The tariff became a subject of great political controversy and struggle in the United States after 1815. Upstart American manufacturers had thrived by supplying a growing domestic market during the period in which a shipping embargo and the War of 1812 suspended trade with Great Britain. With the peace, British manufacturers attempted to regain their American customers by flooding the United States with low-priced wares.Footnote 1 American manufacturers and their allies sought relief by way of higher duties on imported goods and Congress soon produced the Tariff of 1816, a measure that one historian has characterized as “mildly protective” and another as “ambiguous.”Footnote 2 The Panic of 1819 caused a large number of American manufacturers to retrench or fail, which in turn produced widespread unemployment and poverty among wage workers in the urban North.Footnote 3 The distress that he saw in his adopted home city of Philadelphia moved the publisher Mathew Carey, long a vocal participant in American political debate, ally of local manufacturers and noted humanitarian, to turn his considerable energies to the production of a series of works promoting the tariff. This work influenced Henry Clay and later protectionists.Footnote 4
Scholars analyzing Carey’s protectionism have shown that he repeated familiar economic arguments supporting the policy and supported them through the early use of statistics.Footnote 5 Andrew Shankman has demonstrated that Carey argued for a high tariff’s beneficial effect on American society and politics as well. He maintained that as Americans faced a shrinking market for the export of foodstuffs the federal government should use high duties to encourage economic diversification and the development of a domestic market, which would in turn preserve a society of autonomous households.Footnote 6 This article demonstrates that Carey also discussed the tariff’s impact on society and politics in a very different way that scholars have largely overlooked. In it, he presented the policy as an expression of sensibility, which one scholar has described as “the faculty of feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion and quickness to display compassion for the suffering.”Footnote 7 Each of these two assertions made Carey what political scientists Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov have identified as a variety of state-builder operating outside the federal government itself, using “ideological frames” to promote the expansion of state activity.Footnote 8 The publisher’s second case for high duties made his work an early example of a specific type of state-building ideology relying on what Nackenoff and Novkov have called “emotional appeals.”Footnote 9
This second argument borrowed and adapted many of a transatlantic sentimental tradition’s specific concepts and techniques.Footnote 10 Following the example of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers and sentimental novelists, he made references to specific emotions including happiness, love, fear, and anxiety.Footnote 11 Making heavy use of what literary historians have described as the tradition’s privileged terms, including “amiable,” “cruel,” “distress,” “misery,” and “humanity,” as well as other characteristic devices such as exclamation marks, brackets, italics, and words displayed in all capital letters, his writings demanded a personal emotional response from the reader in the form of political action.Footnote 12 Carey also echoed the sentimental tradition by describing society’s movement toward the emergence of humane sentiments as the progress of enlightenment and civilization; employing references to what one contemporary reader described as “shocking sights” in order to influence “delicate people”; focusing attention on family and gender roles; describing society in hierarchical terms distinguishing between the weak, or those unable to care for themselves, and the strong, who should protect them; and comparing sensibility with the hard, cold world of business and politics.Footnote 13 From this latter perspective Carey portrayed Great Britain, and American tariff opponents, as unfeeling actors. By contrast, Americans could bring sensibility together with the market, showing workers the tariff’s care. An adequate tariff would produce higher American wages than international competition, thereby preserving industrial workers’ well-being.Footnote 14 Finally, Carey, like a number of sentimental writers, proposed a theory of enlightened self-interest: humane action ultimately proved more economically rewarding than indifference or outright cruelty.Footnote 15
James Huston has observed that many American protectionists of the 1850s understood the tariff as a social policy using the provision of material benefits (in this case higher wages) to address issues of human well-being raised by the emergence of urban industrialism.Footnote 16 Carey’s first defense of the measure set this concern aside, but his sentimental protectionism plainly identified the policy with it. Its development thus shows the complex origins of the view that Huston described. Scholars of social welfare in the United States have shown that Carey became an early advocate for its systematic provision by private organizations, but their accounts have largely ignored the fact that he also supported a high tariff.Footnote 17 Likewise, discussions of Carey’s protectionism have generally overlooked his devotion to the cause of social welfare. Both have thus failed to recognize the fact that he considered the tariff to be a social welfare policy. Scholars have perhaps missed this connection because Carey’s two visions of the tariff’s impact on American society differed so much. This raises an important question. If Mathew Carey became adept at presenting the tariff in an ideological frame, how did his protectionism relate to this period’s major American political ideologies? Or was it simply an incoherent mishmash of ideas?
Carey aligned his two protectionist arguments with his period’s two major political ideologies: republicanism and liberalism. S. D. Kimmel presents Carey in the late 1820s and 1830s as a Jeffersonian with “one foot in a republican past and the other in a liberal future,” who became a spokesman for a “contraliberal” or democratic republican political culture.Footnote 18 Shankman shows how Carey’s contention that the tariff would preserve a social order of independent yeomen linked him to the republican tradition.Footnote 19 At the same time, Carey’s sentimental tariff advocacy also attached him to an emergent thread in the liberal tradition, opposed to laissez-faire yet distinctly liberal, in several ways.Footnote 20 Susan Pearson has demonstrated that child and animal welfare advocates brought sensibility and liberalism together later in the nineteenth century through their emphasis on the “rights of the defenseless.”Footnote 21 Carey often suggested that manufacturers and their workers suffered at the hands of more powerful foreign manufacturers and enjoyed as much right to favorable federal policies as merchants and planters, but his sentimental appeal meshed with liberalism in another way as well. Huston has identified reference to sacrifice as a significant component of protectionist rhetoric in the 1820s and emphasized how it led tariff promoters into political difficulties, as individuals identifying with different economic and sectional interests often came to believe that the tariff asked them to relinquish more than others.Footnote 22 By contrast, Carey’s version of enlightened self-interest proposed no sacrifice. He argued that support for the tariff combined sensibility and self-interest: a humane policy would also pay his readers the highest returns.
