The opposite economical systems should be designated as those of the nationalistic and cosmopolitan schools. The nationalistic or protective-defensive school … conceives of political economy as applicable only to the political bodies known as nations … The cosmopolitan, or so-called free trade school, ignores the existence of nations … Cobden would gladly see all boundary lines wiped from the map, and regards nations as necessary evils.
The gospel of the modern “historical” and “scientific” school, put forward in Germany sixty years ago by Friedrich List, and preached by his disciples and successors ever since, has, they say, entirely superseded the ancient doctrine which they nickname “Smithsianismus,” and “cosmopolitan Free Trade.”… Friedrich List and his followers declare themselves to be the only worshippers at the shrine of true Free Trade, and that Richard Cobden’s clumsy foot had desecrated her temple, his sacrilegious hand had torn down her veil, and his profane tongue had uttered her mysteries to nations who had for long ages to live and labour before they could be ready for initiation … Round this dogma the Free Trade and Protectionist argument in all countries of the world … has centered.
On a January night in 1846, the triumphal stage was set within Manchester, England’s Free Trade Hall. Never before had so many come to take part in the assemblages of the ACLL (1838–1846), nor had they such reason. After seven years of ravenous agitation, the ACLL could nearly taste its long-sought “cheap loaf.” Sir Robert Peel’s Parliament stood on the verge of overturning the Corn Laws, Britain’s long-standing protective tariffs on foreign grain.
Public demand for the Manchester event was insatiable. Over 8,000 tickets had been purchased within the first hours of availability. More than 5,000 hopeful attendees would be turned away. The Free Trade Hall was filled to capacity, the mad rush at the doors overwhelming. Ladies wore their finest dresses, gentlemen their sharpest suits. The hall gleamed with garish magnificence. Crimson draperies hung upon the platform wall. Crimson panels covered the end walls. The ceiling was white scattered with crimson ornaments and octagonal crimson shields bordered with gold. The gallery balconies were decorated with ornate trelliswork. Over the central iron columns hung a shield, behind which sprung the robed female statue of the Caryatides. A spectator could easily imagine, wrote a Manchester Times reporter at the scene, “that the great leaders of the League movement, fresh from new and yet more successful campaigns than any which they have heretofore achieved, had been met by their grateful fellow-citizens to be honoured with a ‘TRIUMPH.’”Footnote 3
At precisely half past seven, Richard Cobden, John Bright, and the other ACLL leaders entered the hall amid deafening cheers. Cobden, exuberant, was first to speak once the expectant crowd fell still. He observed that the free-trade feeling was spreading rapidly across the globe, especially to the United States: “There is one other quarter in which we have seen the progress of sound principles – I allude to America … I augur … that we are coming to the consummation of our labours.” Loud applause greeted his prophetic vision for Anglo-American free trade.Footnote 4
About six months after this cosmopolitan celebration, a German gentleman – dark-haired, bespectacled, with a receding hairline counterbalanced by a rather heavy beard – arrived in London. He coincidentally witnessed the expiration of the Corn Laws in the Upper House. A few hours later, this same man found himself in the House of Commons to watch Sir Robert Peel’s ministry “receive its death-blow.” A voice suddenly came from behind the German: “Mr. Cobden wishes to make your acquaintance.” The man turned and Cobden, yet energetic at forty-two, with his unruly muttonchops, offered his hand. “Have you really come over to be converted?” asked Cobden. “Of course,” Friedrich List, the German-American protectionist theorist, wryly answered: “And to seek absolution for my sins.”Footnote 5
Unbeknownst to either man, their chance meeting foreshadowed a worldwide ideological conflict over the future of economic globalization. Soon after meeting Cobden, List returned home. Suffering from severe depression, he had forebodingly mentioned to a friend in England just before returning to Germany: “I feel as if a mortal disease were in my frame and I must soon die.” On the morning of November 30, 1846, List went out for a walk. He did not return. His body was found that night, blanketed with freshly fallen snow. He had shot himself.Footnote 6 List’s 1846 depression counterbalanced Cobden’s euphoria. So too would Cobden’s cosmopolitanism meet its match in List’s legacy: the progressive advancement of economic nationalism that survived him in many parts of the globe.
Trade liberalization had certainly taken on an international cast at around this time. The major European powers began instituting freer trade throughout the mid-nineteenth century, picking up even more steam following the signing of the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty between Britain and France. In the United States, the modest 1846 Walker Tariff likewise appeared a promising start, as would further downward tariff revisions in 1857.Footnote 7 As the pro-free-trade New York Evening Post observed on New Year’s Eve 1846, “a great movement of civilized mankind” on behalf of free trade had begun.Footnote 8 But US economic nationalists were skeptical, to put it mildly, of Cobdenism’s promised panacea of free trade, prosperity, and peace. This looming ideological conflict between free-trade cosmopolitanism and economic nationalism was soon to play out on a global stage, but most controversially in the political arena of the United States.
Transatlantic radicals, subscribing to Richard Cobden’s free-trade philosophy, were intimately involved not only with the fight to end the English Corn Laws and American protectionism, but also to abolish American slavery. For them, free men and free trade were far from disparate goals. Conversely, leading American economic nationalists viewed the free-trading plantation South and Free Trade England as respective enslavers of blacks and American manufacturers. These conflicting ideologies would play a critical role in reshaping the Republican party and Anglo-American relations for decades to come, as would rapid American westward expansion. The differences between Cobdenite cosmopolitans and Listian nationalists would, however, remain hidden beneath the Republican party’s political surface until after the Civil War, as both ideological camps rallied to the party’s antislavery banner.
