Copyright

by Marc-William Palen

2011

The Dissertation Committee for Marc-William Palen Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

The Conspiracy of : Anglo-American Relations and the Ideological Origins of American Globalization, 1846-1896

Committee:

H. W. Brands, Supervisor

Francis Gavin

A. G. Hopkins

Mark Lawrence

Mark Metzler

James Vaughn

The Conspiracy of Free Trade: Anglo-American Relations and the Ideological Origins of American Globalization, 1846-1896

by

Marc-William Palen, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin December 2011

The Conspiracy of Free Trade: Anglo-American Relations and the Ideological Origins of American Globalization, 1846-1896

Marc-William Palen, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2011

Supervisor: H. W. Brands

This work focuses on three issues in particular: how Victorian free trade cosmopolitanism reached and influenced American domestic and foreign policies; how

American economic nationalism adversely affected Cobdenism in the and the British World; and how both these conflicting ideologies shaped Anglo-American relations, the international free trade movement, and modern globalization. In doing so, I argue that America’s Cobdenites fought fiercely for freer trade, anti-imperialism, the , and closer ties with the British Empire in an era dominated by protectionism,

“new” imperialism, silver agitation, and Anglophobia. America’s economic nationalists in turn considered these Cobdenite efforts as part of a vast, British-inspired, free trade conspiracy. This period’s leading protectionist intellectuals alternatively held an

Anglophobic belief in infant industrial protectionism and government-subsidized internal improvements. American implementation of what I call Listian nationalist policies in turn iv greatly affected the British Empire by strengthening internal calls to end British free trade practices and to bring closer the geographically disparate colonies through the creation of a Greater Britain, an idea made all the more viable owing to the development of more efficient tools of globalization such as the transoceanic telegraph, railroads, canals, and steamship lines. I thus incorporate a fresh ideological and global approach to late nineteenth-century foreign relations by explicitly intertwining U.S. policies with those of the British Empire and the history of modern globalization.

v Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1 The Ideological Origins of American Globalization ...... 4

A Matter of Definitions ...... 7 A Matter of Historiography ...... 19

Chapter Outline ...... 27

Chapter 1 Globalizing Ideologies: The Rise of America's Cobdenite Cosmopolitan and Listian Nationalist, 1846-1860 ...... 32 Globalizing Ideologies ...... 37 Cobdenism, the , and Westward Expansion ...... 65 The Republican Party: A Fair-Weather Friendship ...... 80 Conclusion ...... 86

Chapter 2 The Civil War's Forgotten Transatlantic Debate: Great Britain, the Morrill Tariff, and the Confederacy's Free Trade Diplomacy ...... 89

Conclusion ...... 137

Chapter 3 The Gilded Age Free Trade Movement and Cobdenite Foreign Policy, 1866-1871 ...... 143 The Cobden Club, the Conversion of , and the Rise of the American Free Trade League...... 147

"Messages of Peace and Goodwill": Cobdenites and the 1871 Treaty of Washington ...... 175

Conclusion ...... 183

Chapter 4 American Cobdenism, Party Realignment, and the Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1872-1884 ...... 185 The Disastrous 1872 Elections...... 187

Peelite Politics and the 1876 Elections ...... 196 The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism ...... 210 vi Cobdenism West and South ...... 216 The 1884 Presidential Elections and the End of Republican Cobdenism ...225

Conclusion ...... 230

Chapter 5 's Cobdenites: The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade, 1884-89 ...... 232 The American Legacies of Antislavery and the Anti-Corn-Law League ...236

Cleveland's Cobdenite Cabinet ...... 250 The Cleveland "Conspiracy" ...... 255

Goldbugs and Greenbacks: Morality and Conspiracy ...... 260 The "Great Debate" of 1888 ...... 264

Conclusion ...... 273

Chapter 6 100 Years before NAFTA: Canadian-American Conflict and the Cobdenite Demand for North American Commercial Union, 1885-89 ...... 276 The Canadian Fisheries Dispute and the Demand for Commercial Union .277

The Rise of 's Listian Nationalists ...... 281 "Canada for Canadians": The Debate over North American Unity ...... 292

Conclusion ...... 302

Chapter 7 "A Sea of Fire": The Listian Harrison Administration, the McKinley Tariff, and the Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1889-93 ...... 306 The Resurgence of the Listian Nationalists ...... 312

Listian Politics and the Passage of the 1890 McKinley Tariff ...... 320 Harrison's Imperialism of Economic Nationalism ...... 330

Free Trade Strikes Back ...... 339

Conclusion ...... 349

Chapter 8 Cobdenism in Retreat: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890-94...... 350 The McKinley Tariff and the Demand for Imperial Unity ...... 354

vii The McKinley Tariff and the British World ...... 364 The Listian-Cobdenite Conflict in Australian Microcosm ...... 369

The McKinley Tariff and Canada's Conspiracy of Annexation ...... 375 The Chimera of Imperial Federation...... 383

Conclusion ...... 393

Chapter 9 Republican Rapprochement: Cleveland's Cobdenites, Anglo-American Relations, and the 1896 Presidential Elections ...... 395 The Panic of 1893 and Modern Globalization's Discontents ...... 401 Cobdenism's Peelite Legacy: the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894 ...... 407 The Cosmopolitanism of Anglo-Saxonism ...... 414 The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade? Hawaii, Venezuela, and Cleveland's Cobdenites...... 417 The 1896 Elections: A Temporary Republican Rapprochement ...... 429 Conclusion ...... 434

Conclusion ...... 437

Appendix List of U.S. Cobden Club Members and Election Year ...... 444

Bibliography ...... 447

viii

List of Figures

Figure 1: Peel and Polk...... 75 Figure 2: Before and After the Morrill Tariff ...... 111 Figure 3: Cobdenite Insignias ...... 194 Figure 4: Lashing Himself into Fever Heat ...... 241 Figure 5: Cleveland Will Have A Walk-Over ...... 267 Figure 6: Under which Emblem? ...... 269

Figure 7: The Transfusion of Blood—A Proposed Dangerous Experiment ...271 Figure 8: Too Thin! ...... 280 Figure 9: A Map of the United States May Look Like This After the Annexation of Canada ...... 333

Figure 10: Daniel O'Connell ...... 345

ix

Introduction

In 1895, Republican Senator took the second Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland (1893-1897) to task for having “been successfully

Cobdenized, and that is the underlying reason for their policy of retreat” in the Pacific.

President Cleveland’s controversial 1887 annual message calling for a revenue tariff had similarly shown that President Cleveland was “an easy convert to Cobdenism.”1 In the view of Republican economic nationalists, Victorian free trade ideology—also known as

“Cobdenism,” the belief that global free trade would bring world peace—was tantamount to conspiracy. This cosmopolitan ideology, alongside its protectionist counterpart, greatly affected American and British foreign relations throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, and are woven throughout the history of American globalization, spindling alongside the rapidly interconnecting threads of global trade, communications, people, and policies.

Many decades ago, historian H. Wayne Morgan observed that U.S. foreign policy during the Gilded Age “often seems negligible simply because we don’t know much about it.”2 Looking at the relatively few historical studies of U.S. foreign relations that have since been published on the era, such a sentiment still seemingly holds true. One

1 Henry Cabot Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” Forum 19 (March 1895), 15; and George B. Curtiss, Protection and Prosperity: An Account of Tariff Legislation and its Effect in Europe and America (New York: Pan-American Publishing, 1896), 626. 2 H. Wayne Morgan, “Book Review,” of The Awkward Years: American Foreign Relations under Garfield and Arthur by David M. Pletcher, Pacific Historical Review 33 (Feb. 1964), 100. 1 overarching purpose of this project is to offer a much needed reinterpretation of late nineteenth-century party politics and foreign relations. Another goal is to show how ideas shape global events. I argue that two previously overlooked global ideological visions— what I call “Cobdenite cosmopolitanism” and “Listian nationalism”—warred over late nineteenth-century capitalism, foreign policy, industrialization, and globalization.

In doing so, this work focuses on three issues in particular: how Victorian free trade cosmopolitanism reached and influenced American domestic and foreign policies; how American economic nationalism adversely affected Cobdenism in the United States and the British World; and how both these conflicting ideologies shaped Anglo-American relations, the international free trade movement, and modern globalization. In doing so, I argue that America’s Cobdenites—men like David Ames Wells and Edward Atkinson— fought fiercely for freer trade, anti-imperialism, the gold standard, and closer ties with the

British Empire in an era dominated by protectionism, “new” imperialism, silver agitation, and Anglophobia. America’s Listian nationalists in turn considered these Cobdenite efforts as part of a vast, British-inspired, free trade conspiracy.

American Cobdenites’ laissez faire anti-imperial proclivities reached their Gilded

Age apex during the nonconsecutive administrations of Grover Cleveland (1885-1889,

1893-1897). Cleveland’s Cobdenite administrations provided a stark contrast both to the aggressive expansionism of the antebellum Jeffersonian Democrats and the postbellum

Republican party, which quickly discarded whatever tattered vestiges that remained of its more restrained antebellum Whig political tradition: that is, aside from the Gilded Age

Republican party’s Whiggish dedication to protectionism.

2 This period’s leading protectionist intellectuals—particularly Henry C. Carey,

James G. Blaine, and William McKinley—were what I call Listian nationalists, holding an Anglophobic belief in infant industrial protectionism and internal improvements.

Whereas “Cobdenism” and “Cobdenite” were terms used by nineteenth-century contemporaries, “Listian nationalist” is my own terminology to describe this intellectual group. In contrast to many of their protectionist political allies who disdained foreign markets, the Listian nationalist economic ideology also incorporated a sophisticated long- term understanding that, as America’s industries matured and became internationally competitive, the United States would correspondingly need more access to foreign markets, and they were willing to use both formal and informal imperial means to gain them. They also generally held a more sympathetic view toward the silver question than their Cobdenite counterparts, as the Listians often viewed U.S. adherence to the gold standard as but a further fiscal shackle tying American markets to the City of .

American implementation of Listian nationalist policies in turn greatly affected the British Empire by strengthening internal calls to end British free trade practices and to bring closer the geographically disparate colonies through the creation of a Greater

Britain, an idea made all the more viable owing to the development of more efficient tools of globalization such as railroads, canals, transoceanic telegraphic cables, and steamship lines.3 The following chapters thus incorporate a fresh ideological and global

3 The formulation of the idea of “Greater Britain” is a complex issue. For the intellectual side of the issue, see especially Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860- 1900 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Bell, ed. Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); E. H. H. Green, “The Political Economy of Empire, 1880-1914,” in 3 approach to nineteenth-century foreign relations by explicitly intertwining U.S. politics and policies with those of the British Empire and the history of modern globalization.

The Ideological Origins of American Globalization

Tracing the ideological origins of a system or idea is invariably a tricky business,

as one can easily get lost in the myriad intellectual tendrils trailing back through human

history. Finding the origins of the ideology of free trade is no exception. Its first

systematic enunciation is of course commonly attributed to . Yet the

universal principles of free trade originate at least two centuries before Adam Smith’s

Wealth of Nations (1776).4 Hugo Grotius, in his early seventeenth-century work The

Freedom of the Seas, described international free trade in religious terms, as an

unimpeachable axiom of the Law of Nations, called a primary rule or first

principle . . . every nation is free to travel to every other nation, and to trade with

it. God Himself . . . ordains that some nations excel in one art and others in

another. Why is this His will, except it be that He wished human friendships to be

Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, Vol. 3, edited by Andrew Porter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 346-71; Jack Gaston, “The Free Trade Diplomacy Debate and the Victorian European Common Market Initiative,” Canadian Journal of History 22 (1987): 59-82; J. E. Tyler, The Struggle for Imperial Unity 1868-1895 (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1938); C. A. Bodelson, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (London: Heinemann, 1960); J. E. Kendle, Federal Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 3; and Kendle, The Colonial and Imperial Conferences, 1887-1911 (London: Longmans, 1967). 4 Douglas A. Irwin traces the idea back even further, beginning his intellectual study of free trade with the writings of Plato, Pliny, and Plutarch in Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 4 engendered by mutual needs and resources, lest individuals deeming themselves

entirely sufficient unto themselves should for that very reason be rendered

unsociable? . . . Those therefore who deny this law, destroy this most

praiseworthy bond of human fellowship . . . do violence to Nature herself. For do

not the ocean, navigable in every direction with which God has encompassed all

the earth . . . offer sufficient proof that Nature has given to all peoples a right of

access to all other peoples?5

As with the opposing principles of protectionism, the ideological origins of free trade can thus be traced back hundreds of years. Yet it should also be pointed out that Adam

Smith—let alone his predecessors among the French Physiocrats or Hugo Grotius—had expounded his ideas from within a protean industrial system quite distinct from that which arose in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I contend that two previously overlooked global ideological visions—Cobdenite cosmopolitanism and Listian nationalism—warred over the future of American industrial development and foreign policy.6 In doing so, I suggest that present-day conceptions of international free trade originated within the Victorian era, a period that witnessed the first booms and busts of modern globalization, and where the problems and promises of the foreign market began to rival those of the national market. It was

(1804-1865) and Friedrich List (1789-1846)—rather than earlier free traders Grotius and

5 Hugo Grotius, The Freedom of The Seas, trans. by Ralph van Deman Magoffin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1916 [1608]), 7-8. 6 I also grant that with such categorization, exceptions to the rule invariably arise. 5 Smith or protectionists John Seldon and Jean-Baptiste Colbert—who lived amid and well understood the rapidly industrializing world of the nineteenth century.7 Cobden’s and

List’s conflicting global visions would battle throughout the world, but most vociferously in the American political arena in the latter half of the nineteenth century, where

American Cobdenites —in emulation of Britain’s free trade system—peaceably sought an end to the protectionist system and the economic ills associated with overproduction by accessing foreign markets through free trade at home and abroad.

The Cobdenite fight for freer trade was an uphill battle. Protective tariffs dominated the Gilded Age political economy owing to the powerful lobbying influence of

America’s manufacturers as well as widely held Listian fears that America’s more nascent industries would prematurely be pulled into the British system of free trade, as the latter’s more advanced manufacturing capabilities appeared to gravely threaten

America’s developing industries.

The British free trade system was itself established with the overturning of

England’s Corn Laws in 1846: an overthrow notably advocated for by Richard Cobden,

Britain’s Victorian free trade apostle, and who thereafter continued his idealistic fight for global free trade and peace. The mid-century leaders of the American free trade movement took their inspiration from Cobden’s efforts to overturn the Corn Laws.

American protectionist worries thereafter turned into Anglophobic paranoia when

7 For the influence of free trade ideology in antebellum America, see, for instance, Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 173-274; and Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1990). 6 Cobden’s friends and disciples created the Cobden Club in London (1866) for the purpose of spreading free trade to the world, but especially to the United States.

The nineteenth century’s most outspoken and influential proponents of the

“American System” of economic nationalism—from to William McKinley— found ideological inspiration from the German-American Friedrich List. List had developed an antebellum Anglophobic protectionist doctrine designed to protect

American infant industries from British manufacturers. As American adherents to

Cobdenism increased in number following the Civil War, the Listian nationalists’ cries of

Anglophobia and protectionism also reached a fever pitch, and the ideological battle over

American globalization correspondingly became frenzied.

A Matter of Definitions

Coleridge once said that abstract definitions had done more to curse the human race

than war, famine, and pestilence—He must have been reading financial literature just

before he wrote that sentence.

James Garfield.8

Ohio Congressman James Garfield’s observation to his friend Edward Atkinson is as apt today as it was in 1868. “Globalization” in particular has increasingly become an academic buzzword, thrown around so indiscriminately that it runs the risk of meaning so

8 Garfield to Atkinson, 11 Aug. 1868, Carton 1, Edward Atkinson Papers, MHS. 7 many things that it becomes meaningless. Historians should take great care in delineating their use of the term. I prefer A. G. Hopkins’s definition of modern globalization, which, with the arrival of the nation state and the expansion of industrialization, occurred when

“the sovereign state based on territorial boundaries was filled in by developing a wider and deeper sense of national consciousness and filled out, variously, by population growth, free trade, imperialism, and war”; I would merely add “protectionism” to the latter list. The tools of globalization ironically allowed for the realistic speculation of two conflicting international systems—one of free trade and the other of protectionism—as a means of tying the globe together.9 As the world became ever more interconnected through steamship lines, canals, transoceanic cables, transcontinental railroads, and imperial expansion in the latter half of the nineteenth century, my work correspondingly expands from a predominantly transatlantic to a global study.10

The history of foreign relations and globalization invariably contains the history of ideas, a history that contains further definitional dangers. Michael Hunt’s study of ideology and policymaking reminded U.S. foreign relations historians of ideology’s centrality, although he leaves out the critical role of economic ideological conflict and

9 Hopkins, “Globalization—An Agenda for Historians,” 7. 10 For a more detailed explanation and examination of the terms “global history” and the “history of globalization,” see A. G. Hopkins, “Introduction: Interactions between the Universal and the Local,” in Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, edited by A. G. Hopkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Hopkins, “Globalization—An Agenda for Historians,” in Globalization in World History, edited by A. G. Hopkins. (New York: Norton, 2002); Hopkins, “The History of Globalization—And the Globalization of History?” in Globalization in World History; Bruce Mazlish, “Comparing Global History to World History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (Winter 1998): 385- 95; Mazlish and Akira Iriye, Global History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2005); Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1999); and Jay Sexton, “The Global View of the United States,” Historical Journal 48 (March 2005): 261-276. 8 instead argues for elite ideological consensus regarding American imperial expansionism.11 Particularly, “ideology,” if left undefined, remains a problematic word within historical scholarship. I therefore define ideology broadly as a belief or doctrine that forms the basis of an ideal political, economic, social, or cultural system. In the case of Listian nationalism and Cobdenite cosmopolitanism, these bases frequently overlapped.

Certain studies of the tariff at the turn of the twentieth century in turn have taken a

semantic stand regarding the label of “free trade.” These works take an extreme view of

free trade by suggesting that free trade in the nineteenth century entailed the complete

and immediate elimination of tariffs, customs houses, and other trade barriers. As the

liberal tariff reformers of this study fought for a “tariff for revenue only” and increases to

the list of duty-free raw materials but rarely for a complete elimination of tariffs,

historians like Tom Terrill and Paul Wolman prefer the label “tariff revisionist” to “free

trader.”12

I find such a categorization misleading. Adam Smith, in his free trade tract Wealth

of Nations—which, like the Bible, is so often cited and so rarely read—even ceded the need for some governmental regulation in order to maintain a strong home market, as

11 Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). For a good analysis of political ideologies, see also, Hunt, “Ideology,” Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 108-115; Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Freeden, ed., Reassessing Political Ideologies: The Durability of Dissent (London: Routledge, 2001); and Freeden, Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 12 Tom E. Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 10ff; Paul Wolman, Most Favored Nation: The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897-1912 (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xi. 9 well as tariffs to provide revenue for national defense.13 Professor William Graham

Sumner, one of the more radical advocates of free trade during the period under scrutiny, in 1888 gave “free trade” the following definition:

The term “Free-Trade,” although much discussed, is seldom rightly defined. It

does not mean the abolition of custom houses. . . . A country may collect its entire

revenue by duties on imports and yet be an entirely Free-Trade country, so long as

it does not lay those duties in such a way as to lead any one to undertake any

employment or make any investment he would avoid in the absence of such

duties; thus the customs duties levied by , with a very few exceptions, are

not inconsistent wither her profession of being a country which believes in Free-

Trade. They either are duties on articles not produced in England, or they are

exactly equivalent to the excise duties levied on the same articles if made at

home. They do not lead any one to put his into the home production of an

article, because they do not discriminate in favor of the home consumer.14

13 Smith wrote that “there seem . . . to be two cases in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign for the encouragement of domestic industry. The first is, when some particular sort of industry is necessary for the defence of the country.” The second case arose if it “be advantageous to lay some burden upon foreign for the encouragement of domestic industry . . . when some tax is imposed at home upon the produce of the latter,” wherein “an equal tax should be imposed upon the like produce of the former.” Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. by Edwin Cannan (New York: The Modern Library, 1937 [1776]), 429-32. See also , “Adam Smith and Laissez-Faire,” Journal of Political Economy 35 (April 1927): 198-232; Nathan Rosenberg, “Some Institutional Aspects of the Wealth of Nations,” Journal of Political Economy 68 (Dec. 1960): 557-70; and Irwin, Against the Tide, 78-83. 14 William Graham Sumner, Protectionism: The –Ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1888), 16. 10 Another prominent spokesman for the Gilded Age free trade movement, Professor Arthur

Latham Perry, laid it out even more bluntly: “By Free-Trade I mean, what every body means, a trade on which low duties are laid in the interest of legitimate taxation only.”15

Similarly, Everett Wheeler, who helped establish the influential New York Free Trade

Club, recalled that “we did not advocate the repeal of the tariff. That was not our view of the meaning of free trade”; to them “free trade” instead meant “Tariff for Revenue only.”16

Under Sumner’s, Perry’s, Wheeler’s, and my definition of nineteenth-century free trade, those whom I label “free traders” predominantly sought a low tariff for revenue only. America’s Cobdenites well understood that the political environment of the day would only allow for modest revisions and a gradual elimination of protective duties.

Most were therefore moderate—or gradualist—free traders, meaning they wanted a minimal tariff revenue system in imitation of the British free trade system, but realized it could take decades to accomplish. Much fewer in number were absolute free traders, dogmatic doctrinaires who wanted immediate implementation of direct taxation as an alternative means of eliminating all customs duties, although their numbers began to increase as the nineteenth century drew to a close.

Thus, it should be kept in mind that Gilded Age free trade in practical application did not mean a complete absence of tariffs or other trade barriers, any more so than the

15 The Free-Trader 2 (Jan. 1869). 16 Everett P. Wheeler, Sixty Years of American Life: Taylor to Roosevelt, 1850 to 1910 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1917), 152. For a more detailed treatment of the term, see David Ames Wells, “‘A Tariff for Revenue’: What it Really Means,” Forum (Sept. 1892), 51-66. 11 term is used today. After all, Britain yet maintained a tariff revenue system at the height of its free trade empire in the mid-nineteenth century.17 To reiterate, during this period

“free trade” was often interchangeable with “tariff for revenue only”; J. S. Mill and other even called this a “free trade tariff.”

My study also challenges the idea, depending on the historian, that this was an era of either liberal or conservative laissez faire government.18 Aside from the lack of government regulation of business and monopoly, this was by no means a period of laissez faire economic practices, but an uphill battle for laissez faire principles and practices. It was an era ripe with governmental intervention in the home market, whether through federal and state protectionism, subsidization of internal improvements

17 See for instance John Vincent Nye, “The Myth of Free-Trade Britain and Fortress : Tariffs and Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of 51 (March 1991): 23-46; Douglas A. Irwin, “Free Trade and Protection in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisited: A Comment on Nye,” Journal of Economic History 53 (March 1993): 146-152; and Nye, “Reply to Irwin on Free Trade,” Journal of Economic History 53 (March 1993): 153-158. 18 For the liberal argument, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: an Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1955); Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: The University of Press, 1956); and Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American , 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). For the conservative argument, see for instance the writings of the “Wisconsin School,” especially William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber; John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968); Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Democrats in the Cleveland Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (New York: Knopf, 1955), 134-35; and Yonatan Eyal, “Charles Eliot Norton, E. L. Godkin, and the Liberal Republicans of 1872,” American Nineteenth Century History 2 (Spring 2001): 53-75. For concise overviews of the liberal-conservative debate see, David M. Tucker, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), vii-x; and Cohen, Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 9-11. For a good summary of government market intervention and distributive policies, see Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 204-14. 12 (especially railroads), or governmental redistribution of land under the Republican party’s much desired Homestead Act.

As Richard Franklin Bensel has effectively argued, the Civil War had brought about the rise of central state authority in both the Northern and Southern governments.

Republicans thereafter instituted a developmental system that involved a general adherence to the gold standard, a national market, and, most importantly, a protective tariff.19 From its inception, a majority of the Republican party, controlling the executive for much of the time under consideration, was in nearly every way antithetical to laissez faire principles, as was a vocal minority of the Democratic party. Liberal Republican free traders were independent thorns in the side of the Republican elephant from the 1850s to the early 1880s, and Mugwump party “traitors” after 1884, when they threw their support behind the Democratic presidential candidate, Grover Cleveland.20

In correcting this laissez faire misimpression, I also offer the first detailed and lively study of the free trade movement in Gilded Age America, as well as a reinterpretation along the way of the Republican party’s early formation and reorientation. This new free trade movement arose from among the leadership of the mid- century Liberal Republican independents. They were American subscribers to

Cobdenism—sometimes referred to as the “ School”—seeking a liberal world

19 Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859- 1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The most accessible treatment of nineteenth-century tariff policy to date is still F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (New York & London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931 [1892]). 20 For a recent study of the Liberal Republicans that also traces their origins back to the 1840s, see Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 13 of free men, a reigning in of protectionist-inspired monopolies and corruption, and the establishment of world peace and American prosperity through global free trade. These were men who struggled but—at least in the short term—failed in their cosmopolitan goals. Their failure owed much to the predominance of parochialism and protectionism; their global ideals would lose out to the Gilded Age’s local realities.21 Perhaps it is this lack of tangible success that helps explain why scholarship on the late nineteenth-century free trade movement in the United States has been minimal.

Another reason certainly lies with the complexity of fiscal controversies that plagued the era. Just on the issues of protectionism and free trade—so often connected with nineteenth-century monetary issues surrounding the gold standard, international , and the free coinage of silver (national bimetallism)—one can easily become lost in the vitriolic maze of contradictions, counterarguments, bogeymen, and obfuscations used by all sides. Another overarching goal of this project, therefore, is to clarify these subjects: to maintain their complexity without making them needlessly complicated.

Protectionists promised high industrial employment and high wages for laborers, both of which would expand the home market for farmers’ and manufacturers’ products.

Free traders asserted instead that protectionism, in stark contrast to free trade, artificially increased costs for consumers, made American products internationally uncompetitive,

21 Geoffrey Blodgett, “Reform Thought and the Genteel Tradition,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1970), 57. For a recent introduction to the free trade debate, see Frank Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865-1890 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 59-69. 14 and diminished agricultural exports for the sole benefit of a small segment of industries, monopolies, and trusts.22

The issue quite often divided the United States at a national, sectional, and local level. Free trade outlets and organizations were promptly met with protectionist counterparts throughout the nation. Horace White’s free trade organ the Chicago Tribune, for instance, found a strong protectionist adversary in the Chicago Inter Ocean, as did

William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post in ’s New York Tribune.

Furthermore, arguments for and against freer trade and protectionism were often amorphous, depending upon the time, place, and audience. Those seeking freer trade ran the gamut from a few of the most extreme, idealistic, absolute free trade intellectuals, to more realistic pragmatists who sought moderate reductions as gradual steps toward ultimate free trade, to those who, bereft of ideological motivations, self-servingly desired reductions on particular duties that would favor their own business enterprises. The vast majority of the free traders within this study fall within the first two groups, as I focus primarily upon the intellectual leadership of both ideological movements.

As these different approaches to the tariff issue demonstrate, internal divisions existed within both the free trade and protectionist camps. Protectionists often found themselves in disagreement over dutiable rates, dutiable goods, the efficacy of trade reciprocity, and the ultimate future of America’s infant industries.23 Small businessmen

22 Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860-1897 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 187. 23 Jonathan Pincus, for instance, provides a detailed analysis and case study of the , bringing together the complex political compromises and lobbying influences involved in the nineteenth-century 15 looking for temporary tariff fortifications could easily find themselves at odds with other

American businessmen in rival enterprises. Some believed the home market and insular free trade among the states would guarantee high wages for the laborer and forever supply the demand for American goods, others that American products would eventually need foreign markets for sustaining high levels of productivity, jobs, and wages. The rise of trusts, monopolies, and combinations in turn led to further protectionist special interest groups and lobbyists with a growing influence within government policies and agencies.

While it was generally understood that, theoretically, infant industries must one day reach adulthood, it became advantageous for some to stunt, or at least stubbornly deny,

American industrial maturation. Nor was protectionism solely an issue in the more industrial North East; Kentuckians, for example, long sought protection for hemp,

Louisianans for sugar, and Westerners for wool.24

The period under study covers as well the American shift from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrial one, part of what some scholars have called the second industrial revolution.25 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, British investment in

the United States skyrocketed; capital investment in manufacturing increased tenfold; the

number of wage earners nearly fivefold; the amount of people living within cities

increased by a third; and the total population of the country more than doubled.

tariff-making political process. See Jonathan J. Pincus, Pressure Groups & Politics in Antebellum Tariffs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). 24 Entire books have been dedicated to these subjects. See, for instance, Chester Whitney Wright, Wool- Growing and the Tariff: A Study in the Economic History of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1910); and Roy Gillespie Blakey, The United States Beet Sugar Industry and the Tariff (New York: Columbia University, 1912). 25 See especially the works of Alfred Chandler. 16 Technological advances in turn drastically increased productivity. For instance, between

1865 and the end of the century, wheat production went up by 256 percent, sugar by 460 percent, corn 222 percent, coal 800 percent. During this same period, exports rose from

$281 million to $1,231 million, imports increased from $239 million to $616 million, and, as the turn of the century approached, American companies and missionaries spread throughout the globe.26

With massive urbanization, innovation, immigration, trade, and industrialization came as well a host of new problems, many of which entered the debate over the tariff. In particular, issues surrounding labor, wages, economic depressions, and trusts became areas of contention between America’s Cobdenite cosmopolitans and Listian nationalists.

Sectional demands of the North East, South, and West quite often conflicted, leading to further disagreements over what was in America’s national interest.27 Significantly, the

Gilded Age calls for laissez faire practices came predominantly from America’s manufacturing centers in the North East and West rather than the predominantly agrarian

26 Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837- 1873 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005); P. L. Cottrell, British Overseas Investment in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1975), 11-15; Joseph A. Fry, “Phases of Empire: Late Nineteenth-Century U.S. Foreign Relations,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. by Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1996), 262; David M. Pletcher, “1861-1898: Economic Growth and Diplomatic Adjustment,” in and World Power: An Assessment of American Diplomacy since 1789, ed. by William H. Becker and Samuel F. Wells, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 120, 122; Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream, 14-37. 27 Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: Press, 1998). For the connection between immigration and U.S. imperialism, see Mathew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 17 Jeffersonian South, where the economic nationalist grip was taking a strong hold over the

New South’s economic development.28

Anglo-American “free trade culture” was indeed rich, and both men and women took part in it. The rhetoric of antislavery, for instance, permeated the Gilded Age free trade debate, acting as a linguistic bridge between the ante- and postbellum eras.

Cobdenite cosmopolitans, many of whom were leading radical abolitionists, viewed the

“unshackling” of the fetters of trade as but the next step in the universal emancipation of mankind and as a tool for bringing civilization to less advanced societies. Listian nationalists in turn believed that premature free trade kept society in a barbaric uncivilized state. They also argued with similar antislavery language that free trade respectively enslaved American manufactures and laborers to the British market and

European pauper labor. The culture of manliness also entered the ideological debate.

With the rising popularity of Social Darwinism, many free traders considered full and

28 A minority protectionist sentiment had already begun to take root in the antebellum South. See John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Majewski, “Who Financed the Transportation Revolution? Regional Divergence and Internal Improvements in Antebellum and Virginia,” Journal of Economic History 56 (Dec. 1996): 763-88; Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Press, 2009); Onuf and Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War, chap. 8, 324-333; Jay Carlander and John Majewski, “Imagining ‘A Great Manufacturing Empire’: Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff,” Civil War History 49 (Dec. 2003): 334-52; Maurice G. Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995); and Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840- 1861 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1924). As to Jefferson’s own free trade proclivities (or lack thereof), the Cobdenite president of MIT, , noted that “probably the most extravagant protectionist whom this country has ever known was, not Horace Greeley, but Thomas Jefferson.” Walker, “Protection and Protectionists,” in Discussions in Economics and Statistics, ed. by Davis R. Dewey, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899), I, 98. For Jefferson’s own shift from free trade to protectionism, see Onuf and Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War, chap. 7. On New England’s Cobdenite economists and industrialization, see Daniel Horowitz, “Genteel Observers: New England Economic Writers and Industrialization,” New England Quarterly 48 (March 1975): 65-83. For a recent treatment of the globalizing effects of the nineteenth-century Anglo-American “settler revolution,” see James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783- 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 18 free competition in world markets manly, the artificial barriers of protectionism emasculating. As I describe as well, women, although a small minority of the Gilded Age free trade movement, began to take a greater interest and larger role in the debate in

Britain, Canada, and the United States as the century came to a close. These cultural and gendered aspects of the free trade debate emerge as subthemes throughout.

A Matter of Historiography

My dissertation proffers the first thorough analysis of the American influx of

Victorian free trade ideology, an influx that frequently spilled over into U.S. and British policymaking from 1846 to 1896. The transatlantic connections and influence of

Cobdenism—particularly of the Cobden Club—also fills a part of what Akira Iriye calls a

“scholarly void” among histories of modern world affairs concerning the affects and interconnectivity of international NGOs. My study also answers Emily Rosenberg’s longstanding request for historians to examine “the cultural and economic discourses,” as well as Walter LaFeber’s urging for a reinterpretation of the relationship of partisanship and foreign policy throughout the nineteenth century.29

“The Conspiracy of Free Trade” at times dovetails with the revisionist work of

William Appleman Williams, LaFeber, and others of the “Wisconsin school” of U.S.

29 Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002), 1; Emily S. Rosenberg, “A Call to Revolution: A Roundtable on Early U.S. Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 22 (Winter 1998), 69; and Walter LaFeber, “Responses to Charles S. Maier, ‘Marking Time: The Historiography of International Relations,’” Diplomatic History 5 (Fall 1981), 364. 19 foreign relations.30 In explaining the United States’ rise to empire and its seemingly unquenchable thirst for foreign markets, Williams, for example, focused on the farmer’s

“militant expansionist foreign policy” for the 1860s to 1890s.31 LaFeber in turn has argued persuasively that America’s war with Spain in 1898 was no “great aberration” as

Samuel Flagg Bemis described it, but in fact stemmed from a conservative, business- government imperial cure-all to the era’s various domestic and economic crises. LaFeber thus also offers a rationale for American expansionism that also contrasts markedly with

Ernest May’s and Robert Osgood’s explanations, that, when the United States obtained a formal empire in 1898, it respectively had “greatness thrust upon it” in “a fit of absentmindedness.”32 I too analyze the growing acceptance of the theory of overproduction that grabbed hold of Gilded Age America, and which helped spur demand for foreign markets.

I also find myself in agreement with “Wisconsin School” historians Ed Crapol,

Tom Terrill, and Walter LaFeber that the tariff issue played a central role in nineteenth-

30 See, for instance, William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland, OH: World Pub., 1959); Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1969); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca and London: Press, 1963); Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and U.S. Foreign Policy; Ed Crapol, America for Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); Thomas McCormick, Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1967); Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream; Carl P. Parrini and Martin J. Sklar, “New Thinking about the Market, 1896-1904: Some American Economists on Investment and the Theory of Surplus Capital,” The Journal of Economic History 43 (September 1983): 559-578. 31 Williams, Roots of the Modern American Empire, xxiii. 32 Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); LaFeber, New Empire; Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 270; Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in American Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 42. 20 century foreign and domestic policymaking. Like these works, I intimately integrate the domestic with the foreign. Tariff policy, after all, invariably contains a mixture of both.

In America for Americans, Crapol does a particularly fine job of explaining American economic nationalism and Anglophobia in the Gilded Age. But the era also had its fair share of cosmopolitan free traders and Anglophiles. As well as explicitly incorporating

British viewpoints and reactions throughout the globe to American policy, and vice versa, my study therefore examines those who preferred to “stroke the lion’s mane” alongside those who enjoyed “twisting the lion’s tail.”

More generally, I depart from these revisionist studies where they argue for a bipartisan conservative consensus of American economic imperialism that took hold in the latter half of the nineteenth century.33 While historians focusing on the domestic side of the Gilded Age have rightly emphasized ideological differences between and within the two political parties, for instance, such differences largely disappear among the revisionist studies of Gilded Age foreign policy.34 The Wisconsin School’s consensus foreign relations histories quite often overlook the nuanced and very real political and

33 See for instance Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and U.S. Foreign Policy, 4; Crapol, America for Americans, 46; David A. Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). By “consensus” I am referring here to the historical approach of emphasizing commonalities and continuity. 34 For the former, see H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969); R. Hal Williams, Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s (New York: , 1978); McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy, 200-204; Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Robert S. Salisbury, “The Republican Party and Positive Government: 1860-1890,” Mid- America 48 (1986): 15-34; Charles W. Calhoun, “Late Nineteenth-Century Politics Revisited,” History Teacher 27 (May 1994): 325-337; Calhoun, “Major Party Conflict in the Gilded Age: A Hundred Years of Interpretation,” OAH Magazine of History 13 (Summer 1999): 5-10; Lewis L. Gould, “Party Conflict: Republicans versus Democrats, 1877-1901,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. by Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1996); and Worth Robert Miller, “The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (Jan. 2002): 49-67. 21 economic conflict over American expansionism that was occurring not only within the rapidly industrializing and globalizing United States, but throughout the world.35 Rather, as diplomatic historian David Pletcher observed, “the continuity of the period was not that of a fully developed expansionism but of uncertainty, improvisation, and frequent arguments over foreign affairs—‘great debates’ in the press and Congress.”36 My dissertation strives to make sense of this pervasive uncertainty and ideological conflict over American expansion.

Amid great debate, historians have at least come to agree that imperial history remains the most effective and useful historical approach to late nineteenth-century foreign relations.37 Robin Winks has pointed out that the history of American imperialism—including the seemingly endless and emotionally-charged arguments on the usage of the term “imperialism” itself—“generally has been written without any

35 For previous studies of such political and economic conflict of this period, see also Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Charles A. Beard, The Open Door at Home: A Trial Philosophy of National Interest (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934); Beard, The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934). Various studies have shown that the business community was also divided on the subject of imperialism and foreign market expansion, even amid the 1890s depression. See, for instance, Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964 [1936]); William H. Becker, The Dynamics of Business-Government Relations: Industry & Exports, 1893-1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Becker, “Foreign Markets for Iron and Steel, 1893-1913: A New Perspective on the Williams School of Diplomatic History,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (May 1975): 233-248; Becker, “American Manufacturers and Foreign Markets, 1870-1900: Business Historians and the ‘New Economic Determinists,’” The Business History Review 47 (Winter, 1973): 466-481. Robert L. Beisner also finds the revisionist approach oversimplified in From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900 (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1986 [1975]), 19, 69, 71. 36 David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 4. 37 James A. Field, Jr., “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” American Historical Review 83 (June 1978), 644-668; Walter LaFeber and Robert L. Beisner, “Comments,” American Historical Review 83 (June 1978), 669-678, 673. 22 awareness of the debates going on among imperial historians in other countries . . . we have concluded that the historical formulations relevant to their nations’ imperialisms had little relevance for an understanding of our own.” He added that American diplomatic historians yet held on to “the noncomparative, exceptionalist, essentially isolated mould of American historiography.”38 Certainly, American imperialism—along with every other empire—contains many unique qualities when approached at the local level.

Similarities, however, abound at the global.

Edward Crapol also has suggested that “perhaps the simplest and most useful way to approach the mysteries of late nineteenth-century foreign relations is via the study of empire and imperial history.” Such an approach would allow scholars “to explain motives and actions at the center of state power as well as at the periphery,” including nonstate actors and agencies. An imperial historical approach to the subject, he concluded, would thus reinvigorate and free diplomatic historians “of the accusation that we are hopelessly parochial and ethnocentric,” as well as allow historians “to overcome the rigid periodization” common in the study of nineteenth-century foreign relations.39 In sum,

38 Robin W. Winks, “The American Struggle with ‘Imperialism’: How Words Frighten,” in Rob Kroes, ed., The American Identity Fusion and Fragmentation (Amsterdam, Amerika Instituut, 1980), 145, 170. 39 Edward P. Crapol, “Coming to Terms with Empire: The Historiography of Late Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations,” in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Paths to Power: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations to 1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 95, 106, 115. Thomas A. Bailey also called into question the supposed watershed date of 1898 as the starting point of American imperialism, in “America’s Emergence as a World Power: The Myth and the Verity,” The Pacific Historical Review 30 (Feb. 1961): 1-16. See, also, Hugh De Santis, “The Imperialist Impulse and American Innocence, 1865-1900,” in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); and Joseph A. Fry, “Phases of Empire: Late Nineteenth-Century U.S. Foreign Relations,” in Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age. 23 American foreign relations in the late nineteenth century can best be analyzed and understood through the purview of imperial history.

I therefore explicitly entwine and compare American and British imperialism. In doing so, I utilize an imperial historical approach that has principally been used for studying empires other than that of the United States. Particularly, my dissertation highlights—where previous historians have blurred or ignored—differences between informal and formal imperialism. Informal imperialism allowed exploited areas to maintain their sovereignty, and therefore involved more indirect economic, cultural, and political coercion to access foreign markets. Formal imperialism instead entailed direct control of foreign markets by means of annexation, territorial acquisition, or military occupation. America’s Cobdenites, on rare occasions advocated an informal version of what John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson have termed the “imperialism of free trade.”

America’s late nineteenth-century Listians in turn utilized what I call the “imperialism of economic nationalism,” entailing a mixture of home-market protectionism, militarism, and aggressive acquisition of foreign markets by formal annexations if possible, or by informal means if necessary.40

Within my analysis, I also examine the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of these dual approaches to Gilded Age expansionism. The leading intellectual advocates for foreign markets during much of the latter half of the century were primarily driven by ideological rather than material motivation. They were free traders rather than

40 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6 (1953): 1-15; Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976). I have also found useful the counterargument of Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti- Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 14 (1962): 489-501. 24 protectionists. This relatively small group of Cobdenites led the charge against strong protectionist opposition from a large and very powerful group of businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians who eschewed the global market for the local. Not until the onset of multiple economic panics, particularly the detrimental depression of the mid-

1890s, did a demonstrable number of businessmen and politicians begin to see the impending need for expanding foreign markets, albeit ultimately through a Listian rather than Cobdenite worldview. The United States’ late nineteenth-century drive to empire ultimately owed itself, then, to the prevalence of the imperialism of economic nationalism rather than the imperialism of free trade.

I have of course relied upon and found useful previous work on these subjects.

David Pletcher’s The Awkward Years and The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment respectively illustrate the haphazard nature and economically-orientated history of foreign relations of the Gilded Age.41 I drew inspiration from Frank Thistlewaite’s

America and the Atlantic Community and Ernest May’s American Imperialism, both of which provide a provocative transatlantic framework for the period.42 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s groundbreaking 1954 article “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” J.

A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902), and Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins’s British

Imperialism (2002) have also proven instrumental in the shaping of my understanding of

41 David M. Pletcher, The Awkward Years: American Foreign Relations under Garfield and Arthur (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1962); Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment. Jeannett P. Nichols similarly labels this era’s erratic imperialism as “ambivalent,” in “The and Imperialism, 1861-1897,” Journal of Economic History 21 (Dec. 1961): 526-538. 42 Frank Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-American Aspects, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Ernest R. May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1991 [1967]). 25 British imperial history and imperial theory more generally.43 I have also found Charles

Beard’s portrayal of political and ideological conflict in his twin 1934 publications The

Open Door at Home and The Idea of National Interest ahead of its time.44 My study of

Cobdenism in turn owes much to the scholarship of Anthony Howe.45

My fresh approach to the industrial rise of the United States and its growing competitiveness likewise coincides with hegemonic stability theorists’ studies of the turn of the twentieth century.46 Britain’s hegemonic maintenance of international free trade allowed for the rest—the United States and Germany in particular—to catch up, inspiring corresponding calls for protectionism throughout the British Empire. Within this broader international relations perspective, my dissertation thus also illustrates an ideological battle between cosmopolitan idealists and nationalist realists. Grover Cleveland’s

43 Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade”; John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1902); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (New York: Longman, 2002). 44 Charles Beard, The Idea of National Interest: An Analytical Study in American Foreign Policy (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934); Beard, The Open Door at Home: A Trial Philosophy of National Interest (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934). 45 Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Howe, “Free Trade and the International Order,” in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Howe, “From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana: Free Trade, Empire, and Globalisation, 1846-1948,” Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies 13 (2003): 137-159; Howe and Simon Morgan, eds., Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Howe, “Cobden Club (act. 1866-1982),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Howe, ed., The Letters of Richard Cobden (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007-). 46 See for instance Patrick K. O’Brien and Geoffrey Allen Pigman, “Free Trade, British Hegemony and the International Economic Order in the Nineteenth Century,” Review of International Studies 18 (April 1992): 89-113; Charles P. Kindleberger, The World In Depression, 1929-1939 (Berkeley, 1973); D. P. Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony (New York: Basic Books, 1987); Robert Gilpen, The Economic Dimension of International Security (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); S. D. Krasner, “State Power and the Structure of the International System,” World Politics 28 (1976): 317-347; and Patrick Karl O’Brien and Armand Clesse, eds., Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 26 Cobdenite coterie espoused Cobden’s idealistic and universal doctrine of free trade and peace, hoping that the rest of the world, in emulation—what Joseph Nye has termed “soft power”—would follow Britain’s lead. America’s Listian nationalists—realists preferring

“hard power”—believed that the United States needed instead to increase its military might, expand its hemispheric influence, and aggressively protect its burgeoning industries from present and future competitors.47

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 begins with the 1846 overthrow of Britain’s Corn Laws and the

American passage of the low , and concludes with the outbreak of the Civil

War. It explores the rise of the American Cobdenite cosmopolitan and Listian nationalist, as well as antislavery’s temporary unifying hold that brought these two groups together under the Republican party umbrella. I also explain how the antebellum establishment of the Republican party’s protective platform contained the seeds of postbellum intraparty factionalism.

Chapter 2 examines the transatlantic repercussions of American protectionism

following the 1861 passage of the North’s Morrill Tariff. The tariff, I argue, handily

offered an alternative rationale for explaining Southern secession that was politically

palatable in free-trading Britain. The Confederacy’s free trade argument and transatlantic

propaganda created ambiguity, division, and initial Southern support in Great Britain, and

47 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). 27 further exacerbated already tense Union-British relations. The tariff debate that followed the passage of the Morrill Tariff created fierce transatlantic speculation concerning the primary cause of Southern secession—with Britons suggesting the blame lay with

Northern protectionism—and contributed to the looming possibility of British recognition of the South in the first years of the war. British and American Cobdenites were thereafter instrumental in undermining what I call the Confederacy’s “free trade diplomacy.” The Journal of the Civil War Era has accepted a preliminary version of this chapter.

In chapter 3, I analyze the influence of nongovernmental organizations— particularly the Cobden Club and its American counterparts—upon postbellum U.S. politics and policies, as well as the subsequent rapid growth of Cobdenism within the

American free trade movement. Through this fresh perspective of American domestic and foreign politics, I also revisit the laying of the 1866 Atlantic cable, the 1871 Treaty of

Washington, and American tariff politics with respect to their connection to Cobdenism and Anglo-American relations. The Listian response is also incorporated, particularly their increasingly vocal charges of a Cobdenite conspiracy. This chapter ends with the presidential campaigning of 1872.

Chapter 4 picks up with the Liberal Republican convention in 1872. The Liberal

Republican movement of the early 1870s ushered in the first concerted Cobdenite attempt to redirect the Republican party’s Listian nationalist path in domestic and foreign affairs.

With the Republican party’s turn away from its antislavery roots as it reestablished itself as the party of protectionism, its alienated Cobdenites correspondingly shifted their

28 earlier antislavery efforts to abolishing American trade barriers. As this chapter demonstrates, the results of the 1872 Liberal Republican convention upon party politics and the free trade movement reverberated throughout national politics and foreign relations for years to come, and laid the groundwork for the realignment of both parties in

1884.

Chapter 5 begins with the 1884 election of Cleveland and describes how

America’s Listian nationalists spotted and attacked the alleged transatlantic free trade enemies proliferating among Cleveland’s Cobdenite supporters, particularly within his cabinet. His administration’s adherence to the Cobdenite policies of freer trade, anti- imperialism, the gold standard, and generally amicable Anglo-American relations would only add fuel to this conspiratorial fire. The rhetoric of antislavery and masculinity in turn pervaded the controversy. This chapter culminates in the “Great Debate” of 1888 and the succession of the Listian Republican administration of Benjamin Harrison. A revised version of this chapter is set to appear in Diplomatic History.