The publisher’s vision of the tariff as a social policy remained distinctly within the boundaries of contemporary liberalism in an additional respect. Carey’s reputation as a social welfare advocate largely rests on the fact that he sought to overturn Pennsylvania’s 1827 ban on all outdoor relief and argued that poverty emerged from larger dynamics producing low wages and unemployment, rather than individual failings. Nevertheless, he remained conflicted on the subject of poor relief. As Kimmel shows, he had initially taken a leading role in the movement to implement the ban earlier that year and, after he reversed himself and sought to revoke aspects of it, continued to object to what he perceived to be an overly widespread provision of outdoor relief.Footnote 23 By the late 1820s it thus became clear that a tariff providing American workers in the manufacturing sector with more jobs at higher remuneration, but no direct payments, represented a potential way to address poverty very much in line with Carey’s understanding of the problem as well as liberalism’s emphases on individualism, limited government and human beings’ progress from a state of dependency toward freedom.Footnote 24 Workers benefiting from the tariff would avoid the prospect of poor relief altogether.
Historians have often emphasized the fiercely combative emotional tenor of Carey’s pro-tariff pamphlets while faulting him for a lack of original contributions to political economy.Footnote 25 An awareness of his references to a wider range of emotions reveals that Carey became an influential American innovator, however, in the promotion of state-building. Even as he linked the tariff to republicanism’s concern for individual autonomy, he employed sentimental concepts and language, several decades earlier than animal- and child-welfare advocates, to present the measure as a means by which the American state might address the emerging challenge of poverty while remaining within the boundaries of the liberal tradition. Carey’s work invested the word “protection,” so often used in conjunction with the tariff, with another meaning. To mercantilists who had long advocated high duties, the policy sought to defend the national economic interest against potentially hostile foreign interests.Footnote 26 Carey certainly endorsed this general position, but he also cast workers employed by manufacturing concerns as vulnerable parties whom the dynamics of international trade subjected to misery. He then sought to persuade more prosperous and secure individuals to support a state policy, effective yet circumscribed, shielding them from these evils. In broadest outline, this variety of tariff promotion represents an early forerunner of what would later become a common American argument for the liberal welfare state.Footnote 27 Its place in the same documents as a contention that the tariff preserved a Jeffersonian order of independent yeomen illuminates a fundamental tension that marked a halting transition toward an American political discourse more firmly rooted in liberalism.Footnote 28
“The Inflammable Mathew Carey”
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1760 to a family of some means, Mathew Carey encountered adversity early in life.Footnote 29 His nurse dropped him while still an infant, and he learned to walk only with a pronounced limp. He recalled that his injury largely prevented him from playing with other children and subjected him to “the taunts and jeers and nicknames of my school and play-fellows, who, humanely, as is usual in such cases, omitted no opportunity of teasing me.”Footnote 30 The boy turned to books. He subscribed to a circulating library, against the wishes of his parents, who opposed the “novels and romances” that he preferred. He sat up reading late into the night, and was dissatisfied that he “could not exchange books oftener than once a day.”Footnote 31 Although his father discouraged his interest in the field, Carey at fifteen apprenticed himself to a bookseller, printer and co-publisher of the Hibernian Journal, a radical anti-British and pro-American sheet.Footnote 32 He quickly proved adept at the trade and rashly criticized British treatment of Irish Catholics in print, attracting the attention of local imperial authorities. Facing prosecution, he escaped to Paris, where he met the young Marquis de Lafayette and Benjamin Franklin and worked at the latter’s printing press.Footnote 33 Carey showed an early taste for sensibility and its political usefulness with the publication of a pamphlet in which he decried the “horrors” of the British East India Company’s “Military Madness.” He wrote that the company’s activities must shock every Briton “who has not totally abandoned every tender Feeling of Humanity,” and called on “the Legislative Power” to regulate it.Footnote 34 Returning to Ireland, Carey in 1783 began, with his father’s financial support, to edit his own newspaper.Footnote 35 “I was miserably qualified for such an occupation, which required no small degree of tact, … and considerable prudence,” he later wrote, but “I had a superabundance of zeal and ardour, and a tolerable knack and facility of scribbling.”Footnote 36 In 1784, Carey’s meager qualifications caught up with him, as he published a cartoon depicting the hanging of a prominent member of the Irish Parliament who had led the defeat of a bill providing Ireland with a protective tariff. Released after confinement at Newgate Prison in London, he fled to Philadelphia.Footnote 37
Carey arrived in the New World with little money but found good fortune immediately. A well-connected shipmate introduced him to Lafayette, now in the United States. Carey found that the nobleman remembered him from Paris and had read of his difficulties in Dublin. The young émigré told Lafayette that he hoped to establish a newspaper in Philadelphia, and was astounded to receive shortly thereafter a letter from him containing $400.Footnote 38 Carey established a newspaper, but his admitted lack of tact soon won him enemies again, and he sustained a new wound to his bad leg in a duel with a rival editor.Footnote 39 In 1786 he began publication of the Columbian Magazine, which won wide acclaim for championing American literature, but found few paying customers. The next year Carey founded the American Museum, which earned a similarly high reputation, but also made no money and folded in 1792.Footnote 40 He especially blamed wealthy subscribers’ failures to pay their subscription fees for the demise of both publications. In the succeeding period Carey largely made his living as a printer, and experienced a great deal of difficulty in borrowing money.Footnote 41 Struggling to keep his business afloat, he lamented the fact that he often had to send his journeymen home on Saturday without wages, “which sent me to bed sick with vexation.”Footnote 42 Carey eventually secured a loan from George Fox, a banker, whom he later praised as a gentleman “of the most amiable manners, (who) spoke to me so kindly, that he brought tears to my eyes—a result which has never been produced on me by harshness, but frequently by kindness and sympathy.”Footnote 43
