manufacturer and mechanic, and mankind at large” ([1847] 1872, pp. 74–75). Carey’s competing system, consistent with his Principles, denied any naturally discordant interests. It also had the advantage of being corroborated, in his view, by the true history of land settlement and human progress around the world. History unfolded as he apprehended his daydream: “the settlers on the sides of the hills, moving down into the valleys.”

To Carey, the histories of the United States, Mexico, South America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Asia, and Australia were all marked by the same tendencies of settlement ([1847] 1872, pp. 24–25). The tendencies had often been frustrated by war and unenlightened policy—but supposing they were not, they could be represented, abstracting from particularities of place, by the progress of the “Happy Valley” (p. 284).

The first settlers begin their cultivation of the Happy Valley “on the sides of the hills by which it was shut in from the world” ([1847] 1872, p. 284). The soil they work on is poor; the rich land, near the banks of the stream below, is thick with vegetation beyond their means to clear. “By slow degrees we find them, however, working downward, and all looking inward toward the banks of the little stream” (p. 284). As their population increases, their commerce with one another grows and their employments diversify: “farmers’ sons become blacksmiths and tanners, and shoemakers, and tailors, and hatters, and carpenters, and masons, and weavers” (p. 284). Together they garner the knowledge and material means of extending their cultivation toward the rich land. As they do, their wealth and population grow further. At last, having cultivated the land at the bottom, they reapply their now-formidable efforts toward improving the poorer land above, and their settlement spreads to the top of the hill (p. 286).

With the farmer in close proximity to the blacksmith and “other mechanics” throughout hill and vale, so that he is “in the habit of daily intercourse with them” and they with him, the community’s knowledge and power grow apace ([1847] 1872, pp. 285–286). “From day to day, and hour to hour, the power of man over land, and over himself, is seen to grow” (p. 286). The community has become “perfect in itself, and capable of advancing in civilization were it to have intercourse with none other in the world” (p. 284).

A bird’s-eye view of the Happy Valley and its distant environs witnesses countless communities of the same kind advancing similarly. Abstracting still further from geographical particularities, the communities are “an infinite number of little pyramids, with heights proportioned to their breadth and depth” ([1847] 1872, p. 286). Specifically, by broadening and deepening the diversification of employment and extent of cultivation, the community’s knowledge and wealth, as well as its physical habitation, grow ever higher. Call it Carey’s “pyramid theory” of development.

To Carey, the pyramid theory, together with the corroborating evidence he proffered from history all around the world, supplanted entirely Ricardo’s system. Rent grows with the progress of population not because people resort to land of lesser fertility, as Ricardo said, but because they amass the knowledge and power to cultivate land of greater fertility. “Improvement of cultivation results from the increase of wealth. The more spades and ploughs, and the better their quality, the larger is the return to labour, and the greater is the rent” ([1847] 1872, p. 73). While rising rent enriches landlords, the conditions giving it rise enrich laborers even more (pp. 73–74). This last claim was already in Carey’s Principles. But Carey reckoned that The Past, the Present, and the Future rebuilt it from a vaster and firmer foundation that was more antithetical to Ricardian principles.

The most notable difference in the new book from both Ricardo’s system and Carey’s earlier views was its trade-policy prescription. The indispensible requirement for the advancement of wealth was concentration of population and diversification of employment. Were it not for a “disturbing force of prodigious power” ([1847] 1872, p. 470)—namely, Great Britain’s drive “to be made the workshop of the world at any cost” (p. 111), which entails driving British workers “from the cultivation of her own soil to the fashioning of products of other soils,” (p. 464)—the requirement would be met. Under the sway of that power, it is not. Americans buy British rather than domestic manufactures. Not buying domestic manufactures, they have scant manufacturing employment. Absent manufacturing employment, they cannot cultivate land intensively, so neither can they concentrate their numbers geographically. At the first opportunity, those who would otherwise be manufacturers fly off to farm virgin but poorer lands on more distant “pyramids,” leaving the old pyramids, like the new ones, narrow and short. Those who would be blacksmiths, tanners, and shoemakers near the rich meadows of Pennsylvania and Virginia scratch out a living instead from soils of Oregon and Texas (p. 469). To Carey, the solution was clear: “we must arrest the progress of depopulation and promote concentration on rich soils, and that can only be done with increased protection” (p. 469).