Postbellum Anglo-American conflicts led to a renewed Canadian-American movement toward North American commercial union following a particularly controversial fisheries dispute in the late ‘80s. Chapter 6 explores the international dimensions of the fisheries issue, especially as it accentuated growing North American disagreements over the future of Canadian globalization. 100 years before NAFTA,

North American Cobdenites adamantly advocated closer ties between the United States and Canada, while, with equal fervor, Canada’s Listian nationalists sought instead to create stronger economic ties within the British Empire.

29 Chapter 7 offers a reinterpretation of the Harrison Administration’s efforts to institute protectionism through the 1890 McKinley Tariff, bimetallism through the

Sherman Silver Purchase Act, imperial designs in Latin America and the Pacific, and the various Anglo-American conflicts that arose from 1889 to 1893. I argue that Listians— under the Republican leadership of Benjamin Harrison, Secretary of State James G.

Blaine, and Congressman William McKinley—sought to implement the imperialism of economic nationalism, and effectively used the innovative and revolutionary reciprocity provision of the McKinley Tariff to further this end.

Chapter 8 utilizes a global historical approach to the 1890 McKinley Tariff and the British imperial federation movement, showing how U.S. tariff policy was intimately intertwined with the political and economic policies of the British Empire. I argue that

American protectionism helped call into question Britain’s liberal, free trade, global empire by drumming up support for an imperial, protectionist, preferential Greater

Britain. The tariff also sped up the demand and development of more efficient transportation and communications—technological developments that made imperial federation all the more viable—within the British Empire. In North America in particular, the tariff acted as the principle impetus to the continental movement toward commercial unity that played out prominently in Canada’s 1891 national elections. This chapter is thus a global history of the McKinley Tariff’s impact upon the British Empire, as well as a study of the tariff’s effect upon the history of modern globalization. The shift in scale and scope from my study of the 1861 Morrill Tariff and 1890 McKinley Tariff also exemplifies the broader integration taking place within the late nineteenth-century global

30 economy, particularly the extended economic reach of U.S. protectionism. An early version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth

History.48

In chapter 9, I begin with Cleveland’s 1892 reelection and his Cobdenite administration’s advocacy for anti-imperialism, free trade, and the gold standard from

1893 to 1897. My examination of the parallel ideological rise of Cobdenite cosmopolitanism and Listian nationalism also reaches its conclusion in the contentious presidential elections of 1896, which I interpret as a final—albeit temporary— rapprochement between America’s Cobdenites and Listians, finding common cause amid their mutual fear of the Democratic party’s radical free silver platform.

48 Marc-William Palen, “Protection, Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890-94,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38 (Sept. 2010): 395- 418. 31 Chapter 1: Globalizing Ideologies: The Rise of America’s Cobdenite

Cosmopolitan and Listian Nationalist, 1846-1860

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. . . . It

believes that the end of a nation is its own perfection. . . . 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.

John Hayes.1

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 has 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

1 John L. Hayes, Customs Duties on the Necessaries of Life, and their Relations to the National Industry (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1884), 36-37. 32 dogma the Free Trade and Protectionist argument in all countries of the world . . . has

centered.

Russell Rea.2

On a chill 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 Anti-Corn-Law League (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 ’s Parliament was finally on the verge of officially overturning Britain’s longstanding protective tariffs on foreign grain.

Two days earlier, over 8,000 tickets to the Manchester event had been purchased within the first few hours of availability, and the insatiable public demand continued unabated. The hall’s seats were removed to allow for maximum capacity. Even still, over

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 Free Trade Hall’s appearance gleamed with garish magnificence. Crimson draperies hung upon the platform wall. Crimson panels covered the end walls. Each panel contained a legend or motto inscribed in crimson-colored Old

English letters: among them, “Faith,” Hope,” and “Perseverance.” The ceiling was white scattered with crimson ornaments and octagonal crimson shields bordered with gold. The

2 Russell Rea, Two Theories of Foreign Trade (London: Henry Good & Son, 1905), 6-7. 33 gallery balconies were decorated with ornate trellis work. 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 journalist for the Manchester Times, “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.’”3

At precisely half-past seven, Richard Cobden, , and the other leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law League entered the hall amid deafening cheers. Cobden was first to speak. When the expectant crowd fell still, he exuberantly observed that the free trade feeling “is spreading beyond our own country,” especially to the United States:

There is one other quarter in which we have seen the progress of sound

principles—I allude to America. We have received the American President’s

Message; we have also the report of the Secretary of the Treasury, and both

President Polk and Mr. Secretary Walker have been taking my friend Colonel

[George] Thompson’s task out of his hands, and lecturing the people of America

on free trade. (Cheers.) I have never read a better digest of the arguments in

favour of free trade than those put forth by Mr. Secretary Walker, and addressed

to the Congress of that country. I augur from all these things that our question is

3 Manchester Times and Gazette, 17 Jan. 1846. 34 making rapid progress throughout the world, and that we are coming to the

consummation of our labours. (Cheers.)4

In London, about six months after this free trade celebration, a German gentleman—dark-haired, bespectacled, with a receding hairline that was counterbalanced by a rather heavy beard—arrived in London hoping for a formal alliance between his home country and Britain. Coincidentally, he witnessed the expiration of the Corn Laws in the Upper House amid their lordships’ cheers. 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.” Suddenly, a voice 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 mutton-chops and eyes shining with intellect, offered his hand. “Have you really come over to be converted?” asked Cobden. “Of course,” Friedrich List, father of

German protectionist theory, wryly answered, “and to seek absolution for my sins.”5

Unbeknownst to either man, their meeting foreshadowed a global intellectual conflict that would play out for many decades to come. More significantly for List at the time, however, was that no political alliance between Germany and Britain was forthcoming. List returned to Germany that autumn, physically and mentally broken.

Suffering from severe depression, he had forebodingly mentioned to a friend in England

4 ibid. 5 Margaret E. Hirst, Life of Friedrich List (London: Smith, Elder, 1909), 100-102. For good introductions to List, see also O. H. Henderson, Friedrich List: Economist and Visionary (London: Frank Cass, 1985); and David Levi-Faur, “Friedrich List and the Political Economy of the Nation-State,” Review of International Political Economy 4 (Spring 1997): 154-178. 35 before his return to Germany: “I feel as if a mortal disease were in my frame and I must soon die.” His failed mission in England only made his mood darker. On the morning of

30 November 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.6

List’s 1846 depression counterbalanced Cobden’s euphoria; so too would

Cobden’s cosmopolitanism meet its match in List’s economic nationalism in many parts of the globe. Spreading Victorian free trade to America and the world would prove to be a difficult feat. Certainly, trade liberalization had taken on an international cast at around this time, as the major European powers began instituting freer trade throughout much of the mid-nineteenth century, picking up even more laissez faire steam following the 1860

Cobden-Chevalier Treaty between Britain and France. As the pro-free trade New York

Evening Post optimistically observed on New Year’s Eve 1846, “a great movement of civilized mankind in favor of freedom of trade is already begun.”7 Across the Atlantic, the modest American 1846 Walker Tariff likewise appeared a promising start, as did further downward revisions in 1857.8 But U.S. economic nationalists—intellectually inspired by the political philosophies of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Friedrich

List—were skeptical, to put it mildly, of Cobden’s promised panacea of free trade and

6 Hirst, Life of Friedrich List, 106-107. 7 Anthony C. Howe, “From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana: Free Trade, Empire, and Globalisation, 1846-1948,” Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies 13 (2003), 141-2; C. P. Kindleberger, “The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820-1875,” Journal of Economic History 35 (March 1975): 20-55; New York Evening Post, 31 Dec. 1846. 8 The Walker Tariff included a fixed ad valorem duty of 30 per cent, although a few exceptions were as low as 20 per cent or as high as 40 per cent. Duties on cotton goods and rail iron, for instance, were lowered from 70 per cent (under the 1842 tariff) to 25 and 30 percent, respectively. Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 151. 36 peace. This looming ideological conflict between the idealism of Cobdenite cosmopolitanism and the realism of Listian nationalism was soon to play out on a global stage, but most controversially in the political arena of the United States.

Transatlantic , subscribing to Richard Cobden’s free trade philosophy, were intimately involved with the abolition of American slavery, alongside their fight for abolition of the Corn Laws and American protectionism. Free men and free trade were by no means disparate goals. Conversely, American economic nationalists—fortified with the doctrines of German protectionist Friedrich List—alternatively viewed the free- trading plantation South and the burgeoning British Empire of Free Trade as respective enslavers of blacks and American manufacturers. Historians of the antebellum political economy have largely overlooked these conflicting ideologies and their role in shaping the Republican party. Historians have also glanced over the complex international dimensions of these diverging ideologies, particularly concerning antebellum economic and foreign policies. The ideological differences between what I term “Cobdenite cosmopolitans” and “Listian nationalists” would remain temporarily hidden beneath the

Republican party’s political surface until after the Civil War, as both free traders and protectionists rallied to the Republican party’s antislavery banner.

Globalizing Ideologies

Like Cobden and Bright, German-born Friedrich List was not a “professional” economist. Unlike Cobden and Bright, he distrusted the cosmopolitanism of orthodox

37 economics, having already engrossed himself in Alexander Hamilton’s economic philosophy contained in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures (1791) as well as

Daniel Raymond’s Thoughts on Political Economy (1820).9 List observed that from the

French physiocratic teachings of Francois Quesnay to the laissez faire doctrines of Adam

Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and David Ricardo had developed the “cosmopolitical idea of the absolute freedom of the commerce of the whole world.”10 , List pointed out, however, that by focusing on the individual and the universal they had ignored the national.11

These prophets of economic cosmopolitanism, List believed, were attempting to go about their goals in the wrong order:

It assumes the existence of a universal union and a state of perpetual peace, and

deduces therefrom the great benefits of free trade. In this manner it confounds

effects with causes. Among the provinces and states which are already politically

united, there exists a state of perpetual peace; from this political union originates

their commercial union, and it is in consequence of the perpetual peace thus

maintained that the commercial union has become so beneficial to them. All

9 Keith Tribe, “Natural Liberty & Laissez Faire: How Adam Smith Became a Free Trade Ideologue,” in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland, eds., (Manchester and New York, 1995), 38-9; Tribe, “Friedrich List and the Critique of ‘Cosmopolitical Economy,’” Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 56 (March 1988): 17-36; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (New York: A. M Kelley, 1946), II, 577; William Notz, “Frederick List in America,” American Economic Review 16 (June 1926), 261-62. 10 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, trans. by Sampson S. Lloyd (London, 1904 [1885]), 97. 11 Tribe, “Friedrich List and the Critique of ‘Cosmopolitical Economy,’” 28. 38 examples which history can show are those in which the political union has led

the way, and the commercial union followed. Not a single instance can be

adduced in which the latter has taken the lead and the former has grown up from

it.

The world as it existed disproved their universal theories; “general free trade would not be a universal republic, but, on the contrary, a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the supremacy of the predominant manufacturing, commercial, and naval power” of Britain. List’s conclusion concerning free trade was “irrefragable. . . . Only with the gradual formation of this union can free trade be developed, only as a result of this union can it confer on all nations the same great advantages which are now experienced by those provinces and states which are politically united.” This leveling of the playing field could only be accomplished through political union alongside internal improvements and protectionism.12

List argued that a country’s industries were dependent upon its stage of development. England, with a strong home market and 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, ‘30s, and ‘40s alternatively needed to focus on the development, not of finer products, but on cheap manufactures that utilized massive numbers of laborers, raw materials, and home consumption. It needed a mixed economy of manufacturers and agrarians working side

12 List, National System, 102-3. 39 by side, brought even closer through the publically and privately subsidized construction of canals and railroads. As the U.S. population grew, Americans would “pass over the

Mississippi, next the Rocky Mountains, and at last turn their faces to China instead of to

England.” South America and Mexico, alternatively, were “yet uninstructed, indolent and not accustomed to many enjoyments.” At their lower stage of development they needed to focus on exchanging “precious metals and raw produce” for foreign manufactures.13

List thereby enunciated an international system of developmental stages coupled with economic exploitation that American protectionists in decades to come would implement at the national and global level.

England, List argued, was practicing what historians have since termed the

“imperialism of free trade,” as the metropole sought “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.”14 “It would be most unjust, even on cosmopolitical grounds,” List believed,

now to resign to the English all the wealth and power of the earth, merely because

by them the political system of commerce was first established and the

cosmopolitical principle for the most part ignored. In order to allow freedom of

13 Friedrich List, “Letter IV,” 18 July 1827, and “Letter V,” 19 July 1827, reprinted in Hirst, List, 187-210; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), II, 575-84. 14 List quoted in Tribe, “Friedrich List and the Critique of ‘Cosmopolitical Economy,’” 28. 40 trade to operate naturally, the less advanced nations must first be raised by

artificial measures to that state of cultivation to which the English nation has been

artificially elevated.15

One of the most “vulgar tricks of history” was that “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.”16 He granted that free trade was the ultimate ideal and universal free trade might someday be possible, but first the rest of the world’s infant industries would need a combination of private and governmental investment and protectionism in order to catch up.17

List’s protectionist prescription for the perceived pandemic of Victorian free trade ideology found wide-ranging patients. Listian disciples multiplied throughout the globe in subsequent decades. List’s desire for a German Zollverein, or Customs Union, was begun in the mid-1820s, realized during the late 1860s, and his economic theory was fully implemented there by the 1880s. List was in turn a source of inspiration for imperial protectionists in Britain, Australia, and Canada in the last decades of the nineteenth century, as will be examined further in chapters 6 and 8.18 Likewise—as historian Mark

15 List, National System, 106-7. 16 Quoted in Leonard Gomes, The Economics and Ideology of Free Trade: A Historical Review (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, 2003), 78. 17 Dorfman, Economic Mind, II, 581. 18 Benjamin H. Brown, The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881-1895 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 16-18; Michael Tracy, Government and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1880- 1988 ( Press, 1989), 24, 41. Sampson Samuel Lloyd, one of the leaders of British protectionism in the late nineteenth century, even produced the first translation of List’s The National 41 Metzler has shown—following European tours in the 1870s and the Japanese translation of List’s work in the 1880s, Japanese economists “imbibed” his economic elixir.19

Russia’s finance minister during the late nineteenth century, S. Y. De Witte, also looked to List for inspiration when he reformed Russian finances and encouraged the construction of a trans-Siberian railway, and French protectionists similarly found List’s theories useful.20

Historian Bruce McCully notes that List’s work also became “a foundational text for anticolonial nationalists in South Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century.”

List’s nationalist economic theory found an avid audience among a variety of Indians.

American and German industrial ascendency merely confirmed the value of List’s work for such men. Indian nationalist Lala Murlidhar, addressing the in 1891, summed up his country’s growing suspicion of Victorian free trade: “the phantasm of free trade drains us. . . . Free Trade, fair play between nations, how I hate the sham! What fair play in trade can there be between impoverished India and the bloated capitalist England?”21 List’s writings thus found a welcome global audience.

System of Political Economy in England in 1885, and Melbourne merchant George Ward Cole published portions of List and Henry Clay in the early 1860s and 1870s. See Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia, 13-14 ff. 19 Masao Miyoshi, in the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 25; and Mark Metzler, “The Cosmopolitanism of National Economics: Friedrich List in a Japanese Mirror,” in Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local, ed. A.G. Hopkins (New York, 2006). Henry Carey also found an accepting audience in Japan. See Yul Sohn, Japanese Industrial Governance: Protectionism and the Licensing State (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 16. 20 The Current Encyclopedia, A Monthly Record of Human Progress (Chicago: Modern Research Society, 1901), 447; O. W. Henderson, “Friedrich List and the French Protectionists,” Zeitschrift fur die gesamte Staatswissenchaft 138 (1982): 262-75. 21 Bruce Tiebout McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 270; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to 42 Yet Friedrich List’s economic philosophy first germinated and took root in the

United States, and was expanded upon by Pennsylvania’s “Ajax of protectionism,” Henry

C. Carey (1793-1879), a man well known for his austerity, propensity for obscenities, imposing height, penetrating gaze, and intellectual intimidation.22 List himself, having fled to the United States in exile from Germany in 1825, was indebted to the protectionist principles elaborated by Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Raymond, and Matthew Carey, the famous Philadelphia publisher, former president of the Pennsylvania Society for the

Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts, and who was of course Henry

Carey’s father.23

In the Fall of 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette introduced his friend List first to

Matthew Carey and then to Henry Clay. List exerted a great deal of influence on Clay.

After making a good first impression, List thereafter frequently gave pro-tariff speeches at conventions organized by Clay’s friends. Throughout the early decades of the century,

Clay himself became the arch-proponent of the “American System” of internal

National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 215, 216, 337. The writings of Mathew and Henry C. Carey also became popular in many of these areas. See Metzler, “Cosmopolitanism of National Economics,” 104-5. 22 William Elder, The Memoir of Henry C. Carey (Philadelphia, 1880), 32-5. The degree of List’s influence upon Henry Carey has been a subject of some scholarly debate. Nearly all studies of Carey, however, agree that List’s American writings and later National System helped turn Carey from free trade to protection. See for instance, Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund, Tariffs, Blockades, and (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2004), 16-17; William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008), 320-21; Hirst, List, 118-22; Andrew Dawson, “Reassessing Henry Carey (1793-1879): The Problems of Writing Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American Studies 34 (Dec. 2000), 479; Frank A. Fetter, “The Early History of Political Economy in the United States,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87 (14 July 1943), 55-56; and Ernest Teilhac, Pioneers of American Economic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by E. A. J. Johnson (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936), 79-80. 23 Hirst, List, 113-17; Kenneth V. Lundberg, “Daniel Raymond, Early American Economist” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin Madison, 1953), 16; Tribe, Natural Liberty & Laissez Faire, 37-38. 43 improvements and protectionism and, by the 1830s, came to see free trade as but a new way for Great Britain to re-colonize the United States through “commercial dominion.”24

In 1826, List became a newspaper editor in Pennsylvania where he gained

national recognition for his defense of the “American System.” He quickly 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 afterward published in English, entitled Outlines of American Political Economy

(1827). Outlines was duly distributed to American congressmen in 1827, greatly

influencing the following year’s tariff debate, and at hand to be read by a young and

intellectually hungry Henry Carey. Some scholars have even suggested that the timing of

List’s protectionist publications and the passage of the “Tariff of Abomination” in 1828

were more than coincidental, as List was “among the foremost pioneers in the history of

the industrial development of Pennsylvania, as well as of the commercial policy of the

United States,” according to an early biographer. 25

Back in Germany, List published his magnum opus in 1841, entitled The National

System of Political Economy, a work that, along with List’s earlier American writings,

influenced Henry Carey’s own economic philosophy. A later disciple of Carey observed

that, “next to Mr. Carey,” List “has contributed most to the science of industrial progress

24 Henry Clay, The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. by James F. Hopkins, 4 vols. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959-), IV, 629; Maurice Glen Baxter, Henry Clay and the American System (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 199, 200; James Barret Swain, ed., The Life and Speeches of Henry Clay (New York: Greeley & M’Elraith, Tribune Office, 1843), II, 24. 25 Friedrich List, Outlines of American Political Economy (Philadelphia: Samuel Parker, 1827); Gomes, Economics and Ideology, 73; Notz, “Frederick List in America,” 255-6, 248; Leonard Gomes, The Economics and Ideology of Free Trade: A Historical Review (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003), 73. 44 in the present century,” and was, before any American, the first to express “with distinctness and boldness . . . the peculiar necessity of highly protective and specific duties upon manufactured commodities of general consumption.”26

In his younger days, Henry Carey had himself been a devout disciple of Adam

Smith. He began to openly question such free trade beliefs a year after List’s 1841

publication, amid an economic boom that coincided with the enactment of the

protectionist 1842 tariff. Like List, Carey came to consider free trade as an ultimate ideal

for any country, but only after the proper implementation of economic protection—even

England, he suggested, had precipitously jumped too far ahead with its abolition of the

Corn Laws.27

In his work The Past, the Present, and the Future (1848), Carey described his

developing belief that “war is an evil, and so are tariffs for protection.” But by now he

also admitted that “both may be necessary, and both are sometimes necessary.”28 He had

expressed similar sentiments to the previous year:

Nobody can admire free trade more than I do. It is a natural state of things. . . . 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

26 Hayes, Customs Duties on the Necessaries of Life, 14. 27 Hirst, List, 121-22. The 1842 tariff instituted a duty of 63 per cent on pig iron, 80 per cent on rolled, and an average rate of 60 per cent on manufactured iron, although some items had much higher duties. Malcolm Rogers Eiselen, “The Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1932), 172ff. 28 Henry C. Carey, The Past, the Present, and the Future (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1848), 302. 45 necessary act of self defence. . . . The cycle of seven years would, I think, settle

it—and then the world might have peace and free trade.29

His views on the British system of free trade came to echo those of List, and

Carey rejected Malthusian pessimism along the way. He thought that the country’s vast

expanse of available lands and a protective tariff were the twin panaceas to solve

America’s economic ills. Biographer Arnold Green explains Carey’s tariff position

succinctly, that protectionism increased the diversity of labor productivity, and that

protectionism “would find husbands for old maids and free the entire sex from an age-old

bondage. The tariff would make Southern planters rich, but it would also ultimately free

the slave. . . . The tariff would lower the bastardy rate, improve morals, eliminate crime

and war.” Like List, Carey also believed that the protective tariff remained essential only

so long as America’s industries remained in infancy.30

While critical of the Mexican War itself, Carey advocated the annexation of

Texas, as the Mexican government could not guarantee security for its inhabitants, and he

denied its acquisition would benefit the Slave Power. Rather, he believed it would turn

Maryland and Kentucky into free states by offering a more profitable use of slaves, who

might more easily obtain their freedom. Southern slave states, he once described to

29 Carey to Sumner, 20 Nov. 1847, microfilm, reel 5, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 30 Henry C. Carey, Principles of Social Science, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858), I, 28- 31; III, 440-445, esp. 442; Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: The Press, 1956), 16-17; A. D. H. Kaplan, Henry Charles Carey: A Study in American Economic Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1931), 30; Arnold W. Green, Henry Charles Carey: Nineteenth-Century Sociologist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 137, 140-141. 46 Charles Sumner, ought to rid themselves of the system because it was unproductive. His was an economic condemnation of slavery, rather than a moralistic one. He also discouraged any abolitionist interference in the Southern system, as he was certain that the “laws of nature” would sort the problem out. Carey saw the South’s African slavery as but one manifestation of human bondage; the Southern cotton growers themselves, with no home market to speak of, were similarly slaves to the British cotton market. He wrote to Charles Sumner that:

The most extraordinary thing I know is that of seeing an antislavery man as

antiprotectionist. The negro is a slave because he is allowed but one market in

which to sell his labour. Allow him to select his own market, and to choose

between forty competitors for the purchase of his labour, and he becomes a free

man. Great Britain desires that the people of the world shall 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, and the one is just as much

slavery as the other. . . . And they are the only people that manufacture at all, and

the only ones that grow rich and strong, with a tendency towards freedom, not

only of trade but of man. You desire that man may become free yet you are

opposed to the system which alone can lead to freedom of the white and the black

47 man. . . . Think of this again and you will see that protection is a peaceful war for

freedom.31

To Carey, slavery and free trade were thus intertwined, and this line of argument and rhetoric would often be used by American protectionists in subsequent decades. To reach , Carey observed, Southerners needed industrial growth, internal improvements, a protective tariff, and a large, easily accessible home market in the

American North.32 Since labor and capital went hand in hand, he suggested, protecting

America’s infant industries thus protected American labor by artificially maintaining higher prices for goods and corresponding higher wages.33 After 1848, Carey also increasingly viewed the free-trading British Empire as evil—a threat to America’s home industries—and he soon found a sympathetic national outlet for his Anglophobic economic nationalism.

From around 1850 to 1857, Carey—whom historian Paul K. Conkin calls the

“most broadly influential American economist before the Civil War”—became the economic consultant of Horace Greeley. Carey was thereafter able to promote his protectionist creed as an editorial writer not only for Philadelphia’s North American but

31 Carey to Sumner, 3 May 3 1852, reel 9, Sumner Papers. 32 Dorfman, Economic Mind, II, 794; Carey to Sumner, 29 Nov. 1847, reel 5, Sumner Papers; Henry C. Carey, The Slave Trade—Domestic and Foreign (Philadelphia: A Hart, 1853). 33 Henry C. Carey, Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial (Philadelphia: privately published, 1851), 145; and Carey, Past, Present, Future, 320. 48 also in Greeley’s widely disseminated New York Tribune.34 In recognition of Carey’s newfound influence, the Tribune’s European correspondent Karl Marx described Carey at that time as “the only American economist of importance.”35

Carey thereafter joined the Republican party in 1856 and helped shape its subsequent protectionist platform, and was often consulted by Lincoln, his treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, and later Republican treasury secretaries. The former Whigs of the Republican party largely accepted the economic views expressed by Carey and the

New York Tribune.36 Greeley himself was an abolitionist and worked closely with

Northern radicals in this common cause, but on most other national political issues he turned to his Whig roots—particularly regarding protectionism.37 His paper would become the principle propagandistic prognosticator of American economic nationalism.

Listian nationalism had thus found worthy spokesmen, a sympathetic press, and an attentive American audience.

34 Elwyn B. Robinson, “The North American: Advocate of Protection,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 64 (July 1940), 346; Nathan A. Baily, “Henry Carey’s ‘American System’” (MA Thesis, Columbia University, 1941); and Jeter A. Isley, Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853-1861: A Study of the New York Tribune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 59. 35 Michael Perelman, “Political Economy and the Press: Karl Marx and Henry Carey at the New York Tribune,” Economic Forum 16 (Winter 1986): 111-28; Marx quoted in Andrew Dawson, Philadelphia Engineers: Capital, Class, and Revolution, 1830-1890 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), 129. 36 Green, Carey, 35; Paul K. Conkin, Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), xi; Isley, Greeley and the Republican Party; and Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 19. 37 For Greeley’s seemingly contradictory mixture of and conservatism, see Adam-Max Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). 49 Although List’s and Carey’s economic nationalism gained welcome reception in powerful American quarters with the aid of Greeley’s Tribune in the 1850s, it was around

this time that Cobden’s cosmopolitanism also found ample accommodation in the United

States: particularly among New England’s radical reformers. Nineteenth-century free

trade ideology has long been associated primarily with its Jeffersonian Southern and

Western Democratic legacy. Yet agrarian-oriented Jeffersonianism represented a free

trade ideology based primarily upon the French Physiocrats, Anglophobia, and a doctrine

that had increasingly become tied to the defense of the Southern slave system.38

Furthermore, by the mid-1830s, perceived Southern economic dependence upon

the North inspired a growing minority of Southerners to support the development of their

own manufactures, transatlantic steam lines, and a Pacific railroad by means of

government intervention, and paid for through protective tariffs. This Listian doctrine

was vociferously espoused, for instance, by Virginia’s George Fitzhugh who thought that

free traders were “old fogies sitting like an incubus on the South,” and that the South

should instead build tariff walls against the North. His writing and popularity showed,

too, that Southerners were beginning to realize that the prosperity of plantation slavery

alone would not sustain that section’s economy in the long run; tariffs for the

development of Southern infant industries and government-sponsored internal

38 See for instance Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Bruno Gujer, Free Trade and Slavery: Calhoun’s Defense of Southern Interests against British Interference, 1811-1848 (Zurich: aku-Fotodruck, 1971). 50 improvements were likewise gaining adherents.39 In similar fashion, the younger generation of Democrats throughout the country increasingly distanced themselves from their Jeffersonian and Jacksonian ideological roots, as they flirted with higher tariffs and government-funded internal improvement programs, thereby bringing the Democratic party closer to the Whig economic vision by the middle of the century.40

In sum, Cobdenism was a different strain of free trade ideology from that of

Jeffersonianism or Jacksonianism. Alongside such growing Democratic demands for protectionism, the party’s Southern wing also contained strong elements of slave-oriented agrarianism and Anglophobia. Cobdenism instead took root first within New England’s manufacturing areas and among its Anglophile abolitionists.

Cobden’s own belief in the benign and universal principles of free trade also carried antislavery overtones, a moralistic tone that struck a familiar chord in transatlantic abolitionist ears.41 The ACLL at times even began using the term “abolition” instead of

39 John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Majewski, “Who Financed the Transportation Revolution? Regional Divergence and Internal Improvements in Antebellum Pennsylvania and Virginia,” Journal of Economic History 56 (Dec. 1996): 763-88; Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union; Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1924) 37, 40, 55-6, 151, 177; Jay Carlander and John Majewski, “Imagining ‘A Great Manufacturing Empire’: Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff,” Civil War History 49 (Dec. 2003): 334-352. The year 1846 also saw the beginning of the Southern textile industry when William Gregg opened his cotton mills in Graniteville, South Carolina. 40 Yonatan Eyal, “Trade and Improvements: Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party,” Civil War History 51 (Sept. 2005): 245-268; Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 41 Richard Cobden, Anti-Corn Law League Meeting, 29 May 1843, 4, quoted in Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy and the Empire of Free Trade and Imperialism 1750-1850 (London and New York, 1970), 162. 51 “repeal” as it was viewed to be stronger and more effective language.42 When ultimately unfettered of the shackles of protectionism, for instance, Cobden believed that international commerce 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.”43 Cobden had faith that the tools of globalization—“railroads, steamboats, cheap postage . . . and Free Trade”—would “keep the world free from actual war.” Cobdenism correspondingly included a strong internationalist policy of anti-colonialism and noninterventionism.44

America’s Cobdenites took inspiration from the seven-year struggle and ultimate success of the Anti-Corn-Law League, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright. U.S.

Cobdenites were likewise imbued with a familiar moral and religious underpinning and were closely connected to the transatlantic abolitionist movement, with its American

42 Morgan, “Anti-Corn Law League,” 90-91; Temperley, British Antislavery, 195; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chap. 2; Cobden to George Combe, 1 Aug. 1846, Add. MS 43660, Vol. XIV, Richard Cobden Papers. 43 Richard Cobden, Political Writings (London: W. Ridgeway, 1867), I, 46. 44 Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community, 155. Cobden put his money where his mouth was, and invested a great deal in the Illinois Central Railroad. For more on Cobden’s foreign policy outlook see Peter Cain, “Capitalism, War, and Internationalism in the Thought of Richard Cobden,” British Journal of International Studies 5 (Oct. 1979): 229-247; William Harbutt Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy: a Critical Exposition, with Special Reference to our Day and its Problems (London: G. Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1926); Nicholas C. Edsall, Richard Cobden, Independent Radical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); J. A. Hobson, Richard Cobden: The International Man (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1918); Anthony Howe, “Richard Cobden and the Crimean War,” History Today 54 (2004): 46-51; Howe and Morgan, Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays; Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963); Semmel, Rise of Free Trade Imperialism, 158-75; Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 14 (April 1962): 489-501; David Nicholls, “Richard Cobden and the International Peace Congress Movement, 1848-1853,” Journal of British Studies 30 (Oct. 1991): 351-376; Richard Francis Spall, “Free Trade, Foreign Relations, and the Anti-Corn-Law League,” International History Review 10 (Aug. 1988): 405-432; Miles Taylor, “Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism during the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19 (Jan. 1991): 1-23. 52 vanguard led by a group of Cobdenite independents. These American radicals 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 these

Cobdenite radicals, free trade quickly became tied to free labor, free men, and free soil.

Following the Civil War and the destruction of Southern slavery, and ever aware of the burgeoning strength of American manufactures and the growing need for foreign markets, much of their attention would turn to free trade and righting the corruptive influences within the Republican party.

Why did Cobdenism take root in New England, which, along with Pennsylvania, was the heartland of protectionism? Directly, of course, Cobdenism spread from Cobden and Bright themselves, with Cobden visiting the United States in 1835 and 1859, and the two ACLL leaders’ friendships among many prominent Americans who would become the first American Cobdenites. But more generally, as the Economist explained in the late

1860s, the area was already coming to resemble England’s manufacturing centers: “In all respects it is discovered . . . that New England is precisely in the predicament of any old manufacturing country,” as it “imports its food and raw material of its manufactures from a distance, exactly as we do here.”45 At a material level alone, segments of New

England’s industrializing economy were therefore ripe for the doctrine of Victorian free trade.

Recent work has focused on the willingness of the Anti-Corn-Law League to work with the South for reciprocal tariffs, that by the mid-1840s the middle-class leaders

45 Economist, 15 May 1869, 565. 53 of the ACLL had “subverted anti-slavery’s moral authority.”46 Yet these interpretations

do not adequately explain why, then, the first American Cobdenites were a regular who’s

who of radical abolitionists. Cobden, Bright, Colonel George Thompson, Joseph Sturge

and other leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law League tied free trade and free labor together.

For instance, in an 1841 speech, Cobden asked his listeners 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?”47 The issue has become a historiographical quandary owing to the

various and often conflicting interpretations that examine the intersection of abolitionism

and American capitalism.48

The ACLL leadership also made sure to present their free trade movement to

abolitionist correspondents in universal religious and humanitarian terms. Cobden was

quite explicit on this point, noting that the league must appeal to “the religious and moral

feelings . . . the energies of the Christian World must be drawn forth by the remembrance

of Anti-Slavery.”49 Such a combination dovetailed nicely with the ministerial teachings

of Brown University’s president, Francis Wayland, whose book, Elements of Political

46 Simon Morgan, “The Anti-Corn Law League and British Anti-Slavery in Transatlantic Perspective, 1838-1846,” Historical Journal 52 (Feb. 2009), 89. 47 Quoted in Stephen Meardon, “Richard Cobden’s American Quandary: Negotiating Peace, Free Trade, and Anti-Slavery,” in Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, 212. Sturge was a leading member of both the ACLL and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. 48 For a general introduction to the historiographical debate, see James L. Huston, “Abolitionists, Political Economists, and Capitalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Autumn 2000): 487-521. My own work on America’s Cobdenites suggests that their subscription to abolitionism and were nearly inseparable, as both contained a deep moral defense of freedom, broadly defined to include free men and free trade. 49 Richard Cobden to Peter Alfred Taylor, 4 May 1840, in Richard Garnett, The Life of W.J. Fox (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1910), 258. 54 Economy (1837), by the 1850s rivaled Jean-Baptist Say’s Treatise on Political Economy

(1803) as the most popular book prescribed by antebellum American professors, and which influenced the elite liberal reformers of the late nineteenth century.50

As Cobden mentioned in his 1846 speech at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester,

George Thompson—among a handful of other British abolitionists throughout the ‘30s,

‘40s, and ‘50s—was himself sent to the United States to tie closer together abolitionism and free trade, and controversially so. At his close friend ’s house, for instance, could be found a collection of handbills that had once been scattered about the city streets, with the following statement:

$100 REWARD

FOR THE NOTORIOUS BRITISH EMISSARY,

GEORGE THOMPSON,

DEAD OR ALIVE!51

50 David M. Tucker, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1998), vii-viii, 4-7; Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1956), 11; Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636-1900 (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1939), 152; Michael J. L. O’Connor, Origins of Academic Economics in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 172-77; and Carl William Kaiser, Jr., “History of the Academic Protectionist-Free Trade Controversy in America before 1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1939). Joseph Medill, a later editor of the Chicago Tribune, in 1866 referred to Wayland’s book as “merely a rehash of plagiarism of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which in turn has ceased to be authority on Political Economy either in England or America. . . . Then newspapers can be filled with chapters from Smith, Mill, Cobden, Bright, and Wayland . . . . But when we come to try it, when we apply it to American industry, it has the same effect on business that the cholera has on the public health. Wild speculation, panic, crash and bankruptcy follow each other in its wake.” He then cited ’s defense of infant industries protectionism. Chicago Tribune, 9 Jan. 1866. 51 Giles B. Stebbins, Upward Steps of Seventy Years. Autobiographic, Biographic, Historic (New York: United States Company, 1890), 99. 55

Thompson’s speeches were so inflammatory that he was even later blamed by a

Harper’s Weekly writer for having created the sectional irritation that led to Southern secession and the Civil War.52 Within this toxic antebellum environment, firebrand

Thompson toured the United States from 1834-35, and again in 1848 and 1850, giving

hundreds of speeches emphasizing the moral ties between free trade and abolitionism.53

Much as William Lloyd Garrison was idolized among some abolitionists in England as

“one of God’s nobility,” Garrison’s intimate friend Thompson and his fellow “British

Christians” in turn were held in particularly high esteem, “the sheet anchor” of the

antislavery cause, by the most radical members of the American abolitionist

movement.54

American abolitionists often took their cue from the British and Foreign Anti-

Slavery Society in England, so much so that Southern congressmen speculated that

Northern abolitionists were merely mouthpieces of their British antislavery counterparts.

With the support of their American abolitionist contacts, by the early 1840s ACLL

members began to see the possibility of an internationalization of free trade—beginning

52 Samuel Finley Breese Morse, The Present Attempt to Dissolve the American Union, A British Aristocratic Plot (New York: John F. Trow, 1862), 34-8. 53 Morgan, “Anti-Corn Law League,” 90; Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, 192-199; Hilton, Age of Atonement, chap. 2; C. Duncan Rice, “The Anti-Slavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States, 1834-35,” Journal of American Studies 2 (April 1968): 13-31; and Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community, 162; Wm. Lloyd Garrison, ed., Lectures of George Thompson, with a Full Report of the Discussion between Mr. Thompson and Mr. Borthwick, the Pro-Slavery Agent, Held at the Royal Amphitheatre, Liverpool, (Eng.) and which Continued for Six Evenings with Unabated Interest: Compiled from Various English Editions.—Also, A Brief History of His Connection with the Anti-Slavery Cause in England (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1836), iii-xxxiii. 54 Temperley, British Antislavery, 192-3. 56 with the abolition of the Corn Laws—“as a key to advances” in America. The transatlantic antislavery cause thus became intimately associated with that of Victorian free trade.55

Massachusetts’ Joshua Leavitt, leader of the antislavery Liberty party and editor of the abolitionist Emancipator, avidly aided in this pursuit. From the late 1830s onward,

Leavitt came to see that overturning the Corn Laws in England might shift English trade

from Southern slave-grown cotton to Western free-grown wheat. “Our Corn Law

project,” he 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 it will secure us

the Democracy, and the corn movement will give us the West.”56

Abolitionist ACLL leader Joseph Sturge, upon his American arrival in 1841, duly made sure to contact Joshua Leavitt and inform him of the status of Corn Law agitation in

England.57 With Sturge’s added insight, Leavitt saw that John Bright and a growing number of British manufacturers, growing weary of their dependence on Southern slave- grown cotton, were turning to Northern markets to sell their finished cotton cloth but

55 David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780-1860 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 126; Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), chaps. 10-11; 21 Jan. 1845, Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 28th Cong., 2nd Sess., 143; Haynes, “Anglophobia, Annexation,” 123. 56 Leavitt to Birney, 1 Oct. 1840, Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831-1857, edited by Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938), II, 604. 57 Joseph Sturge, Visit to the United States in 1841 (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1842); Martin, “Free Trade and the Oregon Question,” 471-74. 57 were sorely hampered in this endeavor owing to Corn Law restrictions.58 According to his biographer, Leavitt hoped to move the antislavery movement into an “independent political action” and “pounced on this antisouthern and antislavery dimension of the

British league’s message.” In a reminiscence of George Thompson’s and other British and American free traders’ calls beginning in the mid-1830s for free produce and the need for non-Southern cotton markets, in the Emancipator Leavitt denounced the English people for importing the products of slave labor while blocking staples produced by free labor from the American North and West throughout the early 1840s. In December 1840,

Levitt even proposed that the people of the free states set up their own embassy in

England in order to counteract the influence of the slaveholders.59

With his newfound transatlantic inspiration, Leavitt thereafter focused much of his attention on overturning the Corn Laws by developing an American repeal strategy that would aid British manufacturers, Northern and Northwestern farmers (suffering from

58 See, for instance, Bright to Sturge, 1853, in Stephen Hobhouse, Joseph Sturge: His Life and his Work (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1919), 109; Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1842), 156-58; Temperley, British Antislavery, 166; J. S. Buckingham, The Eastern and Western States of America (3 vols., London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1842), III, 242-43. For more on the Liberty party and its economic connections, see Julian P. Bretz, “The Economic Background of the Liberty Party,” American Historical Review 34 (Jan. 1929): 250-64. 59 Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt: Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 170; Emancipator, 24 Dec. 1840; 16 March 1847. For such earlier arguments, see Garrison, ed., Letters and Addresses by George Thompson, 121-22; George Thompson, American Slavery. A Lecture (London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1853), 43-4; Thistlethwaite, America and the Atlantic Community, 161, 163-64; Thomas Hodgkin, Letter to Richard Cobden, M.P., on Free Trade and Slave Labour (1848); Carol Faulkner, “The Root of the Evil: Free Produce and Radical Antislavery, 1820-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 27 (Fall 2007): 377-405; Louis Billington, “British Humanitarians and American Cotton, 1840- 1860,” Journal of American Studies 11 (Dec. 1977): 313-334; Merk, “The British Corn Crisis of 1845-46 and the Oregon Treaty”; C. Duncan Rice, “‘Humanity Sold For Sugar!’ The British Abolitionist Response to Free Trade in Slave-Grown Sugar,” Historical Journal 13 (Sept. 1970): 402-418. Boston cotton manufacturer and prominent American Cobdenite Edward Atkinson was also an avid abolitionist who sought alternate cotton supplies, particularly from Africa. See Edward Atkinson, Cheap Cotton and Free Labor (Boston: A. Williams & Co., 1861); and Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827-1905 (Boston: Old Corner Book Store, 1934), 4-10. 58 scarce credit following the banking crisis of 1837), “and strike one of the heaviest blows at slavery, by relieving the free states of their dependence on cotton as the only means of paying their foreign debt.”60 In 1841, Leavitt submitted to the Senate Committee on

Agriculture his Memorial . . . Praying the Adoption of Measures to Secure an Equitable

Market for American Wheat, which called for the repeal of the Corn Laws.61 In it, he contended that an antislavery American government might work toward such a repeal.

“Next to the abolition of slavery” this became “the greatest question that can come before our government.”62 His Memorial was given prompt news coverage on both sides of the

Atlantic.

That same year, Leavitt’s Liberty party sent Ohio’s John Curtis to Britain to support the ACLL in connecting abolition of the Corn Laws with the abolition of

American slavery.63 In 1842, Leavitt thereafter presented to Congress yet another call for an end to the Corn Laws and for increasing Northern trade with Britain by establishing a tariff for revenue in place of the present protectionist one.64 By 1843 he had begun

60 Emancipator, 1 May 1840, 2; Davis, Leavitt, 171; Morgan, “Anti-Corn Law League,” 95; Martin, “Mississippi Valley in Anglo-American Relations,” 212-220; Thomas P. Martin, “Cotton and Wheat in Anglo-American Trade and Politics, 1846-1852,” Journal of Southern History 1 (Aug. 1935): 293-319; Martin, “Conflicting Cotton Interests at Home and Abroad,1848-1857,” Journal of Southern History 7 (May 1941): 173-194. 61 Memorial of Joshua Leavitt Praying the Adoption of Measures to Secure an Equitable Market for American Wheat, Senate Documents, 26th Cong., 2nd Sess., No. 222, 1-8. 62 Ballot Box, 7 Oct. 1840, quoted in Davis, Leavitt, 171. 63 Morgan, “Anti-Corn Law League,” 96; John Curtis, America and the Corn Laws, or Facts and Evidence Showing the Extensive Supply of Food which May be Brought from America, and the Effects of the Restrictive System on the British and American Trade (Manchester, 1841). 64 Memorial of Joshua Leavitt, Praying That, in the Revision of the Tariff Laws, the Principle of Discrimination May be Inserted in Favor of Those Countries in Which American Grain, Flour, and Salted Meat, are Admitted Duty Free, Senate Documents, 27th Cong., 2nd Sess., No. 339, pp. 117-24; British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 7. Sept. 1842, 142. 59 discussing the possibilities of free trade with English abolitionists while attending that year’s antislavery convention in London.65

Leavitt strengthened his transatlantic ties through his correspondence with his

English friends, letters which were then published in the Anti-Corn Law League Circular in England, and which encouraged British free traders and abolitionists to think of

American economic interests as well their own. He even established anti-Corn Law societies in the American Northwest and New York, although in doing so he gained the disfavor of protectionist abolitionists within the Whig party. His efforts, if modest in their material accomplishments, provided transatlantic moral support for the ACLL and strengthened Leavitt’s connection to Cobden and Bright.66

Firebrands Leavitt and Thompson were not alone in bringing the ACLL’s free trade fight to American shores. William Cullen Bryant, former Barnburner Democrat,

Free Soiler, poet, abolitionist, uncompromising free trader, and editor of the New York

Evening Post, had attended Anti-Corn-Law League meetings in London during the

1840s. In admiration for Cobden and Bright, Bryant even went on to edit the American

edition of Cobden’s Political Writings in 1865, and would become a leader of the

American free trade movement in years to come.67

65 Leeds Mercury, 27 May 1843; Hurley, Culture of English Antislavery, 126. Briefly in 1843, called for protectionism mixed with reciprocity, a ploy that most Whigs saw as a political stunt to strengthen Western ties with the South and placate John C. Calhoun. He quietly moved back to orthodox protectionism. See Parish, “Webster, New England, and the West,” 532-34. 66 Davis, Leavitt, 180, 196, 202, 204; James M. McPherson, “The Fight against the Gag Rule: Joshua Leavitt and Antislavery Insurgency in the Whig Party, 1839-1842,” Journal of Negro History 48 (July 1963): 177-195. 67 Foner, Free Soil, 153; Free-Trader (March 1870), 170; John Bigelow, William Cullen Bryant (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 182-83. 60 Arch-abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was himself heavily influenced by

George Thompson. As one abolitionist-turned-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.”68 In later years, Garrison became a member and corresponded frequently with the free trade club that took Cobden’s name (the Cobden Club) upon its creation in 1866.

Garrison expressed his thanks to Richard Cobden and the club “whose honoured name it bears,” and wrote to them that “I do not hesitate to avow myself to be a free-trader to an illimitable extent.”69 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 Cobdenite Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who was himself a convert from protectionism to free trade, and famous in England for his transatlantic tours. In years to come, he would beseech members of the New York Free Trade Club, for instance, to employ “the same energy and the same agitation” of the antislavery struggle toward the burgeoning American free trade movement.70 He also expressed his hope that he would live long enough “to induce the American people to favor the unshackling of intercourse between nation and nation.”71

68 Stebbins, Upward Steps, 194. 69 Morning Post, 7 Sept. 1875, 3. 70 New York Times, 27 May 1882, 5. 71 Henry Ward Beecher as His Friends Saw Him (Boston and New York: The Pilgrim Press, 1904), 128. 61 The “American Carlyle,” was a prominent player in the abolitionist movement, and a friend of Garrison.72 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 “imperial traits” “of that Anglo-

Saxon race” that had “secured for it the scepter of the globe.”73 He would continue to meet with Cobden on his English visits for years to come.74 A few years later, 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, who is the

cor cordis, the object of honor & belief to risen & rising in England . . . above all

educated by his dogma of Free Trade, led on by it to new lights & correlative

liberalities, as our abolitionists have been by their principle. . . . It was quite

beautiful, even sublime, last night, to notice the moral radiations which this Free

Trade dogma seemed to throw out.75

72 Len Gougeon, “The Anti-Slavery Background of Emerson’s ‘Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing,’” Studies in the American Renaissance (1985): 63-77; Gougeon, “Abolition, the Emersons, and 1837,” New England Quarterly 54 (Sept. 1981): 345-65; Gougeon, “Emerson and Abolition, the Silent Years: 1837- 1844,” American Literature 54 (Dec. 1982): 560-575. 73 Liverpool Mercury, 23 Nov. 1847. 74 Barbara L. Packer et al, ed., Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Conduct of His Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), VI, 212. 75 Emerson to Henry David Thoreau, 28 Jan. 1848, in Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Eleanor Marguerite Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-), 145. 62 Emerson, along with many of these first-generation Cobdenites, would exude some of this same energy when he helped create the American Free Trade League in 1865.