In 1796, Carey published a piece entitled Addressed to the Sons and Daughters of Humanity. By a Citizen of the World. It suggested that humane sentiments and benevolent individuals’ personal actions provided a remedy for human suffering. Carey told the story of a young woman with two children, whose husband had just died by falling from a cherry tree. Carefully noting the tear in her eye, the narrator described one of the children as “a cripple from birth” who now faced life “without the protecting hand of a father.” “The sympathetic reader can readily appreciate the keenness of the dagger, which this distressing incident carried” to the mother’s “afflicted heart,” he observed. Continuing, Carey’s narrator recounted that “On enquiry, a few days afterwards, I learned a circumstance to which my feeble pen cannot do justice. O Sterne, that I had thy powers for a few minutes!” The deceased husband owed four dollars to a laborer for as many days’ work. His widow had eleven dollars to her name but offered to pay the man in full. At this point Carey’s narrative considered the laborer’s thoughts: “He cast an eye on the money. It was his, he saw, by the clearest right. In his humble state, the sum was great enough to be an object of some consequence. But he had a large heart—a ‘heart that felt for others’ woe’—and refused the money—‘No, said he, I will not add poverty to the poor—weakness to the weak—or distress to the distressed.” The account closed by contrasting the workman with the many men “wallowing in wealth … (who) must ‘hide his [sic] diminished head, and shrink abashed from the mortifying contrast!”Footnote 44
Carey’s themes and language showed the influence of the sentimental tradition. His early taste for novels likely brought him into contact with its expression in fiction, and in 1794 he published the first sentimental novel in America, a reprint of Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, which ran to nine editions.Footnote 45 Carey made his debt to sentimental literature most explicit by reference to Laurence Sterne, the author of one of the eighteenth century’s signal works of that genre, which illuminated his rhetorical strategy in more detail.Footnote 46 In his Autobiography, Carey recalled Sterne’s description of how he had struggled to write a piece advocating the reform of prison conditions. The author reported that he had begun to write in his usual way, “but finding that plan not likely to bring the matter home to the ‘business and bosoms’ of his readers, he took the case of an individual in a dungeon, which made the picture incomparably more strong and striking.”Footnote 47
Carey’s publishing business also made him one of the New World’s leading reprinters and distributors of Scottish Enlightenment works.Footnote 48 David Hume gave voice to one of the Scots’ main themes when he maintained that matters of morality were “more properly felt that judg’d.”Footnote 49 He also observed that while rationality provided a necessary tool for understanding experience, appeals to feelings furnished a more reliable prompt to action on such matters.Footnote 50 The Scottish Enlightenment provided Carey with a vision in which economic development had facilitated the emergence of sensibility, but such moral progress was by no means automatic.Footnote 51 Human beings required constant persuasion to do right, and Adam Smith suggested that “books of morality” should excite readers’ sympathy and benevolence, to make them act as they should.Footnote 52 Carey later applied the techniques suggested by Sterne, Hume, and Smith in his promotion of the high tariff.
Thomas Jefferson’s election as President of the United States in 1800 helped Mathew Carey to transform himself from a worried young proprietor into a wealthy man. Although he had begun to take part in American politics as a Federalist, Carey abandoned the party in 1794 in large part due to its hostility to immigrants like himself, and he became a strong supporter of the Virginian.Footnote 53 His efforts secured an appointment to a seat on the board of the Bank of Pennsylvania, where he gained ready access to credit.Footnote 54 In 1801 Carey began publication of the Bible, and soon gained a virtual monopoly over the American market for the Good Book through heavy capital investment in standing type.Footnote 55 Working with his itinerant sales representative Mason Locke Weems and postmasters appointed by his ally in the Executive Mansion, he built a national distribution network.Footnote 56 He retired from his firm in 1822, handing control over to his son Henry and a partner.Footnote 57
Mathew Carey experienced physical disability and cruelty, if only of words, as a child. He clearly identified with the weaker parties that sentimental authors urged their readers to aid. Yet as he became wealthy he also cast himself in the role of the stronger parties providing that assistance. He identified individual expressions of sympathy and benevolence as an appropriate remedy for others’ distress, perceived a rich man’s loan as such an act of kindness, and criticized other wealthy individuals’ lack of similar activity. He devoted considerable time to supporting charitable causes and relief efforts, including those of persons suffering the effects of Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 and, later, Greeks displaced by war with Turkey.Footnote 58 Yet he was also a duelist, described by historians as “hot-tempered,” “fiery,” “often irascible,” and a man of “intense feeling.”Footnote 59 In his Autobiography, Carey noted his considerable temper, and referred to himself as “the inflammable Mathew Carey.”Footnote 60 Clearly emotions played a large role in his life, and in his “scribbling” he showed an early gift for marshaling them to produce what one scholar has called “the force of the sentimental mode.”Footnote 61 In this context, Mathew Carey witnessed the Panic of 1819 and turned his talent for words from calls for private, charitable action to matters of state policy.