Globalizing economic nationalism and free trade
Friedrich List had come to distrust the cosmopolitanism of orthodox economics after engrossing himself in Alexander Hamilton’s economic philosophy contained in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures (1791) and Daniel Raymond’s Thoughts on Political Economy (1820). List observed how free traders had developed the “cosmopolitical idea of the absolute freedom of the commerce of the whole world.” List pointed out, however, that by focusing on the individual and the universal they had ignored the national.Footnote 9
List believed that these prophets of economic cosmopolitanism were attempting to go about achieving their goals in the wrong order. “It assumes the existence of a universal union and a state of perpetual peace,” confounding effects with causes. The world as it existed disproved their cosmopolitan theories. A precipitous global turn to free trade would be “a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the supremacy of the predominant manufacturing, commercial, and naval power” of Britain. The rest of the world first needed to catch up. This leveling of the playing field, List argued, could only be accomplished through political union, imperial expansion, and economic nationalist policies of internal improvements and infant industrial protectionism.Footnote 10
Building upon Alexander Hamilton’s late-eighteenth-century theorizing, List argued that a country’s economic policies were dependent upon its stage of development, and that imperial expansion could provide much-needed security for industrializing powers like Germany and the United States. England, with a strong home market and a heavily concentrated population, could focus more on manufacturing finer products and on dumping excess goods in foreign markets. The less advanced United States of the 1820s–1840s instead needed a mixed economy of manufacturers and agrarians working side by side, brought ever closer through the publicly and privately subsidized construction of canals and railroads. According to List, Latin American nations were at an even lower developmental stage, still “uninstructed, indolent and not accustomed to many enjoyments”: a lack of “wants” that undercut the cosmopolitan global free-trade vision. At their lower stage of development, these nations needed to focus on exchanging “precious metals and raw produce” for foreign manufactures, and would remain colonially dependent upon more developed manufacturing nations. As to the latter, List argued that America and a unified Germany needed imperial expansion. Aggressive American westward expansion was therefore becoming ever more necessary, with growing numbers of Americans passing “over the Mississippi, next the Rocky Mountains,” to “at last turn their faces to China instead of to England.” According to List, the German states had similarly progressed to the point that, upon unification, they would require the colonial acquisition of the Balkans, Central Europe, Denmark, and Holland (along with the latter’s colonies) to more firmly establish his German Zollverein.Footnote 11
Figure 1.1 Friedrich List (1789–1846)
List thereby enunciated an international system of developmental stages coupled with “infant industrial” protectionism, coercive economic exploitation, and imperial expansion that Anglo-American imperialists in decades to come would work to implement at the local and global level. In 1897, Johns Hopkins political economist Sidney Sherwood would label it “young imperialism,” when national political union was coupled with “a tariff wall of fortification around the imperial boundaries.” And Sherwood laid much of the credit for America’s own “youthful” imperialism at the feet of none other than “the successor of Hamilton,” Friedrich List, whose protectionist doctrine “is rightly regarded as American in its origin.”Footnote 12 This Listian imperialism of “young” industrializing nations – the imperialism of economic nationalism – would become manifest within late-nineteenth-century America.
In contrast to the imperialism of economic nationalism, List argued that England was practicing what historians have since termed the “imperialism of free trade.” The leading industrially advanced island-nation sought to “manufacture for the whole world … to keep the world and especially her colonies in a state of infancy and vassalage … English national economy is predominant; American national economy aspires only to become independent.” List believed that it was unfair to let the English reap the world’s wealth. “In order to allow freedom of trade to operate naturally,” underdeveloped nations needed to first be lifted up through artificial measures so as to match England’s own artificially elevated state of cultivation.Footnote 13 List described one of the most “vulgar tricks of history” as “when one nation reaches the pinnacle of its development it should attempt to remove the ladder by which it had mounted in order to prevent others from following.” He granted that universal free trade was the ultimate ideal, but first the world’s infant industrial economies would need a combination of private and public investment, protectionism, and imperial expansion in order to catch up.Footnote 14
List’s protectionist prescription for the perceived pandemic of Victorian free-trade ideology found wide-ranging patients. Listian disciples spread and multiplied throughout the globe in subsequent decades. List’s desire for a German Zollverein, or customs union, would fall out of favor from the 1840s to the 1860s, but would be revived and fully implemented by the 1880s. List also became a source of inspiration for imperial protectionists in England, Australia, and Canada in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 15 Likewise, Japanese economists “imbibed” List’s economic elixir following various Japanese tours of Europe in the 1870s and the translation into Japanese of List’s work in the 1880s.Footnote 16 Russia’s finance minister during the late-nineteenth century, S. Y. De Witte, would also look to List for inspiration when he reformed Russian finances and encouraged the construction of a trans-Siberian railway. Anglophobic French protectionists similarly leaned upon List’s theories.Footnote 17 His work in turn received an avid audience among late-nineteenth-century South Asian anticolonial nationalists, to whom American and German industrial ascendency merely confirmed the value of List’s work.Footnote 18 His writings thus found a welcome global audience, especially among modernizers beyond Western Europe.