Cobdenite Amasa Walker, secretary of state for Massachusetts, economist, abolitionist, peace activist, Free Soiler, friend of fellow peace advocate Charles Sumner, and acquaintance of George Thompson, had first met Cobden and John Bright in

Manchester in 1843 where they joined forces to hold the first International Peace Society in London, and maintained their acquaintance thereafter. It was in London, Walker recollected to John Bright, that he first was “in cordial sympathy” with their “great designs and great accomplishments for human welfare.”76 Upon Cobden’s death in 1865,

Walker called his death “one of the saddest events which could have happened” to the cause of peace, a cause second only to his abolition of the Corn Laws, “the greatest economic revolution ever effected.”77

“Conscience” Whig Charles Sumner left that party in 1848 for the antislavery

Free Soil party, before becoming a leading member of the Radical Republicans in the late

1850s. Sumner first met Cobden in 1838 during a trip to England, and they developed a strong 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 Cobden’s condemnation of international

76 Sumner to Walker, 29 June 1849; 9 Jan. 1852, Box 1, Amasa Walker Papers, MHS; Amasa Walker to Bright, 22 Oct. 1866, Add. 43391, Vol. IX, John Bright Papers, British Library. 77 William Lloyd Garrison, ed. and intro., Letters and Addresses by George Thompson from Oct. 1, 1834 to Nov. 27, 1835 (Boston: Isaac Knaap, 1837), 48; Official Report of the Thirteenth Universal Peace Congress (Boston, 1904), 7; The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston, Lee and Shepard, 1870-83), IX, 439- 40; Amasa Walker, “Richard Cobden: His Services in the Cause of Peace,” Advocate of Peace (Boston, 1865), XV, 280, 285, 289; Liverpool Mercury, Sept. 30, 1865. 63 war.78 Henry Carey thereafter tried to convert Sumner to his protectionist doctrine during this period, to which Sumner returned the favor by questioning Carey about his own protectionist conversion. Sumner’s unwillingness to shift from Cobdenism to

Listianism caused Carey in 1852 to beseech:

If you could only once satisfy yourself that protection is the real and the only road

to freedom of trade and freedom in the fate of labour, whether by the white man

or the black you would see, as I think, that you had a great game to play, and

could do as much good as any man in the Union has got done, but that you cannot

do while you hold to British free trade which leads everywhere to the subjugation

of man.79

Sumner was also a strong advocate of Cobden’s quest for “Universal Peace,” writing Cobden that his “position of peculiar and commanding influence” would enable him “to render a service to it higher than has ever been rendered before.”80 Sumner in turn sought to inspire his fellow Free Soilers by reminding his 1849 audience of how the

ACLL had brought together Tories, Whigs, and Radicals to repeal “the monopoly of the

Corn-Laws. . . . In the spirit of these examples, the friends of Freedom have come

78 His personal free trade proclivities did not keep him from voting the Republican party line on the 1861 Morrill Tariff. 79 Carey to Sumner, 24 July 1852, reel 9, Sumner Papers. 80 Sumner to Cobden, 12 Feb. 1849, reel 63, Sumner Papers. For more on Massachusetts’s Conscience Whigs, see Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience: Massachusetts Whig Politics and Southwestern Expansion, 1843-1848 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). 64 together, in well-compacted ranks, to uphold their cherished principles, and, by combined efforts, according to the course of parties, to urge them upon the Government, and upon the country.”81 As historian Stephen Meardon notes, “the equation of tariff barriers with

‘monopoly,’ and their repeal with ‘Freedom,’ was antithetical to the rhetoric of American

Whigs. It 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.”82

America’s first Cobdenites were an imposing group with strong transatlantic ties.

Long after Cobden’s 1865 death, many of these American radicals would maintain correspondence with the Cobden Club’s leadership and Cobden’s chief disciple and man- at-arms, John Bright. They would also work toward bringing about Cobden’s universal vision of free trade and peace. These American friends of Cobden and John Bright were subscribers to Cobdenism and headed the vanguard of Victorian America’s free trade movement. William Freehling has asserted that Jeffersonian free trade and slavery were

“intermeshed” by the time of the (1832-33); by the 1840s, so too were Cobdenite free trade and abolitionism intermeshed in New England.83

Cobdenism, the Corn Laws, and Westward Expansion

81 Sumner to Bancroft, March 15, 1846, Bancroft Papers; Charles Sumner, “Address to the People of Massachusetts, September 12, 1849,” in Orations and Speeches of Charles Sumner (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1850), II, 294. 82 Meardon, “Richard Cobden’s American Quandary,” 216. See also Thomas P. Martin, “The Upper Mississippi Valley in Anglo-American Anti-Slavery and Free Trade Relations: 1837-1842,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 15 (Sept. 1928): 208-211. 83 William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816- 1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 255. 65

The Anti-Corn-Law League hoped to cope with Britain’s growing manufacturing power and its continued economic protectionism. Britain’s unwieldy 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 landowner’s 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, only to be compounded again four years later with the demise of the Navigation

Acts. At long last, the promised “cheap loaf” proved politically palatable, as did Britain’s ensuing empire of free trade. The era of the Pax Britannica had arrived.

Two months earlier, across the Atlantic, at the antebellum apogee of nationwide

Manifest Destiny—the patriotic desire to expand the reach of the United States to every edge of North America—U.S. President James K. Polk declared war against Mexico.84

Anti-war Whigs tended to view the Mexican War as an overt attempt to extend the territory of the Southern “slave power.” In response, as historian Sam Haynes paints the

84 Much has been written on the subject of Manifest Destiny. See, for instance, Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York: Vintage Books, 1966); Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995); and Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). For Polk and the Mexican War, see Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843- 1846 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966); Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America (New York: Random House, 2008); John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846-48 (New York: Random House, 1989); and David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973). 66 scene, Anglophobic Western and Southern expansionists tarred “the Whigs with a British brush.” Antebellum Anglophobia had become a reliable “multipurpose bête noire.”85

The decision for war stemmed in part out of an American fear of British antislavery and annexationist agitation in Texas and California, followed by rumors that the British would support Mexico with men and money if a quarrel broke out.86 Robert J.

Walker, for instance, warned that a pro-British Texas would lead to a slave exodus from the South, and would give the British Empire a convenient foothold with which to invade the Mississippi delta.87 Perhaps in the hope of striking a sympathetic chord with Whig protectionists, others suggested that the British would use the recently minted Texas

Republic as a way to avoid U.S. tariff schedules.88 Alongside Anglophobia and free trade, still others tantalizingly dangled the possibility of global markets in order to gain support, suggesting that the new territories would open up “the trade of the Western coast of the two Americas” as well as “the trade of the East Indies, in Asia, and the rich

85 Sam W. Haynes, “Anglophobia and the Annexation of Texas: The Quest for National Security,” in Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism, ed. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), 139; Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, 145. 86 Haynes, “Anglophobia, Annexation,” 115-45; Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, 230-250; Howard Temperley, British Antislavery, 1833-1870 (London: Longman, 1972), 197-202; Harriet Smither, “English Abolitionism and the Annexation of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 32 (Jan. 1929): 193-205; Ephraim Douglas Adams, British Interest and Activities in Texas, 1838-1846 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1910; Adams, “English Interest in the Annexation of California,” American Historical Review 14 (July 1909): 744-763; Lelia Roeckell, “Bonds over Bondage: British Opposition to the Annexation of Texas,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Summer 1999): 257-78; Sheldon G. Jackson, “The British and the California Dream: Rumors, Myths, and Legends,” Southern California Quarterly 57 (Summer 1975): 251-68; Jackson, “Two Pro-British Plots in Alta California,” Southern California Quarterly 55 (Summer 1973): 105-40; New York Evening Post, 19 Jan. 1846. 87 Robert J. Walker, Letter of Mr. Walker Relative to the Annexation of Texas; in Reply to the Call of the People of Carroll County, Kentucky, to Communicate His Views on the Subject (Washington: The Globe Office, 1844). 88 Haynes, “Anglophobia, Annexation,” 133. 67 commerce of the Chinese Empire . . . and a market for the products of the South and the manufactories of the North.”89

The war with Mexico also contained the problematic promise of massive tracts of new American territory. Would they ultimately become free or slave states? In trying to solve this problem, a halting step toward banning slavery from any territorial additions to the United States—the Wilmot Proviso—was correspondingly pushed through the House of Representatives. Although halted in the Senate, the proviso fertilized the dormant seeds of sectionalism and secession surrounding the future of slavery’s expansion: seeds that would sprout into civil war in 1861.

Aside from the timing, little appears at first glance to connect Victorian-era free trade with the American controversy over free soil, free land, and free men. How significant an issue could free trade have been in the years leading up to the Civil War?

After all, slavery monopolized the era’s political scene as no other issue had in American history.90 Yet the influence of Victorian free trade reverberated throughout antebellum

U.S. domestic and foreign relations, from the Oregon boundary dispute, to abolitionism, to the formation of the Republican party.

Ideas evolve over time, adapting to, and reshaping themselves around, a myriad of fluctuating political, cultural, social, and economic environments. It is not all that surprising, therefore, that the ideology of free trade, for so long associated with French physiocratic and Jeffersonian-Jacksonian agrarianism, soon found its most vocal

89 Ximenes, Mr. Calhoun—Mr. Van Buren—Texas (1 July 1843), quoted in Haynes, “Anglophobia, Annexation,” 126. 90 David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 49. 68 advocates among British Cobdenite manufacturers as England neared its zenith of industrial dominance. Cobdenism spread rapidly across the English Channel, taking root throughout the 1840s in France, Italy, Germany, and Greece.91 Likewise, in Spain, free trade clubs were founded in the wake of Cobden’s triumphal tour.92 By the 1860s,

Cobdenism found fresh converts in Australia, as well.93 Yet, as described above,

Cobden’s cosmopolitan ideology found the most fertile soil within America’s rapidly industrializing New England states.

The United States and Britain had become increasingly interdependent throughout the nineteenth century. From 1820 to 1860, almost half of U.S. exports went to Britain, and British goods made up around 40 per cent of American imports. By 1860, Britain imported 80 per cent of its raw cotton from the South, and nearly all U.S. textile imports came from Britain. British and American commercial policies were thus indelibly linked in the 1840s, when Cobdenism found its way across the Atlantic and onto American soil.94 The Economist of London had ambiguously noted as much in late 1844, following

91 Alex Tyrrell, “‘La Ligue Francaise’: The Anti-Corn Law League and the Campaign for in France during the last days of the July Monarchy,” in Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays, ed. by Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 99-116; Robert Romani, “The Cobdenian Moment in the Italian Risorgimento,” ibid., 117- 140; Detlev Mares, “‘Not Entirely a Manchester Man’: Richard Cobden and the Construction of Manchesterism in Nineteenth-Century German Economic Thinking,” ibid., 141-160; and Pandeleimon Hionidis, “Greek Responses to Cobden,” ibid., 161-176. 92 New York Evening Post, 18 Nov.; 31 Dec. 1846. 93 Craufurd D. W. Goodwin, Economic Enquiry in Australia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966), 11-12. 94 Frank Thistlwaite, America and the Atlantic Community: Anglo-American Aspects, 1790-1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1959), 11; Scott C. James and David A. Lake, “The Second Face of Hegemony: Britain’s Repeal of the Corn Laws and the American Walker Tariff of 1846,” International Organization 43 (Winter 1989): 1-29. 69 that year’s American elections, that “the policy of England will have an important influence on the future commercial laws of America.”95

Also during this era of massive economic growth and instability, some paternalistic Listian nationalist intellectuals in the United States were coming to accept that American infant industries might eventually reach adolescence and eventual adulthood; that reciprocal trade and expanding foreign markets would someday not only become desirable, but inevitable. Yet they also viewed Britain’s expanding free trade empire as a stumbling block to proper American industrial maturation.96

Such Anglophobic sentiment 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 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 . The paper also speculated with less cynicism that there might now be an increased “chance for combining the settlement of the Oregon question with arrangements advantageous to the trade of the two countries.”

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 found

95 Economist, 30 Nov. 1844, p. 1466. 96 Kinley J. Brauer, “The United States and British Imperial Expansion, 1815-1860,” Diplomatic History 12 (Winter 1988): 19-37. 70 encouragement from the ACLL, with one of its member’s expressing the hope that now

England was going “for entire freedom of trade, and 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.”97 Anglophobic Whig opponents were quick to portray Polk as a paid British agent, drawing conspiratorial connections between British industrialists, free trade pamphlet propaganda, and the Democratic nominee’s liberal stance on the tariff.98

It was at about this time, too, that the British began to take substantial notice of the bountiful wheat crop and the expansive agricultural development of the American

West. Discussion arose as to whether these vast Western territories might become

Britain’s next breadbasket, especially after the onset of a severe harvest shortage throughout the in 1845.99 With the promise of cheap U.S. wheat imports to counteract the famine, some of Britain’s ACLL members apparently went so far as to exaggerate the destruction of England’s wheat crop in order to garner further domestic support for repeal of the Corn Laws, proffering a massive U.S. wheat bounty as replacement. Alongside solving the food shortage through increased importation of

American wheat, British free traders also believed that repeal would create such strong commercial connections between the British Empire and the United States that present

97 New York Evening Post, 12 Jan., 19 Jan., 26 Jan., 28 Jan. 1846. 98 Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, 129-31, 149-51. 99 Harry J. Carman, “English Views of Middle Western Agriculture, 1850-1870,” Agricultural History 8 (Jan. 1934): 3-19; Thomas Stirton, “Free Trade and the Wheat Surplus of the Old Northwest, 1839-1846” (MA Thesis, University of Chicago, 1952), 67-139. Wheat continued to play an important diplomatic role in subsequent years. See, for instance, Morton Rothstein, “America in the International Rivalry for the British Wheat Market, 1860-1914,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (Dec. 1960): 401-418. 71 and future Anglo-American hostilities like the present boundary issue might forever come to an end. British free traders’ desire for Western wheat as part of the promised

“cheap loaf” alongside a general British turn toward internationalism and an eschewing of formal imperialism not only strengthened repeal but laid the groundwork for a peaceable solution to the Oregon boundary dispute.100

The European Times speculated that, upon repeal, “Indian corn would, doubtless, form an important article of export from America. . . . Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive a stronger barrier against war . . . than the destruction of all legislative enactments for curtailing the commerce of friendly countries.” According to the

European Times, the Western farmer also desired a peaceful settlement over the horrors of war. “Commerce is always the soother of angry passions—the oil upon the troubled waters of contending factions . . . a large party of this country wish well to Mr. Polk.

They dislike his pugnacity, but they are partial to the President, because he is a free trader, and is desirous of reducing the tariff from ‘protection’ or prohibition to

100 London Times, 11 Nov. 1845, 4; 18 Nov. 1846, 4; Blanche Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: , 1845-49 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 40; Frederick Merk, The Oregon Question: Essays in Anglo-American Diplomacy and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967), 309-36, 391; Merk, “The British Corn Crisis of 1845-46 and the Oregon Treaty,” Agricultural History (July 1934): 95-123; Thomas P. Martin, “Free Trade and the Oregon Question, 1842-1846,” in Facts and Factors in Economic History: Articles by Former Students of (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 485-90; R. C. Clark, “British and American Tariff Policies and their Influence on the Oregon Boundary Treaty,” Pacific Coast Branch of them American Historical Association Proceedings (1926): 32-49; Henry Commager, “England and Oregon Treaty of 1846,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 28 (March 1927): 18-38, esp. 34-38; Howard Jones and Donald A. Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-American Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1997), 228, 236; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, 417-20. 72 revenue.”101 In mid-January 1846, Lord John Russell also put it in Cobdenite terminology in Glasgow:

There is another advantage which I think would arise from the total abolition of

the duties on the importation of grain—it would bind this country much more

closely in the bonds of peace and amity with foreign states, and more especially

with one—I mean the United States of America. . . . If we are determined on this

side to import the products of the United States, and if the United States are

equally satisfied to do the same with the manufactures of this kingdom, that they

should feed us, and that we should clothe them, if no unhallowed legislation

should stand in the way of these desirable results, then we should see two nations

of the same race and speaking the same language united in the bonds of amity and

peace.102

Edward Everett expressed similar sentiments to U.S. Secretary of the Navy George

Bancroft, that Peel’s ministry “is sincerely desirous of peace with America . . . all entertain sanguine hopes of an increased commercial intercourse with us, in consequence of a repeal of the Corn Laws.”103

101 European Times, 20 Nov.-4 Dec. 1845, reprinted in Littell’s Living Age (Boston: Waite, Peirce & Company, Jan.-March 1846), VIII, 54. 102 Quoted in Merk, “The British Corn Crisis of 1845-46 and the Oregon Treaty,” 104. 103 Everett to Bancroft, 2 Feb. 1846, carton 14, George Bancroft Papers, MHS. 73 Baltimore’s protectionist news organ Niles’ Weekly Register wryly speculated that the Peel government would use the Oregon dispute to sway recalcitrant ministers toward repeal, and that obtaining freer trade through the proposed Walker Tariff in the United

States was “an object of such vital importance” that it would be “madness” to lose.

All English interests at once unite on that point. So favorable an opportunity must

not be thrown away, for a punctilio, or a barren waste of Northwestern wilderness.

There are immediate millions to be won by opening the American markets for

British manufacturers. Rival manufactures threatening to grow into predominating

magnitude, may now be prostrated. A rival nation, rapidly expanding ever [sic]

hour, becoming more independent of our fabrics, may again be courted into

colonial reliance.

After all, “who cares for frozen Oregon and Rocky Mountains? The glorious old colonies are coming back to a proper dependence upon British manufactures.”104 Free trade, it appeared, already was bringing its promised panacea of peace through more amicable

Anglo-American relations, as well as the promise of British free trade imperialism in the

United States.

104 Niles National Register (Baltimore), LXIX, 24 Jan. 1846, 322; 31 Jan. 1846, 340; 21 Feb. 1846, 386. 74

Figure 1: “Peel and Polk.” London’s humor magazine Punch offers a cartoon depicting Peel [left] pelting a militant Polk [right] with “Free Corn,” a commercial toss that would hopefully bring a peaceful settlement to the Oregon dispute. Punch explained this simple cartoon with a long-winded caption: “The English Premier has taken the happiest method of dealing with the American President. Polk fires off inflammatory messages, while Peel returns attack with Free-Trade measures. The latter will, we have every hope, prove irresistible, and Polk will not be able to make a successful stand against the very felicitous mode of warfare adopted by our Free-Trade minister. It is not likely that the American people will be misguided enough to continue a hostility, which will be so directly opposed to their own interests. Peel’s Free-Trade must be victorious against Polk’s firebrands. America may, if it pleases, pelt us with its corn, while return the compliment by pitching into the United States some of our manufactured articles. This will be much better for both parties than an exchange of lead, whether in the form of swan or grape, or packed in canister.” Punch (1846), X, 155.

Many Southerners, as well as some North Eastern abolitionists and manufacturers certainly looked with favor upon the overturning of the Corn Laws and the promise of open British markets. A correspondent for the South Carolina Temperance Advocate, for instance, looked upon repeal with “unbounded pleasure. . . . America has no less cause to rejoice than have the starving millions in Great Britain. . . . Should we continue our high

75 system of taxation, the industrial classes of the people” will also, he predicted, “rise up and overthrow their aristocratic rulers.” Cobdenite William Cullen Bryant’s New York

Evening Post argued that, while farmers along the Canadian border might feel a pinch,

farmers that sent their export produce from ports in the Mississippi and the Atlantic

“cannot fail to be benefitted by the repeal of the corn laws.” Cobdenite Joshua Leavitt’s

abolitionist organ The Emancipator predicted great returns for Western farmers and that exports from the “free States to England will be of greater value than our whole exports of tobacco and rice and every other slave grown article, except cotton.” And, within ten years, U.S. exports to Great Britain “of free labor products . . . will exceed in amount the whole export of cotton, and will thus emancipate our foreign commerce from the

Cottonocracy.”105

Yet support for repeal was by no means unanimous, either in Britain or the United

States. Entrenched, powerful interests in England vociferously opposed repeal, even as

Pennsylvania’s protectionists in particular fought against the Walker Tariff. And, in 1842,

Duff Green, a Southern agent, was sent to Europe with the goal of cutting the transatlantic ties between Northern abolitionists and the ACLL so as to maintain the current Southern and Western free trade alliance in American politics. Green had even claimed to have discovered a vast British conspiracy surrounding repeal of the Corn

Laws, the emancipation in Texas, and the destruction of U.S. commerce, and his speculations caused a great deal of alarm back home. Such sentiments were supported in

105 South Carolina Temperance Advocate and Register of Agriculture and General Literature (Columbia), 30 July 30 1846, 15; New York Evening Post, 28 Jan. 1846; Emancipator (New York), 19 Aug. 1846, 66. For a similar reaction, see also New York Evening Post, 20 Feb. 1846; Floridian (Tallahassee), 14 March 1846; Boston Investigator, 5 Aug. 1846; Liberator (Boston) 7 Jan. 1842, 2. 76 the Cleveland Herald in 1846, when it asked if Congress would “sacrifice the industry of our country to propitiate British interests.” Ohio’s Scioto Gazette warned that repeal meant competition with cheap Baltic exports and “would be followed by none of those advantages to the farmer which the Free Traders claim.” Georgia’s Whig Congressman

Thomas Butler King wielded this anti-free trade argument in the House of

Representatives, and the protectionist Whig journal American Review similarly predicted in February 1846 with some accuracy that repeal of the Corn Laws would not bring about any immediate increase in U.S. wheat exports.106

In support of this Whig critique, the reality of repeal meant that Canada and the

United States suddenly had to compete directly with the farm exports of the so-called pauper labor of Europe. This newfound economic competition was compounded by the realization that the United States had lost its backdoor trade route through Canada, a colony which until 1846 had been receiving preferential commercial treatment from

England. Owing to such increased European competition, agricultural prices subsequently fell.

106 Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, 22-23; Eiselen, “Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism,” chaps. 9-10; Martin, “Free Trade and the Oregon Question,” 475-80; Cleveland Herald, 27 Feb. 1846; Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe), 19 March 1846; Remarks of 9 Feb. 1846, Congressional Globe (Washington, 1846), 29th Cong. 1st Sess., 339-40; American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science (New York: George H. Colton, 1846), III, 218. See also remarks of Edward A. Hannegan, 5 March 1846, Congressional Globe, 29th Cong. 1st Sess., 460; Milwaukie Daily Sentinel, 4 Feb. 1846; Fayetteville Observer, 10 March 1846; Daily National Intelligencer (Washington D.C.), 10 March 1846; Scioto Gazette, 10 Feb. 10 1847. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina wrote in 26 March 1845 that “the movement of England toward free trade will greatly strengthen us, especially in the Northwest.” Charles Henry Ambler, ed. “Correspondence of Robert M. T. Hunter 1826-1876,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1916, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1918) , II, 77. 77 By 1849, this sharp price decline produced an economic depression in Canada, as well as a corresponding demand for American annexation from Montreal’s merchant community. Alongside placating this annexationist sentiment, avoiding seemingly never ending Canadian-American fisheries disputes, and the loss of Canada’s preferential treatment, the closing of the United States’ backdoor trade route thereafter played a significant role in the development of U.S.-Canadian reciprocity in 1854. Alternatively, protectionist Whigs like Daniel Webster and some Western farmers—the latter still seething over the Oregon issue—believed that the weak increase in U.S. exports and the declining price of wheat following repeal only strengthened the protectionist’s home- market thesis.107

Nor did repeal diminish American Anglophobia. The low U.S. Walker Tariff, the local success of the ACLL in England, and the peaceful settlement of the Oregon boundary dispute had ostensibly promised a new era of transatlantic trade liberalization and closer Anglo-American relations, a point that Polk himself noted to Congress in late

107 Edwin Williams, The Wheat Trade of the United States and Europe (New York: New York Farmers’ Club, 1846), 17-19; Merk, “The British Corn Crisis of 1845-46 and the Oregon Treaty,” 108-17; D. L. Burn, “Canada and the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” Cambridge Historical Journal 2 (1928): 252-272; Frederick E. Haynes, “The Reciprocity Treaty with Canada of 1854,” Publications of the American Economic Association 7 (Nov. 1892): 9-12; Thomas P. Martin, “The Staff of Life in Diplomacy and Politics during the Early Eighteen Fifties,” Agricultural History 18 (Jan. 1944): 1-15; Peter J. Parish, “Daniel Webster, New England, and the West,” Journal of American History 54 (Dec. 1967), 535. For more on the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, see Lawrence H. Officer and Lawrence B. Smith, “The Canadian- American Reciprocity Treaty of 1855 to 1866,” Journal of Economic History 28 (1968): 598-623; Robert E. Ankli, “The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854,” Canadian Journal of Economics 4 (Feb. 1971): 1-20; Donald C. Masters, The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854: Its History, its Relation to British Colonial and Foreign Policy and to the Development of Canadian Fiscal Autonomy (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937); and S. A. Saunders, “Reciprocity Treaty of 1854: A Regional Study,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 2 (Feb. 1936): 41-53. 78 1846.108 Yet, ironically, these events of 1846 and their aftermath demonstrated that

Anglophobia and tense Anglo-American relations were anything but over. The ideological wall between free traders and economic nationalists also proved seemingly insurmountable.

So how did America’s estranged Cobdenite and Listian bedfellows come to lie together within the Republican party, and how had their opposing ideologies developed?

Put simply, a radical minority of New England free traders initially gave their support to the Republican party—a party made up predominantly of former Whig protectionists— owing to the new party’s ideology of free labor and antislavery. These free traders were heavily influenced by the Anti-Corn-Law League’s leadership and success, and sought to bring eventually the same promised panacea of free trade, prosperity, and peace to

American shores. From 1846 to 1865, ideological movements, economic policies, and foreign relations thus took on previously overlooked international dimensions. The Whig-

Republican supporters of the “American System”—led intellectually by Listian nationalists like Henry Carey and Horace Greeley—began moving the party more and more away from antislavery and toward a platform of protectionism and government- subsidized internal improvements. As American Cobdenite hopes of freer trade became a

Republican pipedream, the party’s precarious Cobdenite-Listian alliance began to fracture. With a tenuous thread and needle, antislavery would stitch the Republican party together. As examined in subsequent chapters, upon the Civil War’s conclusion and

108 James K. Polk, “Second Annual Message,” 8 Dec. 1846, Tariff Proceedings and Documents 1839- 1857 Accompanied by Messages of the President, Treasury Reports, and Bills, 3 vols (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911), III, 1653. 79 Southern slaves’ subsequent manumission, the tempestuous tariff issue—coalescing upon the passage of the Morrill Tariff in 1861—would thereafter tear this fair-weather friendship apart.

The Republican Party: A Fair-Weather Friendship

New England’s free traders appear in stark contrast to the intellectual proponents of protectionism. How did Listian nationalists like Henry Carey and Horace Greeley end up in the same political party as Cobdenites Joshua Leavitt and Charles Sumner? Put simply, the answer lies in the ideology of free labor and free men.109 But the development of this fair-weather friendship involves a complex tale surrounding the formation of the Republican party in 1856.110 The Radical Republicans were a motley crew from their party’s inception, and the party’s eventual internal ideological differences go back at least to 1846.

As discussed earlier, the year 1846 saw the American passage of the moderate

Walker Tariff, one of the lowest tariffs in decades, establishing duties of 30 percent ad valorem on metals, woolens, glass, leather, and wood products, and 25 percent on cotton goods. Its passage also led to conspiratorial conjecture from one British newspaper, which asked whether the bill’s author, Treasury Secretary Francis Walker, was “in communication with the Anti-Corn-Law League,” and whether Manchester

109 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). 110 See, for instance, Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. 80 manufacturers had sent money across the Atlantic to purchase votes for its passage.

Whigs in the United States were quick to take up similar speculation. That same year also witnessed the militant outgrowth of American Manifest Destiny with the onset of the

Mexican War.111

Following the American victory over Mexico, the nationalism of Manifest

Destiny brought America’s western frontier to the shores of the Rio Grande and the

Pacific. But this nationalism also ironically released the forces of sectionalism and disunion. Such sectionalism surfaced from the proposal of a seemingly innocuous amendment to a bill that never was enacted: the 1846 Wilmot Proviso. Congressman

Wilmot proposed that no form of slavery should ever exist in any of the territory gained from Mexico. The vote split Whigs and Democrats, northerners and southerners.

Thereafter, historian David Potter observed, “the slavery question became the sectional question, the sectional question became the slavery question, and both became the territorial question . . . . Instead of being challenged where it prevailed, slavery was challenged where it did not exist . . . . The dialectic of the crisis of 1860 had been articulated by December of 1847.”112

The narrow passage of the Walker Tariff itself, aside from its aforementioned affect upon the ebullient Cobden in January 1846, also hinted at future sectional and ideological divisions over the tariff issue. Antebellum tariffs not only supported industrial development but also greatly contributed to sectional and national division; the 1846

111 F. W. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States (New York, 1931), 114; Standard (London), 1 Dec. 1851; 1 Nov. 1852; Haynes, Unfinished Revolution, 149-51. 112 Potter, Impending Crisis, 17, 18, 49, 62. 81 tariff was no exception.113 Whig spokesman Daniel Webster had prophesied as much when he articulated the Whig anti-annexationist argument regarding Texas, as Texas’s two new votes in the Senate in favor of the Walker bill’s passage not coincidentally had helped overturn the protectionist 1842 tariff. This was a pattern, Webster predicted, that would only be repeated in future tariff votes. Historian Charles Beard tersely summed up

Webster’s preferred protectionist model for American westward expansion: “keep new agrarian states out of the Union, refrain from additional annexations which will make impossible the supremacy of the commercial and industrial interests in national politics.”114 While Beard certainly downplayed the slavery issue and overemphasized this growing commercial-agricultural conflict concerning the tariff issue in the years leading up to civil war, as Marc Egnal and others have argued, such a conflict had indeed surfaced and only intensified the sectional strife.115

113 William D. Carleton, “Tariffs and the Rise of Sectionalism,” Current History 42 (June 1962): 333-38; Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, 2 Vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903), II, 71-81. 114 Charles A. Beard, Idea of the National Interest, 58. See also, Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (2 vols., New York: Macmillan, 1927, 1930), I: 628-724; II: 3-121. 115 Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); Egnal, “The Beards were Right: Parties in the North, 1840-1860,” Civil War History 47 (March 2001): 30-56; William G. Carleton, “Tariffs and the Rise of Sectionalism,” Current History 42 (June 1962): 333-38; Thomas M. Pitkin, “Western Republicans and the Tariff in 1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (Dec. 1940): 401-420. While I appreciate Egnal’s reigniting of economic issues and I agree with his emphasis upon a geographical-economic reorientation of national politics with the rise of the “Great Lakes economy,” I do not, however, agree with his conclusions, particularly that “antislavery remained a secondary concern and economics was primary in the formation of a strong Northern party in the 1850s” or that the Republican “economic agenda was more important” than antislavery. I am arguing the opposite, that economic differences within North Eastern Republican party politics were temporarily overshadowed by the issue of slavery in the years leading to the Civil War. Egnal’s own treatment of the Morrill Tariff demonstrates this lack of party cohesion. Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 124, 253, 256, 248-52, 257. For such earlier criticisms of Beard, see Potter, Impending Crisis, 443; and Allan Nevins, Emergence of Lincoln, 2 Vols. (New York: Scribner, 1950), II, 465-66. 82 The Wilmot Proviso may have sparked the crisis, but the South’s pyrrhic victories contained within the passage of the 1846 and 1857 low tariff bills, the 1850 Fugitive

Slave Act, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision certainly helped kindle it, and the 1854

Kansas-Nebraska Act threw oil on the flames. The antislavery Free-Soilers vociferously denounced the latter act. Intentionally or not, the Kansas-Nebraska Act represented a

“silent repeal” of the of 1820, a compromise that had maintained a precarious sectional peace for over a quarter century. One of the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s most egregious aspects was its affect upon the idea of , by

“employing it as a device for opening free territory to slavery.” Owing to such negative antislavery reaction to the act, northern Democrats lost resoundingly between 1854-55 to antislavery party alternatives. This antislavery reaction destroyed along the way the fragile balance of Northern and Southern Democratic representation in Congress. The act’s unintended galvanizing of antislavery sentiment in turn spelt the beginning of the end for the Whig party organization, as such sentiment tantalizingly proffered to antislavery Whigs the possibility of new alliances if only they left the party. Thus, both major parties roiled in turmoil, and, with the rise of the “Great Lakes economy,” the old

Southern-Western alliance gave way to a new Northern-Western one, tethered together by antislavery, free soil, Great Lakes canals, and railroad lines. This North-West political reorganization coalesced into the Republican party in 1856.116

116 Potter, Impending Crisis, 167, 158, 159, 173, 176, 247, 392; Foner, Free Soil, 125-6; Thistlewaite, America and the Atlantic Community, 9; Bruce Collins, “The Ideology of the Ante-Bellum Northern Democrats,” Journal of American Studies 11 (April 1977): 103-121; Egnal, “The Beards were Right”; Egnal, Clash of Extremes. Owing to more efficient transportation improvements, the West had initially shifted to a lower tariff position (and thus closer to the South) during the antebellum period. See Douglas 83 Although predominantly of the Whig persuasion, the Republican party was therefore a motley crew of former members of the antislavery Liberty and Free Soil parties, economically and politically conservative Whigs and Know-Nothings, and northern Barnburner Democrats who had found themselves more and more alienated from their adamant pro-slavery party brethren to the south. This move toward antislavery politics in the North and West eventually created a general geographical demarcation separating slave and free states, as well as the corresponding development of the

Republican ideology of free labor and free soil, although the party was by no means a fully fledged party of abolitionism.117 Horace Greeley admitted as much in the New

York Tribune: “there are Republicans who are Abolitionists; there are others who anxiously desire and labor for the good of the slave; but there are many more whose main impulse is a desire to secure the new Territories for Free White Labor, with little or no regard for the interests of negroes, free or slave.”118 Thus, America’s New England free traders and North Eastern and Great Lakes protectionists—its Cobdenites and Listians— had found a common cause and tenuous party loyalty under the banner of antislavery.

Finally, an event that would have lasting reverberations in the postbellum

Republican political era was the panic of 1857. The moderate revenue tariffs of 1846 and

1857 appeared to indicate an American move toward a policy of free trade that partly placated both Southern Jeffersonians and New England Cobdenites. The low tariffs also

Irwin, “Antebellum Tariff Politics: Coalition Formation and Shifting Regional Interests,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 12161 (April 2006): 1-43. 117 Foner, Free Soil, xiv, xxiv, 9, 19, 59, 61, 105, 153; William A. Williams, The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Pub. Co., 1961), 248. 118 New York Tribune, 15 Oct. 1856. 84 earned the ire of Henry Carey and politicians from the infant industrial Midwest and

North East.119 Such ire was heightened with the onset of a panic in 1857, which coincided closely with the passage of the passage of the low 1857 tariff, thereby revitalizing the Whig-Republican critique of free trade. They raised calls for more protectionism, thereby garnering further protectionist support in the West and generally intensifying prevailing sectional views.120 Listians Horace Greeley and Henry Carey in particular blamed the financial crisis on the lowering of tariffs, and believed that protectionism alternatively brought prosperity, stability, and high wages for the American laborer.121 Cobdenite Evening Post editor John Bigelow wrote to William Cullen Bryant that Greeley was already “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.” Carey and his acolytes thus intensified their efforts toward making the

Republican party “a protective party en bloc.”122

The Republican minority of free traders alternatively began fighting to institute a modest tariff for revenue only into the new party platform. Cobdenite William Cullen

Bryant believed that free trade was “a part of the grand movement of mankind toward a

119 Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 242-44; Eiselen, “Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism,” chap. 12. 120 James L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 1; Pitkin, “Western Republicans and the Tariff.” 121 On the latter, see James L. Huston, “A Political Response to Industrialism: The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrines,” Journal of American History 70 (June 1983): 35-57. 122 Henry C. Carey, Letters to the President on the Foreign and Domestic Policy of the Union, and its Effects, as Exhibited in the Condition of the People and the State (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1858); Foner, Free Soil, 173; Arthur Lee, “Henry Carey and the Republican Tariff,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 81 (July 1957), 285-90; Bigelow to Bryant, 12 Oct. 1857, box 1, John Bigelow Papers, NYPL; E. Pershine Smith to Carey, 6 Feb., 16 Jan. 1859, Edward Carey Gardiner Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 85 nobler condition of social existence,” and he attacked the resurgent protectionist proliferation among Whig-Republicans. Bryant’s Evening Post mocked Carey and

Greeley’s Listian nationalism, observing that Carey himself had once believed in free trade and appeared to be “‘suffering under a sort of monomania’ on the tariff issue.”123

Two months before the Republican convention, Bryant even charged that there was a conspiracy underway “to pervert the Republican party to the purposes of the owners of coal and iron mines” through tariff legislation. In 1858, Charles Francis Adams Sr. warned that “an attempt is making from the old Whig side to stuff in the protective tariff as a substitute for the slave question.”124 As the outbreak of the Civil War neared, the

Cobdenite-Listian political alliance was already showing strain.

Conclusion

Coinciding with Westward expansion, the spread of Cobdenite cosmopolitanism and Listian nationalism to American shores ushered in an ideological conflict that would reshape the political economic landscape for decades to come, especially as the fledgling

Republican party turned from antislavery to protectionism. This shift began in 1860 with the proposal of a highly protective tariff bill by ’s Republican Congressman

Justin Morrill. Robert Toombs certainly misread the situation in November 1860 when,

123 Parke Godwin, A Biography of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from his Private Correspondence 2 Vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), I, 388; New York Evening Post, 14 Jan. 1860. 124 Adams to Sumner, Aug. 1, 1858, microfilm reel 162, Charles Francis Adams Letterbook, Adams Family Papers, MHS; Foner, Free Soil, 175-6, 203. 86 amid the Georgia secession convention, he stated that “the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists. The result of this coalition was the infamous Morrill bill.”125 Rather, the proposed tariff 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 North East among some merchants and manufacturers and their representatives, as well as among Republican Cobdenites.126 Years later, Justin Morrill himself admitted that protection “was not asked for and but coldly welcomed by the manufacturers.”127

Yet the demands and the lobbying tactics of the protectionists were apparently more than a match for such low-tariff opposition, especially following the secession of various Southern states that might otherwise have voted against it.128 Hoping to woo voters in protectionist Pennsylvania, the Republican party ignored the New England free trade outcry and coalesced behind a high tariff bill crafted by Henry Carey and Justin

Morrill. The latter wrote on April 1861, two months after the tariff’s passage: “Our Tariff

125 William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, eds., Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38. 126 New York Times, 6 Feb.1861, 1; Egnal, Clash of Extremes, 249. Various manufacturers warned Morrill against raising dutiable rates. See J. M. Forbes to Morrill, Feb. 18, 1859; Henry S. Pierce to Morrill, April 26, 1860; J. Sting Fray Bigs[?] to Morrill, May 7, 1860, reel 4; Jed Jewitt to Morrill, Feb. 2, 1861; copy, Portuguese legate De Figaniere e Mordo to J. S. Black, Feb. 12, 1861; J. M. Forbes to Sumner, Feb. 21, 1861; Lombard, Whitney & Co. to A. H. Rice, Feb. 21, 1861, reel 5, microfilm, Justin Morrill Papers, LOC. 127 Richard Hofstadter, “The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 44 (Oct. 1938): 50-55; Cong. Globe, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., 2053; J. L. Bishop, A History of American Manufactures. 2 Vols. (Philadelphia: F. Young & Co., 1864), II, 427; Chester Whitney Wright, Wool- Growing and the Tariff: A Study in the Economic History of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910), 107-8; Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 160, n. 128 Phillip W. Magness, “Morrill and the Missing Industries: Strategic Lobbying Behavior and the Tariff, 1858-1861,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Summer 2009): 287-329. 87 Bill is unfortunate in being launched at this time as it will be made the scape-goat of all difficulties.”129 Morrill’s prescience was remarkable.

129 Justin Smith Morrill to , April 1, 1861, GLC02762, Gilder Lehrman Institute Archives, . 88 Chapter 2: The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate:

Great Britain, the Morrill Tariff, and the Confederacy’s Free Trade

Diplomacy

The Confederate constitution made slavery and free trade its chief corner stones. This

was not an attempt to mix oil and water. Free trade was not adopted because of any love

of freedom. The Confederates knew very well that it would help them to perpetuate

slavery and it did secure for them a large measure of British sympathy and aid.

Listian Albert Clarke.1

….Into your confounded quarrel

Let myself be dragged I’ll not

By you, fighting for a Morrill Tariff; or your slavery lot.

What I want to do with either

Is impartially to trade:

Nonsense I will stand from neither

Past the bounds of gasconade.

“Mr. Bull to His American Bullies,” Punch, reprinted in Leeds Mercury, 1 Oct. 1863.

1 Albert Clarke, “Free Trade is not Free,” A Tariff Symposium (Boston: Home Market Club, 1896), 9. 89 If it be not in slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual

separation of the Southern from the Northern States? . . . The last grievance of the South

was the Morrill tariff. . . .That it disgusts the best half of the North we heartily hope; we

see also that it has severed the last threads which bound the North and South together.

Charles Dickens.2

With the rapid secession of Southern states in the first months of 1861, many in

Great Britain speculated that the Morrill Tariff’s passage was an underlying cause of

secession, or that it at least impeded any chance of reunion. Contemporaries on both sides

of the Atlantic were well aware that the tariff would greatly affect European diplomacy

with both the North and South, to the former’s detriment and the latter’s favor. The

Union’s Morrill Tariff, influenced and lobbied for by Listian nationalist Henry C. Carey,

contrasted sharply with the South’s free trade advocacy. Domestically, the Morrill Tariff

was an important component of the 1860 Republican platform, which ended up being a

tentative triumph for the party’s Whig faction as the platform also called for internal

improvements, a Pacific railroad, and a homestead law.3 The British, in turn, viewed the

2 “The Morrill Tariff,” All the Year Round, 28 Dec. 1861, 328-30. 3 Frank W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (New York and London, 1931 [1892]), 158-60. For more detailed studies of Justin Morrill and the Morrill Tariff, see Phillip W. Magness, “Morrill and the Missing Industries: Strategic Lobbying Behavior and the Tariff, 1858-1861,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Summer 2009): 287-329; Jane Flaherty, “Incidental Protection: An Examination of the Morrill Tariff,” Essays in Economic and Business History 19 (2001): 103-118; Thomas M. Pitkin, “Western Republicans and the Tariff in 1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 27 (Dec. 1940): 401-420; Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century 2 vols. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903); Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 104-110, 113-114, 116; and William Belmont Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924). 90 protective tariff with great trepidation. It both threatened British manufactures and, as

Richard Cobden pointed out in December 1861, proved antithetical to a subject that the

British “are unanimous and fanatical”: that of “Free Trade.”4 The Morrill Tariff thus ushered in nearly a century of American economic nationalism, a system that was correspondingly condemned by U.S. and British Cobdenites throughout the Civil War and for decades to come.

The Morrill Tariff’s rates were generally raised to about the moderate level of those in 1846. Yet, significantly, it also raised the dutiable rates on specific items such as pig iron and wool to nearly 50 percent, levels of protection that severely hit at Britain’s exports to its largest single market, the United States.5 The seceding Southern states, providing England with nearly 80 percent of its raw cotton imports, alternatively offered

Britain the promise of free trade.6 In Great Britain, the tariff thus played an integral role in justifying Southern secession, developing Confederate trade policy, and affecting opinion in Canada, England, Ireland, and concerning the causes of Southern secession and the possibility of Confederate recognition and trade.7 Over the course of

4 Cobden to Charles Sumner, 5 Dec. 1861, microfilm reel 23, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 5 Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 158-9; Magness, “Morrill and Missing Industries,” 327-8; Flaherty, “Incidental Protection”; Duncan A. Campbell, English Public Opinion and the American Civil War (Campbell: Boydell & Brewer, 2003), 41. Between 1830 and 1860, a quarter of British exports went to the United States. David P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861-1865 (New York: Wiley, 1974), 4-9. 6 Bernard Schmidt, “The Influence of Wheat and Cotton in Anglo-American Relations during the Civil War,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics 16 (1918): 401-439; Eli Ginzberg, “The Economics of British Neutrality during the American Civil War,” Agricultural History 10 (Oct. 1936): 147-156; Robert H. Jones, “Long Live the King?” Agricultural History 37 (July 1963): 166-169. 7 William G. Carleton, “Tariffs and the Rise of Sectionalism,” Current History 42 (June 1962): 333-38; Richard H. Luthin, “ and the Tariff,” American Historical Review 49 (July 1944), 614; 91 the Civil War, the tariff sparked a particularly contentious debate in Great Britain over

Southern motivations for secession. When the Union did not immediately declare itself on a crusade for abolition, there were some in Great Britain that either sympathized outright with the South, or at least took a neutral stance.8 Northern sympathizers and antislavery advocates would afterward maintain that slavery had been the primary issue all along, while the Confederacy’s transatlantic supporters and various members of the

British press at first commonly portrayed the war as one fought between Northern proponents of protectionism and Southern advocates of free trade, a view that contemporary Southerners and their British sympathizers made sure to encourage, and one that historians have since neglected.

As Martin Crawford has observed, the Morrill Tariff’s impact upon British opinion “was certainly greater than most modern historians have been willing to admit.”9

Recent studies of Civil War foreign relations have offered strong arguments for why

Britain maintained its neutral stance throughout the conflict by emphasizing the strong

Northern diplomatic and financial ties that had developed by the middle of the century.10

John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 108-39; and Robert A. McGuire and T. Norman van Cott, “The Confederate Constitution, Tariffs, and the Laffer Relationship,” Economic Inquiry 40 (July 2002): 428-38. 8 Douglas A. Lorimer, “The Role of Anti-Slavery Sentiment in English Reactions to the American Civil War,” Historical Journal 19 (June 1976): 405-420. 9 Martin Crawford, The Anglo-American Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Times and America, 1850-1862 (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), 93. 10 The Morrill Tariff receives only the briefest mention in Phillip E. Myers’s argument for Anglo- American cooperation, and the same goes for Jay Sexton, who emphasizes the close financial ties between British and Northern financial houses during the era. Phillip E. Myers, Caution & Cooperation: The American Civil War in British-American Relations (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 2008), 75; Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005). 92 Looking back, it is certainly tempting and persuasive to point out that such close ties likely made British recognition of the Confederacy—let alone military intervention on its behalf—unrealistic. But such studies have done so while overlooking British reaction to the tariff at the time it was passed. Although the Morrill Tariff may not have endangered

British investment in the United States, it greatly ruffled Britain’s commercial feathers and editorial pages. Aside from the work of Duncan Campbell, however, the tariff issue has become little more than a footnote within the diplomatic histories of the Civil War.11

The Civil War itself has received so much transatlantic study that the minimizing of the tariff issue in recent decades is all the more remarkable.12 Brian Jenkins, for instance, has claimed that the Morrill Tariff “did not work to the South’s advantage.” Howard

Jones has likewise recently asserted that the Morrill Tariff did not help the Confederacy

11 Campbell, English Public Opinion, 41-8. 12 For such transatlantic studies of the Civil War, see, among others, Robert E. May, ed., The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995); Howard Jones, Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Richard J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Duncan Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, American and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 142-170; Frank J. Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); David F. Krein, The Last Palmerson Government: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and the Genesis of “Splendid Isolation” (Ames: Press, 1978); Henry Blumenthal, “Confederate Diplomacy: Popular Notions and International Realities,” Journal of Southern History 32 (May 1966): 151-171; Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); D. P. Crook, “Portents of War: English Opinion on Secession,” Journal of American Studies 4 (Feb. 1971): 163-179; Joseph M. Hernon, Jr., “British Sympathies in the American Civil War: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Southern History 33 (Aug. 1967): 356-367; Kinley J. Brauer, “British Mediation and the American Civil War: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Southern History 38 (Feb. 1972): 49-64; Brauer, “The Slavery Problem in the Diplomacy of the American Civil War,” Pacific Historical Review 41 (Aug. 1977): 439- 469; Richard A. Heckman, “British Press Reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation,” Lincoln Herald 71 (Winter 1969): 150-57; Jay Sexton, “Toward a Synthesis of Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1848- 77,” American Nineteenth Century History 5 (Fall 2004): 50-73; Richard Little, “British Neutrality versus Offshore Balancing in the American Civil War: The English School Strikes Back.” Security Studies 16 (Jan. 2007): 68-95; Christopher Ewan, “The Emancipation Proclamation and British Public Opinion,” The Historian 67 (2005): 1-19; and Kenneth Bourne, “British Preparations for War with the North, 1861-1862,” English Historical Review (Oct. 1961): 600-632. 93 gain British support. And while David Crook briefly acknowledges that the South sought to “exploit British resentment at the Union’s ‘new protectionism,’ symbolized by the

Morrill tariff, and offered the lure of a free-trade south as a vital new market for British goods” and that “southern propaganda excoriated the Morrill tariff,” he offers no further treatment of these subjects. Granted, these studies accurately portray the tariff’s relatively small role in influencing the final decisions of Britain’s top policymakers. If, however, the Confederacy’s Free Trade diplomacy is expanded to include not only official state-to- state interactions, but also the activities of non-state Southern sympathizers and pro-

Confederate propagandistic efforts to influence English public opinion, then the tariff debate takes on renewed significance within Civil War foreign relations.