Crisis, Response, Limits
The Panic of 1819 produced widespread business failures and unemployment in the United States, and Mathew Carey’s adopted home of Philadelphia was especially hard-hit. He observed that while his own business “was prospering … calamity was spreading among the manufacturers around me. Their sufferings impelled me first to take up the pen.”Footnote 62 His writings argued that a high tariff would solve the problem. Carey led the way in forming the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, which published a collection of pamphlets before the year was through. Carey wrote all but two of the thirteen documents.Footnote 63 The publication went through six editions in the following several years and grew in length and complexity. Carey largely bore the cost of the pamphlets’ printing and distribution himself, and he left the Society at an early date due to what he considered to be his fellow members’ lack of appropriate financial contributions.Footnote 64 His involvement in the organization was short-lived, but Carey proved a prolific author and published a number of other significant protectionist works in the succeeding years.Footnote 65
Sentimental concepts and language found a prominent place in these works. Carey identified political economy as “the science of promoting human happiness” and industry as “the only legitimate and permanent source” of that emotion.Footnote 66 He noted that American tariff opponents criticized the policy as likely to perpetuate what they perceived to be manufacturers’ wartime price gouging.Footnote 67 In response, Carey hit them at their weakest point: their seeming disregard for the social dislocation and personal misery that so often accompanied international industrial competition.Footnote 68 He described the crisis in vivid terms: “productive industry … laid prostrate,” its “constituents, writhing in distress and misery.”Footnote 69 Adding descriptions of specific individuals, such as a tanner who, “with a diminished capital and broken heart, … in his old age,” lost his business to foreign competition, he insisted that “there are numberless cases equally strong, which no man of sound mind and heart” could overlook.Footnote 70 One could not regard the effects of free trade “without the deepest sympathy for the ill-fated sufferers” it produced.Footnote 71 In the end, low tariffs clearly represented something other than American civilization. As Americans’ mistaken tariff policy “spread distress over the land,” Carey wondered “Is this the nineteenth century, which prides itself on its illumination? Is this the brotherly love we bear to those who are embarked in the same cause with us—who have every possible claim on our protection and kindness … of which they are bereft by a ruinous policy … ?”Footnote 72
Carey found it understandable that individuals living in European nations “exhausted by twenty years of war … should be in a state of suffering,” but “a government emanating more completely from the mass of the people than any other that ever existed, might have been expected to have extended a more paternal care over its citizens than the world ever witnessed.”Footnote 73 He went on to elaborate on his vision of an appropriately protective state, as opposed to one marked by free trade, in a detailed metaphor structured around understandings of female gender roles and family life. Carey asked “whether there be a greater contrast between the conduct of a fond mother towards her only and darling child—and that of a rigorous step-mother, towards a step-child which interferes with her views in favour of her own offspring?”Footnote 74 He then shifted his attention to the role of the male parent. “Behold the afflicted father,” he asked his readers, “having pawned his clothes and furniture, destitute of money and credit to support his famishing wife and children—his proud spirit struggling between the heart-rending alternatives of allowing them to suffer hunger and thirst, or else sinking to apply to the overseers of the poor.” He urged those who so actively sought to defeat the tariff and its “relief of their fellow citizens,” to confront these “affecting realities.”Footnote 75
Carey’s sentimental protectionism grew in part from his own shock at the “calamitous conditions” he saw in Philadelphia in the wake of the Panic of 1819.Footnote 76 He was also a keen observer of, and operative within, the public sphere however and believed that many members of the public, including manufacturers, were unwilling to stand up for the tariff because the policy’s opponents had gained the moral high ground. In addition to charging that high duties would allow manufacturers to charge extortionate prices, free traders asserted that their policy represented the triumph of human brotherhood and philanthropy, creating mutual sympathy and dependence among nations.Footnote 77 By this combination of arguments, Carey worried that “the honest feelings and sympathy of the humane and enlightened part of the community … have … been enlisted and excited to activity” against the tariff.Footnote 78 His appeal to sensibility and the relief of suffering thus also represented an attempt to parry his opponents’ advantage in debate by presenting the tariff as humane and enlightened in another, less abstract, way.