Carey offered the solution so assuredly that one could be forgiven for overlooking an essential qualification. “Perfect freedom,” it may be recalled, described the community that could continue advancing “were it to have intercourse with none other in the world.”Footnote ¹² But that did not mean that it should shut out the world. The community would naturally associate with others, Carey explained: indeed, that is how states are formed. “In time, twenty, thirty, fifty, or a hundred of these little communities … are brought into connection with each other: and these numerous little pyramids now form a great pyramid, or State” ([1847] 1872, p. 288). Trade among states would evolve similarly:

Left unsettled was what form such intercourse would take and what would be the flavor of the laws governing it. Carey did not care to settle those questions directly, perhaps, because they were not pressing. Of more immediate concern in 1847 was the relationship among states under the far less ideal conditions of war. But his treatment of the Mexican war of 1846–1848 carried implications for the appropriate forms and laws of commercial intercourse in peacetime.

In both cause and effect, the Mexican war was for westward expansion. Given Carey’s dismay at the “progress of depopulation” of the East, and, on the other hand, his notion of an expanding pyramidal dominion of territory and trade, his attitude toward the war was perhaps not his most obvious deduction. In the event, it was bitterness (Smith 1951, p. 23).

The problem with the annexation of Texas, which sparked the war—and likewise, in consequence of the war, the annexation of the rest of Mexico north of the Rio Grande—was the same as that of the political abolition of slavery. Legislation to abolish slavery, even merely by preventing its extension over new territories, was an “unnecessary interference” (p. 366). Only a change in material conditions could put an end to slavery, Carey averred, echoing his earlier view in the Principles. Without such a change, the political abolition of slavery anywhere would probably be ineffective. It would certainly infringe on property and undermine security.

Annexation, then, was yet another political measure running in advance of the material changes that alone could justify it. Seen now through the prism of the pyramid theory, it was an act by the “great pyramid” to wrest into the union a smaller one before the latter had developed enough to warrant its inclusion. By superseding the organic decisions of the smaller pyramids with the fiat of the larger one, the act disregarded the supremacy of “local organization and laws.” By effecting prematurely an economic union with a smaller pyramid that was scantly populated, it impeded geographical concentration. “The peaceful annexation of Mexico would be a great work,” wrote Carey, “but the accomplishment of that object requires spades and steam engines, not swords and cannon” ([1847] 1872, p. 413). Soon the parallelism of annexation and trade would come into Carey’s view, and with it the question of whether reciprocity was more like a spade or a sword.

Carey’s theory was an elaborate rationale for his newly acquired protectionism, but it was also more. It was the ostensibly scientific underpinning of a manifesto of freedom. The freedom that it fostered was realized collectively as well as individually, and required variously a passive and an active state.Footnote ¹³ It was also, as any abolitionist would have pointed out, decidedly limited in some respects. But to the convinced, that meant only that freedom was to be tempered by the additional virtue of prudence.

Freedom was the metaphysical aim. More concretely, the theory rationalized the entire Whig platform, especially as advanced by the Clay faction, or more generally the border-state faction.Footnote ¹⁴ Protectionism was the central plank securing all the rest: social conservatism, sanctity of property rights, industrial development, subordination but not surrender of states’ rights to unionism, anti-abolitionism yet opposition to the annexation of Texas and to the Mexican war. In the same manner, the theory rationalized Carey’s disposition toward reciprocity—no matter whether he was disposed to reject or embrace it.