A more thorough treatment of the transatlantic tariff debate is therefore sorely needed. A previous study of the English press during this period, for example, has incorrectly concluded that the Morrill Tariff “had little or no effect on forming editorial opinion,” while Duncan Campbell’s study of English public opinion suggests that few

British journals “actually laid part of the blame for secession on the tariff,” and that such blame was “unusual.”13 This chapter demonstrates otherwise, while at the same time

13 Brian Jenkins, Britain & the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1974-89), I, 81; Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 18; David Crook, North, South, and the Powers, 21-22; Thomas J. Keiser, “The English Press and the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Reading, 1971), 101; and Campbell, English Public Opinion, 44-5. 94 offering a fuller picture of the British Empire’s reaction to the Northern tariff by incorporating Canadian, Scottish, and Irish responses as well.14

Potential pitfalls invariably arise when discussing British “opinion.” By drawing on a wide sampling of British news outlets, hopefully some of these have been avoided.15 Even with these caveats in mind, it becomes quickly clear that such British support for the South as existed went much farther than an opposition to fratricide, blockades, the right to self-determination, or democracy; it was also an opposition to

Northern protectionism.16

What little attention the tariff issue has received primarily revolves around defending or refuting Charles and Mary Beard’s emphasis on domestic economic motivations for the Civil War’s onset.17 Some historians have viewed Southern secession

14 Lorraine Peters has notably looked at Southern Scotland’s diverse reaction to the Civil War in “The Impact of the American Civil War on the Local Communities of Southern Scotland,” Civil War History 49 (June 2003): 133-152. 15 D. G. Wright and D. E. Wright, for instance, discuss the difficulties surrounding English opinion by using the the towns of Bradford and Leeds as case studies, in “English Opinion on Secession: A Note,” Journal of American Studies 5 (Aug. 1971): 151-54. 16 Philip S. Foner briefly mentions these differing reasons for Confederate support in British Labor and the American Civil War (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981), 3. For portrayals of British support for the South based on opposition to democracy, see Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1925); Donaldson Jordan and Edwin J. Pratt, Europe and the American Civil War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931); and Donald Bellows, “A Study of British Conservative Reaction to the American Civil War,” Journal of Southern History 51 (Nov. 1985): 505-526. 17 Charles A. and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1927), II, 35-8; Richard Hofstadter, “The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 44 (Oct. 1938): 50-5; George Winston Smith, “A Rising Industry’s Battle for the Morrill Tariff,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 16 (Dec. 1942): 106-111; Alan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, Vol. II: Prologue to Civil War (New York: Scribner, 1950), 465; Hugh Tulloch, The Debate on the American Civil War Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 121-2; Marc Egnal, ‘‘The Beards Were Right: Parties in the North, 1840–1860,’’ Civil War History 47 (2001): 30–56; Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 7-8; Jane Flaherty, “‘The Exhausted Condition of the Treasury,’ on the Eve of the Civil War,” Civil War History 55 (June 2009), 248-52; and Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund, Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2004), 2, 22-6. See also Magness, “Morrill and Missing Industries,” 287. 95 as little more than a replay of the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, wherein South

Carolina had threatened secession as a response to protectionist legislation. As William

Freehling has effectively argued, however, the tariff question and slavery agitation had largely become “intermeshed” by the earlier crisis of nullification.18 A growing lack of

Southern cohesion on the tariff issue and the succession of seceding Southern states in fact made the Morrill Tariff’s passage all the more possible, suggesting in hindsight at least that the tariff was by no means the primary motivating factor for secession.19

Nevertheless, many in free-trading Great Britain were not nearly so certain at the time of

Southern secession.

As the tariff’s passage approached in early March 1861, the Confederacy and its transatlantic supporters thereafter emphasized abroad the South’s desire for international free trade, dangling the carrot of Free Trade before Europe, even as it brandished King

18 William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816- 1836 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 255. For recent treatments of the tariff issue in the antebellum years, see Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 237-341; Sam W. Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 133-76; and Phillip W. Magness, “From Tariffs to the Income Tax: Trade Protection and Revenue in the United States Tax System” (Ph.D. diss., George Mason University, 2009), 41-144. 19 For this lack of cohesion over the tariff, see Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840-1861 (Urbana, IL, 1924); Schoen, Fragile Fabric of Union; Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy; and Jay Carlander and John Majewski, “Imagining ‘A Great Manufacturing Empire’: Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff,” Civil War History 49 (Dec. 2003): 334-52. Furthermore, although the tariff issue was certainly raised in the secessionist conventions of South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia, for instance, the topic was utterly overwhelmed by speeches concerning the perceived Northern threat to the slave system practiced in the South and promised in the territories. For the tariff raised as a secessionist issue, see, for instance, Robert Toombs’s secessionist speech, 13 Nov. 1860, in William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson, eds., Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 31-50; and George Wythe Randolph’s secessionist speech, March 16, 1861, in Freehling and Simpson, eds., Showdown in Virginia: The 1861 Convention and the Fate of the Union (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 49-61. 96 Cotton’s stick.20 The South’s free trade justification for secession was immediately picked up by numerous British news outlets and drew a surprising amount of initial sympathy from within the zealous empire of free trade, as well as British editorial and parliamentary speculation as to the tariff’s centrality to the conflict.21 The Morrill Tariff, owing to its harmful effects upon British commerce and its reception within the British press, thus helped influence British public opinion for years to come.

While Southern Free Trade diplomacy did not ultimately help gain British recognition any more than did the diplomacy of King Cotton, in the first years of the

Civil War the Northern tariff handily offered a rationale for secession that was politically palatable for many in free-trading Britain, as it was consuming its “cheap loaf” and riding high on its newfound free trade ideology, Cobdenism. Along with the Northern blockade of the South, British recognition of Southern belligerency in May 1861, the Trent Affair in November 1861, and the September 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, the South’s free trade argument and transatlantic propaganda created ambiguity, division, confusion, and

20 The Monitcur was “indignant” over the duties and suspicious as to the ardor of the North’s antislavery sentiment. New York Times, 18 March 1861, 1. George M. Blackburn has mentioned the initial conservative French press reaction; that economic interests, particularly the Morrill Tariff, were the “only” reason for the war. Blackburn, French Newspaper Opinion on the American Civil War (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997), 64, 74. The liberal Journal des Economists likewise wrote that “if slavery has its share of the responsibility in this business, the protective system also has its part.” Serge Gavronsky, The French Liberal Opposition and the American Civil War (New York: Humanities Press, 1968), 81. Brian Jenkins has also noted the Morrill Tariff’s effects on Canadian-American relations in Britain & the War, I, 60, 61, 65. 21 Foner, British Labor, 3-4; and Campbell, English Public Opinion, 41. Mary Ellison has also argued that there existed greater English sympathy for Southern secession than previously realized in Support for Secession: and the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Notable exceptions include the radical Bradford Review and the Leeds Express, which viewed the struggle at the outset as one between slavery and freedom. The Leeds Express, however, was quickly countered by the Tory Leeds Intelligencer, a strong proponent of secession. Wright and Wright, “English Opinion on Secession,” 151-53. 97 initial Southern support across the Atlantic, thereby further exacerbating already tense

Union-British relations, aided and abetted by the Union’s refusal to tackle slavery. The

South’s governmental and nongovernmental allies made good use of the Confederacy’s

Free Trade diplomacy at the outset of the Civil War.22 The tariff debate that followed the passage of the Morrill Tariff subsequently created heated British editorial and parliamentary speculation concerning the primary causes of Southern secession—with many papers suggesting part or all of the blame lay with Northern protectionism—and contributed to the looming possibility of British recognition of the South in the first years of the war. Not until America’s and Britain’s Cobdenites effectively countered the tariff argument with one of slavery did British public sentiment noticeably begin to shift to the

North. Responding with proclamations, editorials, and speeches of their own, transatlantic Cobdenites gradually were able to turn British attention away from the

North’s antagonistic policies of blockades and protectionism, and toward the Union’s fight to destroy the Southern system of slavery.

The Morrill Tariff Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 10, 1860 on a sectional vote, with nearly all Northern representatives in support and nearly all

Southern representatives in opposition. The bill was tabled in the Senate by Virginia’s

Robert Hunter—future Confederate secretary of state and author of the low 1857 tariff—

22 James Morton Callahan termed the tariff argument a “ruse diplomatique,” in The Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1901), 277. 98 until after the 1860 elections.23 While the bill hung in political limbo, its advocates and adversaries alike sprung into action. As Democratic senators attempted to further postpone a vote on the bill, president-elect Lincoln, who was himself a Whig disciple of the “American System” and “in favor of the internal improvement system, and a high protective tariff,” promised a Pittsburgh audience that he would make sure that “no subject should engage your representatives more closely than the tariff . . . so that when the time for action arrives adequate protection can be extended to the coal and iron of

Pennsylvania, the corn of Illinois, and the ‘reapers of Chicago.’”24

The tariff was welcomed in much of the North, and generated a predictable outcry in much of the South.25 Following the resignation of a number of Southern senators who might otherwise have voted against the bill and who could have successfully stopped its passage, the Senate Finance Committee was restructured, Rhode Island’s James Fowler

Simmons was made the committee’s chair, and the Morrill Tariff passed on March 2,

1861. Democratic President , whose home state was the protectionist heartland of Pennsylvania, signed the bill into law with characteristic loyalty to his state.

Ad valorem rates were raised from the low rate of 17 percent to a modest average of 26 percent; the tariff also contained specific protective duties approaching the high level of

23 Henry Harrison Simms, Life of Robert M. T. Hunter: A Study in Sectionalism and Secession (Richmond: The William Byrd Press, 1935), 108-9. 24 Osborn H. Oldroyd, The Lincoln Memorial (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1882), 76; Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Lincoln (Chicago: Belford-Clarke Co., 1889), I, 102; Luthin, “Lincoln and the Tariff”; Speech of 15 Feb. 1861, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 4 Vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), IV, 213. 25 For the bill’s Northern and border state dissenters, see, respectively, Hofstadter, “Tariff Issue”; and Richardson, Greatest Nation on Earth, 111. 99 50 percent or more on pig iron and cutlery, for instance, for the expressed purpose of protecting American “infant industries.”

To Southerners dependent on foreign trade and British manufacturers the bill appeared punitive, incendiary, and economically backward. Adding fuel to the fire, at this time some Northerners turned an expansive eye toward Canada, as well. The New York

Herald in particular began calling for Canadian annexation, quickly turning Canadian public opinion against the North. Southern sympathizers in England correspondingly used the newspaper’s expansionist calls to generalize Northern attitudes toward Britain and its colonies, and the Ottawa Citizen thereafter made sure to differentiate between the

South’s advocacy of “a free trade policy” that would “provide a field of a vast absorption” of English, French, and Canadian goods, and the North’s “hollow contemptuous sympathy” for “the negro” and an “unbearably arrogant and menacing” conduct of foreign relations. Alongside this added anti-Northern agitation in a contiguous

British North American colony, the tariff quickly garnered British support for Southern free trade. This promptly became clear to the London Times, which noted in late March

1861 that the South’s goal was “to gain the goodwill of foreign nations, and particularly

England, by placing Southern liberality in contrast with the grasping and narrow-minded legislation of the Free States. . . . So far the game is still in favour of the new

Confederacy.”26

26 , A Letter to A Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 12; Ottawa Citizen, 15 Feb. 1861; 19 Feb. 1861; London Times, 26 March 1861. One early historian has argued that Canadian opinion was decidedly pro-Union, albeit without examining reaction to either Union annexationist sentiment or the Morrill Tariff. See Fred Landon, “Canadian Opinion of Southern Secession, 1860-61,” Canadian Historical Review 1 (Sept. 1920): 255-266. 100 U.S. congressmen grew angry at the apparent anti-Northern sentiment proliferating in Canada. Republican protectionists were further upset at Canada’s breach of the 1854 reciprocity treaty, owing to the raising of tariff rates by Canadian finance ministers from 1858-60. While some in the Great Lakes area had benefited from the 1854 treaty, and others in the North viewed reciprocity’s continuance as a logical step toward eventual annexation, the increasingly Anglophobic New York Herald again took the lead, and called for the treaty’s end.27 Canadian protectionism thus helped create an atmosphere that made the Morrill Tariff more attractive and intensified already tense

Canadian-American feelings.

Across the Atlantic, Southern secession initially received some sympathy within the British press and public. The pro-North Liverpool Post recollected that “nearly all the aristocracy and a large portion of the middle classes were adverse to the North and in favor of the South. . . . Out of four or five hundred English newspapers, only five were bold enough openly to support the North.” John Lothrop Motley, an American, observed to his mother of “a very great change in English sympathy” following the Morrill Tariff’s passage, as it had “done more than any commissioners from the Southern Republic could do to alienate the feelings of the English public towards the United States.”28 According to Confederate diplomat Edwin de Leon, in London the North at first had only received staunch support primarily from the Daily News and its evening counterpart the Star, John

27 Following the St. Albans raid in December 1864, Justin Morrill and Illinois’s E. B. Washburne began to do just that. This Republican anti-reciprocity movement would reach fruition in 1866 with the treaty’s official abrogation, which, along with the threat of Northern invasion during the Civil War, acted as a strong, albeit unintended, impetus for Canadian confederation in 1867. Robin W. Winks, Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years (Montreal: Harvest House, 1971), 28-29, 343-46, 379. 28 Crawford, Anglo-American Crisis, 93. 101 Bright’s organ. De Leon even quoted Cobdenite antislavery advocate Henry Ward

Beecher as saying at the war’s outset that “the great commercial class is against us. The influential clergymen and laymen . . . are, as a class, against us. Parliament, in sympathy and wishes, is five to one against us.” With the exception of the labor classes, “all . . . is anti-American,” and studies have since shown that neither was British labor by any means unanimous in its support for the Union.29 Union minister to France, Cobdenite

John Bigelow, having just arrived in London in September 1861, noted that “American

Republicanism . . . is right now very much out of fashion . . . my country has few friends left her . . . while the London press with I believe only two exceptions rejoices in our humiliation.” Such sentiments were echoed by Charles Francis Adams Jr., who recalled with some exaggeration that the aristocracy, the press, and the middle class were all arrayed against the North.30 Supporting such claims, reported in

mid-March 1861 that the British had “entirely misapprehended the controversy,”

believing instead “that the question of Slavery does not constitute the essence of the

quarrel; that it has been merely introduced as a blind, or as an instrument of provocation,

and that the real point of contention lies in the national Tariff.”31 The tariff argument had

29 Edwin de Leon, Secret History of Confederate Diplomacy Abroad, ed. by William C. Davis (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 145-6; Lorimer, “Role of Anti-Slavery Sentiment,” 405; Peter d’A. Jones, “The History of a Myth: British Workers and the American Civil War,” in Ellison, Support for Secession, 199-219; Royden Harrison, “British Labour and the Confederacy: A Note on the Southern Sympathies of Some British Workng Class Journals and Leaders during the American Civil War,” International Review of Social History 2 (April 1957): 78-105; Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 165, 167-69. 30 Bigelow to Hargreaves, Sept. 14, 1861, John Bigelow Papers, NYPL; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., The Richard Cobden Centennial. Speech of Charles Francis Adams at the Dinner of the Free Trade League at the Hotel Vendome, Boston, on the Evening of June 2, 1904, 2. 31 New York Times, 23 March 1861, 2. 102 found an accepting audience; British public opinion was by no means unified behind the

American Union.

In late February 1861, with the successive secession of six Southern states, with the possibility of reunion yet tossed around, Democratic Congressman Daniel Sickles of

New York decried the tariff’s nearing passage as it offered “the strongest provocation to

England to precipitate recognition of the southern confederacy.” The bill appeared to

Sickles as “a disunion measure. It does as much as anything else to alienate the South from the Union. We all know that one of the questions that lie at the root of alienation between North and South is the protective policy of the North and the free-trade policy of the South,” and that the latter “perceive that, now that you have obtained power, you intend to use it, not only to assault their rights of property, but to tax them on the necessaries of life in order to enrich the manufacturing classes of the North.”32 The pro- free trade New York World acknowledged as well that the tariff “greatly disaffects

England and France . . . and presents them a direct inducement to recognize, at the earliest day, the independence of the states which reject both it and the policy on which it rests.”33 The New York Times similarly warned that, as Europe moved toward free trade, the North’s passage of this “ill-timed, ill-advised, and . . . disastrous measure” would put it “in conflict” with the Confederacy “in every court of Europe,” and that they would seek recognition “by appealing to the popular sentiment in all commercial circles.”34 Southern

32 Congressional Globe, 36th Cong. 2nd Sess., Appendix, 1153, 1190. 33 Quoted in S. D. Carpenter, Logic of History: Five Hundred Political Texts: Being Concentrated Extracts of Abolitionists (Madison: S. D. Carpenter, 1864), 147. 34 New York Times, 14 Feb. 1861, 4. See also New York Times, 26 March 1861, 4. 103 secession had by no means ended opposition to the tariff and its potential impact upon domestic and foreign relations.

As Duncan Campbell notes, London’s Annual Register of 1861 took the tariff’s passage to mean that the North did not want to reunite with the Confederacy.35 The northern correspondent for London’s Morning Chronicle in turn remarked on what he considered

an odd thing that all the material interests of England are arrayed on the side of

the slave-holding South. They hold all the cotton; they alone sympathise with you

on the doctrine of free-trade; they would be your largest customers if they got rid

of the tariff of 25 per cent., which is only a bounty on the manufactures of the

North. It is really high time that a nation so intelligent and practical as that of

England should begin to investigate the very important fact, where her true

interests lie—whether with the manufacturing and commercial North, or the

agricultural South?

The Morning Chronicle recognized that the bill was crafted to appeal to Pennsylvania voters, but that it also “affords abundant evidence of what will be the policy of the

Northern Union should one be formed, and offers also a marked contrast to the free-trade policy of the South.”36

35 Campbell, English Public Opinion, 44. 36 Morning Chronicle (London), 12 Feb. 1861. 104 The Morning Chronicle went even further two weeks later. It noted that the tariff

“has laid the first foundation of disunion and secession. . . . The Southern revolution stands on two legs, not on one alone—free-trade and security of their slave property.”

The South had been unconstitutionally and “oppressively taxed . . . for the benefit of

Northern manufacturers. . . . This it is which has laid the first foundation of disunion and secession.” Even though powerful commercial interests in New York and Boston loudly protested against the Morrill tariff, it nevertheless appeared close to passing. The

Chronicle concluded that “this is no moment for such legislation. It will confirm the alienation of the South from the Union, at the same time that it will strengthen the motives of policy on the part of the Foreign Governments to recognize the free-trade

Southern Confederacy.”37 Scotland’s Caledonian Mercury concurred; owing to the impact of the Morrill Tariff on their exports, the English, French, and Germans, “as a matter of course . . . will have to fraternize with the South, notwithstanding its slave institutions.”38 In the editorial pages, British recognition of the South appeared promising owing to the latter’s Free Trade diplomacy. Europeans were quick to note that the irreconcilable nature of the conflict was not relegated to ideological debates about slavery; economic considerations had at first figured heavily across the Atlantic.

Less than a month before the bill was signed into law, the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis, had already played the free trade trump card in his inaugural address on February 18, saying that as “an agricultural people, whose chief interest is the

37 Morning Chronicle, 26 Feb. 1861. 38 Caledonian Mercury, 28 Feb. 1861. 105 export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace and the freest trade which our necessities permit.” His speech also notably excluded any direct reference to slavery.39 The address was disseminated in the British press at about

the same time as news arrived of the Morrill Tariff’s passage. If Britons were unclear as

to why the North was seemingly making any chance of reunion impossible with its new

tariff, they also found Davis’s inaugural address inscrutable, as was the South’s “object”

of secession. One contemporary study of English public opinion emphasized editorial

confusion regarding the address: “Is it the question of slavery or that of free trade? We

have never read a public document so difficult to interpret.” Nevertheless, “the tendencies

of trade are inexorable. It may be that the Southern population will now become our best

customers.”40 The London Times approved of the Confederacy’s internationalism but

perceptively asked: “Is the question of Slavery subordinate to that of Free Trade, or is

Free Trade the bribe offered to foreign nations to consideration of their pocketing their

scruples about Slavery?”41 London’s Once a Week remarked on March 16 that “of slavery there is not a word. This is an omission of some importance. It must be confessed at the same time that the Northern States have chosen a most awkward moment for . . . bringing forward a High Protection Tariff, which . . . would shut up the States against the

European manufacturer and producer.”42 Abolitionist and free trade apostle Richard

39 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 9 March 1861, 3. 40 John William Draper, History of the American Civil War, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), II, 510. 41 London Times, 8 March 1861, reprinted in New York Times, 26 March 1861, 5; Crawford, Anglo- American Crisis, 95. 42 Once a Week, 16 March 1861. 106 Cobden, though eventually a strong supporter of the Union, explained England’s confusion to his longtime friend, Cobdenite Republican Senator Charles Sumner:

There are two subjects on which we [the English] are unanimous and fanatical—

personal freedom and Free Trade. . . . In your case we observe a mighty quarrel:

on one side protectionists, on the other slave-owners. The protectionists say they

do not seek to put down slavery. The slave-owners say they want Free Trade.

Need you wonder at the confusion in John Bull’s poor head?43

Cobden thereafter frequently attacked the North’s adherence to “the old and stupid theory of ‘protection’” and recommended that the Union establish a tariff for revenue as a viable

“remedy” to the North’s spreading foreign and domestic ills.44

“Whether it is so intended or not,” remarked London’s Saturday Review, the tariff

“must be read as a solemn declaration by the North that it is irretrievably severed from the South.”45 Scotland’s Dundee Courier thought the Morrill Tariff to be “a sad disaster .

. . disastrous to Mr. Bright’s theories; what is of more consequence, disastrous to the prosperity of the trans-Atlantic republics . . . America . . . is, like the vaulting ambition of the poet, about to overleap itself in this matter. Overleap and overreach, of a verity.” The

43 Stephen Meardon, “Richard Cobden’s American Quandary: Negotiating Peace, Free Trade, and Anti- Slavery,” in Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), ed. by Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan, 213-16; Cobden to Sumner, 5 Dec. 1861, reel 23, Sumner Papers. 44 Cobden to Sumner, 5 Dec. 1861, reel 23; 12 Dec., 19 Dec. 1861, 23 Jan. 1862, reel 24, Sumner Papers. 45 “The American Tariff Bill,” 9 March 1861, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, XI, 245. 107 Morrill Tariff would “be doubly impolitic and fatal” when contrasted with the South’s commercial policy; “if the North becomes strongly Protectionist, then it is not improbable that the trade now concentrated in the harbours of the Northern States will remove itself to those of the rival Federation.”46 While war itself still remained uncertain, the tariff issue appeared to make peaceful reunion impossible.

“Protection was quite as much a cause of the disruption of the Union as Slavery,” the London Times pronounced on March 12, 1861, ten days after the Morrill Tariff had

become law. That day’s editorial was more condemnatory of Republican failings and

diplomatic insensitivity than it was pro-South, however, and “may be legitimately be

viewed,” according to Martin Crawford, “as The Times’s editorial manifesto on the disunion crisis.”47 The newspaper also remarked upon how “the Tariff bill has much changed the tone of public feeling with reference to the Secessionists, and none here, even those whose sympathies are with the Northern States, attempt to justify the course which the Protectionists in Congress have pursued,” and the London Star stated that the

Confederacy “will unquestionably make free trade the basis of its commercial policy; in fact, the injury which the Southern States have sustained from the high tariff upheld by the North has had no small share in bringing about their secession.”48

British newspapers continued to voice their discontent with the Morrill Tariff, even as they highlighted growing sectional divisions in the United States. Five days after

46 Dundee Courier (Scotland), 15 March 1861. 47 Crawford, Anglo-American Crisis, 95-6. 48 London Times, 12 March 1861; London Star, 12 March 1861, reprinted in New York Times, 29 March 1869, 2. 108 the bill’s passage, England’s Bradford Observer portended that the Morrill Tariff “will be a good argument for the Secessionists. . . . A better measure could not be hit upon for consolidating the Southern confederacy and obtaining recognition of its independence by foreign nations.”49 In mid-March, the London Times noted that the Tariff’s passage undid

all the progress that has been made in the direction of Free Trade, and in

manacling their country once more in the fetters of a Protection amounting to

prohibition. . . . The conduct of Congress on the Tariff Bill has much changed the

tone of public feeling with reference to the Secessionists, and none here, even

those whose sympathies are with the Northern States, attempt to justify the

course.

Businesses in Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, and waited in

“apprehension” and “anticipation that the tariff has become law.” English manufactures would invariably be smuggled through Southern ports, the London Times speculated;

New York City might even agitate to become a “free port.”50 One Liverpool merchant wrote the Times editors that “the policy, the interest, and the inclination of the Southern

49 Bradford Observer, 7 March 1861, 4. 50 London Times, 12 March 1861. For the assumed impact of the Morrill Tariff upon British iron, see for instance Truro, England’s Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet, and General Advertiser, 15 March 1861, 3; Leeds Mercury, 26 March 1861; Preston Guardian, 30 March 1861. 109 people are clearly in favour of Free Trade, and the Morrill Bill, if passed, will render a

‘reconstruction’ or a pacific ‘compromise’ . . . impossible.”51

The London Times’s Northern correspondent William H. Russell observed that, owing to the tariff, New York’s journalists wanted the city to become independent of the

North, “a modern Venice or Genoa. . . . If Rome be burning, there are hundreds of noble

Romans fiddling away in the Fifth Avenue, and in its dependencies, quite satisfied that they cannot join any of the fir companies, and that they are not responsible for the deeds of the ‘Nero’ or ‘anti-Nero’ who applied the torch.”52 London’s Morning Post aptly summed up the dilemma: “Slavery, no doubt, is the blight and plague-spot of the South; but the North has its plague-spot in this prohibitive tariff. . . . It were well if North and

South would say to each other . . . ‘Brother, brother, we are both wrong.’”53 Ever the stubborn siblings, neither would.

51 London Times, 13 March 1861. 52 Russell quoted in London’s Nottinghamshire Guardian, 18 April 1861, 4. 53 Morning Post, 13 March 1864, 4. 110

Figure 2: “Before and After the Morrill Tariff.” Harper’s, a pro-Union magazine, portrays the North’s outrage over Britain’s apparent shift from moral outrage to support for Southern slavery owing to the Morrill Tariff’s passage. [Left panel] “Before the Morrill Tariff: Mr. Bull (very indignant), ‘Back, Sir!—stand back, Sir! I shall protect the poor Negro from you bloodthirsty prosecutions!’”; [Right panel] “After the Morrill Tariff: Mr. Bull (very indignant once more), ‘Take that, you Black Rascal! can’t you attend to your task, and keep the flies off my Friend from the South? My Dear Sir! the only way to manage with those lazy Niggers is to drive ‘em, drive ‘em, Sir! with the lash, Sir!’” Harper’s Weekly, 20 April 1861, 256.

A few days later, London’s Daily News acknowledged that “there is probably no event which has attracted so much regretful attention as the adoption by the Northern

American Union of the Morrill Tariff.” At the same time that France, Russia, Spain,

Japan, and China were opening themselves up to “mercantile enterprise,” America

111 falls back upon a policy of restriction and illiberality such as one would imagine

to be a relic of the past century . . . we mark the indecent haste with which . . . the

Northern protectionists rush in selfishly with a programme framed in their own

interest, and certain to widen the breach between the disputing sections of the

nation. . . . It is disgraceful in the present crisis of American affairs for these

narrow politicians to be driving in the wedge of disunion with might and main, for

the effect of the new fiscal legislation must inevitably be to render a reconciliation

between the North and South impossible.54

“If the United States persevere in their policy of inactivity,” the Sheffield & Rotherham

Independent similarly warned, “our government cannot do less than recognize the de facto government of the South.” The South’s constitution, the paper noted, prohibited protection of “any branch of industry” and reduced duties enough to “form a very substantial compensation to foreigners for the loss sustained by the Morrill tariff bill.”55

All the North had offered in return was prohibitive trade restrictions.

Scotland’s Glasgow Herald reprinted an editorial from the New York Herald comparing the Northern and Southern tariff policies and that it was “impossible to deny to the Southern tariff an exemplification of statesmanship, enlightenment, wisdom, and a knowledge of governing a great and enterprising people, which are wholly wanting in the other document.” They were as different “in spirit as the eighteenth and the nineteenth

54 Daily News, 18 March 1861. 55 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 30 March 1861, 6. 112 centuries.” The Morrill Tariff “is the most ignorant, useless, blundering, and pernicious enactment that ever was concocted,” while the South’s tariff “will command the admiration” of Europe, which

will be guided by that conviction in their policy as regards the two sections. . . .

France and England will find little difficulty now in recognizing the independence

of the Confederate States of the South. The statesmen of these nations care

nothing for our eternal nigger question. Their own commercial interests abroad

are all in all to them.56

London’s Morning Herald likewise believed the South’s tariff to be “simple and intelligible, while the Northern is complicated, self-contradictory, and, in many points, unintelligible . . . it is easy, therefore, to see which set of diplomats . . . is the more likely to succeed. . . . The Southern Confederacy has a mighty destiny before it,” while the

North was perched upon the brink of “ruin.”57 The Herald’s Boston correspondent reported on the feeling of gloom in the North: “What contributes most to this feeling is the belief, now almost universal, that the passage of the new tariff law was a most egregious blunder . . . that to persist in passing such a law, right in the face of the

56 Glasgow Herald (Scotland), 6 April 1861. 57 Morning Chronicle, 6 April 1861. 113 existence of a free trade confederacy on our very border,” and with the European nations bound to look more favorably on the latter.58

The Caledonian Mercury similarly noted that the North was “waking up to the idea that the Morrill tariff was an act of insanity” toward both European diplomacy and its ostensible purpose of earning revenue.59 “The opinion is becoming universal,” the

Morning Post sardonically reported, that the Northerners “have made a monstrous blunder in passing the Morrill tariff law . . . and thus forfeited not a little” of the moral high ground.60 It appeared to critics on both sides of the Atlantic that the North had to change tactics if it were to undercut possible European recognition of the Confederacy.

Even the pro-North conservative magazine Fraser’s called the new Northern tariff an

“affront and wrong to the adhering Slave States, and raises a wall against the return of the seceders. . . . It gives them an ex post facto justification. . . . If such a law could be permanent, its mischief would be enormous.”61

The South, hoisting the banner of “Free Trade” for its foreign observers, appeared to be starting strong at the war’s outset in convincing Europe to recognize her independence. William Russell of the London Times even observed that just before his death Stephen Douglas, a northern Democrat, was “to be engaged on a vast system for establishing duties all over the North American Continent in the nature of a Zollverein,” which included Canada. According to Russell, Douglas, although staunchly against a

58 Morning Post, 9 April 1861. 59 Caledonian Mercury, 13 April 1861. 60 Morning Post, 17 April 1861, 6. 61 Fraser’s Magazine, April 1861, LXIII, 411. 114 permanent Confederacy, was of the opinion “that the North, in case of separation, must fight the south on the arena of free trade . . . as the South bids against the North for the commerce of Europe.”62 “However hollow their reasons for revolution,” remarked

another English paper, the Southerners “have shown a degree of energy, perseverance,

and tact in carrying out their designs, strikingly in contrast with the pusillanimity and

vacillating imbecility” of the North.63 British conservatives and the Lancaster Gazette

even began speculating that the North was in actuality going to war for protectionism and

empire.64

On 4 May 1861 the Confederate commissioners to England—Mann, Rost, and

Yancey—gained an interview with Lord John Russell, the British foreign secretary,

through the efforts of William Gregory, a sympathetic member of the House of

Commons. They stated to Russell that the Morrill Tariff was the primary cause of

secession. All the South desired was free trade with the world, a sentiment they repeated

to Russell in written form as well: that the Confederacy could clothe “all the nations of

Europe under the benign influence of peace and free trade.” The commissioners were

acting under the direct orders of Robert Toombs, then Confederate secretary of state.

Toombs had instructed the commissioners on March 16 to meet with Russell as quickly

as possible. Toombs also urged them to emphasize that secession was necessary owing to

the “the manufacturing States of the North” having forced the South since 1828 to “pay

62 Birmingham Daily Post, 23 April 1861; and Russell McClintock, Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 238. 63 Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald (Bury St. Edmunds, England), 23 April 1861, 1. 64 Bellows, “British Conservative Reaction,” 525; Ellison, Support for Secession, 53. 115 bounties to Northern manufacturers in the shape of high protective duties on foreign imports.” This unjust policy, Toombs continued, was “strikingly illustrated by the high protective tariff just adopted by the Government at Washington.” Toombs believed that this line of argument would show “the wisdom of the action of the Confederate States, especially in the estimation of those countries whose commercial interests, like those of

Great Britain, are diametrically opposed to protective tariffs.” Toombs expected “that the enlightened Government of Great Britain will speedily acknowledge our independence,” and granted the commissioners the power “to negotiate a treaty of friendship, commerce, and navigation,” with the principal aim being “peace and commerce.” He even quoted the maxim of Richard Cobden, that the Confederate states would “buy where you can buy cheapest, and sell where you can sell dearest.” With their maintenance of a revenue tariff, their policy would “closely approximate free trade,” and thereby “render their markets peculiarly accessible to the manufactories of Europe.”65 Thus, by March 1861, the

Confederate state department had enunciated through official channels its policy of Free

Trade diplomacy toward Europe, and this policy would be repeated by Toombs and his successors with respect to Spain, Cuba, Russia, and the British, Danish, and Spanish

West Indies.66

65 Callahan, The Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy, 111; Robert Toombs to William L. Yancey, Pierre A. Rost, and A. Dudley Mann, 16 March 1861, reprinted in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy Including the Diplomatic Correspondence 1861-1865, 2 vols. (Nashville: United States Publishing Company, 1905), II, 4-5, 7. Yancey, Rost, and Mann to Russell, 14 Aug. 1861, ibid., 67. Toombs wrote a similar follow-up letter to the three commissioners, that the Confederacy desired “unrestricted intercourse with friendly nations.” Toombs to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, 24 April 1861, ibid., 17. 66 See Toombs to Charles J. Helm, 22 July 1861, Richardson, ed. Compilation of Messages, 46-8; Confederate Secretary of State Robert Hunter to Yancey, Rost, and Mann, 24 Aug. 1861, ibid., 76. 116 The Northern and Southern views on the tariff “are fatal to all hopes of reconciliation,” remarked the Sheffield & Rotherham Independent in mid-May, as were the dueling antagonisms of slave and free labor.67 Confederate diplomat Edwin de Leon wrote a letter to the editors of the London Times on May 25 that slavery was “a mere pretext” for secession, as shown by continued Northern defense of the institution through its guarantee of slavery where it existed and through its enforcement of the fugitive slave law.68 By the end of May, the Preston Guardian even asserted that when Northerners

cried “no slavery,” they “meant protection.”69 The Sheffield Guardian seconded this

suspicion of Northern antislavery motivations, that in fact “the North would bolster up

slavery if only the Slave States would remain in the Union,” a sentiment that Lincoln

himself had expressed.70

Some Englishmen rightly expressed their doubts as to Northern antislavery

sincerity and sought recognition for the South, not “from any advocacy of slavery, but

from love of peace and unrestricted commerce, from horror of civil war and future years

of deadly hatred.”71 William H. Gregory, a member of the British House of Commons,

unsuccessfully led the charge for British recognition, arguing that it would bring an end

Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin wrote Lucius Q. C. Lamar, commissioner to Russia, for instance, to offer the Russian emperor assurance that the Confederate States desired “the most cordial relations of friendship and commercial intercourse,” and again that the two countries could share in “the freedom of commercial intercourse,” and benefit “from the establishment of friendly relations and unrestricted commerce.” Benjamin to Lamar, 19 Nov. 1862, ibid., 365-66. 67 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, Supplement, 18 May 1861. 68 London Times, 25 May 1861, 12. 69 Preston Guardian, 29 May 1861. 70 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 8 June 1861, 8. 71 Letter reprinted in the Belfast News-Letter, 14 June 1861. 117 to the slave trade, keep the states from fighting a “fratricidal, needless war,” and as retaliation against the North’s Morrill tariff. Secession “nullifies that selfish, short- sighted, retrograde policy, and the Western States ought to be thankful.”72 Northern minister to England, Charles Francis Adams, after meeting with Britain’s foreign secretary, John Russell, also noted that the Morrill Tariff and the conflict’s seeming nonissue of slavery yet left Southern recognition as a viable option.73 Seward in turn instructed Adams to respond to Southern Free Trade diplomacy with counterarguments that the Confederacy could not maintain a policy of free trade during times of war, and that a war against the Union was much more detrimental to British commerce than a protective tariff.74

At the same time, Britain’s maintenance of neutrality appeared to many

Northerners as beneficial to the South and scornful of the Union. Some Americans and

Englishmen correspondingly began to see the existing tariff as punishment for Britain’s seemingly ambivalent stance. One Northerner, for instance, suggested that continuance of the Morrill Tariff had become chastisement for British neutrality, which Northerners viewed as an act of “hostility” to their cause. “Had the English Government treated the

Secessionists as they deserve to be treated,” he wrote in the Morning Post, “there would have been prompt sentence of death passed upon the new tariff, and it would have been

72 London Times, 12 June 1861, 12; New York Times, 24 June 1861, 5. 73 Jones, Union in Peril, 34. 74 Callahan, Diplomatic History of the Southern Confederacy, 116. 118 but a serpent strangled in its cradle.”75 The Morning Post falsely asserted that relaxations to the Morrill Tariff had even been tantalizingly held out by the Union’s treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, in the hope that it would “induce the British Government to depart from that position of neutrality.”76 William Rathbone Greg, in the pages of the

National Review, made “perfectly clear” that the North and South were not fighting “to perpetuate or to abolish slavery, but to decide which shall rule the young empire of the

West, and what empire there shall rule.” England was “unable to sympathise heartily with either rival,” as the North was overly ambitious, insolent, and England was “aggrieved by her tariffs,” while the South was “friendly and free trading,” but also “fanatically

SLAVE, and Slavery is the object of our rooted detestation.”77

The protectionist-free trade argument remained prevalent in Britain through 1861 and well into 1862. Liverpool’s avidly pro-South merchant and London Times writer

James Spence, for instance, in his influential publication The American Union (1861), spent but one chapter on slavery, and the other seven on the Morrill Tariff, the right to secession, and why he thought a future reunion was culturally and philosophically

75 Morning Post, 11 June 1861, 5; see also Standard, 29 June 1861, 5. 76 Morning Post, 13 July 1861, 4. Chase had in fact called for an increase to the tariff on 4 July, owing to the growing costs of the war. See Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1987), 144. The Morning Post might have been referring to Northern agent August Belmont’s unsuccessful request in the spring of 1861 that Chase get rid of the Morrill Tariff, as Belmont considered “the repeal of the Morrill Tariff worth more to our Cause than the most brilliant victory which arms could achieve over the rebels.” Sven Beckert, New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17. 77 National Review (July 1861), XIII, 162. 119 impossible.78 After a close reading of Spence’s American Union in late 1861, for instance, Charles Dickens became decidedly pro-South and argued in the pages of All the

Year Round that the Morrill tariff had “severed the last threads which bound the North and South together.”79 Scotland’s Dundee Courier went so far as to assert that if the

Morrill Tariff “were annulled . . . it would act like magic upon the trade of this country, and tend to terminate the civil war.”80 John Bright wrote Charles Sumner that the subject of the tariff was of such “great importance” that there was little “that would more restore sympathy between England and the States than the repeal of the present monstrous and absurd Tariff. It gives all the speakers and writers for the South an extraordinary advantage in this country in their discussion of the American question.”81 Further demonstrating the tariff’s transatlantic traction, following the Southern rout of Northern troops at Bull Run in July 1861, New York banker August Belmont, attempting to obtain a Union loan from the British, reminded Prime Minister Palmerston of the South’s continued maintenance of slavery. Palmerston retorted: “We do not like slavery, but we want cotton and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.”82 To add moral outrage to economic injury, in November English blankets and clothing had been sent “to save the

78 James Spence, The American Union: Its Effect on National Character and Policy, with an Inquiry into Secession as a Constitutional Right, and the Causes of the Disruption (London: Richard Bentley, 1862); de Leon, Secret Diplomacy, 149. 79 “The Morrill Tariff,” All the Year Round, 28 Dec. 1861, 330; John O. Waller, “Charles Dickens and the American Civil War,” Studies in Philology 57 (July 1960): 535-548. 80 Dundee Courier and Daily Argus, 3 July 1861. 81 Bright to Sumner, 29 Nov. 1861, reel 23, Sumner Papers. 82 Belmont to Seward, 30 July 1861, reel 64, William H. Seward Papers, LOC; Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 101-3; Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy, 62; Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy, 92; Campbell, English Public Opinion, 41-3. 120 troops from perishing by the thousands in the coming winter,” but were excluded from

American shores owing to the Morrill Tariff’s prohibitive provisions. The Leeds Mercury denounced the North’s “protectionist mania, which in the first place has contributed largely to drive off the Southern States from the Union, and then actually interfered to prevent the clothing of the Northern armies at the most critical period of the war.”83

Such continued British support for the Confederacy’s Free Trade diplomacy is all the more remarkable considering that the North controlled much of the outgoing information to Europe regarding the war and, until the end of 1861, the Confederacy’s official European propagandistic and diplomatic activities were negligible. Whatever favorable coverage they had received thus far was owed predominantly to Britain’s nongovernmental Southern sympathizers. Nevertheless, Northern control of transatlantic information flows was perceived to be taking its toll on Confederate sympathies in

Europe. Such an imbalance concerning the coverage of the war inspired, first, Toombs’s successor, Confederate Secretary of State R. M. T. Hunter and, afterward, Hunter’s 1862 replacement, Judah P. Benjamin, to send Henry Hotze to England in order to ghostwrite editorials in leading London newspapers, emphasizing Northern tyranny, scientific racialism, and the benefits offered to Great Britain by the Confederacy’s free trade policies. Hotze was shocked to find a near lack of any professional Confederate propaganda machine within the British press.

Hotze’s own first successes did not come about until February 1862, with the

Morning Post editorial page opening itself as a promising outlet in order to encourage

83 Leeds Mercury, 6 Nov. 1861. 121 British recognition of the Confederacy. Hotze asked the paper’s readers if Britain could

“consent to see the cotton and tobacco fields of the world walled in by “legislation like the Morrill tariff,” which “resembles in its causes . . . the favorite legislation of the

Chinese empire.” A united America and a dependent South, he warned, would offer a similarly insular empire: “what should the North care for foreign commerce? When it can buy in a close market all it needs, and sell in a close market all it produces, what need is there for reciprocal treaties with foreign nations?” In subsequent weeks, he also began contributing to the London Times, the Standard, the Herald, and the Money Market

Review. With the first issue appearing in print on May 1, Hotze next created his own paper, the Index, to better disseminate Confederate propaganda in Britain and France, and its printing continued until August 1865.84

Northern seizure of the Confederacy’s special commissioners bound for Europe upon the Trent further agitated already tense Union-British relations. Amid the affair and throughout 1861, Britain’s minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, had expressed to Lord

John Russell his hope that the Morrill Tariff might be replaced by a revenue tariff.85

84 Lonnie A. Burnett, ed., Henry Hotze, Confederate Propagandist: Selected Writings on Revolution, Recognition, and Race (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2008), 15-21; Charles C. Cullop, Confederate Propaganda in Europe 1861-1865 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1969), 28-9, 32-5, 36, 40, 63-4; Morning Post, 24 March 1862, reprinted in Burnett, Hotze, 127. The Parisian correspondent for The Index was Paul Pecquet du Bellet, who on 14 April 1861 desired a Confederate newspaper in France that rested on the grounds that France and the South “have proclaimed the era of commercial liberty and free exchange,” and who noted the initial influence of de Leon in the French editorials. Paul Pecquet du Bellet, The Diplomacy of the Confederate Cabinet of Richmond and its Agents Abroad: Being Memorandum Notes Taken in Paris during the Rebellion of the Southern States from 1861 to 1865, ed. by Wm. Stanley Hoole, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1963), 38, 41, 66. 85 Lyons to Russell, 8 July 1861, F.O. 5/767-327, ff. 106-07, reprinted in James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, The American Civil War through British Eyes, Dispatches from British Diplomats, Volume 1: November 1860-April 1862 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 2003), 138-41; Lyons to Russell, 22 Nov. 1861, P.R.O. 30/22/35, ff. 327-23, reprinted in James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, Private 122 Furthermore, Confederate Secretary of State Hunter’s order to the recently released commissioner to Britain, James Mason, was that he continue to London and express, among other sentiments regarding self-government and its right to defend itself, the

South’s low import duties and its “great interest” in producing and exporting staples, thereby binding “them to the policy of free trade.” Playing on Britain’s free trade heartstrings, he was also to stress that the Confederacy’s “empire . . . of free trade” was essential to the progress of humankind and “to preserve peace.”86

John Slidell, Confederate special commissioner to France, similarly reported to the French Foreign Minister Thouvenel on February 7, 1862 that, upon recognition, the

Confederate States would commit “to the policy of free trade and an untrammeled intercourse with all the world,” and thus “naturally avoid war and seek peace with all the world.”87 Thurlow Weed, the Union’s unofficial emissary to France, reported to

Secretary of State William Seward that the French emperor was considering hinting at

breaking the Union blockade or recognizing the Confederacy owing to the detrimental

economic problems striking France, continued Northern military failures, and the

unpopularity of the Morrill Tariff.88 A couple weeks after Weed’s message, William S.

Lindsay, a wealthy British shipowner hurt by the Northern tariff and the blockade and a

and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844- 67 (Selinsgrove: Sushquehanna University Press, 1993), 267-8. Gordon H. Warren, Fountain of Discontent: The Trent Affair and Freedom of the Seas (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981). 86 reprinted in Richardson, ed., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, II, 89-90. 87 “Inclosure,” Slidell to Benjamin, 21 July 1862, reprinted in Richardson, ed., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, II, 279, 282. 88 Weed to Seward, Paris, 20 Jan. 1862, reel 68, Seward Papers; Case and Spencer, United States and France, 252. 123 radical member of Parliament, himself traveled to Paris in order to urge Napoleon III to spur English action on the matter. On April 11, Lindsay emphasized Confederate propagandistic talking points to the French emperor: particularly that the North did not go to war for emancipation but for the Morrill Tariff and Southern subjugation, views to which the Emperor expressed his agreement.89

In December 1861, John Bright was asked to give his views of the Trent Affair in

Rochdale. In emphasizing that the Civil War was at heart over the issue of slavery, he noted that “there is another cause which is sometimes in England assigned for this great misfortune, which is, the protective theories in operation in the Union, and the maintenance of a high tariff . . . no American . . . attributed the disasters of the Union to that cause. It is an argument made use of by ignorant Englishmen, but never by informed

Americans.” Nor had the tariff question arisen, he noted, during the attempts at compromise in December of the year before. “It is a question of slavery,” and nothing else, he reiterated to his English audience, although criticism was afterward leveled at

Bright for purposefully omitting the free trade clause in Section 8, Article 1 of the

Confederate constitution.90

89 Slidell to Benjamin, Memorandum of dispatch No. 5, 14 April 1862, box 18, Bigelow Papers; Charles M. Hubbard, The Burden of Confederate Diplomacy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998),80- 85. 90 John Bright, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1868), I, 174-76; John W. Hinton, Free Trade and Southern Rebellion (Milwaukee: self-published, 1883), 3; “Constitution for the Provisional Government,” Article I, reprinted in Richardson, ed., Messages and Papers of the Confederacy, II, 3-8. Hinton came to the United States from London “when the agitation of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden was sweeping the average young Englishman off the protection rock into the whirlpool of free-trade,” but became an outspoken leader of the American System. See “John W. Hinton,” Home Market Bulletin 10 (Nov. 1898): 1-5. 124 When Benjamin took over the Confederate State Department in the spring of

1862, he further wrote to Mason that, owing to the North’s “system of deception so thoroughly organized as that now established by them abroad,” it was “not wise to neglect public opinion” of foreign nations. Benjamin supplied Mason, Hotze, and the

Confederate minister to France, John Slidell, with the services of Edwin de Leon along with $25,000 to be used to enlighten public opinion “through the press” in Great Britain and France.91 Mason thereafter put de Leon in contact with his Parisian connections as well as Spence, “the most efficient and able advocate here [England], through the press, of Southern interests,” and who soon thereafter also became the principal cotton agent of the Confederacy.92 Owing to de Leon’s work in France, hundreds of newspapers in

France correspondingly printed articles amicable to the South, especially Paris’s Patrie, which effectively became the French version of Hotze’s Index.93

In Parliament, Southern sympathizers like William Lindsay and William Gregory called for recognition of the free-trading Confederacy in order to end the violence.