Carey bolstered his sentimental vindication of the tariff by arguing that, although humane, the policy also coincided with the liberal notion of self-interest, especially that of the more prosperous classes. As European farmers began to bring in harvests again after the Napoleonic Wars, his collaborator Dr. Samuel Jackson explained, Americans found themselves with a “non-necessary class of producers” made up of individuals who had once found employment in agriculture. Their numbers “must increase,” Jackson concluded, and these “inferior labourers, thus pressed upon … must be thrust into pauperism, and come on the public for support.”Footnote 79 With a tariff’s protection, they could find work in manufacturing industries. Carey emphasized that a strong manufacturing community would in turn benefit merchants, planters and farmers. Thriving manufacturers would increase domestic consumption. By also drawing many marginal farmers who had not yet succumbed to pauperism into new occupations, manufacturing could reduce agricultural production, and thereby furnish more successful competitors with higher prices for their crops.Footnote 80 Carey stoked wealthy readers’ fears of disorder as well. Amid the “wo, and wretchedness, and depravity” caused by free trade, he suggested, “The laboring and industrious classes would be at once bereft of employment … and, through the force of misery and distress driven to prey upon each other, and upon the rest of the community.”Footnote 81 “The wealth of the country would be swept away … and the sources of the revenues of the higher orders would be dried up.”Footnote 82 The high tariff stood to protect that wealth and revenue.Footnote 83
Shortly after he sought to persuade merchants and agriculturalists to support the tariff, Carey berated them for their failure to do so. He returned to the use of sentimental language, depicting them as representatives of the hard, cold world of insensibility. Noting that the idea of free trade was “promulgated by the merchants of Salem,” he attacked “the cupidity of our importers.” They had long enjoyed the federal government’s attentions, and became rich, but opposed duties protecting wage workers as deleterious to their own interests.Footnote 84 He also censured Virginia planters who, contrary to their own pretense of liberality, in fact aimed to “bar the door to the relief of their fellow citizens.”Footnote 85 Finally, he poured scorn on the Congresses that had found these interests more compelling than American manufacturers’ pleas for tariff protection. Their requests, “fraught with tales of ruin and destruction, … would have softened the heart of Herod. Not one of them was ever read in the House!”Footnote 86 Such inactivity on the matter would “remain an eternal blot on the escutcheon of the fourteenth Congress.”Footnote 87
Carey’s sentimental protectionist appeal culminated in an indictment of Great Britain. He depicted it as the embodiment of insensibility, a strong nation preying on those weaker than itself and thus causing widespread human suffering. Carey’s native Ireland served as a case in point. He argued that “the monopolizing spirit of England has sat like an incubus over the sister island.” Whenever Irish interests collided with English, they were “offered up as a sacrifice on the altars of avarice and cupidity, without remorse and without control.” “In every case,” he emphasized, Irish interests “were unfeelingly devoted to destruction.”Footnote 88 Trade policy was to blame. As they had in the time of Carey’s residency in Ireland, imperial officials denied the Irish any protection from competition with “superior British capitals,” which of course overpowered their much weaker competitors.Footnote 89 “This detestable system,” a “cruel and withering policy,” at once “wicked,” “iniquitous,” and “a barbarous and unrelenting persecution … against the national industry of Ireland,” bore responsibility for this “hideous picture of the sufferings of the Irish.”Footnote 90
Carey indicted Britain in a less direct manner as well, gleefully seizing upon a Whig member of Parliament’s too-vivid description of his nation’s commercial orientation at the close of the War of 1812. Henry Brougham had declared that it was “well worth while … to incur a loss on the exportations to the United States, in order to stifle in the cradle [their] rising manufactures.”Footnote 91 The term “infant industries” became prominent in pro-tariff discourse in this period, in part as a metaphor suggesting that only a tariff could ensure the survival of manufacturers located in late-industrializing nations when faced with competition from firms in more mature economies.Footnote 92 In the context of his repeated references to the sentimental tradition’s emphases on suffering, cruelty, relations between the weak and strong, and family life, Carey’s quotation represented something more, however. His reference to Brougham’s remark provided readers with a shocking image that associated British industrial competition with infanticide. An American tariff would indeed represent the federal government’s paternal care for wage workers.
Carey’s indictment of Great Britain linked his sentimental understanding of tariff protection to mercantilists’ long-standing definition of the term as reflecting national interests. In Carey’s view, British manufacturers sought to dominate American markets. He reminded Americans of Britain’s pursuit of foreign trade, “in support of which, no wars, however bloody, no expense, however enormous, are too great a sacrifice.” As had been the case in Ireland, British industries’ superior capital, experience, skill and machinery, combined with their government’s active support, left their prospective American competitors “unequal to the contest.”Footnote 93 English industry had already become “the terror and spoiler of Europe,” and the United States stood to be its next victim.Footnote 94
Several years after publishing the last of his works for the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, Carey figured prominently in his state’s reform of its Poor Laws. His role in this episode sets his sentimental protectionism in a complex political context. Scholars have often described how by the late 1820s Carey became an advocate for the poor, in part by laying out a case for relief that refuted the popular conception that poverty reflected individual failings. Instead, he presented poverty as a structural problem in which unfavorable market conditions drove down wages and made jobs hard to find.Footnote 95 Yet Carey did not act, at first, to secure the broader distribution of relief. In 1827 he played a leading role in the Pennsylvania movement that abolished the laws providing outdoor relief to those in need and directed the poor to residential workhouses.Footnote 96 In this context he, like many Poor Law critics on both sides of the Atlantic, criticized outdoor relief as “of all the modes of providing for the poor, the most wasteful, the most expensive, and the most injurious to their morals, and destructive of their industrious habits.”Footnote 97 Carey soon reconsidered the ban on outdoor relief as it pertained to women, children and “meritorious persons … formerly high in society” who had fallen into poverty and now faced the prospect of life in the almshouse.Footnote 98 He made a public admission of his mistake and spent the final decade of his life seeking to overturn the policy and producing the works that led later historians to understand him as an advocate of poor relief.Footnote 99 Nevertheless, the publisher continued to express an aversion to direct relief for men capable of work. As Kimmel shows, in 1833 he insisted that no assistance be provided “to able bodied men but for labor performed, the more severe the better.’”Footnote 100 Carey’s conflicted position of 1827–28 draws into sharp relief the fact that although he had framed the tariff as a social welfare measure, it did not stand to provide anyone with direct payments and thus run afoul of liberal beliefs in individualism and progress toward human autonomy.Footnote 101 Rather, it was a policy that would, to his mind, provide relatively remunerative work to those dependent upon wages for their well-being.