List’s economic philosophy would germinate first within the antebellum United States, where it would flourish by century’s end. Exiled from Germany in 1825, he had fled to the United States, and was indebted to the earlier protectionist principles of Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Raymond, and Mathew Carey, the famous Philadelphia publisher, former president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts, and father of Henry Charles Carey (1793–1879). List would become a key player in the development of nineteenth-century Philadelphian protectionist thought.Footnote 19 By the end of the century, his influence would culminate in the creation of “the German-American school of economics.”Footnote 20
List became a leading defender of the American System of economic nationalism. It was fair to say, observed the editors of Boston’s news organ the Protectionist in 1919, “that List the economist was ‘made in America.’” In the fall of 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette introduced his friend List first to Mathew Carey and then to Henry Clay. After making a good first impression, List thereafter frequently gave protectionist speeches at conventions organized by Clay’s friends. In the early decades of the century, Clay himself would become an arch-proponent of the “American System” of internal improvements and protectionism and would come to see free trade as but a new way for Great Britain to recolonize the United States through commercial domination.Footnote 21
List exerted a great deal of influence not only on Clay’s American System but also on Pennsylvania’s progressive economic nationalist philosophy. In 1826, List became a newspaper editor in Pennsylvania, where he gained national recognition for his defense of the American System. He took part in the development of coal and railways in the area, and became a propagandist for the Pennsylvania Society of Manufactures. His letters to its vice president, Charles Ingersoll, were published in the United States as Outlines of American Political Economy (1827). List’s published letters were then distributed to American congressmen later that year, influencing the 1828 tariff debate, and were at hand to be read by Mathew Carey’s young and intellectually hungry son, Henry. Some scholars have even speculated that the timing of List’s protectionist publications and the 1828 passage of the “Tariff of Abominations” was more than coincidental.Footnote 22
After List’s death in 1846, Henry Carey would take up List’s forward-looking approach to the American System. Carey would become Pennsylvania’s “Ajax of protectionism,” a man well known for his imposing height, penetrating gaze, propensity for obscenities, and intellectual intimidation.Footnote 23 In his younger days, Carey had been a devout disciple of Adam Smith. Like List, Carey came to consider free trade an ultimate ideal for any country, but only after the proper implementation of economic nationalist policies – even England, he suggested, had jumped too far ahead when it abolished the Corn Laws.Footnote 24
Carey began enunciating his progressive Listian nationalist creed by the late 1840s, noting that “war is an evil, and so are tariffs for protection,” but “both may be necessary, and both are sometimes necessary.” He had expressed similar sentiments to abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in 1847: “Nobody can admire free trade more than I do … I never in my life was more surprised than to find myself brought round to be a protectionist. It is all wrong – as much so as any other sort of war – but it is a necessary act of self defence.” A temporary period of protectionism was needed, he suggested, and then the world might obtain free trade and peace.Footnote 25
Carey’s opposition to free-trade cosmopolitanism echoed List’s. Carey thought that the country’s vast expanse of available lands and a protective tariff were the twin panaceas to solve American economic ills. Protectionism was a cure-all that would increase morality and diversify labor productivity, invigorate the southern economy, and someday free the slaves. Like List, Carey also believed that the protective tariff remained essential only so long as American industries remained in infancy. In proper Listian fashion, by the 1870s Carey would even tout restrictive trade reciprocity – a key US component of the imperialism of economic nationalism – alongside protective tariffs to aid in US regional economic integration.Footnote 26
Carey saw the South’s domestic slavery as but one manifestation of human bondage; the southern cotton growers themselves, with no home market to speak of, were slaves to the global cotton market. He expressed his dismay to Charles Sumner that antislavery men could simultaneously claim to be free traders. For Carey, free trade meant economic subservience to England. Britain wanted the people of the world to “have but one market in which to sell their produce, and one in which to buy their cloth linen – paying what she pleases for the one and charging what she pleases for the other. This is precisely what the planter desires his negro to do.” Carey felt that free trade and southern slavery were therefore two sides of the same coin: “The one is just as much slavery as the other.”Footnote 27 He believed that slavery and premature free trade were interconnected, an antislavery line of argument that postbellum American protectionists would continue to utilize. He thus came to view the British Empire’s advocacy of free trade not only as an impediment to American maturation, but an evil – a threat to America’s home industries and economic freedom.
Carey found a sympathetic national outlet for his Anglophobic brand of progressive economic nationalism. From around 1850 to 1857, he became the economic consultant of Horace Greeley, the editor of the widely disseminated New York Tribune.Footnote 28 Carey was now able to promote his Listian nationalist ideology as an editorial writer for Philadelphia’s North American and the popular Tribune.Footnote 29 In recognition of his newfound influence, the Tribune’s European correspondent Karl Marx described Carey at that time as “the only American economist of importance.” He thereafter joined the Republican party and helped shape its protectionist platform, and was often consulted on economic matters by Lincoln, Lincoln’s treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, and numerous other influential Republican politicians.Footnote 30 Carey’s progressive Listian nationalism had thus found a sympathetic press and an attentive American readership. So too did List’s National System of Political Economy (1841), especially once Carey’s close friend Stephen Colwell solicited an American translation in the 1850s.Footnote 31
Listian nationalism could not claim a monopoly upon American economic thought. Richard Cobden’s cosmopolitan ideology was also finding American accommodation. Like List’s doctrine, Cobdenism spread rapidly, making its way across the English Channel and spreading to France, Italy, Germany, Greece, and Spain during the 1840s. By the 1860s, Cobdenism would be propagated as far afield as Egypt, Siam, China, and Australia.Footnote 32 But Cobden’s cosmopolitan ideology enlisted the most international recruits across the Atlantic, from within America’s rapidly industrializing northeastern states – and from among the country’s most radical abolitionist reformers.
Cobdenism’s mid-century American arrival introduced a new free-trade tradition. Studies of nineteenth-century American economic thought have nevertheless tended to associate the US free-trade tradition solely with Jeffersonianism.Footnote 33 Yet Jeffersonianism represented a free-trade ideology based primarily upon agricultural production, Anglophobia, and a doctrine that had become tied to the defense of the southern slave system by mid-century.Footnote 34 Cobdenism instead took root within northeastern financial and manufacturing centers like New York and Boston, and its first American disciples were Anglophiles and abolitionists. Cobdenism was a very different free-trade ideology than that of Jeffersonianism.