Lindsay called for peaceful separation, and claimed that the war had been caused by longstanding, unjust, and injurious Northern protectionist taxation upon the South, culminating in the Morrill Tariff. Gregory called for recognition and declared that “by the new tariff the rulers of the United States have virtually proclaimed that the great

91 Benjamin to Mason, 12 April 1862, Public Life of Mason, 292-3. 92 Dispatch 14, 31 July 1862;Benjamin to Mason, 28 Oct. 1862; Mason to Benjamin, 10 Dec. 1862; Benjamin to Mason, 15 Jan. 1863, reprinted in Virginia Mason, The Public Life of and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason, with Some Personal History (Roanoke, VA: Stone Printing and Manufacturing Co., 1903), 314, 338-9, 355-6, 350-1. 93 De Leon, Secret History, xvii. 125 American Continent is to be closed to the products of Europe. By the Morrill tariff they resolved on scourging us with whips.” When someone eloquently responded as to why he believed “that slavery was the real cause of the issue,” he was forced to speak over shouts of “No, no!” and “The tariff!”94

Such Confederate editorial and parliamentary efforts seemed to have paid off with propagandistic dividends, as recognized by Cobdenites Charles Sumner and John

Bigelow, close personal friends of Richard Cobden and John Bright. On 15 October

1862, Sumner, who had tried to discourage offending England through high tariffs, expressed his own frustration at the general lack of Northern support in England in a letter to John Bright, that

we are fighting the battle of civilization, and their [English] public men and

newspapers should recognize and declare the true character of the conflict. . . .

And yet this wicked rebellion has found backing in England. . . . It will be

difficult for our people to forget the last five months of coldness and cold

shoulderism which we have received from England.95

94 Parliamentary Debates, 18 July 1862, vol. 168, 512-17, 553-54, 534-38, 541. For a fuller collation of Confederate supporters in London, including members of Parliament, see John D. Bennett, The London Confederates: The Officials, Clergy, Businessmen and Journalists Who Backed the America South During the Civil War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008). 95 Richardson, Greatest Nation on Earth, 114; David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 45-69, 78-81; Edward L. Pierce, ed. Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 4 vols. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), IV, 48-49. See also, Bigelow to Bright, 16 Feb. 1863, Add. 43390, Vol. VIII, Bright Papers. 126 Richard Cobden and John Bright, it should be reiterated, were among the most vocal in defending the North’s position. Bright in particular continued to give speeches arguing against the tariff argument. For instance, having just read Bright’s recent speech in Rochdale, Cassius M. Clay, the Union’s Russian ambassador, complimented Bright for showing “so forcibly” that “the tariff had nothing to do with our revolt.”96 Cobdenite abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison also began working closely with his friend George

Thompson in the spring of 1862 to help shift British public sympathy away from the

South.97

Bright’s radical and polarizing pro-Union arguments had some influence in eventually turning British opinion, although by this time his popularity was waning considerably.98 In the fall of 1861, Karl Marx also began arguing against the tariff argument that had become so prevalent in England.99 Yet it was J. S. Mill who began offering the best refutation of the tariff thesis in the British press. By 1862, the tariff issue had gained enough public traction to earn Mill’s intellectual ire, and he proved quite effective at voicing his opinion concerning slavery’s centrality to the conflict:

96 Clay to Bright, 13 Dec. 1861, Add. 43390, Vol. VIII, Bright Papers. 97 Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 535-37. 98 Stanford P. Gwin, “Slavery and English Polarity: The Persuasive Campaign of John Bright against English Recognition of the Confederate States of America,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 49 (Summer 1984): 406-19; and Roman J. Zorn, “John Bright and the British Attitude to the American Civil War,” Mid America 38 (July 1956): 131-45; Hugh Dubrulle, “We are Threatened with . . . Anarchy and Ruin”: Fear of Americanization and the Emergence of an Anglo-Saxon Confederacy in England during the American Civil War,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 33 (Winter 2001): 583- 613; Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 99-101, 166. 99 “The North American Civil War,” Die Presse (Vienna), 20 Oct. 1861. 127 There is a theory in England, believed by some, half believed by many more . . .

that, on the side of the North, the question is not one of slavery at all. The North,

it seems, have no more objection to slavery than the South have. . . . If this be the

true state of the case, what are the Southern chiefs fighting about? Their

apologists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery. They say

nothing of the kind. They tell the world . . . that the object of the fight was

slavery.

Mill noted that the nullification crisis of 1832—which had not ended in secession— stemmed from a tariff so high that the Morrill tariff would look like “a free-trade tariff” in comparison. “Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of . . . the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed slavery as the one cause of separation.” He also predicted that the Civil War would soon placate the abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic: “I at least have foreseen and foretold from the first that if the South were not promptly put down, the contest would become distinctly an anti-slavery one; nor do I believe that any person accustomed to reflect on the course of human affairs in troubled times can expect anything else.”100 Mill’s argument was echoed in J. E. Cairnes’s May 1862 publication,

The Slave Power, which not coincidentally was dedicated to Mill; Cairnes was especially

“at some pains to show that the question at issue between North and South is not one of

100 Daily News, 31 Jan. 1862. See also, John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” Fraser’s Magazine (February 1862), 12-13. 128 tariffs,” a view which had “pertinaciously” been “put forward by writers in the interest of the South.”101

Ironically, Gladstone and Russell initially used Mill and Cairnes’s argument to strengthen their support for Southern independence.102 London’s Daily News, however, followed Mill’s counterattack with an anti-tariff argument of its own, observing that, as to the question of why the South seceded, “the partisans of secession here, being crafty in their generation, are ready with an answer calculated to find its way to the English heart.

They at once reply, ‘A protectionist policy, a hostile tariff.’” Yet, the Daily News pointed out, “the Morrill tariff had virtually” nothing to do with secession. After all, the

Democrats had had a majority in the Senate at the time of the Morrill Tariff’s movement through the Republican-controlled House; they could easily have stopped the tariff’s passage in its tracks. “‘The eternal nigger’ stands in bold relief in the front of this horrible offending. There is no hustling him out of the way, he crops up everywhere. Tariffs only hide him for a moment.”103

While the slavery cause was thus steadily gaining ground upon the South’s free trade argument, British papers nevertheless continued to attribute the Civil War’s cause

“not to slavery, but to the Morrill tariff.”104 Harper’s Weekly, an American pro-North magazine that closely followed British opinion, noted dubiously in early March 1862 that the South’s envoys had been sent off to purchase European recognition by granting

101 J. E. Cairnes, The Slave Power: Character, Career, & Probable Designs, being an Attempt to Explain the Real Issues Involved in the American Contest (London: Macmillan and Co., 1863 [1862]), viii-ix, 2-14. 102 Lorimer, “English Anti-Slavery Sentiment,” 418. 103 Daily News, 6 Feb. 1862. 104 Sheffield & Rotherham Independent, 27 Feb. 1862, 3. 129 “absolute free trade for fifty years, and by decreeing the emancipation of every negro born at the South after the recognition,” an offer British journals were “gravely” discussing and “many of them declaring it should be accepted.”105 In late May 1862, a letter was written in Scotland’s Glasgow Herald that Southern secession had come about to free it from its Northern dependence and to have “free trade with all the world.”106

Two weeks later, a pro-North respondent asked some insightful questions: “If the

Southern Democrats cherished free trade so greatly,” then why had they not given their support to the free trade, northern Democratic presidential candidate Stephen Douglas?

Why did the senators resign when they had the votes to block the Morrill Tariff bill, and why did the secessionist leader from Georgia Robert Toombs vote for it? Because they had wanted the tariff to pass, the Northern proponent concluded.107

Just as voices were ever more vocally raised to defend the Northern position and undercut the South’s free trade propaganda, in July 1862 Scotland’s Caledonian Mercury observed that Congress had just proposed an even higher tariff out of “hatred of

England,” that made “the Morrill tariff . . . a declaration of free trade” in comparison.108

Owing to the war’s escalating costs, the North in fact had increased duties on imports during nearly every month of every session of Congress throughout the conflict’s

105 Harper’s Weekly, 1 March 1862. 106 Glasgow Herald, 26 May 1862. 107 Glasgow Herald, 11 June 1862. 108 Caledonian Mercury, 9 July 1862. For Britain’s adverse reaction to the new tariff, see also Leeds Mercury, 9, 10, July 1862; Economist, 19 July 1862. 130 duration.109 Then, in part hoping to garner moral support from those in Britain who yet thought there was little difference between the governments of the North and South regarding slavery, Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation on 22 September 1862.

The proclamation’s expected transatlantic gunshot initially misfired.110

Historians have tended to mythologize the Emancipation Proclamation’s immediate effects.111 Such mythologizing ignores the fact that, as Howard Jones has pointed out,

“these events of autumn 1862 actually heightened British interest in intervention,” albeit briefly. Pro-South sentiment among the British press stemming from its Free Trade diplomacy certainly did not lessen such interest. At this time, Britain came closer than ever to conceding to European mediation. Even Richard Cobden, staunch opponent of

Southern slavery and a Northern supporter, at first feared the use of emancipation as a weapon.112

The Emancipation Proclamation therefore initially increased calls for British recognition of the Confederacy, although it would soon help in turning the transatlantic debate from tariffs to slavery. The tariff argument correspondingly lost editorial and public support, and Mill’s prophecy began to bear fruit by 1863, owing to numerous nongovernmental Northern propagandistic efforts in England, the Union victory at

109 Taussig, Tariff History, 160-2. 110 Heckman, “British Press Reaction.” 111 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 545, 556-7; and Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), 334. 112 Howard Jones, “History and Mythology: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War,” in Union, Confederacy, and Atlantic Rim, 30, 44. See also Adams, Britain and the Civil War, 427-29; and Brauer, “British Mediation.” For more on Cobden’s views on the Civil War, see Morning Post, 26 Nov. 1863, 4. 131 Antietam in September 1862, and a growing acceptance of the sincerity of Lincoln’s proclamation.113

Previously in support of peaceful separation and free trade, the liberal Bradford

Observer and Leeds Mercury, for instance, ultimately came down on the Union side following the proclamation.114 And the slavery argument for war gained even greater credence when Cobdenite and Oxford University Professor Goldwin Smith became an active and vocal supporter of the North as president of the Manchester Union and

Emancipation Society, and he took on the various moral and tariff-related arguments of

Southern sympathizers in Britain.115 Likewise, Richard Cobden—although he condemned the Northern blockade and, as Cobdenite Charles Francis Adams Jr. described, the Northern tariff “was odious in his eyes, a violation equally of economic principles and of international comity”—finally gave his wholehearted endorsement to the Northern cause by December 1862. He wrote Sumner in February 1863 that the

Emancipation Proclamation had aroused “our old anti-slavery feeling . . . and it has been gathering strength ever since.” It also led to meetings, the result of which “closed the mouths of those who have been advocating the side of the South.” John Bright seconded

Cobden’s observation, writing his American Cobdenite friend Cyrus Field that “opinion

113 Brauer, “Slavery Problem,” 442; Robert Douthat Meade, Judah P. Benjamin: Confederate Statesman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 265; Frank Merli and Theodore A. Wilson, “The British Cabinet and the Confederacy,” Maryland Historical Magazine 65 (Fall 1970): 239-62; Amos Khasigian, “Economic Factors and British Neutrality, 1861-1865,” Historian 25 (Aug. 1963), 453. 114 Wright and Wright, “English Opinion on Secession,” 153. 115 Worthington Chauncy Ford, “Goldwin Smith in 1864,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 44 (Oct. 1910): 3-13; Smith, Letter to A Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association, esp. 47-48; Goldwin Smith, letter of 10 Oct. 1863, reprinted in Speech of Mr. W. E. Forster, M. P., on the Slaveholders’ Rebellion; and Professor Goldwin Smith’s Letter on the Morality of the Emancipation Proclamation (Manchester: Union and Emancipation Society’s Depot, 1863). 132 here has changed greatly. In almost every town great meetings are being held to pass resolutions in favor of the North, and the advocates of the South are pretty much put down.”116 British Cobdenite George Thompson, founder of the Garrison-inspired

London Emancipation Committee, and Cobdenite Thomas Bailey Potter, founder of the

Manchester Union and Emancipation Society, similarly started seeing noticeable success by December 1862.117

In early February 1862 Republican proponents had in fact already crossed the

Atlantic to meet in London in order to “aid in removing the misapprehensions which prevailed in regard to the unhappy conflict. . . . It could not be denied that among certain classes” in England there was a Southern disposition as well as “a general want of information as to the causes” of the Civil War; “it was simply slavery, and nothing else,” these Northern agents had argued. “Neither the Morrill Tariff, nor any other causes, had the weight of a feather in the matter, except this question of slavery, and the power of extending it to the (as yet) unoccupied territories of the Union.”118 A growing British belief in the North’s antislavery goals in the months following Lincoln’s September proclamation certainly made such anti-tariff propagandistic efforts more effective.

Pro-South advocates had created the Manchester Southern Club and Southern

Independence Associations in Lancashire and London in order to combat this mounting

116 Adams, Cobden Centennial, 2; Cobden to Bright, 29 Dec. 1862, Add. MS 43,652, Cobden Papers; Cobden to Sumner, 13 Feb. 1863, reel 27, Sumner Papers; Bright to Field, quoted in Samuel Carter III, Cyrus Field: Man of Two Worlds (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1968), 204. Duncan Campbell has pointed out that these meetings were often closed to the public, as interruptions from hecklers were common in Unlikely Allies, 164-65. 117 Lorimer, “English Anti-Slavery Sentiment,” 419. 118 Lady’s Newspaper (London), 8 Feb. 1862, 87. 133 abolitionist argument, hoping to emphasize instead that the Confederacy would never reopen the slave trade and would ultimately emancipate its slaves. Failed attempts were made by John Roebuck in Parliament to recognize the South, arguing that the North was hypocritical on the slavery issue and “the South offers to us perfect free trade.”119 Yet these Confederate arguments were overwhelmed by Northern antislavery propaganda.

African American and other pro-North advocates gained greater success in their attempts to persuade the British working class to favor the Union by 1863.120

American abolitionists like Cobdenite Henry Ward Beecher, for instance, toured

England calling for Northern support. In October 1863, Beecher told a Liverpool audience, which was “foaming” with “madness,” that the Morrill Tariff had in fact only been passed “to pay off the previous Democratic [Buchanan] administration’s debt. . . . It was the South that obliged the North to put the tariff on.” Beecher even promised that

“there is nothing more certain in the future than that America is bound to join with Great

Britain in the worldwide doctrine of free trade.”121 In March 1864, Pro-North

Englishman Ernest Jones gave a popular speech in Rochdale, hometown of Richard

Cobden, noting that “some gentlemen here tell you that the rebellion is for free trade— that it was a revolt against the Morrill tariff.” Yet it was notable, for example, that the

119 Parliamentary Debates, 30 June 1863, vol. 171, 1771-77. 120 J. M. Blackett, “Pressure from Without: African Americans, British Public Opinion, and Civil War Diplomacy,” in Union, Confederacy, Atlantic Rim, 69-100; Foner, British Labor, 67-78; Lorimer, “English Anti-Slavery Sentiment,” 410-16. Duncan Campbell has examined this issue in detail, and emphasizes that the membership numbers of Northern and Southern advocacy groups were only a sliver of the English population, suggesting that the lobbying groups were “full of sound and fury” in Unlikely Allies, 163. 121 Henry Ward Beecher, Patriotic Addresses in America and England, From 1850-1 1885, on Slavery, the Civil War, and the Development of Civil Liberty in the United States (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1887), 640, 529. 134 Crittenden compromise, proffered unsuccessfully in December 1860, had contained “not one word about free trade or the Morrill tariff. . . . It is slavery in the beginning, slavery to the end.”122 Under the growing onslaught of the moral-slavery arguments and even with Beecher’s tantalizing promises of future free trade with the Union, the South’s own free trade argument correspondingly lost ground.

Noting this trend, the Leeds Mercury recalled in January of 1864

that during the first year of the war slavery was entirely ignored as a cause, and

that those who ventured to suggest that the North was the side of freedom, and the

South the side of despotism, were derided for their pains. . . . At that time the

public, or at least that portion which could make itself heard, resolutely refused to

hear a word about slavery, and the ‘Morrill Tariff’ was held to be the key to the

whole affair.

It was clear by now “that slavery is the chief stone of the corner in the Southern

Confederacy. . . . It is only the English Confederates” such as the Southern Independence

Association “who attempt to hide the truth.” Furthermore, “when the British public, seeking enlightenment, casts its eyes northwards, it sees the development of a policy which shows that slavery has a great deal to do with the object of the war, whatever it had to do with the cause of the war. Nominally the war is a war against rebellion: practically

122 Papers Relating to Foreign Affairs, Accompanying the Annual Message of the President to the Second Session Thirty-Eighth Congress, Part I (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1865), 337. 135 it is a war against slavery.”123 Similar arguments appeared throughout British publications.124

Similarly, in 1865, Goldwin Smith, hoping to stem the rising tide of anti-British sentiment in the United States, attempted to explain British acceptance of the tariff argument to his Boston audience:

Had you been able to say plainly at the outset that you were fighting against

Slavery, the English people would scarcely have given ear to the cunning fiction

of Mr. Spence. It would scarcely have been brought to believe that this great

contest was only about a Tariff. It would have seen that the Southern planter, if he

was a Free-Trader, was a Free-Trader not from enlightenment, but because from

the degradation of labour in his dominions he had no manufactures to support;

and that he was in fact a protectionist of his only home production which feared

competition—the homebred slave. I have heard the Tariff Theory called the most

successful lie in history. Very successful it certainly was, and its influence in

misleading England ought not to be overlooked. It was propounded with great

skill, and it came out just at the right time, before people had formed their

opinions, and when they were glad to have a theory presented to their minds. But

123 Leeds Mercury, 25 Jan. 1864. 124 See for instance, Preston Guardian, 27 Feb. 1864; York Herald, 23 April 1864. 136 its success would have been short-lived, had it not received what seemed

authoritative confirmation from the language of statesmen here.125

Yet the tariff argument, while nearly muted, somehow survived the war itself. As late as January 1866, the Morrill Tariff was yet touted by the Blackburn Standard, for instance, as “the last straw breaking the camel’s back . . . that led to the outburst of indignation on the part of the representatives of the South, which produced the late civil war.” Foreshadowing the contentious Anglophobic tariff debate of the American Gilded

Age, the Standard concluded by expressing its hope that since “the American people have shed blood in the cause of protection,” they might now “become converts to the free-trade principle.”126

Conclusion

Previous scholarship has downplayed or disregarded entirely the transatlantic effects of the tariff during the Civil War. Yet, through a fresh examination of American,

Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and English sources, the tariff takes on renewed significance.

Along with various other transatlantic crises in the first couple years of the conflict, the

Morrill Tariff heightened anti-Northern and pro-Southern sentiment as well as the prospects of European recognition, particularly within the British press. Belief that

125 Goldwin Smith, England and America: A Lecture, Delivered by Goldwin Smith, Before the Boston Fraternity During his Recent Visit to the United States (Manchester: A. Ireland and Co., 1865), 27-28. 126 Blackburn Standard, 24 Jan. 1866. 137 slavery was the central cause of the conflict did not effectively permeate the British political landscape until well into the war. It took a few months after Lincoln announced his September 1862 Emancipation Proclamation before the North and its transnational antislavery allies—particularly British and American Cobdenites like Richard Cobden,

John Bright, T. B. Potter, Goldwin Smith, George Thompson, and Henry Ward

Beecher—effectively began to counteract the tariff argument. Amid a broad array of issues that had led to pro-Southern or at least anti-Union sentiment, they responded with their own moralistic propaganda, especially as the war openly turned more and more into a war over slavery. Charles Francis Adams Jr. afterward singled out Cobden’s efforts as

“the most influential” in snuffing out the European interventionist fuse.127

One might even speculate that perhaps those Southerners in 1860 who were intent on secession, having learned valuable lessons from the Nullification Crisis, may even have desired the Morrill Tariff’s passage in order to garner European recognition, sympathy, and stronger commercial ties.128 The secession of multiple Southern states from December 1860 on, after all, had made its passage through the Senate certain.

During the war, J. E. Cairnes had suggested as much owing to Georgia Senator Robert

Toombs’s vote for the tariff in order “to make political capital out of the sentiments

127 Adams, Cobden Centennial, 1. 128 The Nullification Crisis did presage post-1860 Southern secession; an eerily similar anti-tariff argument had already been articulated by South Carolina to gain support abroad during nullification. James Hamilton Jr., South Carolina’s governor (1830-32), had encouraged his supporters to avoid the slavery issue as it was “the last on which the South ought to desire to make battle…however we might be united at home, we should have few confederates abroad—whereas on the subject of free trade and constitution rights, we should have allies throughout the civilized world.” Hamilton’s propagandistic plan for justifying nullification had recognized the importance of foreign support; his diplomacy of free trade, wittingly or not, would be resurrected and utilized with even greater effect in Great Britain during the first years of the Civil War. 138 which they calculated on its exciting in England.”129 Whether or not secessionists foresaw the possible diplomatic benefits the tariff might bring in Europe, the Morrill

Tariff was thereafter used effectively by the British press, the Confederate state department, and Confederate sympathizers throughout Britain’s free trade empire during the first years of the war.

Although the Morrill Tariff and other Anglo-American fallouts ultimately failed to gain British recognition of the Confederacy, the British press had been quick to take up the South’s free trade argument for secession, a stance that at the time seemingly enhanced the prospect of recognition. Thereafter, by the beginning of 1862, the

Confederacy began more directly to propagate its Free Trade diplomacy in the British press through agents like Hotze and de Leon. It was not until 1863 that the Union’s advocates had successfully shifted the focus of debate from tariffs, blockades, and King

Cotton to that of slavery. From 1861 to 1862, however, the Confederacy’s Free Trade diplomacy aided in creating transatlantic confusion concerning the Civil War’s causation and in gaining British support. Alongside the diplomacy of King Cotton, therefore, historians need to remember as well the South’s diplomacy of Free Trade.

The Morrill Tariff also created cracks in the brittle Republican party mold by

alienating its minority of Cobdenite cosmopolitans. These cracks would only continue to

grow as the Republican party continued to promote postbellum protective policies and

became ensconced in charges of corruption. The party’s breaking point, however, lay in

129 Cairnes, Slave Power, 14. 139 the indefinite future, a future without the anti-slavery cause and a civil war to maintain

Republican cohesion.

The situation was exacerbated with the death of Richard Cobden on 2 April 1865,

the same day that the Confederacy fell. A telegram of his death soon reached Egypt,

where the driving force behind the transatlantic telegraph, Cobdenite Cyrus Field, and

Ferdinand de Lesseps, developer of the Suez Canal (1869), were festively dining among

about one-hundred European gentlemen. Amid the noisy tables, Field solemnly handed

the telegram to de Lesseps, who in turn read it aloud to the assemblage. Every man, representing every nation of Europe, “left the table, feeling as if he had lost a personal friend.” Cyrus Field recalled with some embellishment that “no other death in Europe had ever produced so deep a feeling in America as did that of Richard Cobden.” Thereafter,

Field placed a signed portrait of Richard Cobden on one side of his library, and, on the other, that of John Bright.130

Five days after Cobden’s death, Charles Francis Adams Sr. walked through

Midhurst in , in the trail of the funeral procession. It was a lovely, picturesque setting of “that peculiarly quiet, English character seen nowhere but in this little island.”

Adams stood in the back, while various members of Parliament and close relatives filled the front. John Bright himself openly wept, and Adams felt his own eyes swelling.

Cobden, he wrote,

130 Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of the Cobden Club, July 11, 1874, with the Report of the Committee and List of Members (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1874), 28-29. With the successful completion of the Suez, de Lesseps thereafter controversially led a failed French attempt to build a canal in Panama in the 1880s. 140 had fought his way to fame and honor by the single force of his character. He had

nothing to give. No wealth, no honors, no preferment. A lifelong contempt of the

ruling class of his countrymen had earned for him their secret ill-will, marked on

this day by the almost total absence of representatives here. And, of all foreign

nations, I alone, the type of a great democracy stood to bear witness to the scene. .

. . In this country, it may be said to owe its existence to Mr. Cobden.

With Cobden’s support of democracy, “he becomes the founder of a new school, the influence of which is only just beginning to be felt. In the next century the effects will become visible. Such were my meditations, as I drew away from the spot, and sauntered along a quiet cross-road by myself back to the little town of . . . it was an event to mark in a lifetime.”131 He wrote State Secretary Seward before leaving for the funeral that Cobden’s death “will be severely felt by us in the next House of Commons,” as

Cobden had stood as almost a solitary figure among the leading statesmen of England in advocating free trade and peace, the effects of which could be favorably seen throughout

Europe.132 Adams was more farseeing than he realized.

The “new school” of Friedrich List would also prove effective in the coming century. On his deathbed, Cobden reportedly decried J. S. Mill for having “done more harm by his sentence about the fostering of infant industries, than he had done good by

131 Entry, 7 April 1865, in Charles Francis Adams Jr., American Statesmen: Charles Francis Adams (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1900), 371-3. 132 Adams to Seward, 7 April 1865, FRUS: Great Britain (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1865), 306. 141 the whole of the rest of his writings.”133 If he had lived a decade more, Cobden would likely have regretted even more his inability to convert List during their chance London meeting in 1846. Although Cobden could not have guessed it, the ideological battle between America’s Cobdenite cosmopolitans and Listian nationalists was only beginning.

The 1861 Morrill Tariff not only influenced the diplomacy of the Civil War, it established the foundational protectionist policy of the Republican party for decades to come; a policy that would ultimately help split the Cobdenite wing from the Republican party during the Gilded Age. The charges of a British free trade conspiracy would duly follow.

133 Donald Winch, “Between Feudalists and Communists: Louis Mallet and the Cobden Creed,” in Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, 253-4. 142 Chapter 3: The Gilded Age Free Trade Movement and Cobdenite

Foreign Policy, 1866-1871

The Rebellion failed to open up our markets for British goods, and the Free-Trade

Cobden Club was immediately formed.

Tariff League Bulletin.1

Who should ponder the lesson of the English corn laws, if not the American farmer? Who

should vitally regard them, if not the American workingman? Are not his shelter, clothing

and food dependent upon them? Who should study them, if not the American

manufacturer?

Cobdenite Congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox.2

On Friday, 27 July 1866 an exuberant forty-five year old Cyrus W. Field took a small boat and pushed off from the magisterial vessel christened the Great Eastern, and headed toward the docks of Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Field’s boat pulled away as the last feet of gutta-percha cable spilled forth from the Great Eastern’s hulking frame.

The Atlantic cable was finally laid. Field had spent more than a decade connecting the

North American continent by rail and wire. Now, after a multitude of setbacks and

1 “Does this Look Like Free Trade?” Tariff League Bulletin, 27 July 1888, 29. 2 Samuel S. Cox, Free Land and Free Trade: The Lessons of the English Corn Laws Applied to the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), 117. 143 failures, he and his British financial backers—among them the British government on the urging of Field’s friend Richard Cobden—had connected the Old World with the New.

John Bright wrote shortly thereafter in a private letter to Charles Sumner that Field “is one of the heroes of our time.”3 Publically, in a speech a few months later, Bright summed up Field’s accomplishment:

A friend of mine, Cyrus Field, of New York, is the Columbus of our time, for

after no less than forty passages across the Atlantic in pursuit of the great aim of

his life, he has at length by his cable moved the New World close alongside the

Old. To speak from the United Kingdom to the North American continent, and

from North America to the United Kingdom, now is but the work of a moment of

time, and it does not require the utterance even of a whisper. The English nations

are brought together, and they must march on together.4

Sir Louis Mallet, at a subsequent Cobdenite banquet in England, honored Field’s having

“annihilated time and space between England and America . . . and which, multiplying transactions and quickening intercourse, has enlisted in the cause of Free Trade those

3 Bright to Sumner, 16 Aug. 1866, reprinted in, William Roscoe Thayer, “Bright-Sumner Letters, 1861- 1872,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 46 (Oct. 1912-June 1913), 151. 4 Isabella Field Judson, ed., Cyrus W. Field: His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1896), 272, 206, 228. 144 material agencies which for the time have even eclipsed the lustre [sic] of the great moral principle which inspires and animates our policy.”5

Although the world was by no means flat, thanks to the efforts of Cyrus Field its distance was certainly shrinking at an astounding rate. Merchants and diplomats in New

York and London could now reach each other in a matter of minutes with but a few clicks of a telegraph key. Certainly, this was a defining moment in the history of modern globalization and Anglo-American relations. It also marked the beginning of the Gilded-

Age free trade movement, coinciding as it did with the rising popularity of Cobdenism, the founding of the Cobden Club in England, and the mobilization of free trade forces in

America, as well as corresponding protectionist charges of a transatlantic conspiracy. The controversy surrounding the transnational and transatlantic spread of Cobden’s Victorian cosmopolitan ideology, the American protectionist response, and the effect of an influential international nongovernmental organization—the Cobden Club—upon U.S. policymaking all intimately shaped the postbellum political economy. Through a reexamination of the entry of Victorian free trade ideology in America, the closely connected Gilded Age free trade movement, and the corresponding charges of a free trade conspiracy, American Cobdenism indelibly helped reshape the national and international political economic landscape of the late nineteenth century.

The tariff question dominated the international political arena. Heralded by some of the most prominent of antebellum abolitionist crusaders, the free trade movement

5 Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of the Cobden Club, July 11, 1874, with the Report of the Committee and List of Members (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1874), 20-21. 145 developed close ties with English free traders, particularly following the Cobdenite conversion of economist David Ames Wells and the peaceful settlement of the Alabama claims. Owing to such transatlantic free trade mobilization, Gilded Age protectionists in turn claimed that the British, practicing informal aspects of what historians have since termed “the imperialism of free trade,” were attempting to pry open American markets through the insidious influence of various transatlantic propagandists among the press, professors, and politicians. American members of London’s Cobden Club—a nongovernmental English organization founded in 1866 for the purpose of spreading

Victorian free trade doctrine abroad following the death of British free trade apostle

Richard Cobden—were particularly targeted in the United States.6

The Democratic party of course long contained many adherents to Jeffersonian free trade throughout the nineteenth century, especially as stringent Gilded Age “war” tariffs increasingly hurt agricultural exports, artificially inflated the price of consumer goods, and frequently created national budget surpluses that many Americans considered unnecessary. Yet Cobdenism sprouted its American roots not within the Jeffersonian

West or South, but in the North East. Cobden Club members proliferated during this period, primarily among New England’s elite independent Liberal Republican

Anglophiles amid a time of otherwise fierce anti-British sentiment in the United States.

The influence of mid nineteenth-century Victorian free trade ideology predominantly within manufacturing-oriented New England and among the Republican party’s

6 For the “imperialism of free trade” argument, see especially John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6 (1953): 1-15; and Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York: New Viewpoints, 1976). 146 independent members has gone neglected.7 Correspondingly, historians have precipitously concluded that such conspiratorial accusations were unfounded and thereby have brushed over the ideological battle brewing within the postbellum Republican party between its Listian nationalists and Cobdenite cosmopolitans.8 Even if historians have overlooked the influence of Cobdenism in the United States, American Gilded Age

Listian nationalists certainly did not.

The Cobden Club, the Conversion of David Ames Wells, and the Rise of the

American Free Trade League

Mr. T. B. Potter presides at the London end of the line, and Mr. David A. Wells manages

the end. The lever with which these gentlemen will soon attempt to wag the

world is to be free-trade. The Cobden Club is to furnish the muscle and Mr. Wells the

brain. . . . In a very short time we shall have Cobden Clubs all over this country.

North American (Philadelphia), Sept. 14, 1877.

7 For an exception, see David M. Tucker, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 91-4, 107-8, 113. 8 Edward Crapol considers the charges of a British conspiracy to be “grossly exaggerated and basically false” in America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 16. Tom E. Terrill ignores the issue altogether in The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy 1874-1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). Anthony Howe brushes aside the charges of conspiracy against the “relatively innocuous” Cobden Club, in his sweeping essay on Anglo-American free trade connections, “Free Trade and the International Order: The Anglo- American Tradition, 1846-1946,” in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. by Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 150. 147 The Atlantic’s temporal and geographical distances had been bridged with

Cobdenite Cyrus Field’s telegraph line. Anglo-American relations nevertheless remained tense following the Civil War, even after the 1871 Treaty of Washington, which settled many long-standing and contentious disputes between the two countries, and even with the strengthening of financial ties as the U.S. Treasury Department sought British funding for the country’s massive Civil War related debts.9 Britain’s policy of international free trade was held under particular suspicion within America’s powerful protectionist political circles. One student of Listian nationalist Henry Charles Carey summarized this position in 1865 by elucidating American fears of British free trade imperialism and by expressing the lingering anger over perceived British support for the Confederacy:

[Free trade] is largely a cry raised by British capitalists and manufacturers, to

unsettle our policy, and that of the world, that they may reap the benefit, by

making England the workshop for the world, and her ships and traders the carriers

of raw material and finished products to and from her workshops—a cry of those

who would monopolize, but not reciprocate. During our civil war just closed, all

will remember how the majority of the trading and manufacturing classes in

England, and the tory aristocracy, sympathized with rebellion here. The

falsehoods of the London Times, the sneers of lesser journals, the fitting out of

9 For the latter, see Jay Sexton, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005); and Sexton, “The Funded Loan and the Alabama Claims,” Diplomatic History 27 (Sept. 2003): 449-478. 148 Alabamas, escaping from their docks through the feeble meshes of “British

neutrality,” to prey upon our commerce, are all fresh in mind.10

The label of “free trader” was now equivalent to “traitor” among American hard-line high tariff proponents and American Anglophobes more generally.

Protectionist ire was directed particularly upon London’s Cobden Club. It was established in England in 1866 by Thomas Bayley Potter, a British politician and abolitionist. Potter created the Cobden Club in memory of his friend Richard Cobden, who had successfully fought for the repeal of Britain’s Corn Laws in 1846, and who had dedicated much of his life to the global eradication of protectionism and war. One of the club’s goals was admittedly to undermine protectionist preeminence in the United States, but more generally the club desired world peace through international arbitration, noninterventionism, and free trade.11

The club’s avowed altruism was stated in its motto, “Free Trade, Peace, and

Goodwill among Nations.” Although its meetings were always held in England and the

majority were British members of Parliament, its membership was global, with honorary

(non-due paying) members fighting for freer trade and sound money in their home

countries, from Western Europe to South Africa, Egypt, Fiji, Ceylon, India, and Japan.

Membership was attained through, first, nomination by an existing member, followed by

10 Giles Stebbins, “British Free Trade,” a Delusion. To the Farmers, Mechanics, Laborers, and all voters of the Western & North-Western States (, 1865), 1. 11 Anthony Howe, “Richard Cobden and the Crimean War,” History Today 54 (June 2004): 46-51; Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 14 (April 1962): 489-501. 149 a vote of acceptance by the Cobden Club Committee in London in recognition of the nominee’s notable advocacy of free trade and sound money principles in their home country, and finalized upon the nominee’s acceptance of membership.

As a later chairman of the Cobden Club noted, however, most of its members

especially had “advocated Free Trade for this country [Britain], and brought it about,

because they believed and proved it to be for the advantage of British trade.” Although

the club’s aims were pacific and international in scope, its primary goal thus was the

promotion of peace and prosperity for England. To England’s Cobdenites, the idea of

freer trade and peace also appeared to be more acceptable in the United States in the

aftermath of the Civil War’s extreme violence and the espousal of Cobden’s peaceful

doctrine among his American friends—American membership in the Cobden Club

became second in number only to England.12

American Anglophobia and opposition from the country’s Listian nationalists

made the club’s efforts extremely difficult. As Cobdenite abolitionist Joshua Leavitt—

winner of the club’s first annual gold medal—noted in his 1868 essay on how best to

establish closer political and commercial ties between the United States and Great

Britain, “no man of prominence in America can support even a partial relaxation of the

rigours of Protection without bringing upon himself the stigma of being a partisan, and

probably a pensioner, of ‘British Free Trade.’” So long as protectionism remained in the

12 23 April 1868, Cobden Club Committee Report, CC MSS; London Times, 12 July 1880, 11; Lord Rhayader, “Letter to the Editor,” Daily Telegraph, 9 March 1937; H. B. Jackson, History of the Cobden Club (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1939), 19, 21-22, 30, 39; Chairman of the Cobden Club, 1 July 1893, The Cobden Club Dinner (1893), 4-5. For the Cobden Club’s influence in Britain, see Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 116-41. 150 United States, Leavitt added, “it will remain an expression of unabated and unalterable hostility, in the face of which it is in vain to expect any considerable amelioration in the political and commercial relations of the two countries.”13

America’s free traders observed in abolitionist language that protectionist politicians like Ohio’s General Schenck—a man whom they vainly hoped would “follow the illustrious example of Sir Robert Peel, and proclaim himself a convert to the truths of

Free-Trade”—and Pennsylvania’s William “Pig Iron” Kelley in particular had shackled an “iron collar around the neck of the nation. At the crack of Kelley’s whip is the whole nation forever hereafter to bow in unison to Pennsylvania’s black idol.” To free traders, the protective system was one of conscription, making the workingmen “semi slaves,”

“forcing them by odious laws to contribute toward supporting monopolies under the false title of ‘the American System.’”14

Such hostility was mutual. The founder of an anti-Cobden Club in Troy, New

York, once described the American Cobden Club member as “a very small man with a very small head, very large ears, and a fearfully large mouth. The ear is a transatlantic ear, so constructed that it can hear the faintest whisper from London. The mouth of this odd specimen of humanity is in perpetual motion, but it never utters a sound which is not first heard in London.” In order to counteract the growing influence and perceived threat of the Cobden Club’s efforts to bring free trade to America, anti-Cobden Clubs were

13 Joshua Leavitt, An Essay on the Best Way of Developing Improved Political and Commercial Relations Between Great Britain and the United States of America (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869), 32-3. 14 Free-Trader (May 1870), 199; (June 1870), 4, 20; Wells to Atkinson, 7 Aug. 1868, folder 3, carton 13, Atkinson Papers, MHS. 151 founded in New York and Pennsylvania, the long-standing industrial protectionist heartland. The American Protective Tariff League was established in 1885 largely to break the “fatal spell of the Cobden club,” to “out-Cobden” the Cobden club’s propaganda. According to its charter, for instance, Philadelphia’s aptly named Anti-

Cobden Club would be founded in the 1880s to protect against the “threatening danger” of “an organization” whose “sole purpose” was to engraft “upon our country the noxious and enervating doctrine of free trade.” The Anti-Cobden Club’s meetings, “filled to overflowing,” were thereafter held in Philadelphia’s Anti-Cobden Hall, where the club’s founder, David Martin, perfected “his plans and plots” to stymie free trade and civil service reform, according to the pro-free trade New York World.15

Protectionism proved politically popular in the Gilded Age, and intellectuals from within Pennsylvania pig-iron and steel manufacturing centers in particular provided the principal arguments for U.S. protectionism, as well as many of the charges of a British free trade conspiracy in the mid to late nineteenth century.16 Listian nationalist Henry C.

Carey of Philadelphia, although himself a onetime free trader, notably led the polemical and ideological vanguard. For many years he held court at his home on Sunday afternoons. These famously became known as “Carey’s Vespers,” where all things political and economical were discussed, and both sides of an issue were hotly debated

15 Chicago Inter Ocean, 4 Jan. 1888, quoting the founder of the anti-Cobden Club “Thousand Defenders of American Industry” of Troy, New York; North American, 21 March 1888; 8 Oct. 1889; Erie County Independent, 18 Jan. 1889, “The Annual Dinner of the American Protective Tariff League”; Syracuse Standard, 4 June 1887; Auburn Bulletin (NY), 18 Sept. 1889; New York Evening Post, 24 Sept. 1889; New York World, 23 Sept. 1892. For more on Philadelphia’s “Anti-Cobden Club,” see North American, 27 Aug. 1890; 21 July 1892, 6; 28 May 1896, 2; 12 Dec. 1896, 3. 16 For more on protectionism’s popularity, see Douglas A. Irwin, “Tariff Incidence in America’s Gilded Age,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, No. 12162 (April 2006): 1-34. 152 over chilled glasses of dry white hock wine from Germany’s Rhine area. Among its attendees were Ulysses S. Grant, Salmon P. Chase, , and Carey’s nephew, Henry Carey Baird. Fittingly, in a letter to T. B. Potter, Cobdenite Cornell professor and recent émigré from Britain, Goldwin Smith, having already given the

Cobden Club its motto “Free Trade, Peace, Goodwill among Nations,” proffered to the protectionist city of Philadelphia a contrary one—“Monopoly, war, ill-will among nations” while attending “Carey’s Vespers” in 1870.17

A number of students of American political economy joined Carey’s ranks.

Ironically, the influence of Victorian free trade significantly began to pervade Republican political circles from among Carey’s own protectionist disciples—in the person of David

Ames Wells (1828-1898), a man who would, as historian John Sproat notes, exert “more

‘potent influence’ on American tariff thought in the late nineteenth century than any politician or academic economist of his time.”18 Wells had been born in Springfield,

Massachusetts, where he was taught the protectionist doctrine common among

Massachusetts manufacturer’s sons. After attending and excelling in the Lawrence

Scientific School at Harvard University, he moved to Philadelphia in 1851, a city he once

17 Jackson, History of the Cobden Club, 21; Henry Carey Baird, Recollections of General Grant at the ‘Carey Vespers,’ June 25, 1865 (Philadelphia, 1889), 1, 19, folder 4, box 21, Henry C. Carey Section, Edward Carey Gardner Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Arnold W. Green, Henry Charles Carey: Nineteenth-Century Sociologist (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 36; Goldwin Smith to Potter, 1 Feb. 1870, Add. 43663, Vol. XVII, Richard Cobden Papers, British Library, London, England. 18 John Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 179. For Wells’s influence on economic thought, see also Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, and Company, 1903),158; Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 88-94; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1946), II, 969-70; Dorfman, Economic Mind, III, 134-35. 153 described “as the central sun of political economy and science, as there I could get the advice of Mr. Henry C. Carey.” There he became an adherent to “the strongest and strictest school” of protectionism while sitting “at the feet of Henry C. Carey.” Wells devoured Carey’s books and kept up a regular correspondence and visitation with him.

Wells then joined Abraham Lincoln’s Treasury Department in 1865 as Special

Commissioner, for a short time becoming the most important economist in government.19 Entering political office under the protectionist persuasion, Wells would, however, leave a Victorian free trader.

While personal doubts regarding the tariff arose as early as 1866 thanks to the concerted efforts of Cobdenites Edward Atkinson and J. S. Moore, Wells covertly converted from protection to free trade following his visit to England as Special

Commissioner in 1867. Republican Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch (Cobden

Club member, 1871) wrote to Wells that perceptive high tariff men in the United States were worried that Wells would “become too much indoctrinated with free-trade notions by a visit to England”—particularly from London’s Cobden Club. Wells, coming to the belief that free trade would benefit the United States as well as Britain, became an ideologically changed man during his time in England, particularly following an illuminating dinner with the Cobden Club and tours of Lancashire cotton mills, where

Wells “learned many things which still further shook” his “faith in the doctrines of

19 Biographical letter about Wells upon his death from friend F. B. Sanborn to the Cobden Club, read aloud at the 1898 annual London Cobden Club meeting, Official Report of the Annual Meeting of Members, 1898, 6; Free-Trader (Dec. 1870), 123; Tucker, Mugwumps, 28; Michael Perelman, “Retrospectives: Schumpeter, David Wells, and Creative Destruction,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9 (Summer 1995), 190. 154 Protection.” Yet, according to Wells himself, what ultimately turned him into a free trader was a conversation with Carey himself, that “great of Protectionists.” The two were discussing Cobden’s recent death, and Carey remarked that “among the many mercies since the war” Cobden’s passing was the greatest. Wells asked him “How is that?” “Why, don’t you see,” Carey replied, “he was such a friend of this country that if he had come over here the people would have all gone to hear him, and he would have taken the occasion to indoctrinate them with Free-Trade.” Carey’s response unnerved

Wells. Seemingly in anticipation of what was inevitably to follow, Wells, upon his return from England in mid-September 1867, even attempted to mislead his former mentor, assuring Carey that he had “not turned free trader.” Nevertheless, Wells soon thereafter actively joined the burgeoning American free trade movement, and was made a member of the Cobden Club three years later.20

Contra the protectionist argument that national commercial independence guaranteed peace, David Wells would continue to elaborate upon his free trade views, writing that the universal free exchange of goods was “in accordance with the teachings of nature,” and, echoing Cobden, Wells thought that free trade was “most conducive to the maintenance of international peace and to the prevention of wars.” To Wells,

20 Wells to Atkinson, 14 July 1866, folder 1; 6 July 1867, folder 2; 17 Nov., 24 Dec. 1867, folder 3, carton 13, Atkinson Papers; Sproat, “The Best Men,” 192; Free-Trader (Dec. 1870), 123; Wells to Carey, 17 Sept. 1867, Folder 3, Box 19, Carey Papers; Herbert Ronald Ferleger, “David A. Wells and the American Revenue System 1865-1870” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1942), 68; McCulloch to Wells, 12 July 1867, reel 1, David Ames Wells Papers, LOC; Minutes of 21 Feb. 1871, Committee and Annual Meetings of the Cobden Club July 1866-Aug. 1886, CC MSS; Ferleger, Wells, 186; Tucker, Mugwumps, 33; Minutes of 18 Feb. 1870, CC MSS. J. S. Moore wrote Atkinson that “I am afraid that you and I have much to answer for, as Mr. Wells was made a convert to free trade by us.” Moore to Atkinson, 19 March 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers. For a summary of Wells’s background and Edward Atkinson’s role in his conversion to free trade, see Stephen Meardon, “Postbellum Protection and Commissioner Wells’s Conversion to Free Trade,” History of Political Economy 39 (Winter 2007): 571-604. 155 economic protection, alternatively, was but another form of slavery as it prohibited individuals from freely utilizing the products of their labor.21

Not coincidentally, during the 1860s Wells befriended and gained the support of an outspoken and influential group of American Cobdenites. Republican Congressman

James Garfield, an antebellum abolitionist from Ohio, Wells reminisced, “was in principle as radical a free trader as ever lived . . . he was a member of the Cobden Club

[1869],” and “helped make me a free trader”; Garfield’s “logic and his wit were always antagonistic to the theory of protective duties.” Edward Atkinson—abolitionist, Boston cotton manufacturer, and intimate friend of Wells—considered Cobden “among the greatest of men in the service to mankind” and became a well-known proponent of incrementally introducing free trade to America, was an economic advisor to Charles

Sumner, James Garfield, and the Cleveland administrations, as well as a Cobden Club member (1869). Abolitionist Horace White, editor of the Chicago Tribune, frequently corresponded with J. S. Mill and Cobden’s free trade ally John Bright, subscribed to their anti-imperial foreign policy, became a member of the Cobden Club in 1872, and sought to eradicate protectionism as the Republican party had once dealt with slavery. For

White, “Free Trade” was but an obvious addition to the slogan of “Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Speech.” The “Nestor of Free Trade,” William Cullen Bryant—prominent poet and editor of the New York Evening Post—had attended Anti-Corn-Law League meetings

21 “In Times of Peace, etc.,” Free-Trader (May 1870), 207; David Ames Wells, Free Trade (New York and Milwaukee: M. B. Cary and Co., 1884), 294; Wells, “The Creed of Free Trade,” reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly (1875), 15; Wells, A Primer on Tariff Reform (London: Cassell & Company, Limited, 1885), 9; Wells, Freer Trade Essential to Future National Prosperity and Development (New York: Wm. C. Martin’s Steam Printing House, 1882), 3-4. 156 in London during the 1840s, used his popular newspaper to espouse free trade principles, edited the American edition of Cobden’s Political Writings in 1865, and became a member of the Cobden Club in 1869. The influence of these men upon Wells and their connection to Victorian free trade invariably led to further conspiratorial conjecture.22

Adding to the controversy surrounding the increasing popularity of Victorian free trade ideology in the United States, leading members of London’s Cobden Club worked closely with these and other prominent American free traders, gave out memberships, and disseminated well over fifteen million Cobden Club leaflets, along with 2,478,440 books and pamphlets, throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century.23 Alongside its various political and economic propagandistic activities, the club also gave out prizes to free trade scholars at American universities. These actions and connections, while not nefarious, definitely were motivated in part by British national interests and raised the alarm among American protectionist circles, as shown upon Wells’s return from England

22 David Wells, quoted in Ferleger, Wells, 196; Minutes of 10 June 1869; David Ames Wells, “Tariff Reform: Retrospective and Prospective,” Forum (Feb. 1893), 701; Minutes of 10 May 1869, CC MSS; F. B. Sanborn to the Cobden Club, Official Report of the Annual Meeting of Members, 1898, 6; Atkinson to Wells, 11 Nov. 1875, reel 3, Wells Papers; Atkinson to Wells, 21 Feb. 1884, carton 16; Atkinson to R. R. Bowker, 16 Oct. 1885, carton 17, Atkinson Papers; Atkinson, “Address to the American Free Trade League on the Hundredth Anniversary of Richard Cobden’s Birth, 3 June 1904,” in Edward Atkinson, Facts and Figures: The Basis of Economic Science (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904), 138; Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827-1905 (Boston: Old Corner Book Store, 1934), 4-7, 64; Joseph Logsdon, Horace White, Nineteenth Century Liberal (Westport: Greenwood, 1971), 174, 357-8; Chicago Tribune, 12 Nov. 1870; Tucker, Mugwumps, 6; Minutes of 9 Feb. 1872, CC MSS; Free-Trader (Dec. 1870), 118, 125-6; John Bigelow, William Cullen Bryant (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1890), 182-3; George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher, 1865- 1915 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 40; Minutes of 23 March 1869, CC MSS. 23 List of Members and Committee Reports, 1898 (London: Cassell and Co., 1898), 198. England’s leading Cobden Club members quickly developed close ties with the United States’ leading free traders. See, for instance, Thomas B. Potter to Wells, 7 July 1871; and [Cobden Club committee member] to Wells, 13 Aug. 1871, thanking Cobden for acquainting them with AFTL secretary Mahlon Sands, and asking Edward Atkinson to contribute essays to the Cobden Club publications. Carton 1, Atkinson Papers. 157 to the United States; American free traders increasingly appeared to be fighting their battles “under the banner of Cobdenism.”24

Wells, backed by his clique of Cobdenites and bolstered by his recent conversion to free trade, published a scathing indictment—cleverly hidden amid his subtle call for increases to the free list and a modest revenue tariff—of the present American tariff and currency system in his 1869 Treasury Department report, and concluded that the domestic market would not be able to soak up the country’s agricultural surplus. New

York Cobdenite Mahlon Sands believed Wells’s report to be a “standard . . . we can fight under,” and that, once Wells broke ties with the Philadelphia protectionists once and for all, the AFTL would bring him on board with a salary of $5,000 a year. Horace White wrote Wells that it was “the most important and valuable state paper ever produced in this country on any financial or economical subject. The high tariff gentry will never get over it.” The Cobden Club promptly made 3,750 copies for distribution and the AFTL included the report as a supplement to its January edition of the Free-Trader in 1870.