V. CAREY ON RECIPROCITY IN THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD

Before The Past, the Present, and the Future, Carey had already spoken to the question of reciprocity in his Principles. Referring to the protective tariff of 1824 and the reciprocity act of the same year, Carey had written, “at the very time that the passage of the tariff indicated a change of system, offers were made to all the nations of the world to abolish all discriminating duties on shipping, thus showing the tendency towards free trade, and freedom of action” (1837–40, p. 224). Notably, beyond approbation of the benefits for the shipping interest, his reason for touting reciprocity appears to have been the opposite of Clay’s. Clay saw reciprocity as consistent with, even a way of promoting, protectionism; Carey saw in it a “tendency” toward free trade. But that was before Carey renounced free trade. After the renunciation, what happened to his view on reciprocity?

The debate about reciprocity from the late 1840s to the mid-1850s related predominantly to trade with British North American provinces, consisting of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. Simultaneously with the liberal Walker Tariff Act of 1846 came the more dramatic repeal of the British Corn Laws, and, in the few years following, Britain’s more comprehensive adoption of a free-trade policy. Free trade was hard on British North America: it implied the dismantling of preferences granted to British imports from the colonies. Exports of wheat and flour from the North American colonies fell by over 40% in 1848 compared to the previous year when the full suspension of the Corn Laws took effect, and timber exports fared no better. The colonies were afflicted by a severe depression (Cross Reference Cross1971, pp. 4–6). Their inhabitants sought relief from the United States.

Great Britain had offered at least the means of seeking it. The Enabling Act of 1846 gave the colonies discretion to levy duties that were not preferential to the mother country. Canada and the Maritime colonies took the opportunity to equalize tariffs on British and U.S. imports at low rates (Hart 2003, p. 46). But any substantial boost to U.S. demand for Canadian exports would have had to entail U.S. reductions of its own tariff barriers. Notwithstanding the Walker Act, those barriers remained substantial: coal, firewood, and manufactures of fur paid 30%; hewn and sawed timber, fish, wheat, Indian corn, oats, barley, rye, and furs dressed on the skin paid 20% (9 U.S. Stat., p. 42)

One method of removing the barriers was the United States’ annexation of the colonies. The immediate agitation for annexation came from Canada.Footnote ¹⁵ It was just clamorous enough to add force to the other method of removing barriers: a reciprocal trade treaty. Lord Elgin, the Governor General from 1847, informed Britain’s Colonial Office that “unless reciprocity of trade with the United States be established, these colonies must be lost to England” (cited in Cross Reference Cross1971, p. 13). In the United States, some Southern senators who feared the consequences of bringing several new antislavery states into the Union came around to the same view: reciprocity would attenuate the push for annexation (Hart 2003, pp. 47, 51). Beginning around 1850, reciprocity and not annexation was the salient question (Cross Reference Cross1971, p. 12).

Lord Elgin was the British agent responsible for lobbying the United States government to agree to reciprocity, which course he pursued beginning 1849 (Hart Reference Hart2002, pp. 50–51). The treaty he negotiated in the course of five years eliminated import duties in both countries on several natural products of the land and sea, including hides, pelts, grain, timber, and fish; this provision was expected to benefit mainly Canada. The United States was enticed by other provisions that concerned not tariffs but expanded fishing and navigation rights in British North American waters (Robinson Reference Robinson1904, p. 31). Henry Carey, for one, thought the United States was being suckered.

Carey opposed the treaty from an early stage. The monthly agricultural journal The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil—a veritable serial homage to Carey published by his associate, John S. SkinnerFootnote ¹⁶—sounded the alarm about Canadian reciprocity years before the treaty was signed and ratified. In 1851 the journal referred to “the bill for the prostration of the agricultural interests of the Union, commonly known as the Reciprocity Bill.” The object of reciprocity was described, in one instance, as “admitting the products of Canada duty free, while the duties on those of our products that Canada required to purchase, as tobacco, cotton, &c. &c., are continued”;Footnote ¹⁷ in another, “to admit the products of this land duty free, in order that our land may be cheapened.”Footnote ¹⁸ The complaints are reducible, on one hand, to the unreciprocal, even conspiratorial, nature of the negotiations and the treaty’s text; and, on the other, to its pernicious economic consequences. These were the complaints that Carey himself voiced before the treaty’s signing and ratification, during its ten-year life, and afterwards to put down efforts to resuscitate it.