Cobden’s own classical liberal belief in the benign and universalizing principles of free trade, inspired by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), contained a strong moral message that struck a familiar chord in transatlantic abolitionist ears.Footnote 35 Cobden believed that international commerce, when ultimately unfettered of the shackles of protectionism, would bring with it “the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world.” He had faith that the tools of globalization – among them free trade, cheap postage, and steamboats – would one day make the world so integrated and interdependent that war would become obsolete.Footnote 36
US Cobdenites, imbued with a similar moral underpinning, numbered among the mid-century leaders of the transatlantic free-trade and abolitionist movements. America’s northeastern Cobdenites took inspiration from the seven-year struggle and ultimate success of England’s ACLL, and quickly became cosmopolitan thorns in the side of not only the slave-ridden Jeffersonian, but also the northeastern Hamiltonian and Madisonian, nationalist political traditions. For American Cobdenite radicals, free trade became entwined with free labor, free men, and free soil. Following the Civil War and the abolition of southern slavery, and ever aware of the burgeoning strength of American manufactures and the mounting need for foreign markets, much of their attention would turn to establishing free trade in the ACLL tradition and to righting the corruptive influences emanating from within the postbellum Republican party.
So how did Cobdenism take root in the Northeast, the heartland of mid-century American industrialism and protectionism? The Victorian free-trade tradition spread directly from Cobden, Bright, and other leaders of the ACLL to their radical counterparts in the United States. They did so by explicitly tying free trade and free labor together. Cobden asked his transatlantic disciples to “remember what has been done in the Anti-Slavery question. Where is the difference between stealing a man and making him labour, on the one hand, or robbing voluntary labourers, on the other, of the fruits of their labour?”Footnote 37 The ACLL would even begin replacing “repeal” with “abolition,” as the latter contained more effective transatlantic resonance. The ACLL leadership also made sure to present their free-trade movement in universalist religious and humanitarian terms to transatlantic abolitionist correspondents. Cobden was quite clear on this point, urging the ACLL to appeal to “the religious and moral feelings … the energies of the Christian World must be drawn forth by the remembrance of Anti-Slavery.”Footnote 38 African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s news organ noted as much, recalling how the “Anti-Corn Law movement” had “but one plank in its platform, and that was taken from the system of Christianity.”Footnote 39 Personal friendships and a shared sense of moral economy directly led to the transatlantic germination of Cobdenism.
Added to this, the US and British economies had also become ever more interdependent throughout the nineteenth century. Through free trade, Anglo-American Cobdenites hoped to speed up this integrative process in order to cultivate greater prosperity and peace. Already, from 1820 to 1860 almost half of US exports went to Britain, and British goods made up around 40 percent of American imports. By 1860, Britain imported 80 percent of its raw cotton from the South, and nearly all US textile imports came from Britain. British and American commercial policies were thus indelibly linked when Cobdenism was exported to American shores.Footnote 40 US Cobdenites believed that free trade would link the two countries even further, to their mutual benefit. At a personal, moral, and material level, Cobdenites believed the United States required free trade.
For transatlantic Cobdenites, free trade and free labor were far from disparate goals.Footnote 41 Yet recent work has focused instead on the willingness of the ACLL to work with the slaveholding South for reciprocal tariffs: that by the mid-1840s the middle-class leaders of the ACLL had “subverted anti-slavery’s moral authority.” So, too, did leading Southerners encourage this perceived connection between transatlantic trade liberalization and the decline of antislavery sentiment.Footnote 42 But why, then, were the first Anglo-American Cobdenites a regular who’s who of radical abolitionists? As Richard Huzzey illustrates, the British antislavery movement had not fallen away by the 1840s. It had splintered rather than declined, fractured rather than faltered. Though perhaps not “a nation of abolitionists,” Free Trade England would remain an antislavery nation.Footnote 43 America’s own first Cobdenites accordingly included some of the era’s leading abolitionists, with close ties to British abolitionist free traders.