Wells’s American free trade friends rejoiced, proclaiming that Wells “will be the Cobden of America . . . you will win for our country the same victory and honor he won for his.”

Wells “started a sincere Protectionist,” noted Mahlon Sands, “and has been converted by the teaching of facts and the argument of the Free-Traders. Once he was Saul, now he is their chief apostle to the Gentiles.”25

24 George B. Curtis, Protection and Prosperity: An Account of Tariff Legislation and its effect in Europe and America (New York: Pan-American Publishing Co., 1896), 617. 25 Report of the Special Commissioner of the Revenue, 40 Cong., 3 Sess., 5 Jan. 1869, Document 16, pp. 1- 11, 47, 69-76; Sands to Atkinson, 12 March 1869; Dec. 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers; White to Wells, 158 Maine’s imposing, bearded, and magnetic Republican Congressman James G.

Blaine (1830-1893) had urged Wells to “be very cautious” in his report, but Wells opted instead for striking “very heavy blows,” even if it cost him his job, although he did not think the protectionists would “dare openly attack” him.26

Wells was wrong. His protectionist enemies, particularly Wells’s spurned mentor

Henry Carey and the New York Tribune’s Listian editor Horace Greeley, charged that

Wells had been bribed with British gold. Wells’s free trade message had at first been

subtle enough to escape the notice of Greeley himself, who for a few weeks believed

Wells’s report to be a protectionist message. Once Greeley caught on, the Tribune responded that “we do most surely believe that the scope and drift of Mr. Wells’s late

Report was influenced by the money of foreign rivals.” Greeley asserted that Wells, as revenue commissioner, had been “bought and paid for” by the British. Carey, in a series of thirteen letters to the Tribune, in turn asked why Wells’s report aligned itself “so

precisely in accordance with the views and wishes of those great British ‘capitalists,’”

who, “in their efforts to gain and keep foreign markets,” distributed “money so freely

among those of our people who are supposed to be possessed of power to influence

public opinion?”27

In the House of Representatives, Republican Congressman “Pig-Iron” Kelley of

Pennsylvania, Henry Carey’s most avid congressional protectionist disciple and a staunch

24 Dec. 1869, reel 1, Wells Papers; Free Trade and the European Treaties of Commerce, Including a Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of the Cobden Club, July 17, 1875 (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, 1875), 128; Free-Trader. Supplement. (Jan. 1870); Elihu Burritt to Wells, 14 May 1869, reel 1, Wells Papers; Crapol, America for Americans, 24-26; Free-Trader (March 1870), 169. 26 Wells to Atkinson, 29 Oct. 1868, folder 5, carton 13, Atkinson Papers. 27 New York Tribune, 9 March 1869, 5; 23 March 1869, 4; 8 June 1869, 4. 159 silverite, attacked Wells for moving “stealthily toward his sinister objects.” Kelley charged that Wells’s report advocated on behalf of the British “whose interest is to hold us in commercial and maritime dependence,” and that he had been bribed by his

“Sheffield employers.” Kelley also noted the timing of Wells’s 1867 trip to England and his conversion from protection to free trade. The charges of a British conspiracy had begun, and Wells strengthened such charges through his years of dissimulation in the late

1860s among his protectionist allies regarding his Cobdenite conversion.28

Following his 1869 free trade report, Wells’s career within mainstream

Republican politics came to an abrupt end, as well. The strong protectionist reaction to

Wells’s report also foreshadowed the long road stretching before the reformers of the civil service and the tariff. Young Cobdenite noted as much to Edward

Atkinson, that “our coming struggle is going to be harder than the anti-slavery fight, and though we may carry free-trade, I fear we shall be beaten on the wider field.”29

Disgusted by cronyism, corruption, and Republican protectionist orthodoxy,

Wells and his fellow reformists crafted the message of the Liberal Republican movement.

This predominantly free trade and civil service reform movement voiced its concerns primarily through print: American Cobden Club members Wells and Atkinson in the

North American Review; Samuel Bowles (Cobden Club member, 1872) in the Springfield

28 Congressional Globe, 41 Cong., 2 Sess., 11 Jan. 1870, 371, 373; Crapol, America for Americans, 33. 29 Adams to Atkinson, 1 Feb. 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers. That same year also saw the creation of the Brooklyn Free Trade League, which sought a tariff for revenue only. Its president was Cobdenite Joshua Leavitt, and Cobdenite R. R. Bowker was secretary. See Platform and Constitution of the Brooklyn Free Trade League (New York: Hosford & Sons, 1869). For Kelley’s free silver proclivities, see Jeannette P. Nichols, “Silver Diplomacy,” Political Science Quarterly 48 (Dec. 1933), 570-71. For a detailed study of the civil service reform movement, see, for instance, Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). 160 Republican; Bryant in the New York Evening Post; Horace White in the Chicago Tribune; and William M. Grosvenor (Cobden Club member, 1872) in the Missouri Democrat.

Henry Adams, himself holding “a warm feeling of good-will to England,” also joined the

Cobdenite camp (Cobden Club member 1869) in the pages of the North American

Review. Adams had known Cobden well during his years in England, and thereafter drew inspiration from John Bright and “Mr. Cobden” regarding “the free-trade issue and our outrageous political corruption.” While Henry Adams’s free trade position might have been unpopular, he wrote Bright, “I know what to say and I shall say it without much caring whose toes I tread upon.”30 His brother, Charles Francis Adams Jr., was also an admitted free trader: “one who believes in the economic dispensation of Adam Smith, as developed by Richard Cobden . . . the most effective exponent the practical political world has yet seen.”31 Oxford Professor Goldwin Smith’s arrival in Ithaca, New York in

1869 provided the free trade movement with further intellectual and editorial firepower, and he quickly distributed copies of Cobden’s writings to his Cornell students.32

In 1865, Liberal Republican Cobdenites William Cullen Bryant, Jacob D. Cox

(Cobden Club member, 1872), Horace White, and Edward Atkinson—inspired by the success of Cobden and Bright’s Anti-Corn-Law League—had founded the American Free

30 Henry Adams to Carl Schurz, 27 Oct. 1870, in Henry Adams, The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. by J. C. Levenson, et al. 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), II, 86; Adams to Carl Milnes Gaskell, 29 Jan., 1882, in ibid., 448; Adams to Bright, 3 Feb. 1869, Add. 43391, Vol. IX, John Bright Papers, British Library, London, England. 31 Charles Francis Adams Jr., The Richard Cobden Centennial. Speech of Charles Francis Adams at the Dinner of the Free Trade League at the Hotel Vendome, Boston, on the Evening of June 2, 1904, 3. 32 Goldwin Smith to T. B. Potter, 1 Nov. 1869, Add. 43663, Vol. XVII, Richard Cobden Papers, British Library, London, England. 161 Trade League, with Bryant as its president through 1867, and who was thereafter replaced by Cyrus Field’s brother, David Dudley Field (Cobden Club member, 1869), followed by David Wells himself in 1871. The AFTL commenced upon an active propaganda campaign, aided further when, after some coaxing on Edward Atkinson’s part, Henry Ward Beecher officially joined the free trade fray. Beecher, General Roeliff

Brinkerhoff (Cobden Club member, 1886), Professor Arthur Latham Perry (Cobden Club member, 1870) of , Edward Atkinson, William Lloyd Garrison, and

David Dudley Field thereafter went on speaking tours throughout the country on the

AFTL’s behalf in 1869 and 1870, wherein dozens of meetings were held and pamphlets distributed. Other prominent members included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joshua Leavitt, former New York governor Samuel Tilden—who, upon his election to the Cobden Club in 1877 expressed his appreciation and happiness to have his name “associated in any way with that of the illustrious statesman of whose life it is the worthy purpose” of the club to prolong—former Ohio Governor George Hoadley (Cobden Club member, 1888), a young publisher by the name of Henry George (Cobden Club member, 1881),

Congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox, Carl Schurz, E. L. Godkin, Robert B. Minturn

(Cobden Club member, 1871), and William M. Grosvenor. Charles M. Marshall was the

AFTL’s treasurer (Cobden Club member, 1871), and Mahlon Sands its secretary (Cobden

Club member, 1870).33

33 League (Sept. 1867), 40; Atkinson to Beecher, 25 June 1867, carton 14, Atkinson Papers; Mahlon Sands, The Free Trade League to its Subscribers and the Public (1869); Mahlon Sands to Atkinson, 1 March 1869; 12 March 1869; 29 March 1869; 8 April 1869; 22 April 1869; 29 April 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers; Caro Lloyd, Henry Demarest Lloyd, 1847-1903, A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), I, 24-25; Tilden to Thomas Bayley Potter, Aug. 23, 1877, folder 41, Samuel Tilden 162 The AFTL began publishing a monthly, The League, from June 1867 to October

1868. The newspaper was initially named after the Anti-Corn-Law League’s own popular circular, and its motto was a quote from Richard Cobden: “Free-Trade: The International

Common Law of the Almighty.” With the increasing popularity of protectionist publications containing “league” in their titles, however, in 1868 The League was renamed The Free-Trader (1868-1871), which jumped in publication from 4,000 to

16,000 between 1869 and 1870 alone, made its way to “nearly every newspaper in the

United States,” and noted its first female subscriber in December 1869.34

The AFTL maintained close ties with the Cobden Club and the Free Trade

Association of London, with the latter writing the AFTL upon its inception that its endeavor to secure free trade for free labor was but the “consummation of the task” that had been “commenced in the abolition of slavery. Free Trade is the vital element of Free

Labour: without the former the latter cannot healthfully exist.” The AFTL’s “Declaration of Principles” advocated “Free Trade, the natural and proper term in the series of progress after Free Speech, Free Soil and Free Labor.” Ties were further strengthened through growing American Free Trade League membership in the Cobden Club.35

Papers, NYPL. Other founders of the AFTL included Cobdenites Alfred Pell and Parke Godwin. See Constitution of the American Free Trade League and List of Members (1865). 34 League (June 1867); Free-Trader (June 1868), 1; Free-Trader (Jan. 1870), 125; Free-Trader (March 1870), 168. The December issue was sent to its first known female subscriber, residing in Fairfield, Vermont. Free-Trader (Jan. 1870), 127. 35 Earl Dudley Ross, Liberal Republican Movement (Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1910), 3-5; Michael McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59; Howe, “Free Trade and the International Order,” in Anglo-American Attitudes, ed. Leventhal and Quinault, 145; Constitution of the American Free Trade League and List of Members (1865); Address of the Free Trade Association of London, to the American Free Trade League, New York; being a Resume of the Financial Changes of Recent Years, and their Effects upon Revenue and Trade (London: P.S. King, 1866), 4. 163 The free trade movement gained ever more momentum as its onetime abolitionist leadership sought to move past the Civil War’s problematic legacy of Reconstruction. In

1869, for instance, former abolitionist Horace White’s radical paper, the Chicago

Tribune, gave its endorsement to the following sentiment: “The negro, having secured all his rights, including a seat in the , has ceased to be an object of interest.” AFTL secretary Mahlon Sands wrote Atkinson in late 1869 that “we care not for the 15th Amendment one way or the other; if it is an obstacle, however, to our success the sooner it is gotten rid of the better.” Edward Atkinson similarly implored: “Let the reconstruction matters be once settled, and the fight between Protection and Free Trade will be upon us, and Free-Trade views will win.” While the rhetoric of antislavery permeated the coming free trade debates, the former Southern slaves themselves would increasingly become marginalized both in national politics and in the minds of the

Cobdenite abolitionists in the decade following the Civil War. According to historian

Andrew Slap, by 1872, the Liberal Republican movement itself would ironically doom

Reconstruction.36

The AFTL’s free trade agitation did not go unnoticed. Immediately upon the league’s founding, a spokesman for Cincinnati’s Society for the Encouragement of

American Industry correspondingly observed “that British agents in this country are

36 The League 1 (June 1867), 5; Chicago Tribune, 4 April 1870; Sands to Atkinson, 29 Dec. 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers; Williamson, Atkinson, 81; Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 164 already at work to reduce the tariff.”37 Listian Giles Stebbins of Detroit stated without reserve that the AFTL “is ‘run’ in the interest of foreign manufacturers and their importing agents—who want control of our markets—and of political demagogues.”38 In

July 1866, protectionist Congressman John A. Griswold of Troy, New York also noticed with suspicion the AFTL’s strong transatlantic ties. He found the league’s members to

“have made up their minds deliberately . . . to obey the behests and dictation of British manufacturers and British capitalists.” In Griswold’s same speech to Congress, he read a letter from the former American consul at Liverpool, Thomas H. Dudley, who warned that the British were “making great efforts on this side to repeal our tariff and admit

British goods free of duty. . . .Their plan is to agitate in the Western States, and to form free-trade associations all over the country.”39

Dudley’s observation proved rather accurate. Free trade leagues closely associated

with the AFTL and the Cobden Club began sprouting up throughout the country in

subsequent years, predominantly in the North East and West. The South, undergoing its

own vast economic, political, and social upheaval, had ample issues other than that of

free trade to keeps its attention. Struggling post-war Southern development of infant

industries, flight of former slave labor to the North and West, relative Democratic

political impotence, and corresponding political and racial violence were bringing about,

among other changes, a reorientation of the South’s outlook on the tariff question during

37 Edward D. Mansfield, The Tariff—British Imposture and Political Humbug (Cincinnati, OH: Society for Encouragement of American Industry, 1865), 1. 38 Giles B. Stebbins, Read and Circulate! The Free Trade Falsehood that “A Tariff is a Tax” Exposed (Detroit, 1871), 1. 39 Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1866), 3689. 165 Reconstruction. Mining and manufacturing interests in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, and Tennessee were also “more zealous” for protectionism, as were Louisianan sugar interests and Kentucky’s hemp growers.40 Free trade advocacy in the Gilded Age thus was finding its most vocal adherents outside of the Jeffersonian New South.

During this period that historian Morton Keller describes as “the triumph of organizational politics,” the process of creating local free trade leagues (as well as protective groups) was systematized.41 The Chicago Tribune explained how simple it was to form one, and suggested local clubs: hold monthly meetings and debates between protectionists and revenue reformers; supply traveling lecturers; and that “good could be done—as Cobden’s example shows—by catechizing candidates for Congress and for

Legislatures which were to elect Senators, on their views of revenue reform.”42

The AFTL’s principle goals were to send out lecturers and distribute free trade tracts throughout the West, and to “organize Revenue Reform societies in all the large towns.” And so they did. The Chicago Free Trade League, for instance, held its first meeting early in 1866, with Cobdenite Chicago Tribune editor Horace White—following his own advice—a member of its constitutional committee and a vice president. The

40 New York Tribune, 5 April 1881, 4; Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1867 (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), esp. 148-179; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),104-131; Howard K. Beal, “The Tariff and Reconstruction,” American Historical Review 35 (Jan. 1930): 276-294; Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), xxi, 8; William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 14. 41 Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 238-273. 42 Reprinted in “The Organization of Free Trade Clubs,” New Century (International Free-Trade Alliance, 1876), 91. 166 Chicago branch proposed to fight against exorbitant railway rates and the present national tariff, which “distinguishes and damns the name of [Justin] Morrill”—author of the 1861 protective tariff—and was “unhappily imitating the policy which Great Britain pursued so long in the instance of its Corn Laws.” The antebellum Slave Power, one Chicago branch member pronounced, had merely been replaced by “a sectional manufacturing class” in Congress.43

Free trade agitation was of course also encouraged throughout New England.

After much prodding by AFTL Secretary Mahlon Sands, Edward Atkinson and William

Lloyd Garrison (Cobden Club member, 1869) organized the Reform League of Boston in

April 1869, which focused on civil service reform and tariff reductions. Among its officers were Charles Francis Adams Jr. as a vice president, Atkinson its corresponding secretary, and Garrison its advisory council chairman. Cobdenites Atkinson, Wells,

William Grosvenor, Sands, Horace White, and Jacob Cox also formed the Taxpayers’

Union in November 1871 to act as a lobbying group in Washington D. C. in order to more effectively influence legislation for a revenue-only tariff. The AFTL’s Henry D.

Lloyd headed the publication of a new monthly, The People’s Pictorial Taxpayer, and, in coordination with Sands at the AFTL, William Grosvenor was made the union’s

Washington “Free Trade lobbyist,” with free trade radical J. S. Moore as his secretary.

For his part, Cobdenite Roeliff Brinkerhoff went on a speaking tour of the West on the union’s behalf. Grosvenor also developed a secret grassroots list of the country’s tariff

43 Chicago Tribune, 10 Jan. 1866, 2. 167 reformists.44 Such efforts in the West and North East paid noticeable dividends; the

Nation observed in 1870 that “a great change has come over public opinion within the last three or four years about the tariff. . . . Newspapers all over the country, and particularly in the West . . . have become decidedly free-trade.”45

In what would become a predictable and effective response throughout the United

States, protectionist associations were formed in these same areas of agitation to protect industries from this rapidly growing free trade “threat.”46 To thwart Horace White’s determination to access “the markets of the world,” the Chicago Tribune’s former protectionist editor, Joseph Medill, for instance, encouraged “the friends of the

‘American System’ to organize also, and meet sophistry with facts.”47 In Detroit, Carey disciple Giles Stebbins directly connected and attacked British free trade and the AFTL’s efforts in the Western United States.48 In New York, the journal The Protectionist announced in early 1870 that it would begin issuing its paper weekly rather than monthly

“in order to counteract more effectually the increasing dissemination of the pernicious

44 Mahlon Sands to Atkinson, 13 Feb. 1869; 1 March 1869; 8 March 1869; 10 March 1869; 12 March 1869; 16 March 1869; 18 March 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers; first Tax-Payers’ Union Circular, dated 29 Nov. 1871; Grosvenor to Atkinson, 21 Dec. 1871, carton 1; Grosvenor to Atkinson, 2 Jan. 1872, Sands to Atkinson, 4 Jan. 1872, Grosvenor to Atkinson, 13 Jan. 1872; 29 Jan. 1872, carton 2, Atkinson Papers; Williamson, Atkinson, 87-89; Slap, Doom of Reconstruction, 129. 45 Nation, 3 March 1870, 132. 46 Chicago Tribune, 5 Jan.1866; Bessie Louis Pierce, A History of Chicago, From Town to City, 1848- 1871, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), II, 293. 47 Chicago Tribune, 11 Jan. 1866. 48 Stebbins, “British Free Trade,” a Delusion. To the Farmers, Mechanics, Laborers, and All Voters of the Western and North-Western States; Stebbins, Western Campaign of the Agents of the “American Free Trade League”: Their Plan of Free Trade and Tariff for Revenue the British Plan, it Works Badly There and Here: Wages, Real Tariff Reform (Detroit: American Industrial League, 1869); Stebbins, Read and Circulate! The Free Trade Falsehood that “A Tariff is a Tax” Exposed; Stebbins, Upward Steps of Seventy Years. Autobiographic, Biographic, Historic (New York: United States Book Company, 1890), 184-89. 168 Free-Trade doctrines of the Free-Trade press of the country.”49 Henry Carey’s nephew,

Philadelphia publisher Henry Carey Baird, took up his aging uncle’s protectionist mantle, and began to spar on the stump and in print with the leading free traders of the day, in order to block the “nefarious schemes” of the AFTL, that “foreign importers’ British

Free-Trade League of New York . . . which . . . is so manifestly and boldly in the interest of Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, and Staffordshire.”50

Stoking conspiratorial embers to white hot, Congressman Griswold’s and Consul

Dudley’s allegations of the AFTL’s transatlantic ties came out into the open in 1869

when, upon receiving a copy of the AFTL’s financial records, New York Tribune editor

Horace Greeley uncovered that three-fourths of the League’s funds “came either directly

from foreign houses” or “their recognized agencies” in New York, particularly from the

wealthy Baring family in England. The AFTL was by no means a national movement, the

Tribune asserted, but was rather “Foreign in the incitement of its organization, Foreign in

the interests it is intended and calculated to promote, and Foreign in much the larger

portion of the contributions whereby it is supported and rendered efficient.” The Tribune

also noted that these were not merely financial ties, but familial; AFTL member Robert

B. Minturn, the Tribune also pointed out, was a brother-in-law of Baring himself.51

49 Quoted in Free-Trader (April 1870), 181. 50 Henry Carey Baird, The Rights of American Producers, and the Wrongs of British-Free-Trade Revenue- Reform (Philadelphia: Collins, Printer, 1872), 8, 1. See also, Henry Carey Baird, Some of the Fallacies of British-Free-Trade-Revenue-Reform. Two Letters to Arthur Latham Perry, Professor of History and Political Economy in Williams College (Philadelphia: Collins, Printer, 1871). 51 New York Tribune, 28 May 1869, 4; 8 June 1869, 4; 22 May 1869, 7. 169 Ironically, the AFTL found encouragement from the New York Tribune’s discovery, particularly as it pointed out that the league had been able to raise $50,000 in just nine months. Such rapid fundraising suggested that the AFTL “shall not have to wait so long . . . as the anti-corn-law men of England did for Free-Trade in corn.” The Tribune had also emphasized that the majority of funding came from “importers, foreign bankers, or ship-owners.” This the AFTL did not deny. After all, the league asked rhetorically, where else would the money come from? The iron masters? Wool manufactures? Salt- makers? “We doubt if any body will think the worse of Free-Trade because men who own ships and men who use them believe their business honorable and honest, and who ask that the laws of trade shall have free course, untrammeled, except for the necessary purpose of revenue.” As to the “foreign bankers,” there were only a couple of them, unless foreign bankers included anyone dealing in foreign exchange. Such appeals to

“petty prejudice,” the AFTL countered, were “always the resort of knaves and fools when argument fails them.”52

The fervor that once drove antebellum antislavery found renewed rhetorical expression among Cobdenites on both sides of the Atlantic. In the pages of the AFTL’s

Free-Trader, for instance, William Grosvenor asked:

What is the difference of principle between that slavery which took the whole of

the earnings of labor for the benefit of another and that slavery which takes any

part of its earnings for the benefit of another? We are all anti-slavery men to-

52 Free-Trader (Nov. 1870), 104. 170 night. Let us touch the elbow, East, South, and West united, and go forward to

crush the enemies of the freedom of the people.53

In similar fashion, John Bright in England considered it “strange that a people who put down slavery at an immense sacrifice, are not able to suppress monopoly which is but a milder form of the same evil. Under slavery the man was seized and his labor was stolen from him, and the profit enjoyed by his master and owner.” Likewise, “under Protection the man is apparently free, but he is denied the right to exchange the produce of his labor except with his countrymen, who offer him less for it than the foreigner would give.”54

Abolitionist agitators had certainly found a new outlet for their reformation.

From December 1870 to June 1871, the AFTL’s meetings increased, spanning from Maine to Minnesota, and the distribution of the league’s free-trade tracts in this period alone numbered more than 245,000. Following the 1870 elections, the AFTL had also unsuccessfully suggested a secret conference that would join “Western Revenue

Reform Republicans with democrats” to start the new reform movement and “control the organization” of the House of Representatives. Horace White was subsequently castigated for suggesting a bipartisan anti-protectionist union with Democrats in

Congress. He was taken to task for such ill-timed efforts as the Klan began ratcheting up

53 Quoted in Free-Trader (Dec. 1870), 125. 54 Quoted in Herman Ausubel, In Hard Times: Reformers Among the Late Victorians (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 221 171 its violence and intimidation in the South, thereby forcefully reminding the country of the

Democratic party’s ongoing bloody legacy.55

In spite of White’s bipartisan backfire, the AFTL began to gain adherents among

American blacks as well. Joseph H. Perkins of Cincinnati made a name for himself from his free trade advocacy, for instance, as did the Colored Young Men’s Christian

Association of Washington. William Cullen Bryant explained that part of the movement’s success was owed to the fact that “a generation is rising up who never knew Henry Clay and who will not adopt his errors merely because they were his”; the American System would not find such a stronghold as it had within the Whig party, Bryant half predicted and half hoped.56

The movement’s momentum caught the eye and ire of Pennsylvania’s Listian

Congressman “Pig-Iron” Kelley, who himself once youthfully had subscribed to the

“cosmopolitanism of free trade” and zealously had given his support to the 1846 Walker

Tariff. Yet in 1859 he had come to the Listian belief that “the protective system is the only road to really Free Trade” under the tutelage of Henry C. Carey. Kelley also observed that “Free-Trade principles are spreading through the North like wildfire, just as secession principles once overran the South.”57

Republican Speaker of the House James G. Blaine had been warned in late 1870 that free trade sentiment was becoming more popular among Northwestern Republicans,

55 Mahlon Sands to Carl Schurz, 10 Nov. 1870, reel 4, Carl Schurz Papers, LOC; Logsdon, White, 183. 56 Free-Trader (Dec. 1870), 121. 57 William D. Kelley, Reasons for Abandoning the Theory of Free Trade, and Adopting the Principle of Protection to American Industry. Addressed to the Farmers and Working Men of the United States (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1872), 4, 22, 26. 172 and that the party could not sustain itself “upon the platform of Schenck and Kelley.”

Correspondingly, Blaine began to view the Independent Republican free trade reach within Congress with enough trepidation that he made a duplicitous deal, ostensibly offering them control of the House Ways and Means Committee in return for continued party loyalty. American free traders thereafter tried to have Cobdenite Republican

Congressman James G. Garfield—who had by now “lost the good-will of the

Protectionists” owing to his warning that protectionism would be the ruin of the

Republican party—appointed chairman of the committee, only to be thwarted in the end by Blaine.58

The increasing power of the Liberal Republicans, particularly from their

Cobdenite element, was thus being felt in national as well as local politics. In 1870, some of these same liberals, under the leadership of Carl Schurz and Cobdenite Colonel

William Grosvenor, formed an independent ticket—a Liberal Republican party ticket—

“in favor of tariff reform” in Missouri.59 A similar association seeking universal amnesty, civil service reform, and free trade was developed in Cincinnati the following year, led by Cobdenite AFTL leaders Jacob Cox and George Hoadley, president of the

Ohio Free Trade League.60

Alongside such political organizing, the Liberal Republican movement in turn found strong journalistic support from Cobdenite editors Horace White of the Chicago

58 R. C. Cook to Blaine, 17 Nov. 1870, reel 7, James Gillespie Blaine Family Papers, LOC; Free-Trader (May 1870), 202; (April 1870), 180; (June 1870), 5; Ida Minerva Tarbell, The Tariff in our Times (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), 70; Logsdon, White, 183-4. 59 Roeliff Brinkerhoff, Recollections of a Lifetime (Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Co., 1900), 214-15. 60 Joyner, Wells, 123; Slap, Doom of Reconstruction, 129-130. 173 Tribune, Manton Marble of the New York World, Samuel Bowles of the Springfield

Republican, Murat Halstead (Cobden Club member, 1887) of the Cincinnati Commercial, and Charles Nordhoff (Cobden Club member, 1872) of the New York Evening Post, which Listian Henry Carey Baird once described as “the special organ, advocate, and friend of the British free-trade revenue reformers.” In May 1870, these men met privately in Washington D. C. with fellow Cobdenites David Wells, William Grosvenor of the St.

Louis Democrat (and representative of the Missouri party), E. L. Godkin of the Nation,

Charles Francis Adams Jr., Henry Adams, Amasa and his son Francis Walker, and

Mahlon Sands. At this private meeting, these men resolved to ask Grant for a renewal of

Wells’s term as Special Commissioner of the Revenue, and decided “that action outside of the Republican Party would become necessary” if the Republican party did not seek

“repentance” for its protectionist past and “remove the crushing shackles” of the current high tariff system. This meeting was followed by another larger one in late November at the invitation of the AFTL. The Liberal Republican movement’s national phase had begun.61

The summer of 1870 witnessed two other occurrences that significantly enhanced growing Republican intraparty dissent: Cobdenite David Wells was forced to step down from office, and Cobdenite Charles Sumner successfully halted the Grant

Administration’s attempt to annex Santo Domingo. Grant turned against the independents for thwarting his expansionist scheme, and thereby proceeded further down the path of

61 Baird, The Rights of American Producers, 4; Free-Trader (May 1870), 204; Slap, Doom of Reconstruction, 128. 174 cronyism and political patronage in order to gain temporary congressional allies; he thereby also garnered further animosity from civil service reformers. Yet around this time as well, temporarily overshadowing these visible Republican rifts, a growing Anglo-

American crisis reached its breaking point.

“Messages of Peace and Goodwill”: Cobdenites and the 1871 Treaty of Washington

There is to be a war of some kind with England, either of tariff or of gunpowder.

Henry Charles Carey, 3 May 1869.62

With the presidential elections of 1872 in the near distance, transatlantic

Cobdenite efforts turned toward foreign policy as Anglo-American tensions turned ever sourer throughout the 1860s. Anglophobia did not just spill over from the Civil War; it flooded the international political landscape. Many Northerners held a lingering resentment over seeming British support for the South during the conflict, particularly over the British sale of warships like the Alabama to the Confederacy. These ships had proven quite effective against Northern ships, and the U.S. federal government now sought indemnities from Britain over its role in these so-called Alabama Claims. By

1870, the British government, for its part, was rather eager to come to a settlement, as its leaders peered with anxiety across the English Channel at the outbreak of war between

France and Prussia. The Anglo-American diplomatic situation became tenser as these

62 Carey to Charles Sumner, 3 May 1869, reel 46, Sumner Papers. 175 seemingly scabbed-over Civil War sores festered profusely. Speculation regarding the possibility of war between Britain and the United States was commonly batted about on both sides of the Atlantic, leading some proponents of peace to encourage global Anglo-

Saxon political union in order to keep future disagreements from occurring. Historians, however, have since overlooked the episode’s various Cobdenite connections.63

Cobdenite Goldwin Smith, having just left his post as Oxford University’s Regius

Professor in order to teach in the United States, held out hope that the Alabama dispute would not lead to blows. He wrote the Cobden Club’s founder, Thomas Bayley Potter, that the Cobden Club might even lend its aid to ending the “Alabama case” as it was “just the sort of thing for the Club to do . . . if we could once get rid of this wretched quarrel . .

. a great obstacle to Free Trade principles in America will be removed, and the opening of this market will not be very distant.” To further counteract Anglophobia, Smith even encouraged English emigration to Virginia before the next elections, as “an English

Virginia would be an effectual counterpoise to the Irish vote.” But Smith also warned

Potter that “any direct efforts on the part of Englishmen to propagate Free Trade here by supporting Free Trade associations or otherwise should be carefully avoided,” as “they put a weaker and fatal efficacy into the hands of Carey & Co.”64

63 Extension of Peace: Proposal for the Amalgamation of Great Britain and the United States (London: Hammond & Co., 1873 [1871]). For such studies, see especially Adrian Cook, The Alabama Claims: American Politics and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); and Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936); Sexton, “The Funded Loan and Alabama Claims”; Duncan Andrew Campbell, Unlikely Allies: Britain, America and the Victorian Origins of the Special Relationship (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 182-88. 64 Smith to Potter, 1 Nov. 1869; Smith to Potter, 7 Dec. 1869; Smith to Potter, 1 Feb. 1870, Add. 43663, Vol. XVII, Cobden Papers. 176 Smith and Potter’s desire to see the Cobden Club play a part in the proceedings was not entirely farfetched; members of the Cobden Club did indeed play important roles throughout the dispute. First, the situation certainly appeared less dangerous with

Cobdenite Charles Francis Adams Sr. as U.S. arbiter, and with Cobdenite William

Gladstone as Britain’s prime minister. Second, American Cobden Club member Cyrus

Field, riding high upon his transatlantic cable, was integral in bringing a peaceful end to the dispute, as he had similarly diffused a difficult situation during the Civil War when

Confederates had attempted to draw Canada into the conflict by staging a Canadian raid upon St. Albans, Vermont. Throughout the Civil War, Field had maintained close ties with England; perhaps too close, as charges of treason were even brought against him in

1862 owing to his close transatlantic ties. As dangerous as it was, he frequently found himself acting as an unofficial American ambassador between the two countries. In an era where the U.S. Foreign Service was less than professionalized, Field—alongside the concerted efforts of international bankers wary of an upset financial market—epitomized the importance of nongovernmental actors in late nineteenth-century foreign relations.65

It so happened that Field found himself in London when the Alabama dispute broke out. It was further fortuitous that his friend William Gladstone had returned to the

British premiership, and as Cyrus also had close contact with President Grant and his cabinet, as well as ties to the British legation across the Atlantic. Field immediately encouraged John Bright to offer publicly his pacific opinion on the Alabama matter in

65 Samuel Carter III, Cyrus Field: Man of Two Worlds (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968), 217-18, 198-203; Sexton, “The Funded Loan and the Alabama Claims.” 177 order to thaw the sudden chill in relations. Field also held a banquet for the English High

Commissioners where Field’s guests gave their “unofficial and cordial ratification” to the

Treaty of Washington, and where Cobdenites William Cullen Bryant and Henry Ward

Beecher gave speeches on the future of Anglo-American peace and friendship.66

No matter how many letters were exchanged, however, Bright’s old friend

Charles Sumner, in his usual uncompromisingly principled manner, proved particularly intransigent on the subject of reparations. In initial agreement with President Grant and

Hamilton Fish, Sumner demanded that Canada and the West Indies be handed over to the

United States as payment for Britain’s transgressions and so as to avoid any future conflicts between the North American neighbors. Such a desire to join the United States with Canada was concurrently shared by Goldwin Smith, an idea that he would advocate for many years to come, although never in the outraged spirit in which it was then being promulgated by Sumner.67

Sumner’s vituperative response, exaggerated as it was in the British press, has since been portrayed as one stemming from some combination of Anglophobia, jingoism, and an unhappy marriage.68 Yet it was not fear of the British, militarism, or his estranged

66 Justin McCarthy, ed., The Settlement of the Alabama Question. The Banquet Given at New York to Her Britannic Majesty’s High Commissioners by Mr. Cyrus W. Field (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1871), ix; “The Alabama Claims,” London Times, 4 March 1872, 12; Field to Vice-President , 24 Feb. 1872; Francis Wells to Field, 16 April 1872; Edward Thornton to Field, 17 April 1872, folder 2, box 1, Cyrus W. Field Papers, NYPL; Carter, Field, 198-203. 67 Goldwin Smith, America & England their Present Relations. A Reply to Senator Sumner’s Recent Speech (London: John Cambden Hotten, 1869); D. H. Chamberlain, Charles Sumner and the Treaty of Washington (New York: Riverside Press, 1901), 32-33. 68 Campbell, Unlikely Allies, 184; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 53; Cook, The Alabama Claims, 89-102. 178 wife that motivated him, although his actions might metaphorically be viewed as those of a spurned lover. Sumner’s was the anger of an Anglophile upset that the British government and people had not lived up to his high expectations during the Civil War. It was also the reaction of a Cobdenite peace advocate seeking an end to any further disputes between the two countries on the North American continent. Sumner became enraged when he found that his message had been so misconstrued in Britain; the transatlantic hysteria that followed his message was entirely unintentional.69

Furthermore, Sumner’s Canadian agitation stemmed from Cobden’s own “loose the bond and go” approach to the British colonies. In response to Sumner’s enthusiastic reaction to Montreal’s agitation in favor of American annexation in 1849, Cobden had written to Sumner that “I agree with you that nature has decided that Canada and the

United States must become one . . . if the people of Canada are tolerably unanimous in wishing to sever the very slight thread which now binds them to this country, I see no reason why . . . it should not be done amicably.”70 As Charles Francis Adams Jr. noted in his study of the event:

These words of Cobden furnished the key of the situation as it lay in his

essentially doctrinaire mind. He, accordingly, looked forward with confidence to

the incorporation of British Columbia into the American Union; but he always

69 Cook, The Alabama Claims, 91-99. 70 Sumner to Cobden, 2 May 1849, reel 68; Cobden to Sumner, 7 Nov. 1849, microfilm, reel 7, Charles Sumner Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. 179 insisted that it “should be made by peaceful annexation, by the voluntary act of

England, and with the cordial assent of the colonists.”

To support his stance, Sumner repeated Cobden’s words as late as April 1869.71

Unfortunately for Sumner, although one failed Canadian proposal for a North

American Zollverein was briefly put forth in 1870, the annexationist sentiment that had been popular between 1849 and 1854 had largely disappeared in Canada, and London also was “beginning to turn away from the tenets of the Manchester school,” as Goldwin

Smith observed. Sumner had misread the rise of Canadian nationalism that had followed confederation in 1867. Unlike in the U.S. case, “nationalism never meant separation” from the motherland. Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, desirous of a quick settlement in 1869, was also surprised by Sumner’s intransigence regarding

Canadian annexation. When Sumner was told that English sentiment was decidedly against letting Canada go, Sumner adamantly replied that “he knew . . . that England was willing; with the sentiment so strong in England the Canadians could be dealt with; the true policy was to bring them into harmony with the opinion in Britain and the United

States.” As Goldwin Smith admitted, “Sumner may have been misled” by his years of correspondence with Cobden, Bright, and the Duke of Argyle.72 Much of this

71 Goldwin Smith, Treaty of Washington: A Study in Imperial History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1941), 19, 20, 29, 29n; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Before and After the Treaty of Washington: The American Civil War and the War in the Transvaal (New York: New York Historical Society, 1902), 103-4. 72 Smith, Treaty of Washington, 19, 20, 29, 29n; Adams, Before and After the Treaty of Washington, 103- 4. For the Canadian proposal for a Zollverein stemming from the Alabama dispute, see New York Times, 30 March 1870, 2. 180 international crisis thus stemmed from Sumner’s misunderstanding of Canadian nationalism and the dampening of Cobdenite sentiment in Britain regarding the colonies.

Cobdenite Henry Adams expressed his own incomprehension of Sumner’s pro- annexationist motivation to John Bright, and urged Edward Atkinson to bring the

Bostonians and “Eastern Senators” to their senses and give their support to the treaty.73

Seeing friends Grant and Sumner as the crux and key to peaceful settlement, Field thereafter sent a torrent of letters to the two of them throughout 1869, anxious as he was

“to keep good feeling between England and America.”74

A settlement was ultimately reached through international arbitration in 1871, in no small part to the efforts of Cyrus Field. Following the settlement, Field invited his transatlantic friends to his regularly held Thanksgiving dinner at the Buckingham Palace

Hotel in London, complete with sweet potatoes, pies, and roast turkey. Prime Minister

Gladstone, sitting on Cyrus Field’s right at the dinner, commented that Field had been

“the most efficient promoter of the settlement of the Alabama question,” and that Cyrus was like “a telegraph wire, so often has he crossed the Atlantic, and always charged with messages of peace and good will from nation to nation.” Former U.S. Secretary of the

Treasury Hugh McCulloch suggested that Field would one day look “upon his connection with this Treaty,” being “the most lasting and the most honourable monument to his

73 Adams to Bright, 3 Feb. 1869, Add. 43391, Vol. IX, Bright Papers; Adams to Atkinson, Feb. 1, 1869, carton 1, Atkinson Papers. 74 Carter, Man of Two Worlds, 281-282. 181 fame,” with “more satisfaction” than any other accomplishment.75 Such sentiment was echoed by the chairman of the Cobden Club at its 1874 banquet, that “I know no man who has done more—ay, as much—to promote the views of the late Mr. Cobden as our illustrious friend, Mr. Cyrus Field. (Cheers.) He has crossed the Atlantic times without number, and travelled . . . as a messenger of peace.”76

Upon the signing of the 1871 treaty, Hugh McCulloch told the Cobden Club at its annual dinner in England that he had not been worried, as others had been, about the possibility of war. How could he be, when there existed such “a feeling of friendship” that would inevitably “prevent actual hostilities” between the two countries?77 In 1873,

Wells in turn remarked at the annual Cobden Club dinner in England that the Treaty of

Washington was “not only a long step” toward a permanent system of peaceful

arbitrament of international disputes between the two countries, “but that it was also a

great advance in the direction of Free Trade”; it included an article admitting fish from

“British colonial waters free of duty into the United States . . . it is sure to be the entering

wedge for other commercial reforms.” Wells concluded to his British audience that

that treaty is one of the most important epochs in the history of our time. I am

well aware that we are still far distant from universal peace. . . . One might well

75 Carter, Man of Two Worlds, 299; Proceedings at the Banquet given by Mr. Cyrus W. Field, at the Palace Hotel, Buckingham Gate, London, on Thursday the 28th November, 1872 (London: R. Clay, Sons, and Taylor, 1872), 6-7, 11. 76 Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of the Cobden Club, July 11, 1874 (London: Cassell Petter & Galpin, 1874), 15. 77 Report of the Proceedings at the Annual Dinner of the Cobden Club, June 24th, 1871 (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, Ludgate Hill, E.C., 1871), 39. 182 fear that we are going to devour one another, and that mankind, having started

with cannibalism, is going to end with anthropophagy. Yet this is but one more

reason for seeking the means of preventing war.

He concluded, amid boisterous cheers, with a toast to “International Arbitration, and more especially to peace—nay, better, to intimate friendship, to the closest tie of brotherhood—between America and England.”78

Henry Carey, on the other hand, strongly opposed the treaty and Grant’s

subsequent attempt at reciprocity. With considerably less enthusiasm, Carey agreed with

Wells that the treaty “is really one of free trade with the British Empire.” Carey wrote to

U. S. Grant that the treaty’s softening of U.S. trade relations with Canada merely offered

the British to side-step American protectionist walls and would allow a British fleet to

float with ease into the Great Lakes, placing U.S. cities in imminent danger.79 While

Cobdenism certainly played an important role in settling the Alabama dispute and ameliorating Anglo-American relations, Listian nationalists like Carey showed that their

Anglophobic outlook was far from softened by its settlement.

Conclusion

78 Wells, Free Trade and Free Enterprise, 63, 72, 73. 79 Carey to Grant, 23 Nov. 1874, in Henry C. Carey, Miscellaneous Papers on the National Finances, the Currency, and other Economic Subjects (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird & Co., 1875), 17-20. 183 The laying of the Atlantic cable in 1866 tantalizingly offered the promise of a new era in Anglo-American relations. Aided by the various propagandistic efforts of the

Cobden Club, British and American Cobdenites increasingly made their presence felt in foreign and domestic affairs, as demonstrated by their influence upon the peaceful settlement of the Alabama claims, the burgeoning American free trade movement, and the corresponding Anglophobic charges of a vast free trade conspiracy. The Republican party, alternatively, was moving away from its antislavery foundations and was fast reestablishing itself as the party of protectionism. The Republican party’s Cobdenite minority hoped to halt this Listian surge by involving themselves directly in shaping the outcome of various political issues, from the 1872 presidential elections to the 1884 election of Grover Cleveland.

184 Chapter 4: American Cobdenism, Party Realignment, and the

Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1872-1884

[Henry Carey] has over and over again expressed the opinion that the death of Richard

Cobden was one of the crowning mercies for which the United States had cause for

gratitude.

David Ames Wells, speaking at the 1873 Cobden Club banquet.1

Mr. Wells would gladly have repeated in America the career of Cobden.

Journal of Political Economy.2

The Liberal Republican movement of the early 1870s ushered in the first concerted Cobdenite attempt to redirect the Republican party’s Listian nationalist path in domestic and foreign affairs. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Cobdenites began to shift their earlier antislavery efforts to abolishing American trade barriers, even as the

Republican party began to turn away from its antebellum antislavery foundations and toward reestablishing itself as the party of protectionism.3 The results of the 1872 Liberal

1 David Ames Wells, Free Trade and Free Enterprise: Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of the Cobden Club (London, 1873), 45. 2 “David Ames Wells,” Journal of Political Economy 7 (Dec. 1898), 93-4. 3 Andrew L. Slap has also recently reconnected the Liberal Republicans to their antebellum roots. See Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 185 Republican convention upon party politics and the free trade movement would reverberate in national politics and foreign relations for years to come.

America’s Cobdenites encountered intense opposition to their attempts at reconfiguring the Republican party’s economic ideology and at controlling Western free trade sentiment. Along the way, the Liberal Republican free traders also became vocal critics of the Republican party’s implementation of the imperialism of economic nationalism. Various postbellum Republican administrations maintained a national policy of protectionism at home while attempting to open new foreign markets either through formal annexation or informal prohibitive reciprocity, especially as Republican Listian nationalists increasingly had their way both in domestic and foreign affairs. In response to their conflicting ideological vision for the United States at home and abroad,

America’s Cobdenites further strengthened their transatlantic ties, finding renewed inspiration from the Anti-Corn-Law League’s Peelite reforms of thirty years before as well as contemporary support from London’s Cobden Club.

An examination of the domestic and international dimensions of the American free trade movement offers a new look at Gilded Age party politics and foreign policy.

Under the direction of David Ames Wells, Edward Atkinson, and R. R. Bowker, U.S.

Cobdenites worked to halt the Republican party’s protectionist turn, lower American tariff walls, and undermine Republican imperialism. Their failure to do so gradually shifted their support to free trade and civil reform elements within the Democratic party.

This party realignment would culminate in the pivotal presidential elections of 1884.

