But all such affiliations
and truces were only temporary. Sooner or later the combat was bound
to be renewed between North and South, between peoples alienated by
inheritance, temperament, and products.
Contemporaneous with the debate on national surveys for improvements,
a spirited debate arose on the tariff. It soon showed an unfortunate
tendency to North and South sectional lines, especially when compared
with the post-war-tariff debate of eight years before. Protection in
those intervening years had begun to assume a sectional aspect, although
as yet only in a formative state. The Southern people had begun to
realise that their slave labour was not applicable to factories, and
that they must depend for their goods upon Europe and upon the Northern
States. Under the theory that the consumer pays the duty, the burden
was thought to fall equally upon all parts of the country, unless the
duty should grow into a discrimination upon one kind of goods or those
consumed exclusively in one section. Massachusetts was singular among
Northern States, being opposed to this tariff measure of 1824 because
of the high duty on canvas and other ship-building materials.
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