In January thorough May of 1851, Skinner’s journal published a series of essays by Carey folding his complaints about the proposed Canadian reciprocity into a more general indictment of U.S. trade policy under the Walker Act.Footnote ¹⁹ When republished the next year as a pamphlet, The Working of British Free Trade (1852), the title and content alike amplified a trope Carey had used in The Past, the Present, and the Future. There he had insisted that “free trade” did not deserve its name, because the dismantling of trade barriers impeded rather than enhanced man’s power to produce and trade things. Now he took the rhetorical step of conjoining the term “free trade” with an odious adjective, and italicizing it to boot. “British free trade,” Carey scorned, “looks to limiting the [American] planter to a single market in which to sell his cotton, and a single market in which to purchase his cloth and linen” (1852, p. 38). The benefits would go to the British, who would have the power to set a low price for their imported cotton and high prices for their exported manufactures (p. 7). He endeavored to prove the claim by exhaustive argument, punctuated liberally with statistics comparing the poor economic conditions of the post-Walker years with the bountiful ones of the four years prior.

But British free trade did worse than turn the terms of trade against America. Under its sway, the more grain Americans exported, the “more rapidly we exhaust the land, impoverish the farm, and weaken the State and the nation” (1852, p. 32). When, by dismantling tariff barriers, “the farmer of Ohio … closes the furnace and drives away the miners and smelters of iron ore,” moving those occupations and industries to Great Britain, he loses the domestic market for other things produced on his farm. “He ceases to manufacture his food into pork, and beef, and lard.” Failing to raise pigs and cows, he also fails to make fertilizer for his land: “and then he exports his corn, and gives his land no manure, after which he runs away himself” (pp. 22–23).

The United States was not the only country that suffered thus from British free trade. Canada, fixed tighter to the British yoke, suffered more. Contrasting the large production of butter, cheese, and wool in Ohio, New York, and Vermont with the small production of the same goods in Upper Canada made sufficiently clear to Carey “the reason why the latter is compelled to beg for the admission of her products into the Union” (1852, p. 23). British free trade made Canadians hungry and cold. By substituting a merely distant market for a trans-oceanic one, reciprocity with the United States might stop their starving and freezing. But neither in Canada nor in the United States was reciprocity a substitute for the home market that could be secured by protection. In Canada, it would would be an inadequate step forward on “the road to perfect freedom of trade” (p. 40); in the United States, a great leap backward. Progress along that road required efforts “to bring the loom and the anvil to take their natural places by the side of the plough and the harrow” (p. 40). British free trade kept them apart. At this moment Carey’s critique of reciprocity involved a straightforward application of the ideas he set down in The Past, the Present, and the Future, with perhaps a more determined tone. In very little time, as the reciprocity treaty gathered momentum and other circumstances loomed menacingly over the political debate, his tone grew more determined still.

The other circumstances were slavery and the growing bitterness of the surrounding controversy. It hardly requires mentioning that The Working of British Free Trade was not the best-selling publication of 1852, but it is worth recalling what was. Readers of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, raised a “resistless tide of emotion that swept all before it” (Stowe and Stowe 1911, p. 160). Carey’s ability to make his argument heard, let alone accepted, required the tide’s force to be rechanneled away from abolitionism.