186 The Disastrous 1872 Elections

The 1872 Liberal Republican Convention in Cincinnati found support among disaffected Republicans along with a growing number of Democrats. Yet the convention’s faction of Liberal Republican free traders was certainly the most zealous.4

Cobdenites David Ames Wells, George Hoadley, and Horace White were even on the committee that framed the Liberal Republican national platform. With the approval of

White, Carl Schurz, Lyman Trumbull, and Wells, Cobdenite William Grosvenor had laid out the intended goals of the “meeting of Republican reform friends”: first, to restore local self-government in the South; second, establish a tariff for revenue only; third, bring about “hard money” currency reform; and fourth, institute proper reform of the civil service. Grosvenor himself was instructed to remain in Washington D.C. as the

“Washington agent” of the American Free Trade League (AFTL).5

With the endorsement of David Ames Wells and the AFTL, Cobdenite Charles

Francis Adams Sr. initially stood out as a strong—albeit reluctant—favorite for the convention’s presidential nomination. Yet the free traders quickly lost control of the convention. This happened in part because the convention contained a motley mixture of free trade and protectionist elements, as well as some men focusing solely on civil service reform or a more liberal policy in the New South. Another reason for losing control of the

4 Lloyd, Lloyd, I, 26-30. 5 New York Tribune, 16 March 1872, 4; Grosvenor to Atkinson, 21 Dec. 1871; 28 March 1872, Jacob D. Cox to Atkinson, 5 April 1872, Grosvenor to Atkinson, 6 April 1872, carton 2; Atkinson to Charles Sumner, 3 April 1872, carton 14, Atkinson Papers. 187 convention owed to the Cobdenite faction’s lack of political talent. As Andrew Slap has ably argued, the free traders were outmaneuvered by Listian nationalist Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who had himself become involved in the Liberal Republican political movement. Greeley’s interest evoked distrust from Atkinson and the other free traders, as they did not believe Greeley “to be honest as to the tariff, and because he was by no means a shining example of civil service reform. Quickly confirming their suspicions, Greeley threatened to withdraw the Tribune’s powerful support if the platform included a free trade plank: “If it should be decided to make Free Trade a cornerstone of the Cincinnati Movement,” he and his newspaper would “ask to be counted out.” In an ironic twist of political fate and savvy maneuvering, the Cobdenites’ same protectionist enemy Greeley thereafter obtained the Liberal Republican convention’s presidential nomination, as well as the national Democratic party’s subsequent reluctant endorsement.6 As historian John Sproat notes, “had the Cincinnati delegates deliberately worked to select the candidate most unfit for the presidency and most perilously vulnerable to attack, they could have done no better.”7

6 In his chapter on Greeley and the Liberal Republican convention, Adam-Max Tuchinsky similarly emphasizes the “ideological confusion” of mid-nineteenth-century Republican politics. See Adam-Max Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 215, chap. 7. 7 Richard A. Gerber, “The Liberal Republicans of 1872 in Historiographical Perspective,” Journal of American History 62 (June 1975): 40-73; Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction, 126-163; Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” Journal of American History 53 (March 1967): 727-750; Earle D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement (New York: H. Holt and Co., 1919); Patrick W. Riddleberger, “The Break in the Radical Ranks: Liberals vs. Stalwarts in the Election of 1872,” Journal of Negro History 44 (April 1959): 136-157; Sproat, “The Best Men,” 82. 188 Cobdenite apprehension of Greeley’s machinations turned into paranoia as it appeared that Horace White and Carl Schurz, among others, had sacrificed the free trade cause upon Greeley’s protectionist alter. The AFTL leadership was particularly concerned about rumors that William Grosvenor, their own Taxpayers’ Union lobbyist in

Washington, might have jumped ship as well. As a result, the AFTL leadership feared that Grosvenor’s secret list of American free traders might “fall into the hands of the

Greeley men,” as Mahlon Sands explained to Edward Atkinson, who had himself initially been suspicious of Grosvenor’s possible part in Greeley’s nomination. With Atkinson’s cautious authorization, AFTL officers Sands, Henry D. Lloyd, and Robert Minturn correspondingly had Grosvenor’s rooms in Washington D. C. ransacked while he was away. His books and papers were confiscated and taken to AFTL headquarters in New

York for further inspection. This act of internal was followed by an embarrassing volley of charges and countercharges. After Grosvenor indignantly explained his innocence in the matter, and with AFTL faces red over the affair, tempers eventually cooled. As a result of the affair, however, the decision was made to pay

Grosvenor’s remaining debts in Washington and formerly dissolve the Taxpayers’

Union.8

This episode hints at the distrust and disunity that was to follow in the aftermath of the 1872 Liberal Republican Convention. America’s Cobdenites thereafter had a poor

8 Carl Schurz to Horace Greeley, 6 May 1872, Box 4, Horace Greeley Papers, NYPL; Minturn to Atkinson, 9 May 1872; Sands to Atkinson, 10 May 1872; Grosvenor to Atkinson, 12 May 1872; Sands to Atkinson, 13 May 1872; Sands to Atkinson, 22 May 1872, carton 2; Atkinson to Sands, 10 May; 11 May; 14 May 1872; Atkinson to Grosvenor, 11 May; 14 May 1872; Atkinson to Minturn, 13 May; 15 May; 21 May 1872, carton 14, Atkinson Papers. 189 choice of backing either Grant or Greeley. Horace White, Samuel Bowles, and David

Wells, for instance, reluctantly gave their support to Greeley, while Edward Atkinson,

William Cullen Bryant, Charles Francis Adams Jr., Jacob Cox, and J. S. Moore refused to back that “Trickster” and “Thief,” as the latter gentleman described him.9 Lacking an acceptable presidential option, William Lloyd Garrison lashed out at Charles Sumner and

Horace White, and White’s Chicago Tribune defended itself against editorial barrages from Garrison, Bryant’s New York Evening Post and Godkin’s Nation. Adding to the disconnect between the Cobdenites and the mainstream Republican party, the pro-free trade Chicago Tribune found itself replaced as the Republican party’s official Illinois news organ by the newly-christened protectionist Chicago Inter-Ocean.10 Upon Grant’s reelection, the Chicago Tribune summed up the situation: “Grant, the practical protectionist, has triumphed over Greeley, the theoretical protectionist, who suffered himself to be made the figure-bearer of a free trade party.”11 The fallout from the convention had a further important result; Greeley’s nomination and his subsequent loss to Grant exacerbated the already disintegrating Listian-Cobdenite Republican coalition.

Although maintaining their independent status and free trade proclivities, Wells’s

Cobdenites dissolved the independent movement in despair following the 1872 elections.

The Republican free traders were once again left directionless, floundering in relative

9 E. L. Godkin to Atkinson, 29 May 1872; Lloyd to Atkinson, 4 June 1872; S. L. Taylor to Atkinson, 24 June 1872; Jacob D. Cox to Atkinson, 2 July 1872; J. S. Moore to Atkinson, 6 July 1872, carton 2, Atkinson Papers. 10 Slap, Doom of Reconstruction, 172-182; Logsdon, White, 238-275. 11 Sproat, “The Best Men,” 75-82. In 1866, Horace White had attempted to educate Grant on the subject of free trade, sending him a copy of the Catechism on the Corn Laws, a volume which was duly shelved, unread, in Grant’s library. Logsdon, White, 169-70. 190 political impotence. Edward Atkinson took the convention debacle particularly hard and he thereafter developed a more patient, long-term view toward tariff reform. He wrote to

Wells in 1875 that “we must . . . remember that England took from 1824 to 1846 before the corn laws were repealed, and it took 20 years more to perfect their work.” It might take a while, but he was confident free trade would win out, as “protection has now no intellectual force behind it; it is only a vested interest. It must die but it will take time.”12

Both David Wells and the Chicago Tribune were able to look with at least a modicum of optimism upon the tens of thousands of mobilizing Western Granger farmers, with Horace White offering editorial aid to those farmers who were showing free trade proclivities.13 White and the AFTL became influential enough among the Grangers that one protectionist journal made note that

The free-trade League, with its headquarters in New York city, and branches and

agents distributed over the country, is controlled by cunning and unscrupulous

men who are laboring to deceive the farmers into the belief that the country,

owing to the protective features of the tariff, is about to enter upon a period of

serious embarrassment, from which it can escape only by the early adoption of a

free-trade tariff.14

12 Atkinson to Wells, 11 Nov. 1875, reel 3, Wells Papers. 13 Wells, Free Trade and Free Enterprise, 62; Chicago Tribune, 16 Jan. 1873, 4; 18 Jan. 1873, 2; 18 March 1873, 4; 28 March 1873, 2; 3 April 1873, 1; 17 April 1873, 2; 19 April 1873, 2; 4 July 1873, 2. 14 “The Granges and the Free-Trade League,” Republic (Nov. 1873), I, 513. 191 The Grangers themselves appeared “ripe for the enlightenment on the issues of ‘Free trade and direct taxation.’” Such free trade designs for the Granger movement proved precipitous, however. AFTL leader Robert Minturn wrote Atkinson in 1878 that he had at first hoped that economic “hard times” would have turned Westerners to the principles of free trade. Instead, the West has moved toward “repudiation, silver money etc., and . . . their only efforts in this direction have taken the shape of crazy granger laws.”15

Amid such mixed success out West, America’s Cobdenites regrouped. Atkinson and other goldbugs fought hard, for instance, against passage of the Bland-Allison Act of

1878, a slight victory for the silverites as it provided that the U.S. government would purchase annually a sizeable amount of Western silver. Likewise, Cobdenite opposition to the bill caused these “enemies of silver” to be characterized afterward as co- conspirators with England who “kept up their Cataline assemblages” with “their daggers ever ready to strike down the silver dollar,” as Elihu Farmer charged in The Conspiracy against Silver. The gold monometallists’ “exaltation of their golden idol is their one song, and as priests to this golden Juggernaut, they smile to see the wreck and ruin its gilded wheels have wrought; while around this car may be seen the bloody footprints of the

British lion.”16

While this vituperative battle over silver played out throughout the ‘70s, further free trade agitation in New England led to the creation of the Boston Free Trade Club—

15 New Century (Feb. 1876), 67; Minturn to Atkinson, 3 July 1878, carton 2, Atkinson Papers. For the Granger movement, see Worth Robert Miller, “Farmers and Third-Party Politics in Late Nineteenth- Century America,” in Charles W. Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1996), 235-60. 16 E. J. Farmer, The Conspiracy against Silver or a Plea for Bi-Metallism in the United States (Cleveland, OH: Hiles & Coggshall Printers and Binder, 1886), 8. 192 which the Nation described as “one of the most active and rapidly growing organizations of the kind”—and the International Free-Trade Alliance (IFTA), established by radical free trader Alfred Earle and Cobdenites R. R. Bowker, William Cullen Bryant, William

Graham Sumner, and Parke Godwin (Cobden Club member, 1876) in New York. The

IFTA’s principal purpose was to establish “absolute” free trade through direct taxation, in contrast to the more moderate free trade goal of a tariff for revenue only that was sought by the AFTL, and with the latter league still reeling from the 1872 election debacle.

Bowker, at the IFTA’s January 1876 meeting, told its members that Richard Cobden’s approach “is the true method” for free trade agitation both in England and in the United

States. Along with using the Anti-Corn-Law League as a blueprint for agitation, the new alliance also borrowed the Cobden Club’s insignia [figure 3] and mantra: “Free Trade,

Peace and Good Will among Nations.” The IFTA’s members numbered throughout the

United States, stretching as far north as Quebec, and as far west as Japan, giving some credence to its titular claim to internationalism.17

17 Nation, 28 Dec. 1876, 377; Abraham L. Earle, Our Revenue System and the Civil Service, Shall They be Reformed? (New York: International Free Trade Alliance, 1874); First Report and Circular Address of the International Free Trade Alliance (1874); New Century (Dec. 1875), 9-11, 17; New Century (Jan. 1876), 43. 193

Figure 3: “Cobdenite Insignias.” The International Free-Trade Alliance’s [center] and the New York Free Trade Club’s [right] insignias were nearly identical to the Cobden Club’s [left].

Where Atkinson moderated his Peelite approach to ending protectionism, Wells

radically strengthened his ties to Victorian free trade ideology.18 Wells returned to

England in 1873 to give a speech at the Cobden Club’s annual dinner then being held in

Greenwich, writing ahead to express “his wish to avoid any prominence in speaking except at the dinner during his visit to England, which might excite jealousy in the U.S.”

Introduced at the banquet as “one of the most vigorous and able writers in favour of Free

Trade in the United States . . . fitly designated as the leader of the Free Trade party in that country,” Wells highlighted the outspoken opposition to the principles of Cobden in the

United States. Fear of Cobdenism remained strong among his countrymen who subscribed to “the old, selfish, and Pagan principle” of protection—even as the American industrial classes held less purchasing power than their counterparts in Europe. Wells, quite aware of the conspiratorial charges laid against him, acknowledged that some

18 Louis Mallet to Thomas Bailey Potter, 18 Nov. 1872, Cobden Papers, Add. 43663, Vol. XVII. 194 among them would consider his attendance at the dinner “sufficient evidence of a conspiracy and a reward for the betrayal of their industrial interests.”19

Like Cobden before him, Wells was truly becoming the “International Man,”

accepting honorary membership in the Royal Statistical Society in 1871; filling J. S.

Mill’s now vacant position in the French Academy of Political Science in 1874; joining

the Regia Accademia dei Lincei of Italy in 1877; and presiding over the American Social

Science Association in 1875, the New London Historical Society in 1880, and the

American Free Trade League in 1871.20 Alongside his adherence to the laissez faire

teachings of Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and Frederic Bastiat, Wells also began

delving into the French philosophy of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727-1784) of the

Physiocratic “school of Quesnay.”21 America’s Listians had certainly found a formidable

intellectual opponent in David Ames Wells.

Cobdenite newspaper editor Horace White also proved a tough adversary. At the

Cobden Club’s 1875 banquet, White’s letter to the club was read aloud. With a veiled

reference to the protectionist fallout following the low , White noted that the

Republicans for once had been unable to fault the depression that struck in September

1873 “to the account of Free Trade.” Rather, they had only themselves and their system

of protection—established in 1861—to blame. As previously mentioned, he also found

that the free trade movement among the farmers in the West more promising than any

19 Minutes of 8 May 1873, CC MSS; London Times, 30 June 1873, 9; Wells, Free Trade and Free Enterprise. 20 “David Ames Wells.” 21 Worthington Chauncey Ford to Wells, Oct. 23, 1880, folder “1880,” box 1, Worthington Chauncey Ford Papers, NYPL. 195 time in the past decade. He was further encouraged by the National Board of Trade, but was particularly excited about growing free trade agitation in Massachusetts, where there was “an active and most intelligent body of Free Trade thinkers and workers, whose influence is perceptibly increasing.” Just as the overturning of the protective system in

England “required a period of dire distress,” White predicted to the club, “so it seems that a period of great stringency and depression is most favourable to Revenue reform with us.” Wells likewise reported to the Cobden Club that he had witnessed “marked progress in the United States during the past year,” and similar sentiments were expressed by

Professor Arthur Latham Perry and William Lloyd Garrison.22 Beset by continued charges of a transatlantic conspiracy and political setbacks, Wells and his Cobdenite coterie nevertheless had regained some of their lost momentum.

Peelite Politics and the 1876 Elections

In 1876, Wells worked privately with his ally Congressman William R. Morrison of Illinois, the Chairman of the Democratic House Committee on Ways and Means, who was himself rather moderate on the silver issue and a member of the recently created

Illinois Free Trade Club. Wells’s and Morrison’s 1876 efforts evolved into the first serious attempt to lower U.S. tariffs following the Civil War. Heavily influenced by

Cobdenite J. S. Moore as well as Wells himself, the proposed Morrison Tariff Bill ultimately ended up “conservative” rather than “extreme” in its tariff reductions upon the

22 Report of the Cobden Club Dinner, 1875, 102-3, 99, 104-6. 196 request of Democratic Speaker of the House Michael Kerr. Coinciding as it did amid the era’s rising partisan and ideological conflict, it was still labeled “an English measure—a

Cobden Club measure . . . designed to subserve British at the expense of American interests” by Anglophobic Republicans and the protectionist press. With a reference to either Wells or Moore, the Chicago trade journal Western Manufacturer went so far as to assert that the bill had ultimately been concocted “by the Cobden Club in England” and the Chicago Tribune, “the leading organ of the Cobden Club in this city,” and that “one of the few American members of the English Cobden Club (whose special business is to look after British interests in America), after hob-nobbing with British manufacturers for a whole year . . . has been lobbying for this Morrison Bill ever since its introduction in the House of Representatives.” The Chicago Inter Ocean, one of America’s most outspoken protectionist papers, redoubled the charge that the British government and the

Cobden Club, “hidden as it may be under adroit phrases,” sought to manipulate U.S. policy in order to reach their ultimate objective of abolishing “all custom houses, to repeal all tariffs on imports, to open all ports indiscriminately to the entrance of foreign goods, in order that Great Britain . . . shall become a sort of commercial sponge to soak up the profits of the world’s exchanges by obtaining, through these overwhelming advantages, a monopoly control over many foreign markets!” The Morrison bill would become the first among many unsuccessful attempts to reduce import tariffs in the last years of the 1870s.23

23 New York Times, 2 Aug. 1877, 5; Robbins, “William Ralls Morrison,” 59-60, 64-65; Michael C. Kerr to Wells, 31 Dec. 1875, 12 Jan. 1876; Anson Phelps Stokes to Wells, 17 Jan. 1876; Morrison to Wells, 20 Feb.; 9 March; 16 March 1876; Illinois Free Trade League, Circular No. 1, 1 Sept. 1876, reel 4, Wells 197

Less than three weeks later, rumors began to circulate that Wells was receiving payments of $10,000 a year from the Cobden Club. Although lacking a smoking gun,

Inter Ocean and other protectionist papers thought it probable, since “he is known to have been its active, energetic, thorough-going propagandist in this country for a number of years.” Such an opinion “has diffused itself widely among the people that Mr. Wells is an agent—a paid agent—a well-paid agent—of the Cobden Club.”24

Evidence does suggest that Wells may occasionally have been able to obtain modest sums from the Cobden Club to help fund free trade leagues in the United States.

In 1876, Alfred B. Mason, for instance, writing to Wells for financial support in order to start up a free trade league in Illinois, inquired whether “a cable dispatch to the Sec. of the Cobden Club” might “bring £1,000”; and R. R. Bowker coyly beseeched Wells in the summer of 1880 to ask “the gentlemen who . . . are always ready to back you in good works (those outside of New York I mean),” for $1,000 to support the New York Free

Trade Club. That Wells was a “well-paid agent,” however, was unproven and highly unlikely considering that the Cobden Club was not nearly as wealthy as its detractors claimed.25 With or without token British financial support, Wells’s desired Morrison

Papers; Tom E. Terrill, “David A. Wells, the Democracy, and Tariff Reduction, 1877-1894,” Journal of American History 56 (Dec. 1969), 549; The Cobden Club. Report and List of Members for the Year 1903 (London, 1904); Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 29-34; Western Manufacturer, July 1876; June 1876; March 1876, quoted in Ralph Russell Tingley, “American Cobden Clubs” (MA thesis, University of Chicago, 1947), 30; Chicago Inter Ocean, 9 Feb. 1876, 4; 7 Feb. 1876, 4. 24 Chicago Inter Ocean, 29 Feb. 1876, 4. No such proof ever surfaced. 25 Mason to Wells, 2 Oct. 1876, reel 4; and Bowker to Wells, 12 June 1880, reel 6, Wells Papers. Similar charges were laid against Horace White in 1876. See Philip Kinsley, The Chicago Tribune, Its First Hundred Years (Chicago: The Chicago Tribune, 1945), 231. 198 Bill, too, came to naught, having been pushed to the political wayside owing to the 1870s depression, growing government debt, and the upcoming presidential elections.

During the 1876 elections, Cobdenite Cyrus Field entertained the idea of having a hand in shaping the Republican presidential ticket. He asked John Bright for his opinion on the matter, and expressed his own hope for a Republican ticket that included Charles

Francis Adams Sr. as president, Carl Schurz as secretary of state, and David A. Wells as secretary of treasury, since they were “all sound on the currency question, Civil Service

Reform and the Tariff.” Bright likewise hoped Adams would become the next president, but sagely asked Field not to quote his “choice of President, as . . . any expression from me would be thought intrusive and impertinent.”26

The Republicans instead chose Rutherford B. Hayes to run against Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden of New York in what became one of the most contentious elections in American history, with Tilden clearly winning the popular vote and possibly the electoral as well. Yet his victory was by no means assured, as swing electoral votes in various states remained in dispute. Although the independent vote was split, Cobdenites

David Wells, Henry Adams, and Henry’s father, Charles, at least, found Tilden to be the clear choice, with Henry admitting that Tilden was “the best man without regard to party.”27 The political compromise the following year ended with Hayes in the oval

26 Field to Bright, 10 Dec. 1875, Add. 43391, Vol. IX, Bright Papers; Bright to Field, 1 Nov. 1875, folder 2, box 1, Field Papers. 27 Henry Adams to David Ames Wells, 15 July 1876; Watson R. Sperry to Wells, 20 Sept. 1876, reel 4, Wells Papers. 199 office and ended Reconstruction, signaling a resurgence of the southern wing of the

Democratic party, a development that would thereafter help reshape both the local and national political landscape.28 Hayes’s administration would thereafter support various expansionist endeavors, such as the Samoan treaty of 1878 (gaining access to Pago Pago) and the development of a U.S. controlled Central American isthmian canal. The Hayes administration also made tentative steps toward closer trade with Latin America, steps that James G. Blaine would try to continue as secretary of state under James Garfield and

Benjamin Harrison.29

The fight for free trade did not pause for the elections, no matter how contentious.

Following the 1876 Morrison Bill’s failure, continued unsubstantiated charges of a

British conspiracy, and the disputed results of the November presidential elections, the

American Cobdenites regrouped. Wells, Bryant, Perry, and Professor William Graham

Sumner of Yale (Cobden Club member, 1873), for instance, sat on the advisory committee of the newly minted Boston Free Trade Club, and, along with William Lloyd

28 For more on the 1876 elections, see especially Allan Peskin, “Was There a Compromise of 1877?” Journal of American History 60 (June 1973): 63-75; Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973); Ari Arthur Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1988); Michael Les Benedict, “Southern Democrats in the Crisis of 1876-1877: A Reconsideration of Reunion and Reaction,” Journal of Southern History 46 (Nov. 1980): 489-524; Benedict, The Fruits of Victory: Alternatives in Restoring the Union, 1865-1877 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986); and Michael F. Holt, By One Vote: The Disputed Presidential Election of 1876 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2008). 29 Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 20-41. 200 Garrison and Samuel “Sunset” Cox, gave speeches to garner support for free trade throughout New England, the West, and the South.30

Later that same year, Wells and his fellow American “disciples of free trade theory” gathered together in New York in December to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It was a “grand assemblage,” and one that Wells and R. R. Bowker had been planning for nearly a year. The old gang which included Parke Godwin, William Lloyd Garrison, Cyrus Field, William Cullen Bryant,

John Bigelow, and Horace White, was complemented by the attendance of William

Graham Sumner, France’s famous international bimetallic spokesman Henri Cernushci, and Professor Francis Amasa Walker of MIT. Yet for more than a few of the one-hundred free traders and reformers attending the dinner, their once-shining optimism appeared tarnished with the onset of a nationwide depression in 1873.31

Edward Atkinson, speaking before the Cobden Club Committee in London a few months later, opined that, although at times counterproductive, continued cooperation between the Club and “Free Trade Associations in the United States” were “undoubtedly of great value and importance.” Less than two months later, Wells was unanimously appointed by the Cobden Club Committee in London to be the club’s honorary secretary

30 Constitution and By-Laws, also Creed and Platform, of the Boston Free Trade Club (Boston, 1876), 11- 12. 31 Bowker to Wells, 11 Jan. 1876, reel 4, Wells Papers; Wells to Bowker, 13 Jan. 1876, Box 11, R. R. Bowker Papers, LOC; New York Times, 13 Dec. 1876, 5; Cyrus W. Field to Parke Godwin, 27 Nov. 1876, Box 6, Bryant-Godwin Papers, NYPL; Minutes of 14 Feb. 1873, CC MSS; Report of the Proceedings at the Annual Dinner of the Cobden Club, June 24th, 1871 (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, Ludgate Hill, E.C., 1871); Report and List of Members for the Year 1903; E. McClung Fleming, R. R. Bowker: Militant Liberal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952), 94; Tucker, Mugwumps, 76; Minutes of 22 Sept. 1877, CC MSS. 201 in the United States in order to head the American free trade movement “in cooperation with the Cobden Club,” an appointment that the New York Tribune ridiculed—as well as

Wells himself—for being “an American Cobden . . . who accepts a subordinate post”

within an English club whose mission was to allow for “British control over American

markets.”32 Illinois Congressman William R. Morrison, upon receiving notification of

his election to the Cobden Club in April 1877, wrote Wells that he was “glad to aid in the

free trade movement.” Free trade efforts were further bolstered when energetic R. R.

Bowker of New York returned from London to the American free trade battleground.33

Bowker had been an active and influential reformer since 1869 as secretary of the

Brooklyn Free Trade League. As mentioned earlier, in 1875 he helped Alfred Earle set up

the International Free-Trade Alliance, which published its own free trade journal, the

New Century, edited by Bowker himself.34 In 1877, he thereafter helped establish the

New York Free Trade Club—referred to by one protectionist pamphleteer as “The New

York branch of the Cobden Club” and whose other leaders included Cobdenites Poultney

Bigelow, William Graham Sumner, David Wells, and Horace White—as a local

association of the IFTA. He also formed the Council for Tariff Reform, which united

younger free trade elements with the older American Free Trade League. In 1879,

Bowker—along with R. L. Dugdale, Dugdale’s sister, Cobdenite publisher George Haven

Putnam (Cobden Club member, 1878), Edward M. Shepard (Cobden Club member,

32 New York Tribune, 25 Oct. 1877; 12 Sept. 1877. 33 Minutes of 16 June 1877, CC MSS; Morrison to Wells, 5 April 1877; Potter to Wells, 1 Aug. 1877, reel 4, Wells Papers. 34 The New Century was published from 1875 to 1876. 202 1886), Wells, William Graham Sumner, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Horace White— created the Society for Political Education, which sought regulation of corporations, public discussion of the tariff issue, and a tariff for revenue only. Under Bowker’s supervision the society disseminated publications up to the 1890s.35

Bowker’s advocacy for free trade turned to zealousness upon his election to membership in the Cobden Club in 1880, his attendance at its London dinners, and continued correspondence with its leaders. Wells noted as much to American Cobdenite

Graham McAdam, secretary of the New York Free Trade Club, although Wells did not

“think Bowker’s Cobden Club acceptance amounts to much in the way of conversion,” since his conversion to Cobdenism had already occurred. Bowker’s letter of acceptance to the Cobden Club was considered important enough on the subject of free trade that the

Cobden Club immediately produced 25,000 copies for dissemination in the United States.

Bowker thereafter helped Wells breathe new life into the ailing AFTL in 1883, which had lain largely dormant ever since what Bowker described as “the fiasco of the Greeley campaign of 1872.”36

Transatlantic Cobdenite bonds were further strengthened with a visit late in 1879 from the founder of the Cobden Club, Thomas Bayley Potter. He promptly made contact

35 New York Times, 9 Nov. 1880, 5; Joyner, Wells, 147-50; George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher, 1865-1915 (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 171-73; Dugdale to Ford, 9 April 1881, folder 1881, box 1, Ford Papers. 36 Curtis, Protection and Prosperity, 627; Fleming, Bowker, 93-4, 198; Wells to McAdam, [?], 1880; Potter to Bowker, 21 May 1881, Box 51; [draft copy] Bowker to Ostrogorski, 15 Jan. 1898, Box 89; The American Free Trade League. Constitution. Provisionally Adopted by the Executive Committee, June 18, 1883, Box 90, Richard Rogers Bowker Papers, NYPL. In 1885, Bowker undertook to dispel charges that the Cobden Club was funding the American free-trade movement owing to the club’s lack of wealth in The Economic Fact-Book and Free-Traders’ Guide (New York: New York Free Trade Club, 1885), 13-16. 203 with the American heads of the club, Atkinson and Wells. He asked them who in the

United States should be included or stricken from the forthcoming 1880 list of honorary membership, he requested distribution of the club’s pamphlets, and he asked that they might inform Harvard and Yale of the club’s silver medal for the best students of political economy.37 The protectionist Western Manufacturer of course immediately assumed that he had arrived in New York City to “do a little legislating in the interest of English manufacturing.”38

In early November 1879, the New York Free Trade Club threw Potter an opulent banquet at Delmonico’s, where he commented on what he saw as good progress toward bringing free trade to the United States. The luxurious restaurant was decorated that night with various Anglophile ephemera: the walls covered in both British and American flags, and the tables decorated with a shield depicting Brother Jonathon and John Bull shaking hands over the Atlantic Ocean. Potter himself announced his hope for a curbing of imperialism and “an alliance, perhaps even a confederation, of the English speaking race which may have a power and influence over the whole world” and which would act as “a final check to selfish and aggressive war.” The New York Tribune was quick to observe that Potter’s pacific Anglo-Saxonist “boom went out like a wet match.”39 Godkin of the

Nation correspondingly blamed the tepid response to Potter’s remarks upon the powerful and entrenched opposition to free trade in the United States, as well as the continued cries

37 Potter to Atkinson, 22 Dec. 1879; 16 Jan. 1880; 20 Jan. 1880; 15 Feb. 1880, carton 1, Atkinson Papers. 38 Western Manufacturer, 15 Nov. 1879, 148, quoted in Tingley, “American Cobden Clubs,” 32. 39 New York Tribune, 18 Nov. 1879, 1, 4. 204 of “British gold” from Listians Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune and Henry

Charles Carey.40

One Carey disciple, John F. Scanlan, secretary of Chicago’s Industrial League of

America, wrote a pamphlet discouraging Irishmen from voting for the Democratic party.

Apparently ignorant of the fact that most U.S. Cobdenites were still at least ostensibly in the Republican camp, Scanlan charged that both the Democrats and England, “through the Cobden Club,” were making war on American industry. “It becomes treason doubly odious to find Irish Americans performing the work of England, just as effectively as if they were neath [sic] the blood stained cross of St. George, with the Cobden Club playing

Rule Britannia, marching to the ballot box to introduce into this country that blighting system of free trade, which drove us from our native land with the ‘vengeance.’”41 Amid such anti-Cobdenite sentiment, ironically, the 1880 Republican party ended up nominating Cobden Club member James Garfield for the presidency, who had worked out an effective enough balancing act on the tariff issue to remain standing in the center of national Republican politics.42

40 Nation, Nov. 1879, 338. 41 John F. Scanlan, Why Ireland is Poor. Ripe Fruit from the Tree of British Free Trade (Chicago: McCann & O’Brien, 1880), 22. 42 Following a strong defense of “hard money,” Garfield, an advocate for freer trade for many years following the Civil War, was nominated by John Bright, unanimously elected (see Potter to Garfield, June 10, 1869, reel 16, Garfield Papers), and thereafter accepted his membership to the Cobden Club. Owing to his district’s protectionist sentiments and the enforced protectionist orthodoxy of the Republican party by the late 1870s, Garfield increasingly had to outwardly moderate his position in order to remain active within mainstream Republican politics, and his public views on free trade mellowed as well. Wells wrote something very similar in his letter to the New York Times of 2 May 1886. Perhaps Garfield’s public and private differences on the tariff issue explain why he wished to avoid the issue in the 1880 presidential elections. See New York Times, 3 Feb. 1878, 10; Robert Caldwell, James A. Garfield: Party Chieftain (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1931), 192-201, 210; and David M. Pletcher, The Awkward Years: 205 Garfield’s nomination gave R. R. Bowker, Edward Atkinson, and their fellow

Cobdenites an obvious choice for their votes. Upon Garfield’s nomination, Atkinson’s friend George P. Smith, who Atkinson had just nominated to membership in the Cobden

Club, was exuberant that the country was soon to have a president that “will have you at his hand—and go at things, ala Jackson, and R. J. Walker—the prosperity to follow will be as in 1847 to 1857,” when lower tariffs had previously been enacted. Atkinson himself noted to President-elect Garfield that the manufacturers were coming on board, and were becoming “aware that they are no longer infant.” Atkinson promised Wells that “we shall get a tariff reform at once,” and it very much looked as though Atkinson would have the new president’s ear on economic matters. T. B. Potter expressed his pragmatic pleasure to

Atkinson because Garfield “is a member of the Cobden Club. . . . Of course I don’t estimate the latter for more than its worth, as he must in the main adopt the programme of the Republican Party. Still, the question of Free Trade must surely have more fair play than it has had.”43

Garfield’s membership in the Cobden Club was “made a matter of great importance” by the New York Post and other Republican newspapers, according to the free trade New York World, as bipartisan speculation spread about whether or not

Garfield was secretly a free trader.44 Adding to this controversy, upon Garfield’s election

American Foreign Relations Under Garfield and Arthur (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 150. 43 George P. Smith to Atkinson, 3 June 1880; Atkinson to Garfield, 29 June 1880, carton 15; Garfield to Atkinson, 6 Dec. 1880; T. B. Potter to Atkinson, 11 June 1880, carton 2; Atkinson to Wells, 7 Nov. 1880, carton 15, Atkinson Papers. 44 New York World, 22 Oct. 1880. For protectionist attacks upon Garfield’s Cobden Club connections, see also Geneva Gazette (New York), 12 Oct. 1880; and New York Herald, 11 Oct. 1880. 206 and amid great controversy, Potter thereafter defended to the president-elect the Cobden

Club’s continued propagandistic efforts in the United States. He also expressed to

Garfield his heartfelt congratulations, his hopes for the future of free trade, and saw

no reason why I should not offer my good wishes on your election, in spite of all

that has been said of me and of the doings of the Cobden Club. When I worked

for the Union and Emancipation years ago, no one in the States thought me wrong

in circulating numbers of pamphlets, to influence English public opinion in favor

of what I believed to be the cause of humanity, above all of labor, all over the

world. Sincerely as I believe in free trade, I should not be found fault with for a

propagandism in favor of a principle which I believe is scarcely second to that for

which I fought and I spent my money and labor . . . your triumphant election will

seal forever the success of the cause. . . . I have worked as unselfishly for

Cobden’s principles as I did for Union and Emancipation and for the repeal of the

Corn Laws long ago. . . people in America will not continue to grudge an effort to

influence by fair argument American political opinion in favor of “Free trade,

peace, Good will among nations.”45

The protectionist press showed that they could indeed hold a grudge. Garfield’s

alleged free trade communiqués with Potter became a matter of public knowledge soon

thereafter. The protectionist backlash was such that Garfield, in nearly his first act in the

45 Potter to Garfield, 14 Nov. 1880, reel 76, James A. Garfield Papers, LOC. 207 White House, was forced to deny publicly any “Cobden Club connection,” and that he did not subscribe to “the principles of the Cobden Free-Trade Club.”46

Whatever possible tariff reductions that might have followed Garfield’s election, however, died with his assassination. The president was shot in the back while on his way to deliver a book to his friend Cyrus Field. The subsequent 1882 Tariff Commission of

Chester Arthur, Garfield’s presidential successor, came to naught, and the subsequent

“Mongrel Tariff” of 1883 did little to change U.S. tariff rates, while at the same time finding a way to upset all parties involved. State Secretary Frelinghuysen’s Spanish treaty allowing for trade reciprocity with Cuba and Puerto Rico subsequently earned the support of Listian James G. Blaine and gained the moral and economic disdain of the New York

Free Trade Club, which feared the treaty would undercut true revenue reform and, through its preferential limitations, impede the opening of the world’s markets to U.S. manufacturers. The treaty would thereafter be condemned by incoming president Grover

Cleveland, and ultimately withdrawn in 1885.47

Aside from halting possible tariff reform, the assassination of President Garfield had larger repercussions at the national and international level. His death was a gruesome result of the Republican party’s internal discord. By the election of 1880, the party had been riven by factionalism and lacked the cohesive ideological underpinning that had

46 North American, 10 March 1881. 47 Lucretia R. Garfield to Field, 7 Nov. 1881, folder 6, box 1, Field Papers; Thomas G. Shearman to Wells, 23 Nov. 1880, reel 6, Wells Papers; Sproat, “Best Men,” 193-94; Williamson, Atkinson, 134; Blaine to Frye, reprinted in New York Tribune, 26 July 1890, 1; J. Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1903), 114-126; The Spanish Treaty Opposed to Tariff Reform. Report of a Committee of Enquiry Appointed by the New York Free-Trade Club (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1885). 208 once helped bring the party into existence a quarter century before.48 Old-guard

“Stalwarts,” who in 1880 had thrown their support behind Grant’s third-term attempt,

were increasingly at loggerheads with the younger “Half-Breed” supporters of either

James G. Blaine, John Sherman, or George Frisbie Hoar.49 Republican independents in

turn continued to criticize the pervasive protectionism, patronage system, and general

corruption of mainstream politics. The younger independent element, led by Bowker and

his “Young Scratchers” in New York, had already proven itself instrumental in getting

underdog Garfield the Republican nomination.50

Amid such gaping party fissures, it took nothing less than Garfield’s death to

begin bridging the divide. A man by the name of Charles Guiteau, deranged after not

receiving a political appointment, shot Garfield on 2 July 1881. Guiteau explained his

mad act by saying: “I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is President.” From his jail cell,

Guiteau noted with morbid pragmatism that “the President’s tragic death was a sad

necessity but it will unite the Republican party.”51

Guiteau’s prophetic vision for Republican party solidarity would come to fruition,

but not until 1884. Garfield’s death also symbolized the strengthening of transatlantic

48 Charles W. Calhoun, Conceiving a New Republican: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869-1900 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). 49 Frank B. Evans, “Wharton Barker and the Republican National Convention of 1880,” Pennsylvania History 27 (Jan. 1960): 28-43; Richard E. Welch, Jr., George Frisbie Hoar and the Half-Breed Republicans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Allan Peskin, “Who Were the Stalwarts? Who Were Their Rivals? Republican Factions in the Gilded Age,” Political Science Quarterly 99 (Winter 1984- 1985): 703-716. 50 [draft copy] Bowker to Ostrogorski, 15 Jan. 1898, box 89, Bowker Papers, NYPL. 51 Stewart Mitchell, “The Man Who Murdered Garfield,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 67 (Oct. 1941-May 1944), 468; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 5, 214. 209 bonds amid an era of heightened Anglophobia. The estranged Anglo-Saxon cousins already felt closer after the laying of the Atlantic telegraph and the Treaty of Washington; hardened Anglophobic hearts softened further as Americans were temporarily touched by the degree of mourning in Britain at the death of America’s fallen leader.52

The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism

With continued control of the executive in the aftermath of the Civil War, the

Republican party began exhibiting foreign policy traits that bore little resemblance to its antebellum Whig roots. With protectionism firmly entrenched at home, William Seward and U. S. Grant in particular looked abroad with an eye toward formal imperial annexation of territory and informal imperial control of foreign markets. Seward jumped at the chance to add Alaska to American control, chomped at the bit whenever he thought of Canada’s fallow lands lying temptingly to the north, and even sought to annex the

Danish West Indies.53 In order to emphasize informal imperial expansion, Anglophobic

Republicans like John A. Kasson and James G. Blaine frequently pointed to the massive amount of invested British capital and trade in South America throughout the last decades of the century, utterly dwarfing U.S. trade and investment in the area. Such weak

American influence in comparison to the British drove demand for investments, often

52 Mike Sewell, “‘All the English-Speaking Race is in Mourning’: The Assassination of President Garfield and Anglo-American Relations,” Historical Journal 34 (Sept. 1991): 665-686. 53 David E. Shi, “Seward’s Attempt to Annex British Columbia, 1865-1869,” Pacific Historical Review 47 (May 1978): 217-238; Halvdan Koht, “The Origins of Seward’s Plan to Purchase the Danish West Indies,” American Historical Review 50 (July 1945): 762-767. 210 with the aid of government subsidies, in Latin American telegraph, railroad, and steamship lines. These projects were bolstered further when the British-backed Western

Telegraph Company established a cable between Rio and Portugal in 1874, and as the

Germans also began to make a concerted effort to replicate Britain’s informal empire in the region.54

From the early 1880s to early 1890s, Listian James G. Blaine would develop a grand solution entailing a protective Pan-American trade union, with the principal goals of expanding American markets while excluding British influence in the hemisphere.

President Grant had earlier been especially keen on seeing Santo Domingo under direct

U.S. influence, and his state secretary, Hamilton Fish, played the card when the European powers took excessive interest in a revolution that broke out in

Venezuela in 1875. Historian Jay Sexton has also brought renewed attention to the Grant

Administration’s mixture of Reconstruction-era antislavery ideology, British-inspired

(albeit limited) internationalism, and an informal imperial approach toward ending

Spanish-Cuban conflict from the late 1860s to the mid-1870s, with their sights set on establishing financial ties and prohibitive trade reciprocity rather than annexation.55 The

54 Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment, 180-215; Howard B. Schonberger, Transportation to the Seaboard: The Communication Revolution and American Foreign Policy, 1860-1911 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 178-79; Ian D. Forbes, “German Informal Imperialism in South America before 1914,” Economic History Review 31 (Aug. 1978): 384-98. 55 Charles C. Tansill, The United States and Santo Domingo, 1798-1873, A Chapter in Caribbean Diplomacy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938), 344-406; Jay Sexton, “The United States, the Cuban Rebellion, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875,” Diplomatic History 30 (June 2006): 335-66. For Grant and Fish’s informal imperialism, see also LaFeber, New Empire, 32-39; James Chapin, “Hamilton Fish and American Expansion,” in Makers of American Diplomacy: From Benjamin Franklin to Henry Kissinger, eds. Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 223-51. For the ambiguity and conflicting interpretations of the Monroe Doctrine throughout the nineteenth 211 depression of 1873 further spurred on aggressive expansionist speculation over how to solve the problems of perceived American overproduction. In a way, these imperial designs might be viewed as an attempted “Scramble for the Americas,” a halfhearted

Western hemispheric imitation of European activities in Africa. Such Republican agitation also represented the early stirring of the postbellum era’s imperialism of economic nationalism.

America’s Cobdenites were also noticing the increased attention given to the problem of overproduction, particularly the need for new markets. Just before Garfield’s assassination, Wells had written him how he had noticed a speculative shift over the cause of the 1873 depression: “One argument had risen to prominence since the mid- seventies that America was shifting too fast from the production of raw materials to a manufacturing economy, and that she would have no market for the goods that poured from her factories.”56 The desire for foreign markets was certainly growing in

popularity, albeit with disparate proposals for gaining them.57

Alongside this growing acceptance of the theory of overproduction, French

meddling in Mexico and British expansion into the Caribbean during the Civil War era

were still fresh in American minds, and fears of European influence in the Western

century, see Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011). 56 Wells quoted in David Pletcher, The Awkward Years, 5. 57 William Appleman Williams, for instance, has suggested that the early 1880s boom in agricultural exports helped shape Blaine’s export-oriented focus to the tariff, “making overseas economic expansion a central element in their basic program for the nation,” yet erroneously described this expansionist outlook as “similar” to that of David Wells. Williams, Roots of Modern American Empire, 21. 212 Hemisphere remained commonplace.58 Economic competition with Britain in particular was a driving force behind such conjecture, and also spurred on U.S. economic expansion. Partly owing to growing British trade interests in the Sandwich Islands, for instance, the Grant Administration had signed a reciprocity treaty with Hawaii in 1875, thus making it, according to Blaine, “essentially a part of the American system of states” by giving “to our manufacturers therein the same freedom as in California and Oregon.”

While William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post gave the treaty its support and as

Bryant himself, in “his zeal for Free Trade,” was “extremely anxious to have the paper support everything which wears the appearance of Free Trade,” Wells looked askance on the reciprocity treaty, seeing it as little more than protectionism hidden under the guise of free trade. Cobdenites Roger Q. Mills and William R. Morrison were similarly “soured on the Sandwich Island treaty,” but then-Congressman Garfield had pragmatically pointed out to Wells that opposition to this reciprocity treaty would make any future reciprocity treaty with Canada—which Wells and various other Cobdenites greatly desired—nearly impossible. In the end, with Wells as advisor, Morrison crafted a strong case against the formal imperial acquisition of Hawaii, dismissing the British bogeyman and encouraging instead neutral and equal access to Hawaiian ports by all nations.59

58 Pletcher, Awkward Years, 144. 59 Pletcher, Awkward Years, 139; William R. Morrison to Wells, 20 Feb. 1876; Watson R. Sperry [editor of Evening Post] to Wells, 11 Feb. 1876; Roger Q. Mills to Wells, 29 Feb. 1876; James Garfield to Wells, 24 Feb. 1876; Morrison to Wells, 20 Feb., 9 March, 16 March 1876, reel 4, Wells Papers; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 19-20; Merze Tate, Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1968), 108-117; Sylvester K. Stevens, American Expansion in Hawaii, 1842-1898 (Harrisburg: Archives Publishing Co. of Pennsylvania, 1945), 108-140. See also Donald Marquand Dozer, “The Opposition to Hawaiian Reciprocity, 1876-1888,” Pacific Historical Review 14 (June 1945): 157-183. Listian William D. Kelley was also against Hawaiian reciprocity at this time. 213 Arch-Anglophobe Blaine, who along with Grant frequented Listian Henry

Carey’s “vespers,” was also becoming a proponent of protectionism mixed with

reciprocity, albeit reciprocity for American goods only. In 1881, for instance, British

merchants in Hawaii argued that they should receive the same favored treatment that U.S.

goods received under the 1875 reciprocity treaty. Blaine, as secretary of state, moved

quickly to counter the British claims, and subsequently warned the Hawaiian king that

only the United States was allowed territorial acquisitions in Hawaii. He was also a

strong supporter of government-supported internal improvements, meddled in the War of

the Pacific, and hoped to find a way around the limitations of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty

in order to secure an American-controlled isthmian canal.60 In 1883, the Arthur

Administration asked U. S. Grant to take the lead on a similar prohibitive reciprocity

treaty with Mexico in order to undercut European influence in that country, impose the

Monroe Doctrine, and stimulate Southern business. Mexican railroad promoters had been

particularly supportive of the plan, as were Listians like Grant, who was himself a partner

in a southern Mexican railroad scheme. Strong opposition arose, especially from

Louisiana sugar producers, and the bill ended up tied together with Arthur’s prohibitive

reciprocity treaty proposals with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, as well

as the proposed Nicaraguan canal. All these proposals came to an anticlimactic end

following Grover Cleveland’s election who disapproved of Republican imperialism and

any reciprocity that did not entail tariff reductions, and he received unusual oppositional

60 Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 89-90; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 45. 214 support from strict protectionists who feared reciprocity in any form.61 Regardless of their success or failure, these Listian policy prescriptions for maintaining protective tariff walls at home and prying open new markets either through formal annexation or informal prohibitive reciprocity were not the imperialism of free trade, but the imperialism of economic nationalism.

This Listian approach in turn met opposition not only from American Cobdenites but from protectionist purists like Republican Senator Justin Morrill and Philadelphia’s

Joseph Wharton who put all their faith in the home market and belittled foreign traders.