Humanity and Policy
Carey’s early tariff publications had cast proprietors and partners in manufacturing establishments as among those suffering from the effects of free trade, but by the mid-1820s he described them as prosperous individuals who might become benefactors to the less fortunate.Footnote 102 The Panic of 1819 had passed, and the tariff of 1824 once again made industry a remunerative use of capital. The Boston Associates, who turned fortunes earned in the merchant trade to the mass production of textiles at Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, had emerged, and Carey also took note of prosperous manufacturers, albeit at a different scale, in his hometown.Footnote 103 To his amazement, however, many industrialists apparently refused to promote still higher duties, or only supported tariffs on the limited number of products that directly benefited their own firms. In the late 1820s and early 1830s he devoted considerable attention to the question of why they chose this course.Footnote 104 Carey especially fretted over the fact that manufacturers twice proved unwilling to provide him with the funds that he believed were necessary to produce sufficient amounts of tariff pamphlets and distribute them in regions of the country unfriendly to the policy. Wealthy men had let him down before, and Carey interpreted the new snubs as evidence that American manufacturers were unwilling to speak up for the tariff, a policy sure to benefit their own interests. His repeated reviews of why American manufacturers might fail to endorse the tariff by his preferred method provided him with an opportunity to revisit and expand upon his argument for high duties rooted in enlightened self-interest.
Carey followed sentimental authors by aligning humane sentiments with liberalism’s emphasis on the pursuit of profit.Footnote 105 The literary historian Markman Ellis has shown how British novelists, following Adam Smith’s contention that free labor proved less expensive than slave, maintained that kindness to bondsmen in the West Indies paid higher returns than indifference or cruelty. Far from advocating the abolition of the slave system in the Empire however, they sought to persuade masters to change their treatment of slaves in order to promote their own economic interests and preserve the larger system itself.Footnote 106 In his 1796 publication Carey had presented a laborer who refused to collect the money due him by a widow with young children as an example of how sensibility might cure human suffering. By the 1820s, however, he emphasized how manufacturers could secure their own material interests while at the same time protecting workers with a high tariff.
Carey began his evaluation of manufacturers’ failure to support the tariff as he had hoped by returning to his experience with the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry. In 1827 he recalled that its members had refused to cover additional expenditures that he incurred in attempts to achieve wider distribution for pamphlets, while merchants promoting low tariffs had spent liberally and carried the day.Footnote 107 Carey emphasized that he had appealed to the manufacturers, on “every principle of public spirit and private interest.” There were among them “individuals who, on the mere ground of self-interest, laying aside all regard to the public welfare, would be warranted in defraying the whole expense necessary.”Footnote 108 Yet the manufacturers in the Society’s membership had done nothing. “This fatal failure, the result of parsimony and apathy,” had ceded the ground of public opinion to free traders.Footnote 109
In 1830 Carey stepped back from the tariff issue itself and shed light on what he considered to be the intersection of self-interest and sensibility that should have led the manufacturers to support the policy in the proper way. In an essay entitled “HUMANITY,” he used an anecdote about the Russo-Turkish War of 1774, in which the Greeks had revolted against the Ottoman Empire, to explain. After the war’s end, he began, the Turkish government debated exterminating the entire Greek nation. “This barbarous measure was on the point of being carried in execution” when the celebrated capudan Pacha prevented it, he continued, “not by any arguments drawn from the criminality or inhumanity of the measure – but from a motive of more potent influence within the divan. `If,’ says he, `we massacre all the Greeks, we shall lose the capitation they pay us.’ This argument was irresistible… . Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.’” Carey’s mention of a prospective genocide provided his readers with another shocking image, but instead of using it to refer to the specific struggle between tariffs and free trade, he chose to emphasize how both humanity and self-interest recommended a generally merciful course of action, which paid higher returns than barbarous measures.Footnote 110
In a series of autobiographical sketches published between 1833 and 1835, Carey reflected on a second attempt to circulate pro-tariff pamphlets in 1828. He recalled that he sent copies of a letter seeking subscriptions to between fifty and seventy of “the most respectable and wealthy citizens in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, not one of whom condescended to reply.”Footnote 111 He singled out the manufacturers of Boston, “half a dozen [of whom] were worth at least two or three millions of dollars,” for their “torpor, apathy, and parsimony.”Footnote 112 Carey emphasized that his attempts to persuade manufacturers to support additional protectionist publications had mentioned “every motive that humanity and policy could suggest,” “those motives calculated to excite the energies of liberal and generous minds, in order to arouse from their lethargy those whose fortunes were in a greater or less degree at stake.” But it was all for naught. He had “exhausted the powers of language,” without producing the necessary contributions.Footnote 113
Influence
Contemporaries remarked on Mathew Carey’s influence in policymaking circles. A fellow tariff advocate called the publisher “our Great General,” while others acknowledged that they relied on his publications for information and arguments.Footnote 114 Another credited Carey with bringing Henry Clay around to the protectionist cause, and an opponent described him as Clay’s “Magnus Apollo” on tariff matters.Footnote 115 Clay cited Carey in an 1824 tariff speech, thanking him for the provision of “facts,” but his remarks showed a general emphasis on the tariff as a form of social welfare as well.Footnote 116 He declared that “want of employment, and a consequent reduction of the wages of labour” caused “general distress” and “impoverishment”: “No class suffers more in times of stagnation of business, than the laboring class.”Footnote 117 In 1832 Clay argued that it was “especially for the poor, that I have supported the American System. It affords them profitable employment, and supplies the means of a comfortable subsistence.”Footnote 118