This he set out to accomplish in The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign (1853). Stowe’s readers were correct, Carey believed, to deplore Uncle Tom’s removal from Kentucky to the Deep South and to weep for his fate there. But as to the responsibility for that fate, they should look not to the South but abroad:

To put it simply, the afflictions of Uncle Tom, and likewise of the shivering Canadians, were no accident. The case of the West Indies, both before and after the act of 1833 to abolish slavery in the British colonies, showed concretely the cases’ similarity in both effect and origin. Just as by “rendering it necessary to send all the raw products of the land to a market far distant” the mother country had enervated Canada’s land and made its workers poor, and just as liberal trade had done the same to the United States since 1846, so it had done to the West Indies. Consistent with his argument in the Principles a decade and a half earlier, Carey denied that it mattered whether slavery existed formally and by that name. What mattered was the condition of laborers. British free trade “ensured that the planter could exist, himself, only by overworking his people” (1853, pp. 73, 76); thus it had promoted West Indian slavery before emancipation, and it had maintained slavery, in effect if not in name, after emancipation. As for the planter, “he was himself a slave to those by whom the labours of himself and his workmen were directed, and it would be unfair to attribute to him the extraordinary waste of life resulting necessarily from the fact that the whole people were limited to the labours of the field” (p. 83). One should blame instead the British merchants and government, who, “by separating the consumer from the producer,” maneuvered “to take to themselves three-fourths of the whole sales of the commodities consumed, while leaving but one-fourth to be divided between the land and labour that had provided it” (p. 88).

Here, in its complete form, was Carey’s project to build an intellectual foundation for the Whig Party’s nationwide coalescence around a conservative position on slavery and a protectionist one on trade policy. To Southern outward-looking agriculturalists and merchants, he aimed to show that protection, not free trade, would yield their prosperity; to Northern anti-slavery industrialists and smallholders, that protection, not abolition, would yield emancipation. To assuage each section’s increasingly bitter feelings toward the other, he aimed further to redirect their antagonism to the real culprit for their complaints: Great Britain and its American agents. Opposition to reciprocity with Canada was consistent with Carey’s project, and even promoted it, in the same manner that advocacy of reciprocity a generation earlier served Henry Clay’s.

What remained to be seen was how durable Carey’s opposition to reciprocity would be as circumstances changed. In 1854, the Canadian reciprocity treaty that Carey had been arguing against for at least three years became a reality. Thereafter the evidence of its effects was available to bolster Carey’s argument or, less likely, to change his mind. More importantly, in the same year, the Kansas–Nebraska Act repealed the compromise of 1820 barring slavery in all territories to the northwest of Missouri’s southern border. The sectional reaction was so vituperative that the national Whig Party could not be sustained. When it disintegrated, Carey tried to influence the trade-policy orientation of the Republican Party that emerged from its pieces. The new party embraced, in addition to nearly all Whigs from Northern states and many like him from border and mid-Atlantic states, numerous erstwhile Democrats from the North with anti-slavery convictions. The latter faction tended toward free trade; their preference had to be quashed.

In fact, these particular circumstances only hardened Carey’s opposition to reciprocity and did little to change the substance of his argument. Even the argument’s connection to slavery remained useful. The Republican Party’s opposition to the extension of slavery outside of settled compromise did not imply advocacy of the political abolition of slavery where it already existed. The West Indies, therefore, remained to Carey’s mind a potent example of antislavery sentiment badly misapplied and British free trade disastrously introduced. The example carried implications for reciprocity with Canada. In his Principles of Social Science, Footnote ²⁰ Carey wrote,

The anecdote concludes with Carey telling ironically of the British government’s disapproval of the West Indies’ petition on the grounds that it “‘would be inconsistent with the imperial policy of free trade’!”

Given what Carey had already written about Canadian reciprocity, what is most notable here is not the allusion to his continuing opposition to the treaty of 1854. It is the clear implication that, in some instances, reciprocity, even in the specific form of an agreement for the mutual abolition of customs duties, could be mutually beneficial. How Carey’s hint about “perfect reciprocity” might be drawn out and applied in the United States, however, would not become evident until after the Civil War.