George Thompson, among a handful of other British abolitionists from the 1830s to the 1850s, was sent to the United States to link abolitionism and free trade together, and controversially so. Thompson was militant – some thought him mad – in his abolitionist quest. He even attempted to smuggle slaves out of Missouri in the 1830s, landing him a stint in prison. At his close friend William Lloyd Garrison’s Boston home could be found a collection of handbills that had once been scattered about the city’s streets, offering a $100 reward “for the notorious British Emissary, George Thompson, dead or alive.”Footnote 44 Within this toxic antebellum environment, firebrand Thompson toured the United States, giving hundreds of speeches emphasizing the moral connection between free trade and abolitionism.Footnote 45 While feared and hated by many, he was held in high esteem among the more radical members of the American abolitionist movement, who often took their cue from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in England – so much so that Anglophobic southern congressmen opined that northern abolitionists were merely mouthpieces of their British counterparts. With the support of their American abolitionist contacts, by the early 1840s ACLL members saw the possibility of an internationalization of free trade, beginning with the abolition of the Corn Laws “as a key to advances” in America. Although not all-pervasive, the transatlantic abolitionist cause had become intimately associated with that of Victorian free trade.Footnote 46
Massachusetts’s Reverend Joshua Leavitt played a key role in tying American antislavery to Cobdenism. From the late 1830s onward, this onetime Whig, leader of the antislavery Liberty party, and editor of the abolitionist Emancipator, came to see that overturning the Corn Laws in England could shift British trade from the importation of southern slave-grown cotton to western free-grown wheat. “Our Corn Law project,” Leavitt wrote to Liberty party presidential nominee James Birney in 1840, “looks larger to me since my return after seeing the very land where wheat grows …. We must go for free trade; the voting abolitionists can all be brought to that … and the corn movement will give us the West.”Footnote 47 English abolitionist and ACLL leader Joseph Sturge, upon his American arrival in 1841, made sure to contact Leavitt to inform him of the status of the Corn Law agitation in England.Footnote 48 With Sturge’s added insight, Leavitt discovered that John Bright and a growing number of British manufacturers, weary of their dependence on southern slave-grown cotton, desired to turn instead to northern markets to sell their finished cotton cloth, but were sorely hampered in this endeavor owing to Corn Law restrictions and American protectionism.Footnote 49 According to his biographer, Leavitt hoped to move the antislavery movement into “independent political action” and “pounced on this antisouthern and antislavery dimension of the British league’s message.” Leavitt also denounced the English people (and by proxy the Corn Laws) for importing the products of slave labor while blocking staples produced by free labor from the American North and West throughout the early 1840s. Leavitt went so far as to propose that the people of the free states set up their own separate embassy in England in order to counteract the influence of southern slaveholders.Footnote 50
Leavitt, with his newfound transatlantic inspiration, focused much of his attention upon overturning the Corn Laws. He did so by developing an American repeal strategy that would aid British manufacturers and northern farmers (suffering from scarce credit following the banking crisis of 1837), all while striking “one of the heaviest blows at slavery” by allowing the duty-free import of northern wheat to repay their foreign debts.Footnote 51 Leavitt then beseeched the Senate Committee on Agriculture to call for the repeal of the Corn Laws. He contended in 1840 that an antislavery American government might work toward such a repeal. “Next to the abolition of slavery,” this was “the greatest question.”Footnote 52 Leavitt’s Liberty party also sent Ohio’s John Curtis to Britain to support the ACLL in connecting Corn Law repeal with the abolition of American slavery. Leavitt thereafter presented to Congress another request for ending the Corn Law and for increasing northern trade with Britain by replacing the protectionist 1842 tariff with a tariff for revenue only.Footnote 53 He also began discussing the possibilities of Anglo-American free trade with English abolitionists while attending the 1843 antislavery convention in London. He then went on the ACLL tour circuit with Cobden and Bright, during which Leavitt claimed that a conspiracy existed between southern slaveholders and British aristocrats in opposing the Corn Law repeal.Footnote 54
Leavitt reinforced his transatlantic ties through his correspondence with his English abolitionist friends and through the creation of American anti-Corn Law organizations. He encouraged his English correspondents to think of American interests alongside their own, letters that were then published in the Anti-Corn Law League Circular in England. He also began establishing anti-Corn Law societies in the American Northwest and New York. Although in doing so he gained the disfavor of protectionists within the Whig party, his efforts provided further transatlantic moral support for the ACLL and strengthened Leavitt’s connection to Cobdenism.Footnote 55
Abolitionist firebrands Leavitt and Thompson were not alone in bringing the ACLL’s free-trade fight to American shores. A variety of other American abolitionist free traders also took lessons from the ACLL. As W. Caleb McDaniel has recently noted, women of the ACLL staged Free Trade bazaars, giving direct and indirect encouragement to American abolitionists. Garrisonian pacifist Henry Clarke Wright similarly developed close ties with the ACLL, and the antislavery and free-trade work of Harriet Martineau fell within this transatlantic network, as well.Footnote 56
William Cullen Bryant, former Barnburner Democrat, Free Soiler, poet, abolitionist, uncompromising free trader, and editor of the New York Evening Post, attended ACLL meetings in London during the 1840s. In admiration for Cobden, Bryant would afterward go on to edit the American edition of Cobden’s Political Writings in 1865. He would also become an early leader of the subsequent Gilded Age American free-trade movement.Footnote 57
Arch-abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was heavily influenced by George Thompson and other British free traders. As one abolitionist (and protectionist) friend, Giles Stebbins, recollected, “Wm. Lloyd Garrison and others of the abolitionists whom I greatly respected, inclined to free trade; for their English anti-slavery friends were free-traders.” In later years, Garrison became a member of, and corresponded frequently with, the Cobden Club upon its creation in 1866, avowing himself “a free-trader to an illimitable extent.”Footnote 58 For him, free trade was but the next step to freeing mankind from bondage.
The humanitarian and religious antislavery rhetoric likewise entered the free-trade language of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, himself a convert from protectionism to Cobdenism, and famous in England for his transatlantic tours. In the years to come, he would beseech American free traders to employ “the same energy and the same agitation” of the antislavery struggle toward the burgeoning American free-trade movement. He hoped that he would live long enough “to induce the American people to favor the unshackling of intercourse between nation and nation.”Footnote 59
The “American Carlyle” Ralph Waldo Emerson was also involved in the abolitionist and free-trade movements.Footnote 60 Emerson first met Cobden in 1847 at a meeting of the Manchester Athenaeum, where he heard Cobden give an “eloquent” address, spurring Emerson to comment upon the shared traits “of that Anglo-Saxon race” that had “secured for it the scepter of the globe.” He would continue to meet with Cobden on his English visits for years to come. During one such visit in 1848, Emerson wrote to his friend Henry David Thoreau of the Free Trade Banquet held the previous night, where he “heard the best man in England make perhaps his best speech.” Cobden, “the cor cordis … educated by his dogma of Free Trade … as our abolitionists have been by their principle …. It was quite beautiful, even sublime.”Footnote 61 Emerson’s Cobdenite sentiments even found outlet in his literary musings. In his 1857 “Concord Ode,” for example, he would beseech his country to “bid the broad Atlantic roll, a ferry of the free.”Footnote 62 Emerson, along with many of these first-generation Cobdenites, would exude some of his own dogmatic energy when he helped create the American Free Trade League (AFTL) in 1865.