A new generation of Whig protectionists adopted Mathew Carey’s sentimental approach more fully. In 1828 Willard Phillips called for public provision for the poor and lamented the distress brought about by the “derangement of industry.” Although he blamed low duties for such distress, he did not explicitly discuss the tariff itself as a social welfare policy or expression of sensibility.Footnote 119 Twenty-two years later, Phillips described political economy as an account of “the happiness and misery of mankind,” and identified the tariff with civilization and free trade with barbarism.Footnote 120 Free trade represented barbarism because it served as an “inhuman” and “cruel” cause of human suffering, as seen in England’s treatment of Ireland.Footnote 121 Publishing in 1848, Calvin Colton depicted free trade as a form of international “depredation” that benefited strong nations at the expense of the weak. In society, it also gave “the field to him who has the most advantageous position, the most wit, the strongest arm.”Footnote 122 It behooved society to protect those who could not protect themselves, namely “defenceless” (sic) laborers.Footnote 123
In 1852 the Pennsylvania manufacturer and philanthropist Stephen Colwell added an explicitly religious element to the development of sentimental protectionism. Christians, he reminded his readers, should never “lose sight of those multitudes who are least able to protect themselves, and most injuriously, if not ruinously affected by unwise, ignorant, or insufficient legislation. Christianity is by its very constitution the appointed protector of humanity, and being so, in no way can it so befriend the poor or ameliorate their condition as by well-directed efforts to assure the laborer the due reward of his labor.”Footnote 124 In 1862 he excoriated free-trade political economists for “sternly reject[ing] moral considerations” and concluded that the “spirit of trade is but the natural dictate of selfishness placed in positions in which it can prey upon the industry of those who are unable to protect themselves.” These laborers were “fully entitled to proper consideration and constant protection… . The difficulty of affording this protection is no excuse for not attempting it… . No Government can employ any considerable proportion of its population, but every Government can be careful to open and extend the avenues of industry.”Footnote 125
Mathew Carey’s sentimental protectionism found its fullest development in the work of his son, Henry C. Carey. Henry retired at an early age on the proceeds of the family publishing house and devoted himself to social science and advocacy. His early publications called for free trade, but in 1847 he turned to protectionism with the publication of The Past, the Present, and the Future. Footnote 126 In this and a multitude of succeeding works, Henry Carey identified low American tariffs with the cause of a powerful Great Britain seeking to dominate world markets, using its economic might to impose a de facto tax on the world.Footnote 127 He identified British workers’ meager wages as the source of its industries’ low-priced goods. British policymakers seeking foreign markets sacrificed their own people’s well-being for profits. Their approach produced shocking cruelty at home, as seen in the cases of women working in mines and “the excessive overworking of young and feeble operatives,” which together combined to destroy “the feelings of family affection.”Footnote 128 A “merciless” policy toward the infirm and unemployed produced untold suffering and misery as well.Footnote 129 The younger Carey expanded his emphasis on free trade’s cruelty with a series of references to Ireland, “the prey of England.”Footnote 130 “The details of some of the cases are truly touching and heart-rending,” he advised readers.Footnote 131 Quoting from a traveler’s narrative, he provided a vivid description of Irish “squalor and wretchedness.” The Tartars of Crimea were desperately poor, it noted, but “they at least look like human creatures,” whereas skeletal Irishmen lived in rags. Many Irishmen only ate meat on Christmas Day: “Every other day they feed on potatoes… . Now this is inhuman.” The traveler went on to note that such accounts “awaken(ed) the most painful feelings,” and appealed to “friends of humanity” to reflect on the cause of this distress.Footnote 132 Americans advocating free trade risked a similar fate for their working class.Footnote 133 Echoing his father, Henry made repeated use of Brougham’s “stifle in the cradle” metaphor and expanded his dichotomy between civilized tariff protection and barbaric or savage free trade by references to infanticide, in primitive societies as well as among the working class of industrial, free-trade England.Footnote 134 Finally, he proposed that Americans supporting a tariff that provided higher wages and wider employment to workers acted with an enlightened self-interest.Footnote 135 “Happily,” he reasoned, the measure “involves no sacrifice. To raise the value of labour throughout the world, we need only to raise the value of our own.”Footnote 136 Friends of humanity could improve the condition of workers in England, Ireland, and other nations afflicted by British competition by using the tariff to stand up for their own nation’s interests.Footnote 137
Scholars have often identified Phillips, Colton and the younger Carey’s generation of protectionists as authors of one of the principal antebellum American justifications for the tariff. It emphasized the policy’s ability to provide workers with high pay and social mobility, thereby preserving the United States’ exceptional social and political conditions.Footnote 138 Each man indeed contributed to this “free labor” appeal, which expanded upon Mathew Carey’s insistence (in his first argument for the tariff’s impact on American society and politics) that the tariff could preserve Americans’ autonomy. However, they also developed an appeal to sensibility that sought to cast the measure as a social policy reflecting civilization and humanity, and free trade as an expression of what Henry C. Carey called “rapacity, cruelty and perfidy.”Footnote 139 This latter discussion cast American wage workers as a static, vulnerable, indeed “defenceless” (sic), class in need of protection against dangerous market dynamics caused by Great Britain’s dominant position in the world political economy. It asked more comfortable and secure Americans, especially in the North, to use the tariff, which in many cases benefited themselves, to do so.Footnote 140 Both threads of this protectionist discourse began with Mathew Carey’s tariff pamphlets of the early 1820s.