VI. CAREY ON RECIPROCITY IN THE POSTBELLUM PERIOD

The contest within the Republican Party for the protectionist or free-trade orientation of its platform was moot during the war. Revenue needs drove policy. After the war, the maintenance of high tariffs meant that Carey’s view prevailed. Its prevalence, combined with resentment of perceived Canadian sympathy for the Confederate cause, led to the United States’ abrogation of the treaty for reciprocity with Canada in 1866 (Stanwood Reference Stanwood1903, vol. 2, p. 138).

Great Britain and its North American provinces tried without success to reinstate reciprocity from the moment of U.S. abrogation. They made progress toward the general end of U.S.–Canada economic cooperation, falling short of commercial reciprocity, with the Treaty of Washington in 1871. The treaty settled the United States’ claims against Great Britain for the wartime construction of the Confederate raiding vessel Alabama. It also gave the U.S. rights to fish in the waters of British North America, for a fee to be determined later, in return for continuation of the privilege of free passage of goods between Britain and its North American provinces by way of the United States. The privilege, which pertained most importantly to traffic on the railway between Montreal and Portland, Maine, was an essential lifeline for Canada during the several months annually when the St. Lawrence River was choked with ice. President Grant had threatened to cut the lifeline in frustration with British recalcitrance in paying the Alabama claim. The Treaty of Washington settled those matters and set aside the question of reciprocity for later (Morrison Reference Morrison1978, pp. 462–463).

The question returned to the fore in 1874, when Secretary of State Hamilton Fish conveyed to the President the draft of a new U.S.–Canada reciprocity treaty proposed by British commissioners. The hook the British dangled was the prospect, in return for the reinstatement of reciprocity, of suspending the payment required under the Treaty of Washington for U.S. access to the British North American fishery (Morrison Reference Morrison1978, pp. 464–465).

Carey, now an octogenarian, feared that the President and Congress might bite. With unflagging vigor, in the space of ten days he wrote a series of nine disapproving letters to Grant (taking a break only on the Sabbath) and published them collectively as “The British Treaties of 1871 & 1874” (1874).

Carey’s complaints were several. Included in the litany was a recollection of the “sham reciprocity” of twenty years earlier, which he believed the proposed treaty of 1874 would reinstate (Carey Reference Carey and Elder1874, pp. 17, 20). He objected also to the way “conspirators” submitted it for the government’s consideration with little public scrutiny (p. 28). As one might have expected of a conspiracy, the ostensible reciprocity it put forth was unreciprocal: the free access that the United States would be granted to the British North American fishery belonged to the U.S. anyway by right (p. 12). A national security concern arose from a certain stipulation that the United States would lend financial support to construct a system of canals linking together the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes, and the Hudson River for British and American vessels drawing up to twelve feet. In effect, the U.S. would be paying to put its cities from Milwaukee to Buffalo “practically under the guns of almost the whole British fleet” (pp. 25–26). And Carey worried (needlessly, in fact) that the most-favored-nation provisions of U.S. treaties with France, Germany, Belgium, and other countries would require all the treaty’s favors to be extended to them, too (p. 27).Footnote ²¹

More fundamental than all the foregoing complaints, however, was this: “Nominally treating of a reciprocal free trade with the British provinces, this treaty is really one of free trade with the British empire” (Carey Reference Carey and Elder1874, p. 18). By the Treaty of Washington, British goods were already allowed to pass through the U.S. to Canada duty free, saving transportation costs; by the proposed reciprocity of 1874, they would pass back into the U.S. subject only to whatever duties, if any, applied to Canadian merchandise. The treaty stipulated that to be subject to U.S. preferences the goods should be the “growth, produce, or manufacture” of Canada—but who could tell? “The whole arrangement,” said Carey, “is but a new edition of the fable of the monkey and the cat, the former employing the latter to draw from the fire the chestnuts that would have burnt his own fingers had he attempted to do the work himself” (p. 18).