Charles Sumner maintained perhaps the closest mid-century correspondence with Cobden and his man-at-arms, John Bright. “Conscience” Whig Sumner left that party in 1848 for the antislavery Free Soil party, before becoming an influential member of the Radical Republicans in the late 1850s. Sumner first met Cobden in 1838 during a trip to England, and they developed a friendship in the decades leading up to and during the Civil War. Not coincidentally, Sumner’s protectionist convictions began to soften during this period, even as he came around to Amasa Walker and Richard Cobden’s condemnation of international war. Henry Carey would thereafter try without success to turn Sumner away from his Cobdenite convictions. Sumner’s unwillingness to shift from his Cobdenite beliefs caused Carey to beseech him one final time in 1852 – if only Sumner could just satisfy himself “that protection is the real and the only road to freedom of trade and freedom in the fate of labour,” and let go of “British free trade which leads everywhere to the subjugation of man.”Footnote 63 Sumner instead became a strong advocate of Cobden’s quest for “Universal Peace.” In an inspirational 1849 speech before an audience of Free Soilers, for example, Sumner urged them to remember how the ACLL had successfully brought together Tories, Whigs, and Radicals to repeal the monopolistic Corn Laws. As economic historian Stephen Meardon notes, “The equation of tariff barriers with ‘monopoly,’ and their repeal with ‘Freedom’ … was the rhetoric of free trade. More to the point, in the broader context of peace and anti-slavery in which Sumner spoke, it was the rhetoric of Cobdenism.”Footnote 64
America’s first Cobdenites were thus an imposing group of abolitionists with strong transatlantic ties.Footnote 65 Long after Cobden’s death in1865, many of these American radicals would maintain correspondence with the Cobden Club’s leadership, and continue to work toward bringing about Cobden’s universal vision of free trade, prosperity, and peace. These northern subscribers to Cobdenism were the vanguard of the Victorian American free-trade movement. William Freehling suggests that Jeffersonian free trade and slavery had become “intermeshed” in the South by the time of the Nullification Crisis (1832–1833). By the 1840s, so too were Cobdenism and abolitionism enmeshed within the American North.Footnote 66
Free trade, the Corn Laws, and westward expansion
The American arrival of Cobdenite ideology was closely linked not only to abolitionism, but also to connecting the ACLL with American westward expansion, a seemingly unexpected pairing. From the 1830s, the ACLL had sought to undo the British protectionist system. England’s industrialization delivered with it a double punch of prosperity and poverty. The latter attribute, argued Richard Cobden, had only been compounded by the English aristocracy’s militaristic atavism and the well-to-do landowners’ selfish adherence to protective tariffs. Such protectionism was exemplified by the Corn Laws, which for so long had artificially raised the price of bread stemming from the laws’ protective tariffs on imported foreign grain. The ACLL therefore had clear cause for celebration in 1846 when the Corn Laws were repealed.Footnote 67 At long last, the promised “cheap loaf” proved politically palatable, as did Britain’s ensuing free-trade policies. The era of the so-called Pax Britannica had arrived, yet with it came deteriorating Anglo-American relations arising from US westward expansion.
More than timing linked the rise of Free Trade England and American westward expansion. Just as Britain was turning to free trade, across the Atlantic, Jeffersonian Democratic President James K. Polk declared war against Mexico, marking the antebellum apogee of nationwide Manifest Destiny – the patriotic desire to expand the reach of the United States to every edge of North America. Antiwar Whigs tended to view the war with Mexico as an overt attempt to extend the territory of the southern “slave power.” In response, as historian Sam Haynes paints the scene, western and southern expansionists tarred “the Whigs with a British brush.” Antebellum Anglophobia had become a reliable “multipurpose bête noire.”Footnote 68
Anglophobia – defined as fear, distrust, or hatred of the British – was a multifaceted psychological condition that permeated American politics from the American Revolution onward, and remained prevalent even after Anglo-American rapprochement at the nineteenth century’s fin de siècle. From the country’s founding, southern Jeffersonians both feared British antislavery agitation and disliked their own continued reliance upon the British market for their agricultural exports. Many northern manufacturers instead feared Britain’s pronounced advantages in the way of industrial production. And all sections generally remained wary of the British Empire’s geopolitical presence in North America. More than a few Northerners and Southerners even set out to create a unique national identity in an effort to differentiate the fledgling American states from their English colonial heritage. While a strong vein of Anglophilia could be found among some northeastern elites, Anglophobia proved to be an effective and malleable tool for gaining electoral advantage; for creating a new sense of national identification that buttressed the American System of protectionism; and for further justifying American westward expansion.Footnote 69
The decision for war against Mexico stemmed in no small part from an American geopolitical fear of British antislavery and annexationist agitation in Texas and California, followed closely by rumors that the British would support Mexico with men and money if a quarrel were to break out.Footnote 70 US Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker warned that a pro-British Texas would lead to a slave exodus from the South and would give the British Empire a convenient base from which to invade the Mississippi delta. Perhaps in the hope of striking a sympathetic chord with Whig protectionists, others suggested that the British might even use the recently minted Texas Republic to bypass US tariff schedules. As a complement to this British antislavery and free-trade fearmongering, still other expansionists would dangle the tantalizing possibility of accessing Pacific-rim markets – that the new territories would open up the western coastline of North and South America, as well as the markets of Russia, India, and China, for American exports.Footnote 71
The war with Mexico also contained the problematic promise of acquiring massive tracts of new American territory. Would these new lands ultimately become free or slave states? This difficult question surrounding slavery’s expansion fertilized the dormant seeds of sectionalism and secession: seeds that would sprout into Civil War in 1861. Yet even though slavery monopolized the era’s political scene like no other issue in American history, the influence of Victorian free trade also reverberated throughout antebellum US foreign relations and domestic politics, from the Oregon boundary dispute to the formation of the Republican party.Footnote 72