Conclusion
Mathew Carey developed two new arguments for the high tariff. Each discussed the measure as a social policy from the perspective of a significant intellectual tradition in this period’s political life. In the first he argued that a high tariff could preserve a society of republican households ensuring many Americans’ continued autonomy and liberty. In the second he meshed liberalism with a transatlantic sentimental tradition in philosophy and literature. It described a newly emerging class of wage workers as a group exposed to the malign dynamics of international industrial competition and the tariff as a measure able to provide them with more opportunities for work and higher wages than the operation of an untrammeled market would otherwise allow. This second branch of his work drew on his overtly emotional temperament and personal experiences as a victim of cruelty, recipient of what he took to be sympathetic assistance, and provider of assistance to the suffering. It borrowed many of sentimental writers’ favored techniques and themes, but the liberal tradition also informed it. Susan Pearson has argued that nineteenth-century child- and animal-welfare reformers combined sensibility and liberalism by emphasizing that defenseless parties held fundamental rights and governments should expand their scope of activities in order to uphold them.Footnote 141 Carey’s references to sensibility and the state predated those of child- and animal-rights advocates, making him the likely originator of this general rationale for state-building in the United States. He also meshed the sentimental tradition with liberalism by two different means than those they employed.
Mathew Carey’s emphasis on enlightened self-interest became clearest as he struggled to persuade hesitant manufacturers to promote the tariff more aggressively through mass print. It drew on the work of other authors bringing sensibility and liberalism together, including Adam Smith, who insisted that the more generous or humane course of action paid the highest returns. No sacrifice was necessary, Carey reassured his readers. They could help others while they helped themselves. The publisher’s second liberal point of emphasis, reflecting his skepticism of widespread outdoor relief, came into view as he began to maintain that poverty often resulted from economic factors beyond an individual’s control, which caused low pay and joblessness. The method by which he argued the tariff would supply relief reflected this conflicted position. It provided increased opportunities for employment and higher wages, but not the direct payments that seemingly, at least in the cases of able-bodied men, threatened liberal ideals of personal independence. Carey’s sentimental state-building campaign made him an early architect of a new variety of liberalism that brought trade policy together with a concern for social welfare to seek a middle way between outdoor relief and untrammeled laissez-faire, or even laissez-faire with workhouses.
Historians have described the volume of Mathew Carey’s pro-tariff pamphlets as a deluge.Footnote 142 He found a mass audience, although perhaps not quite so large as he would have liked. Within this public he appealed to different groups and interests. The elder Carey arranged his early publications around separate arguments for planters, merchants, farmers, workers, and manufacturers, although he often wrecked his chances of success with the former two parties by abusing them as examples of insensibility. References to the tariff as necessary to preserve autonomous republican households spoke to farmers, artisans and craft workers who were likely anxious about their standing in a time of economic depression, but Carey focused the sentimental portion of his protectionism on an audience of readers in comfortable, secure circumstances, especially manufacturers. His reasoning came together around a central concept and term. He expanded the political significance of the word “protection,” already important in tariff matters, to include a new meaning. Advocates of promoting national interests through favorable balances of trade had long presented the measure as a way in which a state might shield its citizens and itself from damaging foreign competition in the marketplace, but Carey discussed it as a means by which the state might protect workers dependent on wages for their survival from the suffering caused by low remuneration and unemployment, if only enough voters would let it.Footnote 143
In his Autobiographical Sketches, Mathew Carey referred to his attempts to marshal the powers of language on the tariff’s behalf.Footnote 144 Although he only held public office once, the publisher nonetheless became a figure of large political significance, an early example of what Nackenoff and Novkov have recently called a state-builder working outside the state itself, constructing ideological frames for expanded state activity.Footnote 145 Marshaling the power of mass print, he helped to introduce this role to American political life. More specifically, Carey’s second argument for the high tariff made him a pioneer in introducing what these political scientists have described as “emotional appeals” to the work of building public support for additional state activity. Although Statebuilding from the Margins’ emphasis on emotional appeals on behalf of American state-building makes a major contribution to the literature, it offers a limited amount of support, drawn from a single period in American history, for it.Footnote 146 Mathew Carey and subsequent protectionists’ use of sentimental techniques and themes to promote the high tariff offer a particularly strong body of evidence, drawn from earlier eras, to document this important aspect of the American state-building project.