Opponents of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1874 in Congress, like steadfast protectionist Sen. Justin Morrill, a Vermont Republican, voiced arguments resembling Carey’s (Morrison Reference Morrison1978, p. 468, n32). In February of 1875 they defeated the treaty in the Senate (Sen. Exec. Jour., 43^rd Cong., 2^nd Sess., p. 502). Remarkably, only one month later the Senate would begin debate on another reciprocity treaty—and this time, many protectionists would apply the same doctrine and come to a more favorable verdict.

Hawaii and the United States had been negotiating either reciprocity or annexation for some time. A reciprocal most-favored-nation treaty was signed in 1849 and ratified the following year (Malloy Reference Malloy1909, vol. 1, pp. 908–915). Shortly later, in 1851, the Hawaiian King proposed a treaty ceding his country voluntarily to the United States in order to shield it from British and French predations, but the treaty was not accepted in Washington (Robinson Reference Robinson1904, p. 106). Only three years after that, in 1854, the U.S. sought a treaty of annexation for the same reason, but the King died before signing it and his successor refused it (p. 111). A treaty of reciprocity negotiated in 1855, allowing several U.S. manufactures and other goods to enter Hawaii duty free in exchange for similar treatment by the U.S. of Hawaiian sugar and other products of agriculture or livestock, was defeated by the U.S. Senate (pp. 112–113). So too, in 1870, was another reciprocity treaty along the same lines that had been negotiated in 1867 (pp. 115–116).

Still another reciprocity treaty, similar in regards to goods and the elimination of duties to the unratified treaties of 1855 and 1867, was signed in 1875 and permitted to take effect in 1876. What was decisive on this occasion was a new article, namely the fourth, which forbade Hawaii to grant the same duty-free access to the goods of any other countries. The article guaranteed the U.S. a crucial advantage against its European rivals in the Hawaiian trade—and by extension a commercial and military advantage in much of the Pacific Ocean. In the words of the majority of the House Ways and Means Committee (which had its say because the treaty stipulated duties, and so concerned revenue, which was under the purview of the House), the Hawaiian Islands were a “necessary post provided by the Great Ruler of the universe as points of observation, rest, supply, military strategy, and command.” They would aid America and Asia in “protecting both hemispheres from European assault, aggression, and avarice” (Cong. Record, 1876, 4,2; 1422). Above all else, the logic of international rivalry had prevailed.

But supremacy of that logic did not imply the irrelevance of free trade and protection. One could just as well say that reciprocity with Hawaii was established because protectionists found a way to reconcile advocacy of the treaty with their doctrine, and their doctrine with the treaty. Finding the way was complicated. President Grant provided little direction: after extolling the “American system” at the beginning of his annual message to Congress of 1875, he had gone on to proffer the Hawaiian treaty with no apparent connection between the two (Cong. Record 1875, 4,1: 175). Senator Morrill, among others, saw no connection—only a treaty worse than anything contemplated with Canada, this time with a country whose natives would once “have Cooked and eaten us up in a different way” (4,1: 157). Yet most of the party that favored protection favored the treaty, and most of its opponents did not. On the question of authorizing the treaty as a revenue measure, which required the assent of both chambers, Republicans cast 59 of 115 yeas in the House and only 22 of 101 nays. In the Senate, they cast 24 of 29 yeas and only 3 of 12 nays (Cong. Record, 1876, 4,4: 3037; 4,6: 5572). It would be too much to say that the tallies signify a manifest path from protection to reciprocity. But to most protectionists the path was at least discernible. Even Morrill, despite his opposition, admitted that sometimes he entertained thoughts of making discriminating trade arrangements with some countries—not a “waif in the ocean” like Hawaii, to be sure, but perhaps the wealthier and more populous South American republics (4,1: 157, 158). Carey, more than anyone else, made such thoughts conceivable for postbellum protectionists.Footnote ²²

Carey’s reconciliation of reciprocity and protection originated in the “perfect reciprocity,” mentioned previously, that he saw years before in the doomed agreement between British North America and the West Indies. Its perfection consisted in the colonies’ proposal to abolish the duties on their “respective productions.” The latter term implied that some goods are the native products of one country and not another.Footnote ²³ When such goods pass between the two countries they pose no difficulty from the standpoint of protection: if both countries draw up non-overlapping lists of native goods, and each agrees to abolish duties on those goods insofar as they originate in the other country, then reciprocity is perfect because it does not threaten import-competing producers of other goods. It could even benefit them if among the listed goods are some of their inputs to production.