During this era of massive economic growth and transatlantic interconnectivity, some paternalistic Listian nationalist intellectuals in the United States also were slowly coming to accept that American infant industries would one day reach adolescence and adulthood – and that reciprocal trade and expanding foreign markets would in the near future not only become desirable, but necessary. They also viewed Britain’s newly christened free-trade imperialism as a formidable stumbling block to proper American industrial maturation.Footnote 73
Such Anglophobic sentiments had already begun to spill over into international politics stemming from an Anglo-American boundary dispute surrounding the Oregon territory in the early 1840s, a conflict commonly remembered by Polk’s 1844 expansionist presidential campaign slogan “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!” The pro-free-trade New York Evening Post even reported that some conspiratorial protectionists in Congress and the Whig press were considering “making the apprehension of war a pretext for spending large amounts of money in military and naval preparations,” thereby creating enough new expenditures to justify the high tariff of 1842. The paper also speculated with less cynicism that there was now the possibility of combining the Oregon boundary question with Anglo-American free trade. A “free trade tariff on both sides will settle the matter quickly,” the Post predicted in late January, “and give us something better to do than fighting.” Such speculation received encouragement from the ACLL, with one of its member’s expressing the hope that, now that England was embracing free trade, “if your President can only carry out his sensible trade views, the extended intercourse between the two countries will be the surest guarantee for peace.” Treasury Secretary Walker, temporarily putting aside his own expansionist impulse for the sake of tariff reform, had noted in his 1845 annual Treasury report that if the US tariff were reduced, “the party opposed to the Corn Laws of England would soon prevail,” leading to Anglo-American free trade. Even as Whig antiwar politicians were being labeled pro-British, protectionist Whig opponents of Polk were quick to portray him as a paid British agent, drawing conspiratorial connections between British industrialists, free-trade propaganda, and Polk’s liberal stance on the tariff.Footnote 74
At the same time, the British were also beginning to take notice of the bountiful wheat crop and the expansive agricultural development of the American West. Discussion arose on both sides of the Atlantic as to whether these vast western territories might become Britain’s next breadbasket, especially after the onset of a severe harvest shortage throughout the United Kingdom in 1845, culminating in the horrific Great Famine of Ireland (1845–1852).Footnote 75 Alongside potentially solving the food shortage through increased importation of American wheat, British free traders believed that repeal of the Corn Laws would create such strong commercial connections between the British Empire and the United States that future Anglo-American hostilities like the boundary issue would disappear. British free traders’ desire for western wheat as part of the promised “cheap loaf,” alongside a general British turn toward internationalism, strengthened repeal and laid the groundwork for a peaceable solution to the Oregon boundary dispute.Footnote 76
Yet support for repeal was far from universal. American protectionists preferred fearmongering to tariff reductions. Baltimore’s protectionist news organ Niles’ Weekly Register speculated that the Peel government would use the Oregon dispute to sway recalcitrant ministers toward repeal, and that American trade liberalization would mean that the United States “may again be courted into colonial reliance … the glorious old colonies are coming back to a proper dependence upon British manufactures.”Footnote 77 For some, free trade appeared to be bringing its promised panacea of peace through more amicable Anglo-American relations, but for others it also carried with it the possibility of British free-trade imperialism in the United States.
Cobdenite free-trade agitation in favor of Anglo-American rapprochement also met staunch opposition from some Anglophobic Jeffersonians hoping to undermine the growing transatlantic abolitionist–Cobdenite alliance. In 1842, Duff Green, a southern agent, was sent to Europe with the mission of cutting the ties between northern abolitionists and the ACLL so as to maintain the current southern–western free-trade alliance in American politics. He even claimed to have discovered a vast British conspiracy involving the repeal of the Corn Laws, British emancipation agitation in Texas, and the destruction of US commerce. Green’s allegations caused alarm back home.Footnote 78
Nor did North American prosperity immediately follow transatlantic trade liberalization. In the short term, at least, the reality of Corn Law repeal meant that Canada and the United States now had to compete directly with the agricultural exports of the so-called pauper labor of Europe.Footnote 79 This newfound economic competition was compounded by the realization that the United States had lost its backdoor trade route through Canada, a British colony that, until repeal in 1846, had been receiving preferential commercial treatment from England. Owing to the sudden increase in European competition, agricultural prices in North America fell. By 1849, this sharp agricultural price decline produced an economic depression in Canada, and a corresponding demand from Montreal’s merchant community for American annexation of Canada. Alongside placating this annexationist sentiment, avoiding the era’s seemingly endless Canadian–American fisheries disputes, and the loss of Canada’s preferential treatment with England, the closing of this American backdoor trade route thereafter played a sizeable role in the development of US–Canadian reciprocity in 1854. Protectionist Whigs like Daniel Webster and some western farmers – the latter still seething over the Oregon issue – instead believed that the weak increase in US wheat exports and declining agricultural prices following repeal only strengthened the protectionist home-market argument.Footnote 80
The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, the passage of the low US Walker Tariff, and the peaceful settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute also did little to diminish American Anglophobia. All of these events held out the possibility for a new era of transatlantic trade liberalization and closer Anglo-American relations.Footnote 81 But these events and their aftermath also demonstrated that Anglophobia and tense Anglo-American relations were anything but dissipating. The ideological dividing wall between free traders and economic nationalists was already proving to be formidable.
