A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin Verplanck | Page 8

period in our history, held to imply
a right, by laying duties, to favor particular traffics, products or fabrics.
This view of the subject was presented with great skill and force in a
pamphlet entitled "A Letter to Colonel William Drayton, of South
Carolina," published in 1831. Mr. Verplanck was through life a friend
to the freedom of exchange, but he would not use in its favor any

argument which did not seem to him just. His pamphlet was so ably
reasoned that William Leggett said to him, in my presence, "Mr.
Verplanck, you have convinced me; I was, till now, of a different
opinion from yours, but you have settled the question against me. I now
see that whatever may be the injustice of protective duties, Congress
has the constitutional right to impose them."
It was while this controversy was going on that President Jackson
issued his proclamation warning those who resisted the revenue laws
that their resistance was regarded as rebellion, and would be quelled at
the bayonet's point. Mr. Calhoun and his friends were not prepared for
this: indeed, I do not think that in any of his plans for the separate
action of the slave States, he contemplated a resort to arms on either
side. They looked about them to find some plausible pretext for
submission, and this the country was not unwilling to give. It was
generally admitted that the duties on imported goods ought to be
reduced, and Mr. McLane, Secretary of the Treasury, and Mr.
Verplanck, Chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, each drew
up a plan for lessening the burdens of the tariff.
Mr. McLane had just returned from a successful mission to Great
Britain, and had the advantage of considerable personal popularity. He
was a moderate protectionist, and with great pains drew up a scheme of
duties which kept the protection of home manufactures in view. Some
branches of industry, he thought, were so far advanced that they would
bear a small reduction of the duty; others a still larger; others were yet
so weak that they could not prosper unless the whole existing duty was
retained. The scheme was laid before Congress, but met with little
attention from any quarter; the southern politicians regarded it with
scorn, as made up of mere cheese-parings. Mr. Verplanck's plan of a
tariff was more liberal. He was not a protectionist, and his scheme
contemplated a large reduction of duties--as large as it was thought
could possibly be adopted by Congress--yet so framed as to cause as
little inconvenience as might be to the manufacturers. It was thought
that Mr. Calhoun and his friends would readily accept it as affording
them a not ignoble retreat from their dangerous position.

While these projects were before Congress, Mr. Littell, a gentleman of
the free-trade school, and now editor of the "Living Age," drew up a
scheme of revenue reform more thorough than either of the others. It
proposed to reduce the duties annually until, at the end of ten years the
principle of protection, which was what the southern politicians
complained of, should disappear from the tariff, and a system of duties
take, its place which should in no case exceed the rate of twenty per
cent, on the value of the commodity imported. The draft of this scheme
was shown to Mr. Clay: he saw at once that it would satisfy the
southern politicians; he adopted it, brought it before Congress, urged its
enactment in several earnest speeches, and by the help of his great
influence over his party it was rapidly carried through both houses,
under the name of the Compromise Tariff, to the astonishment of the
friends of free-trade, the mill owners, the Secretary of the Treasury, the
Committee of Ways and Means, and, I think, the country at large. I
thought it hard measure for Mr. Verplanck that the credit of this reform
should be taken out of his hands by one who had always been the great
advocate of protective duties; but this was one of the fortunate strokes
of policy which Mr. Clay, when in the vigor of his faculties, had the
skill to make. He afterwards defended the measure as inflicting no
injury upon the manufacturers, and it never appeared to lessen the good
will which his party bore him.
About this time I was witness to a circumstance which showed the
sagacity of Mr. Verplanck in estimating the consequences of political
measures. Mr. Van Buren had been sent by President Jackson as our
Minister to the British Court while Congress was not in session, and the
nomination yet awaited confirmation by the Senate. It led to a long and
spirited debate, in which Mr. Marcy uttered the memorable maxim: "To
the victor belong the spoils of the enemy,"