Canadian wheat for West Indian sugar, then, was an example of perfect reciprocity. Hawaiian sugar for American wheat and manufactures was another, or at least was close enough. From the protectionist perspective, anyway, it was arguably an improvement over the “free breakfast table,” a term that Republicans had used lately to promote the reduction of duties on tea, coffee, sugar in the Tariff Act of 1870 (Tarbell Reference Tarbell1912, p. 63). According to Rep. Garfield of Ohio, many supporters of the act of 1870 had intended the legislation to deflect anti-tariff sentiment that might otherwise “soon shatter our whole protective system” (Cong. Globe, 41^st Cong., 2^nd Sess., 272). To that end, the free breakfast table was an effective stratagem that required little sacrifice of principle, given that there were no producers of coffee or tea to protect and few enough of sugar.Footnote ²⁴ Reciprocity of the U.S.–Hawaii kind was just the free breakfast table, which protectionists had already endorsed, plus an extra dollop of jam in the form of the foreign country’s preferences for U.S. goods. As the House Ways and Means majority report put it, “the Pacific States are to receive from those islands what they do not produce, and the islands are to receive from the Pacific States in exchange therefore what they do not produce” (Cong. Record, 1876, 4,2: 1420).Footnote ²⁵

Carey’s doctrine evolved with the exigencies of Republican politics in the 1870s. He emphasized more the circumstances in which promotion rather than suppression of trade was desirable. In the same week of 1876 in which Congress gave final authorization to reciprocity with Hawaii, Carey addressed “The Friends of the Union Throughout the Union” (1876) on the matter of the upcoming election. He remembered a conversation he had had with the martyred President Lincoln in which they agreed that if only there were railroads criss-crossing Appalachia—one from the Ohio River southeast through eastern Tennessee to Charleston and Savannah, another from the Delaware Valley southwest through the mountains of western Virginia to Alabama and the Gulf of Mexico—then the Union could not be dissolved. Such “iron cross-ties” would help the people of each region to reach the others’ markets by means that would also help them “to maintain a commerce among themselves such as before they had never known” (1876, pp. 4–5). Local commerce would grow; inter-regional commerce would grow too, but only as a consequence, not an antecedent, of local development. Setters would develop intensively the border states, and commerce along the whole expanse of the railroads would grow proportionately with their development. Here again implicitly was the pyramid theory, with the added twist that the federal government would build internal improvements to assist the development of each little pyramid while preparing simultaneously for the gradual development of commerce among all of them.Footnote ²⁶ The new twist was also a nod to an old Whig tradition.

“True to its constructive instincts,” Carey continued, “the Republican party has now for fifteen years been engaged in developing and building up those internal connections by means of which the men of all sections are to be brought into harmonious relations with each other” (1876, p. 7). It had done so while maintaining high tariffs on imports of many goods, especially manufactures. But tariffs should not be seen as manifesting a general aversion to foreign trade. Just as local development leads to inter-regional commerce, so too does national development lead to international commerce. When foreign trade evolves in the right way, of course, it tends to consist of items that the particular climates and soils of different countries are uniquely well suited for producing:

On the eve of final approval of the Hawaii treaty and in one of his last published works before his death, Carey was issuing a doctrinal endorsement of the free breakfast table and Republican reciprocity. The endorsement completed a half-century-long arc of the development of protectionist doctrine in tandem with the politics of reciprocity. To Carey, the “road to perfect freedom of trade” remained tariff protection. But reciprocal trade arrangements had once again become, as they had been for the generation of protectionist thinkers preceding Carey, a vehicle for reaching that end.