So how did America’s estranged free traders and protectionists come to lie together within the Republican party? Put simply, a radical minority of northeastern Cobdenites initially gave their support to the Republican party – a party made up predominantly of former Whig protectionists – owing to the fledgling party’s ideology of free labor, free soil, and antislavery. The Republican party’s minority of Cobdenite free-trade radicals, drawing upon the ACLL’s leadership and success, hoped to bring the same promised panacea of free trade and peace to American shores. As Frederick Douglass’ Paper described it, the American Cobdenites’ proposed Republican doctrine was “Free Men, Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Trade.”Footnote 82 The Whig-Republican supporters of the “American System” – revamped by Friedrich List, Henry Clay, and Henry Carey – would instead seek to move the Republican party away from antislavery and toward a platform of protective tariffs and government-subsidized internal improvements. With a tenuous thread and needle, antebellum antislavery stitched the Republican party together. Free traders and protectionists in the North and West had thus found a common cause and tenuous party loyalty under the broad Republican banner of antislavery, a northern–western alliance that was buttressed by the construction of Great Lakes canals and railroad lines.Footnote 83 When American Cobdenite desires for freer trade increasingly became a postbellum Republican pipedream, however, the party’s precarious free-trade–protectionist alliance would begin to wear. As examined in subsequent chapters, upon the Civil War’s conclusion and the manumission of southern slaves, the tempestuous tariff issue would tear this fair-weather friendship apart.
Moreover, the Panic of 1857 would have lasting reverberations, in both the ante- and postbellum Republican party. The moderate Democratic revenue tariffs of 1846 and 1857 appeared to have indicated a national move toward a policy of trade liberalization: a move that had partially placated both southern Jeffersonians and northeastern Cobdenites. But the low tariffs also earned the ire of Henry Carey and protectionist politicians from the infant industrial Midwest and Northeast. Economic nationalist ire was heightened following the onset of the 1857 economic panic, which coincided closely with the passage of the low 1857 tariff. The timing may have been coincidental, but it revitalized the Whig-Republican argument that only protectionism could return prosperity, stability, and high wages to the American laborer. This line of argument garnered further protectionist support in the West and generally intensified prevailing sectional views.Footnote 84 Carey and his Listian acolytes would continue to use subsequent economic panics in seeking to make the Republican party “a protective party en bloc.”Footnote 85
The Republican party’s Cobdenite minority unsuccessfully sought to counter this Whig-Republican protectionist insurgency. They even tried to include a “tariff for revenue only” plank into the new Republican party platform. In 1857, John Bigelow wrote to William Cullen Bryant that Horace Greeley was instead “trying very hard to get up a clamor for protection” by “hammering at the Tariff of ’46 and the bill of last winter as the cause of all our troubles constantly.” Bryant’s Evening Post thereafter charged that there was a conspiracy underway “to pervert the Republican party to the purposes of the owners of coal and iron mines” through high tariff legislation. Charles Francis Adams, Sr. similarly warned that “the old Whig side” was attempting “to stuff in the protective tariff as a substitute for the slave question.”Footnote 86 As the outbreak of the Civil War neared, the Republican party’s free-trade–protectionist political alliance was already showing strain.
Conclusion
The burgeoning struggle between Listian nationalism and Cobdenite cosmopolitanism over the political economic course of American economic expansion thus coincided with Manifest Destiny’s mid-century westward push and England’s own turn to free trade. Contrary to the common narrative that antebellum free trade only went hand in hand with southern Jeffersonianism and slavery, a study of the arrival of Cobdenism illuminates how Anglo-American free trade and abolitionism had also become entwined in the Northeast. American abolitionist free traders, the country’s first Cobdenites, worked closely with their British counterparts in the overthrow of both the English Corn Laws and American slavery. At the same time, forward-looking economic nationalists within the Republican party sought instead an aggressive protectionist path for American expansion. The newly formed Republican party’s rally around antislavery may have temporarily overshadowed the Republican coalition’s conflicting free-trade and protectionist ideologies, but a culmination of events would soon usher in an ideological, territorial, and racial conflagration that would reshape the transatlantic political economic landscape for decades to come: especially once the postbellum Republican party began turning its main focus from antislavery to protectionism.
The Republican reorientation toward infant industrial protectionism began in 1860 with the proposal of a protective tariff bill by Vermont’s Republican congressman, Justin Morrill, with the aid and encouragement of Henry Carey as well as more orthodox home-market protectionists. Georgia politician Robert Toombs certainly misread the situation in November 1860 at the Georgia secession convention, however, when he stated: “The free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists. The result of this coalition was the infamous Morrill bill.” Rather, the proposed bill had backing from Midwesterners and Pennsylvanians, as it offered protection to wool, iron, and coal, among other industries. But opposition arose to the tariff not only in the South, but also in the Northeast, particularly among Republican Cobdenites.Footnote 87
However unintentionally, the Morrill Tariff further alienated Republican Cobdenites from the party’s protectionist majority. The demands and the lobbying tactics of the protectionists would prove more than a match for the country’s cross-sectional free-trade opposition, especially following the secession of various southern states, whose Jeffersonian congressmen might otherwise have voted against the bill. Hoping to woo voters in protectionist Pennsylvania, the Republican party majority ignored the northeastern free-trade rumblings of dissent and fell in behind the high tariff bill. Morrill wrote in April 1861, two months after the tariff’s passage: “Our Tariff Bill is unfortunate in being launched at this time as it will be made the scape-goat of all difficulties.”Footnote 88 Morrill’s prescience was remarkable.