Nevertheless, hard-line protectionists were gradually being swayed by the argument that high tariffs to protect the home market and the opening foreign markets were the proper cure to American overproduction, especially with the frequent onset of economic panics in the last decades of the century. Blaine’s own Listian calls were also being amplified by his right-hand-man—and Greeley’s Tribune editorial successor—Whitelaw Reid.62

Thus, by the early 1880s, more people in government and business were warming up to the Listian idea that the key to prosperity lay in maintaining protection of the home

61 Tom E. Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874-1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 68-92; Pletcher, Awkward Years, 185-88; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment, 110-12, 148-79. These treaties were under the direction of John W. Foster, who believed that the proposed treaty with Spain “will be annexing Cuba in the most desirable way,” who would later replace James G. Blaine as secretary of state in the Harrison Administration. The Cleveland administration did support reciprocity with Mexico, Canada, and Hawaii. Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 79, 92. 62 Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 80-84. Henry Carey had begun requesting Reid to attend his Sunday “Vespers” in 1874. Henry Carey to Whitelaw Reid, 9 Jan. 1874, Folder 1, Box 20, Carey Papers. 215 market while increasing foreign commerce through prohibitive reciprocity: that it was the best solution to the problem of American overproduction.63

Cobdenism West and South

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, that year also saw a strong, albeit

unsuccessful, gubernatorial run in Iowa by Democratic candidate George Kinne, who had

the Irish endorsement “of the Kinne-Philpott free trade doctrine” and the corresponding

attentions of the AFTL in New York and the Cobden Club in England, according to one

Iowa Republican daily. 1883 also saw the appearance of the first independent candidate,

Cobdenite William Brownlee of Detroit, run for office on the sole issue of free trade,

with the endorsement of David Wells and R. R. Bowker.64

In 1880, amid great controversy, the Cobden Club also mass disseminated a

pamphlet written by an Englishman, Augustus Mongredien. The tract was dedicated to

“the farmers of America” by encouraging U.S. agrarians to support free trade over

protectionism in order to influence that year’s presidential elections. Thomas Bayley

Potter, just a week before the pamphlet’s release, begged Edward Atkinson not to be

“very cross” with him, as Atkinson and American Cobden Club member George Plumer

Smith had strongly urged the club not to publish it. The Cobden Club Committee had

63 Williams, Roots of American Empire, 27-29. 64 Article extract in Philpott to Bowker, 20 Aug. 1883; Philpott to Bowker, 13 Sept. 1883; George Peabody to Bowker, 14 Sept. 1883; Thomas G. Shearman to Bowker, 26 Sept. 1883; J. Sterling Morton to Bowker, 24 Sept. 1883; Brownlee to Bowker, 5 July, 1 Aug. 1883, Box 89, Bowker Papers, NYPL; National Conference of Free Traders and Revenue Reformers. Chicago, November 11 and 12, 1885 (New York: New York Free Trade Club, 1885), 18; Brownlee to Wells, 5 Oct. 1882, reel 6, Wells Papers. 216 decided to overrule Atkinson since “David A. Wells strongly recommended the publication, which he said would be severely criticised but would do good. All our other friends . . . approved.”65

In hindsight, Potter likely regretted not heeding Atkinson’s advice. Mongredien’s

Western Farmer of America created quite a splash in the United States, but not of the kind hoped for by the Cobden Club. The protectionist response was impressive. The

Cobden Club pamphlet was portrayed as an “authorized manifesto of a British association” with the power equal to a “hostile national power,” and an obvious English attempt to influence the upcoming 1880 elections. The Cobden Club at least felt chastised enough to be more circumspect thereafter about its pamphleteering efforts in the United

States.66

For Atkinson, the publication of Mongredien’s pamphlet and the protectionist response only solidified the hard lessons learned in 1872 regarding direct meddling in national politics. The Mongredien affair irked Atkinson for years to come. When

Poultney Bigelow—son of John Bigelow, America’s first Cobden Club member—offered

Atkinson honorary membership in the New York Free Trade Club in 1882, Atkinson declined,

65 T. B. Potter to Atkinson, 11 June 1880, carton 2, Atkinson Papers. 66Jonathan B. Wise, The Farmer’s Question: Being a Reply to the Cobden Club tract Entitled “The Western Farmer in America” (Cambridge: University Press, John Wilson and Son, 1880), 5. See also the Boston Daily Advertiser, 27 Oct. 1880; North American, 11 Oct. 1880; The Chicago Inter Ocean, 13 Oct. 1880, 9; “Who is Augustus Mongredien?” Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association 4 (July 1880); Thomas Haines Dudley, Reply to Augustus Mongredien’s Appeal to the Western Farmer of America. Showing the Prosperity of America Under Protection and the Decline of England Under Her So- Called Free-Trade System (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane & Scott’s Printing House,1883). 217 because I am very profoundly convinced that it would prevent me from doing the

effective work which I desire to do in the present direction of freer trade with the

objective point of free trade in a reasonable time. Our fiasco in 1872 retarded the

work and since then I have adopted very different methods of action which I

believe to be more effectual . . . extreme free traders and protectionists alike

retard the general progress of tax reform by exaggerating the influence of a tariff.

. . . The intellectual contest for free trade is over—the only question now pending

is the method of change—The very injudicious method applied by free traders

retards this change . . . here I will cite the publication of Mongredien’s appeal to

our western farmers published by the Cobden Club, which I attempted to suppress

while still in proof but failed.67

The younger more radical free trade element, particularly William Graham Sumner and

Arthur Latham Perry, were “doing mischief in exaggerating the burden of protection.”

Atkinson himself had once “indulged” in what he called “the vituperative method,” he later confessed to Bowker. But he had learned his lesson: “More flies can be caught with molasses than with vinegar; and a little vinegar is more potent in obstruction, than a great deal of molasses in smoothing the way.” Atkinson continued to express his dissatisfaction with the extreme approach of the more radical free trade fringe for years to come.68

67 Atkinson to Poultney Bigelow, 13 Feb. 1882, carton 16, Atkinson Papers. 68 Atkinson to Wells, 21 Sept. 1882, carton 16, Atkinson Papers; Atkinson to Charles S. Fairchild, 16 May 1887, carton 3; Atkinson to Bowker, 11 Jan. 1890, carton 19, Atkinson Papers. 218 As late as 1888, Atkinson recollected to Potter that Mongredien’s pamphlet did

“more harm than good. . . . The election of Gen. Garfield turned on a very narrow margin, that pamphlet by the Cobden Club was one of the forces which created that narrow margin at that time. I do not like to see the Cobden Club make mistakes; I am proud of being a member of it,” he added, “but I hope it will be conducted on sound methods.”69

American Cobden Club member, sometime congressman, and editor of the

Louisville Courier-Journal Henry Watterson perhaps best exemplified the rare confluence of Southern Jeffersonianism and North Eastern Cobdenism. Much as

Cobdenite Edward Atkinson took special interest in the development of postbellum

Southern cotton production—having been instrumental, for instance, in bringing the

International Cotton Exhibition to Atlanta in 1881—Watterson called for the expansion of foreign markets to spur Southern economic recovery in a speech entitled “The New

South.” At around the same time that David Ames Wells was calling for free trade with

Mexico, Watterson also encouraged commercial, and eventual political, union between the United States and Mexico as a viable solution to Southern economic ills.70

69 Atkinson to Potter, 3 Oct. 1888, carton 19, Atkinson Papers. 70 David A. Wells, Freer Trade Essential to Future National Prosperity and Development (New York:, Wm. C. Martin’s Steam Printing House, 1882); Wells, “An Economic Study of Mexico,” Popular Science Monthly 28 (April 1886): 721-36; 29 (May 1886): 11-29; Williamson, Atkinson, 169-70; Daniel S. Margolies, Henry Watterson and the New South: The Politics of Empire, Free Trade, and Globalization (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 44-45. For the development and legacy of the New South and U.S. foreign policy, see Patrick J. Hearden, Independence & Empire: The New South’s Cotton Mill Campaign, 1865-1901 (DeKalb, IL: North Illinois University Press, 1982); and Tennant S. McWilliams, The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and the Southern Sense of Self, 1877-1950 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). 219 Watterson’s Southern roots and previous Confederate activities also opened him up to Listian attack. Protectionist Republicans frequently and effectively waved the

“bloody shirt,” and Watterson found himself castigated for his former Confederate ties and his current free trade proclivities and involvement in the Democratic party. The New

York Tribune took particular enjoyment in drawing connections between Watterson, the postbellum free trade movement, and Southern rebellion.71

American Listians did not stop there. In November 1881, the various protective tariff leagues throughout the country held national conventions in Chicago and New

York. At the former, a young high-tariff enthusiast from Ohio named William McKinley was particularly outspoken for a “tariff for revenue and Protection,” and at the latter the attendees emphasized that a tariff for revenue only was “nothing but free trade in disguise.” It was at about this time as well that the protectionist leagues took further aim at the activities of the Cobden Club and the disturbing growth in public opposition to high tariffs. The Metropolitan Industrial League, for instance, was created in New York

City to combat such “persistent efforts of the theorists in political economy.” In 1883, industrialist leaders founded the Association for the Protection of American Industries with Listian Ulysses S. Grant as its president, followed closely a couple years later by the creation of the American Protective League.72

71 New York Tribune, 16 Sept. 1880, 1; 22 Oct. 1880, 4; 2 Dec.1880, 4; 17 Jan. 1881, 1; 2 Aug. 1882, 4. Former Confederate L. Q. C. Lamar was another prominent Cobden Club member. 72 Proceedings of the National Tariff Convention Held at the Cooper Institute, New York, November 29 and 30, 1881 (Philadelphia: American Iron and Steel Association, 1882), 49; Chicago Tribune, 17 Nov. 1881, 4; New York Tribune, 1 Dec. 1881, 5; Wilford J. Eiteman, “The Rise and Decline of Orthodox Tariff Propaganda,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 45 (Nov. 1930), 23-24. 220 Protectionists also took aim at colleges where Cobdenites proliferated as professors of political economy. Wells’s Cobdenite friend William Graham Sumner, ever following his “manly course” to tackle the protectionist system, had found his position at

Yale threatened in 1883 after he attacked a recent speech given by William Evarts before the New York Association for the Protection of American Industry. Sumner was a highly talented teacher. He was also what Edward Atkinson considered an extreme adherent to the tenets of laissez faire, and not afraid to lash out at those “who dread the Cobden

Club.” Sumner argued that the protective tariff was an “arrant piece of economic quackery” and “a subtle, cruel and unjust invasion of one man’s rights by another. . . . It is at the same time a social abuse, an economic blunder, and a political evil.”73 His

Cobdenite ideology complimented his adherence to Malthusian law and Social

Darwinism, with the latter entailing an almost anarchic scientific belief in free market principles as famously articulated by Britain’s .74

Herbert Spencer himself even took issue with the term “protectionist,” which he considered inaccurate. He preferred the term “aggressionist” since, for one producer to gain, “ten consumers are fleeced,” thereby increasing the costs of living, and frightening

73 “The Month,” Penn Monthly (Nov. 1880), 883; William L. Phelps, “When Yale was Given to Sumnerology,” Literary Digest International Book Review 3 (1925): 661-663; Sumner, “Protectionism: The –Ism which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth,” in Essays of William Graham Sumner, ed. by Albert Galloway Keller and Maurice R. Davie, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), II, 366-367, 435; Sumner, “Why I am a Free Trader,” Twentieth Century, 24 April 1890, 8-10. 74 Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 32-46, 80-81, 84-89. 221 away labor.75 Spencer’s scientific approach to free trade complimented the moral one of

Cobden and Bright in the United States, as Cobdenites like Henry Ward Beecher, John

Bigelow, David Dudley Field, Hugh McCulloch, Sumner, and George Peabody would doubtless have agreed during their attendance at Spencer’s farewell banquet at

Delmonico’s in November 1882.76 Henry Holt was only exaggerating a little when he wrote that “probably no other philosopher ever had such a vogue as Spencer had from about 1870 to 1890.”77

Spencerian Cobdenite William Graham Sumner was particularly outspoken about his free trade principles in and out of the classroom throughout the Gilded Age. He was thus even more antagonistic to protectionists than was the more moderate Edward

Atkinson, considering that as a Yale professor he held a position that involved shaping the minds of future generations of Americans. The New York Tribune therefore attempted to cut Sumner and other “shallow and one-sided” professors’ careers short for decades to come.78

Against such protectionist pushback, the American free trade movement pressed on. In May 1883, Cobdenite Henry Adams wrote Carl Schurz that now was the time for

“radicalism.” He asked Carl Schurz how the “Free Trade organization” might punish the

75 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, Abridged and Revised: Together with the Man Versus the State (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1899), 369; Herbert Spencer and Thomas Mackay, eds., A Plea for Liberty: An Argument against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1891), 166f. 76 Edward Livingston Youmans, ed., Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), 22-24. 77 Henry Holt, Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor, with Other Essays Somewhat Biographical and Autobiographical (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923), 49-52, 298. 78 New York Tribune, 11 Feb. 1883, 6; 16 Feb. 1883, 5; 25 Feb. 1883, 6; 11 March 1886, 2; 18 May 1890, 18; 3 Feb. 1897, 7. 222 Democrats in the Northwest, if the Democratic party were to shy away from free trade.

Adams recommended organizing “a free trade party, and if we had the strength to contest a single State, make an independent nomination for the Presidency.”79

Adams’s calls for radicalism did not go unheeded. Along with U.S. Cobden Club

members Thomas G. Shearman, Hugh McCulloch, and Worthington Chauncey Ford,

Cobdenite Henry Ward Beecher—a firm believer in the moral “virtue and manhood” of

free trade—took a lead role as president of the Brooklyn Revenue Reform Club, which

was founded in 1881 and which had a decidedly free trade bent.80 Amid an American

economic boom owing to rapid Westward expansion and a desperate European market

suffering from diseased crops and animals, the New York Free Trade Club actively

sponsored a series of lectures, and began holding annual dinners in the early 1880s,

dinners which received great attendance, including large numbers of women. In fact,

owing to such feminine interest in the transatlantic free trade movement, the Cobden

Club went co-ed. Its first female member, , joined in 1885.81

R. R. Bowker’s New York Free Trade Club, along with Cobdenite William

Brownlee’s Michigan Free Trade League, Cobdenite Western Secretary for the AFTL

Henry Philpott’s Iowa Free Trade League, the Kings County Free Trade League, and the

79 Adams to Schurz, 20 May 1883, in Letters of Henry Adams, II, 503. 80 New York Tribune, 9 Dec. 1881, 5; 27 Feb. 1881, 2; 5 April 1881, 4; 27 Jan. 1886, 8; Henry Ward Beecher to Ford, 19 Oct. 1881, folder 1881; Beecher to Ford, 11 Dec. 1881, folder 1882, box 1, Ford Papers. Reform Club secretary Thomas Shearman’s subsequent publication of the correspondence between the Brooklyn Revenue Reform Club and Cobden Club founder T. B. Potter was correspondingly castigated by the New York Tribune. 81 Williams, Roots of Modern American Empire, 20; New York Tribune, 15 April 1882, 2; 23 Nov. 1883, 5; 29 May 1883, 5; 16 March 1884, 2; Annual Meeting, 17 July 1886, CC MSS; Jackson, History of the Cobden Club, 38-39. 223 Detroit Free Trade Club organized a conference held at Detroit’s Opera House on 31 May

1883. Representative delegates from various state and local leagues totaled around seventy five, and Wells arrived as the keynote speaker.

Mayor Thompson of Detroit suggested “a movement in favor of a North

American Zollverein,” a suggestion that had also been called for by farmers of Cobden,

Illinois the year before and by Canadian Cobdenite Goldwin Smith throughout the previous decade. Other speeches were given by Cobdenites Frank Hurd, David Wells,

Thomas Shearman, Arthur Latham Perry, and Henry Ward Beecher. It was a public forum, wherein “ladies are especially invited to attend.” One hoped-for result was expressed by the young Cobdenite publisher and future leader of the Progressive Era free trade movement, George Haven Putnam, who suggested that the conference might garner enough attention to be referenced by “some of our English Free-Trade friends” at the following month’s Cobden Club dinner. Another result of this conference was the design of a national conference in Chicago to be held in two years’ time. The free trade movement’s efforts even drew the interest of some in Montreal, who founded a free trade club based upon the AFTL-, with the long-term goal of creating a free trade league that represented the entire Dominion of Canada.82

82 “Instructions to Delegates to the Free Trade Conference”; Brownlee to Bowker, 26 April, 7 May, 12 May, 14 May, 23 May, 18 July, 19 June 1883; S. W. Emerson [Kings County] to Bowker, 2 May; Poultney Bigelow [NYFTL] to Bowker, 5 July, 27 July 1883; Putnam to Bowker, 28 May 1883, Box 89, Bowker Papers, NYPL; Chicago Tribune, 1 June 1883, 6; Report of the Tariff Commission Appointed under Act of Congress Approved May 15, 1882, 47th Cong., 2nd Sess., Misc. Doc. No. 6, Part 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882), I, 968-970; Chicago Tribune, 9 Sept.1882, 7; John Redpath Dougall [Montreal] to Bowker, 27 June 1883. Cobden, Illinois was named after Richard Cobden, as were other towns like Cobden, Ontario and Cobden, Minnesota. For Goldwin Smith’s early advocacy of North American union see his The Political Destiny of Canada (Toronto: Willing & Williamson, 1878); and Smith, “Canada and the United States,” North American Review 131 (July 1880): 14-25. 224

The 1884 Presidential Elections and the End of Republican Cobdenism

Following such bolstering to the circle’s free trade impetus, the final straw fell

that broke the Cobdenites’ Republican backing; in 1884, the Republican Party nominated

for president Listian nationalist and corruption-laden James G. Blaine of Maine.83

Pennsylvania-born Blaine was a strong proponent of the American System. Listian Henry

Carey had a helping hand in shaping Blaine’s (and Grant’s) views on economic

nationalism and Anglophobia, particularly during Blaine’s attendance at “Carey’s

Vespers” in the late 1860s.84

As touched upon earlier, Blaine would evolve into the most progressive of the

Listian nationalists. A young, antislavery, Whig member of the Republican party in the

1850s, Blaine had become a proponent of American worldwide expansion from the 1840s

onward, although his nationalistic belief in such expansive manifest destiny had been

tempered during this period stemming from his fear of the territorial expansion of

Southern slavery. Upon his entrance into politics, his assent up the Republican political

ladder was swift, and it is fair to say that he was probably the most famous politician of

the Gilded Age, as well as one of the era’s most unscrupulous. He was a particularly

ambidextrous political matador, waving the “bloody shirt” before his Democratic

83 For the 1884 presidential contest, see especially Mark Wahlgren Summers, Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, 1884 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 84 , “Henry C. Carey’s Roundtable,” Gunton’s Magazine 13 (August 1897), 99; Edward Crapol, America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1873), 22. 225 opponents with one hand, while shaking a political red cape with the other in the hopes of goading John Bull into a calamitous charge. The prospect of Blaine as president was a difficult pill for any man desirous of civil service reform, peaceful Anglo-American relations, or freer trade to swallow.85

In 1884, America’s Cobdenites therefore had a difficult choice to make: remain loyal either to the Republican party or their free trade principles. The vast majority threw their support behind civil service reformer Grover Cleveland. A handful, however, chose the former. Cyrus Field, worried that a Democratic administration would not be as open to the idea of his planned Pacific cable and with Blaine a long-time friend, voted

Republican, although the New York Evening Telegram still asked “that recreant

Republican monopolist and prominent member of the Cobden Club” to “clear himself if he can from the foul charge of aiding and abetting the importation of British gold and to spread the contagion of Free Trade and Democracy.”86 For more pragmatic political reasons, Cobdenite Henry Cabot Lodge followed suit, as did another rising Republican politician by the name of , who had earlier been exposed to the doctrine of Victorian laissez faire while attending Harvard College.87

Since the late ‘70s Roosevelt had in fact been a “howling academic free trader,” according to Cobdenite Henry George, the radical American tax reformer and absolute

85 Ed Crapol, James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc, 2000), 1- 39. 86 Field to Blaine,22 Oct. 1884, folder 8, box 1, Field Papers; Field to Blaine, 18 Nov. 1884, reel 10, Blaine Papers; Carter, Man of Two Worlds, 334-336; New York Evening Telegram, 4 Oct. 1884. 87 For Lodge’s explanation for supporting Blaine, see Lodge to Carl Schurz, 14 July 1884, microfilm reel 3, Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, MHS. 226 free trader. George even recalled during his 1883 speech on free trade “before the

Cobden Club of New York,” “a young man who sat on the platform behind him . . . and applauded his most radical utterances with such tumultuous vehemence that the speaker almost lost the thread of his discourse in his wonder over who the young man with the eye-glasses and the big teeth could be. This was Theodore Roosevelt in the very early

80s.”88

Roosevelt believed that tariff reform was “the great question of the day.” He joined the New York Free Trade Club in 1882, and became one of its financial officers.

At the club’s 1883 dinner, he had even given a speech entitled “The Tariff in Politics,” wherein he encouraged and hoped for the success of free trade over protection, and called for a tariff for revenue only. His free trade advocacy and admiration for Henry George were not the only actions considered anathema among most late nineteenth-century

Republicans; in 1883, Roosevelt became a member of the Cobden Club. So too had his friend Lodge three years earlier, having just ended his professorship at Cobdenite Charles

Eliot’s Harvard College.89

Lodge and Roosevelt showed up to the 1884 Republican National Convention in

Chicago as anti-Blaine reformers, with Roosevelt himself traveling with a delegation representing the New York Free Trade Club in order to demand the abolition of the “war

88 Single Tax Review (1909) IX, 56-57. By the mid-1880s, George became quite critical of the Cobden Club’s approach to free trade and the land question. Henry George, Free Trade or Protection (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1886 [1911]), 14, 229, 233. 89 Roosevelt to Bowker, 24 May 1883, Box 5, Bowker Papers; The Members of the Cobden Club, with Dates of Entrance (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1880); Organization of the New York Free Trade Club, 1882; New York Free Trade Club Annual Dinner. May 28th, 1883. List of Toasts and Speakers, Box 90, Bowker Papers, NYPL; Bowker, ed., The Economic Fact-book and Free-traders’ Guide, 14. 227 tariff” from the party platform. Yet Roosevelt and Lodge ultimately ended up throwing their support behind Blaine and the Republican banner of protection in the 1884 elections and beyond, and their names were thereafter stricken from the Cobden Club’s list of members.90

Lodge’s own protectionist turn appears to have been considerably more drastic, no mere political posturing as Roosevelt’s appeared. Lodge had early on expressed his independent streak, as seen in his support for Cobdenites Tilden in 1876 and Garfield in

1880, and continued to express his free trade proclivities as late as 1884. Yet, after his

1884 decision to back Blaine, he subsequently became a staunch and vocal defender of the American System of protectionism and the imperialism of economic nationalism.

Correspondingly, his former free trade friends among the Mugwump independents— whom Roosevelt now referred to as “cursed pharisaical fools and knaves”—successfully worked to see Lodge defeated in his own 1884 Republican congressional run.91 On various occasions following this 1884 fallout with Republican tariff reformers he expressed his lingering animosity toward his former Cobdenite colleagues. In an 1891 defense of the McKinley Tariff, for instance, he castigated his former free trade friends as

90 Million, 14 June 1884, 118; Petition of the New York Free Trade Club to the Republican National Convention, 29 May 1884; Edward P. Kohn, “Crossing the Rubicon: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the 1884 Republican National Convention,” Journal of Gilded Age & Progressive Era 5 (Jan. 2006): 18-45. 91 “Henry Cabot Lodge as an Apostle of the Autocratic Money-Controlled Machine and the Foe of Popular Rule,” Arena 36 (Nov. 1906), 534-35; Henry Cabot Lodge, Speeches and Addresses, 1884-1909 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), 125; Claude Moore Fuess, “Carl Schurz, Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Campaign of 1884: A Study in Temperament and Political Philosophy,” New England Quarterly 5 (July 1932), 461, 463, 467-82. 228 devout followers of the Manchester School, and take all their teachings and

practices with little discrimination. They are essentially imitative. The anti-corn

law agitators pointed their arguments by exhibiting loaves of bread of different

sizes, and so our free traders, during a campaign, have gone about in carts and

held up pairs of trousers, a more humourous if less intelligent form of object

lesson.92

Roosevelt appears thereafter to have leaned on Lodge’s own high tariff arguments and sought Lodge’s approval on the tariff issue in subsequent years. Roosevelt also denied ever having been a member of the Cobden Club, and would make “a savage onslaught” on Grover Cleveland’s attempts at tariff reform to make certain “the mugwump papers” did not think his attitude “in any way one of alliance with them.”93

His Anglophilia would resurface, but he did make a habit of avoiding the tariff issue in subsequent decades, and his early flirtation with free trade haunted him in later political life.94 Roosevelt’s less than amicable split from the Mugwumps might also help explain much of his future disdain for America’s Cobdenites, who indignantly considered his and

92 Henry Cabot Lodge, “Protection or Free Trade—Which?” Arena 24 (Nov. 1891), 653. 93 Boston Daily Advertiser, 29 Oct. 1884, reprinted in Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), I, 20-21; Roosevelt and Lodge,17 Jan. 1888, ibid., I, 61-62; Roosevelt to Lodge, 22 Jan. 1888, ibid., I, 62-65; Roosevelt to Lodge, 27 Sept. 1902, ibid., I, 532-34. 94 William N. Osgood, An Open Letter to Hon. Henry Cabot Lodge, Relating to His Speech upon the Present Tariff Recently Delivered before the Harvard Finance Club (Boston: Massachusetts Tariff Reform League, 1888); Theodore Roosevelt, Campaigns and Controversies (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1926), 52-53; Roswell A. Benedict, Malefactors of Great Wealth! (New York: American Business Bureau, 1907), 377-81; Moody’s Magazine (Feb. 1908), 157. For Roosevelt and the tariff issue, see also James Anthony Rosmond, “Nelson Aldrich, Theodore Roosevelt and the Tariff: A Study to 1905” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974). 229 Lodge’s 1884 choice one of political expediency rather than that of moral and ideological principle.

Conclusion

American Cobdenism’s transatlantic ties—real and perceived—strengthened the

American free trade movement, even amid Republican implementation of the imperialism of economic nationalism, and even following the political setbacks of the

1870s and early 1880s. The 1884 presidential election in turn resulted in a new political alignment of great import for future American domestic and foreign relations. With

Blaine’s nomination, many of the Liberal Republican independents, now nicknamed

Mugwumps, switched their support to the Democratic party’s candidate, the civil service reform governor of New York, Grover Cleveland. Perhaps the most significant immediate result of the election was the Cobdenite abandonment of the Republican ship.

With Republican Cobdenites overboard, the Republican party could finally claim what

Henry Carey had searched for since the party’s founding: a semblance of ideological cohesion not seen since the days of antislavery. Five years after Carey’s death, it had finally become the Party of Protection en bloc.

Even though the Republicans tried to attract the Irish vote by laying the blame for

Ireland’s economic problems upon British free trade, and that the Irish “ought to be the heartiest supporters of protection and the bitterest foes of England’s commercial policy,”

230 Cleveland yet won the presidential battle.95 The Mugwumps were further delighted upon

Cleveland’s election owing to his slight victory, taking the state of New York by only

1,149 votes. To the Mugwumps, whose area of control rested predominantly in the North

East, this slim margin demonstrated to them that they had brought about Cleveland’s success. E. L. Godkin, British-born Mugwump editor of the Nation and friend of David

Wells, stated that the “independent Republicans of the country have elected Grover

Cleveland President. That point is so clear in the result that nobody questions it.”96 Des

Moines’s free trade weekly the Million similarly observed that the “independent reinforcements held the balance of power. They awarded it to Cleveland.”97 Wells and his American Cobdenites had found their man in Cleveland; and they felt he owed his election to them.

95 New York Tribune, 2 Aug. 1884, 4. For the politics of ethnicity, see, for instance, Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 96 “The Week,” Nation 39 (13 Nov. 1884), 407. Historians of Cleveland and the Mugwumps disagree over the claims, but all agree that the Mugwumps were influential in his election, owing to their strong political support in New York and Massachusetts. See for instance, Richard E. Welch, Jr., The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland (Lawrence, 1988), 29-30; Fleming, Bowker, 203; Terrill, “David A. Wells,” 548. 97 Million, 22 Nov. 1884, 303. 231 Chapter 5: Grover Cleveland’s Cobdenites: The Anti-Imperialism of

Free Trade, 1884-89

The Cobden Club found a willing ally in the Democratic party.

George B. Curtiss.1

The American members . . . have combined to conquer and subdue American energy and

enterprise. They shine out on the British Cobden Club list like apples of gold in pictures

of silver. They ought to be preserved as relics for the reverential inspection of the rising

generation of American workingmen.

The Republican Campaign Text-book for 1888.2

This reveals the real motive of the Club—the subjugation of the industries of the United

States. This Club is the most potent and dangerous of all the forces menacing our

industries and therefore menacing our liberties—most potent because of the wealth and

political influence back of it; most dangerous because of its stealthy methods. Let no man

belonging to the Cobden Club or avowing any sympathy with it ever be trusted to office.

“Address of the Irish-American Protection Union of New York,” 3 Dec. 1884.3

1 George B. Curtiss, The Industrial Development of Nations and a History of the Tariff Policies of the United States, and of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Other European Countries, 3 vols. (Binghamton, NY: George B. Curtiss, 1912), III, 254. 2 George Francis Dawson, The Republican Campaign Text-book for 1888 (New York: Brentano’s, 1888), 91. 232

Just days before the November 1884 presidential election, Thomas Dudley, former U.S. Consul in Liverpool, spoke to a Republican gathering in Astoria, New York.

Although Grover Cleveland had pointedly avoided serious discussion of the tariff on the campaign trail, Dudley nevertheless emphasized that it was the “great issue” before the nation.4 The approaching election offered the country a clear cut choice between “the

American system of protection” and “the English system of a tariff for revenue only.”

Dudley emphasized that a tariff for revenue only, “or free trade,” was “indifferent” to

American workers, whereas high tariffs protected the laborer. He also excitedly noted to his Anglophobic audience that not even one English newspaper favored James G.

Blaine’s Republican nomination, in marked contrast to the positive British reaction to

Cleveland’s. Dudley had been in England a year ago where he witnessed a similar British reaction when Cobdenite John G. Carlisle was elected Speaker of the House:

[England’s] rejoicing over this election would have been quite enough to have

driven all free trade ideas out of me. England, in order to carry out this work of

breaking down protection, has formed the Cobden Club; and for wealth, for

power, and for the influence of its members, I know of no political organization

that is equal to it. . . . It has its agents all over this country with its pamphlets and

3 Reprinted in Million, 13 Dec. 1884, 326. 4 For more on the growing importance of the tariff during this period, see S. Walter Poulshock, “Pennsylvania and the Politics of the Tariff, 1880-1888,” Pennsylvania History 29 (July 1962): 291-305. 233 other documents, and now has as its chief agent the Democratic party of this

country to assist it in its work.5

Dudley also noted that Harvard’s own president, Charles Eliot, had just recently bragged that each and every one of his students favored free trade. The Cobden Club was further poisoning the minds of America’s youth by offering silver medals to the students of Eliot’s Harvard, William Graham Sumner’s Yale, and Arthur Latham Parry’s Williams

College, all three men being themselves members of the club. And why does Henry Ward

Beecher support Cleveland? Because of Beecher’s membership in the Cobden Club,

Dudley explained. Beecher’s support, as well as that of Horace White and Parke Godwin, can easily be explained away by their “attachment to free trade and the Cobden Club.”

The failed 1884 Morrison bill had also recently been proposed by order of the club,

Dudley charged, through the efforts of the club’s American “minions,” Congressmen

Samuel “Sunset” Cox, John Carlisle, and William R. Morrison, the bill’s author. Only by fighting the Cobden Club’s efforts, Dudley concluded to loud and prolonged applause, will America “become the great manufacturing country of the world.”6 As both Dudley’s speech and this chapter show, America’s Listian nationalists spotted and attacked the alleged transatlantic free trade enemies proliferating among Cleveland’s advisors, cabinet

5 Thomas H. Dudley, The Cobden Club of England and Protection in the United States: A Speech Made at a Republican Meeting, Held at Astoria, New York, October 23D, 1884, 3, 5-7, 10-12. 6 Dudley, The Cobden Club of England and Protection in the United States, 14-15, 32. President Eliot had at around this time also gained a secretary, a young Cobdenite by the name of Frank W. Taussig. Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1865-1918, 3 vols. (New York: The Viking Press, 1949), III, 264. 234 members, and supporters.7 Amid their ideological fencing, both Listian nationalists and

Cobdenite cosmopolitans in turn retooled the antebellum rhetoric of antislavery to demonize the opposition.

Surprisingly, the influence of Cobdenism—the Victorian belief that free trade would bring world peace—upon the Democratic party and its controversial effects upon

U.S. policymaking and the American free trade movement in the 1880s has gone neglected.8 Yet the Cleveland Administration’s Cobdenite members adhered to the policies of freer trade, anti-imperialism, the gold standard, and generally amicable Anglo-

American relations. The new administration’s policies struck a stark contrast both to the antebellum imperial expansionism of the Jeffersonian Democrats and to the postbellum

Listian Republicans. The Cobdenite adherence of Cleveland’s cabinet would also add fuel to the conspiratorial fire. In analyzing these various facets, a much-needed Cobdenite corrective is proffered to the prevailing expansionist-driven, business-government consensus: a consensus that—in attempting to describe America’s late nineteenth-century

7 Listian John A. Kasson also dedicated a speech in 1884 to attacking the teachings of Cobden in Tariff Tract No. 3, 1884: Free Trade not the International Law of the Almighty (Philadelphia: American Iron and Steel Association, 1884). 8 Of the many scholarly works on Grover Cleveland, only a handful has given the Cobdenite connection even minimal attention. See Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 77, 105; Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Knopf, 1969), 302; Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1933), 281; and David M. Tucker, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 91-4, 107- 8, 113. 235 rise to formal empire—has misleadingly lumped Grover Cleveland’s Cobdenite administrations with those of his Democratic predecessors and Republican successors.9

The American Legacies of Antislavery and the Anti-Corn-Law League

A year after Grover Cleveland’s election, the American Free Trade League

(AFTL) called its second national conference, this one in Chicago. Members of thirty- nine clubs and delegates from twenty states arrived to hear David Ames Wells—the current AFTL president—and other leading free traders speak on the need for tariff reductions, although Cobdenite reformer Edward Atkinson himself notably abstained, still smarting from the 1872 debacle and still “disgusted” by the free trade movement’s new dogmatic doctrinaire leaders, Professors William Graham Sumner and Arthur

Latham Perry.10

R. R. Bowker, the AFTL secretary, beseeched his audience to donate funds for the upcoming congressional elections, just as all of England had once come to the support of

Richard Cobden and John Bright. About $20,000 was desperately needed despite, he wryly joked, “our unbounded resources of British gold.” Where once the Republican

9 For such “consensus” arguments, see especially, Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, [1963]); LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Volume II: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Tom E. Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874-1901 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland: World Pub., 1959); and Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). 10 New York Tribune, 13 Nov. 1885, 4; Atkinson to Bowker, 16 Oct. 1885, carton 17, Atkinson Papers. 236 party had stood as the “party of freedom” and had been created to “free our soil from the curse of negro slavery,” it now encouraged a system that tied Americans “down into a new slavery.” Tariff reform and sound money were alternatively the twin panaceas to prosperity and freedom. Hinting at the increasing political influence of American labor,

Bowker paid tribute to the worker generally and trade unions in particular. He urged free traders to target these men and women, to explain to them the immorality and corruption inherent in the protective system. While he readily admitted the election had not been decided on the issue of the tariff, Bowker also had faith that the new reform-minded president, Grover Cleveland, would “sooner or later” become “the champion of the tax- payers against the tax-eaters.”11

Cobdenite politician J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska, presiding over the conference, connected the free trade movement’s goals with those of abolitionism and compared protectionism to emasculation: “It has been said by many that the old Abolition party had accomplished its end, and that there was nothing more to be freed. It is true that we have free men and free speech and a free press, but we have an enslaved commerce . .

. this Congress has been convened . . . that the shackles will be stricken from American

11 National Conference of Free Traders and Revenue Reformers. Chicago, November 11 and 12, 1885 (New York: New York Free Trade Club, 1885), 11-15; Chicago Tribune, 13 Nov. 1885, 1-2. There remained a general disconnect between the middle to upper class free traders and the demands of American labor, eerily reminiscent of the divisions between the Anti-Corn-Law League and the Chartist movement in England in the 1830s and 1840s. Cleveland’s misuse of federal troops to quell the 1886 Haymarket riot and his later reaction to Coxey’s Army and the Pullman strike further alienated the reformers from laborers. For attempts to sway laborers to support free trade, see, for instance, various issues of the Free-Trader and American Laborer’s Political Manual. To which is Added the Laboring-Man’s Interview with the Party Chiefs on the Great Issue of the Tariff. Both Platforms being Given (Boston: American Laborers Educational Society, 1884). 237 commerce.”12 According to Morton, American commercial slavery could only be

overcome through open global economic competition.

The New South also arose as a topic of some discussion at the conference. The

former slave-based economy had come a long way since the Civil War, as had Northern

temperament. The South’s economy had begun to rebound with infant industries of its

own, so much so that “the fully developed matron of the North is asking protection

against the infant-suckling of the South,” a delegate from Ohio ironically observed.

Although only a handful of Southerners were present, they made their voices heard. John

Dargan of South Carolina, “fired” by the writings of Cobdenites William Graham

Sumner, David Wells, and Henry George, admitted that he had at first been hesitant to

speak up on free trade, fearing “the readiness with which you would suspect that I had

come before you to advocate nullification as the best method . . . and I felt that you would

think, if I failed in that I would say the next step, gentlemen, is secession.” He was happy

to report instead the warm reception from his “Northern friends.” He could not wait to

return home and say to his Southern audiences “that under my eyes the bloody shirt has

been torn to tatters, and its miserable rags swept out of sight forever. This is the proudest

occasion of my life.”13

David Ames Wells, honorary secretary of the Cobden Club in the United States

and the intellectual head of the American free trade movement, then rose to speak. He

12 National Conference of Free Traders, 2-3. 13 National Conference of Free Traders, 57. As a reporter and Republican in California in the 1860s and 1870s, Henry George, having formerly subscribed to Henry Carey’s brand of economic nationalism, became a proponent of David Ames Wells, free trade, and peace, coming to a belief “in the international law of God as Cobden called free trade.” Charles Albro Barker, Henry George (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 72-8, 142. 238 granted that there were some “honest advocates of the protective system” who looked “to free-trade as an ultimate objective point.” Unfortunately, most “put this ultimatum a long way off in the future.” In particular, he emphasized the American farmer’s mounting need for foreign markets, as farmers yet outnumbered “all the mills, mines, fields, and factories.” This sentiment was seconded by a farmer and wool grower from Ohio who proclaimed that America’s excess products “must find markets in foreign countries,” and only a policy of free trade could accomplish this. In similar fashion, others noted that the markets of South America might easily become available if only the United States were to “adopt a tariff as simple and liberal as that of Great Britain.” Another delegate observed that U.S. pig-iron production, so long listed among America’s infant industries, was cheap enough now to even compete in the markets of Europe. While delegates disagreed over preferred methods of taxation or the degree of revenue reductions, they all shared the desire for freer trade and access to global markets. They also agreed that the exemption of all raw materials would aid agrarians and manufacturers. When a gentleman from Flint, Michigan suggested that the league send Cleveland an address concerning the tariff, Wells responded confidently that, on that issue, “we can trust the

President.”14

America’s protectionists agreed, claiming to have discovered hidden transatlantic ties connecting American free traders to the Cobden Club and Grover Cleveland’s election. According to San Francisco’s Evening Bulletin, the London Times had “foretold

14 National Conference of Free Traders, 5-9, 21, 32-33, 111, 127. Henry Ward Beecher concluded the conference with his address, “Why I am a Free Trader.” 239 the Free-trade propaganda that is now being vigorously pushed under the leadership of

Grover Cleveland.” The Bulletin was referring to a Times article detailing the

pronouncements of the Cobden Club at its annual banquet of 1880. The California

newspaper recounted that it was toward the United States that the Cobden Club gazed “as

the most likely sphere for its vigorous foreign policy,” unable to “rest while the United

States are unsubdued,” and to ply “them with arguments and statistics, with books and

pamphlets and speeches, until reason has dislodged protection from the great stronghold

in which it has intrenched [sic] itself.”15

The New York Tribune in turn made the unsubstantiated claim that America’s first

Cobden Club member, John Bigelow—former U.S. minister to France and friend of

Richard Cobden—had even traveled to England in the fall of 1884 to “secure funds for

Cleveland . . . and free trade.” Republican Congressman J. P. Dolliver of Iowa warned

that “the Cobden Club is working here” in America. For the past ten years, he continued,

the organization’s free trade tracts and pamphlets have fallen “among us like the leaves of

autumn. . . . The Democratic Party is the tool of these Cobden Club members and their

sympathizers.” Former Congressman Thompson Murch of Maine, a Blaine supporter,

noted that throughout his home state “the Cobden Club’s influence is felt. Their

pamphlets find their way into every farm house. There can be no disputing the fact that

Democracy, free trade, and British interests are bound up together. The money and

influence of English manufacturers play a much greater part in American politics than

most persons would believe.” Thomas Dudley again warned that England’s Cobden Club

15 San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 23 Aug. 1888, 4; London Times, 12 July 1880, 11. 240 would not “rest until the United States are subdued, and they are at work subduing us.”

At the behest of the British government, the club was bent upon “breaking down our protective policy.”16

Figure 4: “Lashing Himself into Fever Heat.” Thomas Nast mocks Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune editorial tactic of tying Cleveland to British free trade and Southern slavery in the lead up to the 1884 elections. “Lashing Himself into Fever Heat. Black-

16 New York Tribune, 3 Oct. 1884, 5; 29 Oct. 1884, 8. Poultney Bigelow, himself a Cobden Club member and active in the New York free trade movement, came to his father’s defense in a letter to the editor London Standard, which had reprinted the Tribune’s charges. Standard, 6 Oct. 1884, 3. 241 Law Reid, ‘You are British Free-Traders, Dudes, Pharisees, Frauds, and Mugwumps— that’s what you are!’” Harper’s Weekly, 18 Oct. 1884.

While such conspiratorial potshots were being leveled at the incoming administration, free traders returned fire with the antebellum rhetoric of antislavery. In

Industrial Slavery (1885), Frank H. Hurd—co-founder of the Anti-Protective Tariff

League in Toledo with fellow Cobden Club member and head of the Ohio Free Trade

League J. M. Osborne in November 1885—asked “who is free who cannot control his own labor? What was the African slavery, which the blood and the death and the graves of the war abolished, but the ownership of the labor of one man by another man?

Whoever owns my labor owns me.” “I say to you,” Hurd concluded, with nostalgic antislavery fervor,

that every dollar of the increase of prices which the protective tariff occasions is a

day of slavery to the American laborer . . . Free-trade comes to strike off these

shackles which protection has imposed. It finds the American laboring man bound

hand and foot, striving, perishing, dying, and it strikes off the shackles and sets

him upon his feet as a free man again.17

Hurd also hinted at the growing crisis of American overproduction and market expansion that would grip American foreign policy for decades to come, that when protectionists

17 New York Times, 14 Nov. 1885; Frank H. Hurd, Industrial Slavery (New York: New York Free Trade Club, 1885), 64. 242 cry about overproduction, they are really complaining about America’s “limited market.”

What the United States needed instead was access to all the markets of the world:

Mexico is ready, South America is ready, Canada is ready—ah! the world is

ready, and nothing stands in the way of keeping the laborer from starving but the

ignorant selfishness of the protected manufacturer. . . . Open the doors and let the

world be free to come here and buy, both from the Orient and the Occident, and

the channels will be bursting with the overflow that will come rushing through

your streets.18

E. J. Donnell, the vice president of the New York Free Trade Club, in similar fashion wrote his 1884 pamphlet entitled Slavery and “Protection,” wherein “this vile creature, ‘protection,’ is chained to the dead body of slavery, and it will be buried in the same grave . . . the Republican party, as soon as the war ended switched its focus from freeing slaves to enslaving both whites and blacks to the monopolistic system of protection.”19 Cobden Club member and former governor and senator from North

Carolina Zebulon Vance likewise pronounced at the 1884 New York Free Trade Club dinner that

18 Hurd, Industrial Slavery, 68. 19 E. J. Donnell, Slavery and “Protection”: An Historical Review and Appeal to the Workshop and the Farm (New York: E. J. Donnell, 1884), 14-15. 243 There is still slavery. Political slavery, that from which we escaped by the great

revolution of 1776, is behind us; domestic slavery, that which was abolished in

this country by the great civil war, is behind us . . . there is financial slavery now,

that holds us in its grip as tenaciously and as injuriously as any other that we have

ever encountered. . . . Away with slavery of all kinds!20

For American Cobdenites like Hurd, Donnell, and Vance, free trade and access to the world’s markets were a cure-all to the “enslaved” industrial laborer and to American overproduction. Some labor leaders such as Ezra Heywood of the New England Labor

Reform League found the Cobdenite argument persuasive and came to the conclusion that the “tyrannous greed which held negroes slaves, now denies to workers freedom in exchange; as color lines fade out . . . the same political party which helped abolish chattel-bondage” in the South “now insists that ‘protective’ slavery shall be perpetual in

New England!”21

In response, protectionists pointed to the poverty of the British working class, the supposed glut of British goods, and forced emigration from free trade England owing to

British overproduction. The pauper laborer of England was thus shackled in servitude to

20 Proceedings of the Annual Dinner of the New York Free Trade Club, March 15th, 1884, at Delmonico’s (New York: New York Free Trade Club, 1884), 17. 21 Ezra H. Heywood, Free Trade: Showing that Mediaeval Barbarism, Cunningly Termed ‘Protection to Home Industry,’ Tariff Delusion Invades Enterprise, Defrauds Labor, Plunders Trade, and Postpones Industrial Emancipation (Princeton, MA: Co-operative Publishing Company, 1888), 1.

244 its free trade system of cheap products and cheap wages.22 Thus, on one side Americans

were allegedly conspiring with British free traders to keep the United States dependent on

British markets, on the other industrial slave-masters were holding the United States back

from its promised position as the manufacturing center of global trade. Such was the

polemical political climate when Cleveland and his Cobdenite cabinet came into office.

It was within this political and ideological milieu, too, that General M. M.

Trumbull’s popular work, The American Lesson of the Free Trade Struggle in England

(1884), was republished “to show that the moral of the contest is as applicable to the

United States to-day as it was to England forty years ago.” The new edition was replete with an introductory letter of prophetic praise from John Bright, who predicted that just as “the shackles have been struck from the limbs of the slave,” so “they cannot remain to fetter the freedom of your industries.”23

Also in 1884, Cobdenite Congressman William Morrison sought a reduction in the tariff in a fashion similar in kind to that taken by Sir Robert Peel in England, with the initial encouragement of American free trade’s “jackal,” Edward Atkinson, and its

“roaring lion,” David Wells. Reeling from the aforementioned conspiratorial attacks and the small chance of the bill’s ultimate success, however, Morrison himself was becoming disconsolate. Wells gave Morrison encouragement to keep up the fight, writing to him that he ought to read a pamphlet entitled History of the Free Trade Struggle in Great

22 New York Tribune, 19 Aug. 1885, 4. 23 M. M. Trumbull, The American Lesson of the Free Trade Struggle in England (Chicago: Schumm and Simpson, 1884 [1882]), 7, 5. 245 Britain to “strengthen” his “soul.”24 The Anti-Corn-Law League’s antebellum efforts remained a source of inspiration to the postbellum American free trade movement.

With Morrison’s Peelite tariff bill hanging in political limbo, U.S. free traders continued to educate Western farmers on the tariff, and far-traveling Cobdenite Henry

Ward Beecher observed “a change of sentiment, in favor of free trade” in that section, a change that might lead to the destruction of “the very poisonous root” of protectionism.25

Cobdenites also found fresh support from more moderate reform organizations like the

Manufacturers’ Tariff Reform League—a New York-based manufacturing lobby—and

the Philadelphia Tariff Reform Club, a low-tariff group that popped up smack in the

middle of the Listian heartland. Aid also arrived from the more extreme free trade press,

particularly the Million, first published in March 1884 in Des Moines, Iowa under the

editorship of Cobdenite and Western secretary for the AFTL, Henry Philpott. The

paper—filled with the free trade writings of leading U.S. Cobdenites, editorial defenses

of the Cobden Club, and reprints of Cobden Club leaflets—also made special note in

June 1884 of the subscription of a “colored free trader,” Charles Nelson of Springfield,

Illinois, whose “fearlessness” regarding the “fight for revenue reform ought to put a good

many white democrats to blush.”26 The free trade movement was even beginning to cut

across the country’s racial divide.

24 Atkinson to Morrison, 28 Dec. 1882, carton 16, Atkinson Papers; Williamson, Atkinson, 136; Atkinson to Wells, 14 Jan. 1882, 5 Feb. 1884, 26 Feb. 1884, carton 16, Atkinson Papers; Wells to Morrison, 26 Feb. 1884, quoted in Barnes, Carlisle, 79-80. 25 Beecher to Poultney Bigelow, 4 Oct. 1883, Box 8, Poultney Bigelow Papers, NYPL 26 Petition of the Manufacturers’ Tariff Reform League, May 8, 1884; Benjamin F. Dunlap [Organizing Secretary, Philadelphia Tariff Reform Club] to Bowker, 25 June 1884, Box 89, Bowker Papers, NYPL; 246 With such growing support, Morrison attempted to reduce tariffs by 20 percent across the board. Yet massive wage cuts and strikes owing to another economic downturn, as well as the intractability among Listian Republican congressmen like

Ohio’s William McKinley and protectionist Democratic congressmen like Pennsylvania’s

Samuel J. Randall (41 Democrats voted against Morrison’s proposal) made certain that the bill—and Morrison and Wells’s subsequent failed bill in 1886—would not become law.27

Foreseeing this failure, Atkinson ultimately advised against the final drafts of the proposed tariff bills of 1884 and 1886, encouraging Morrison and Wells instead to reach

“the [manufacturing] men who control the members of Congress by a compact, moderate and well-organized system of clubs throughout the country” where, as Horace White put it, “the ground swell is beginning.” He suggested to both Wells and Bowker instead that the free traders focus on consolidating their clubs, while keeping their actually numbers a secret, so as to better use their small membership to political advantage, much as Cobden

Club founder Thomas Bayley Potter had used the Union and Emancipation Society’s secret membership roles to deter British intervention during the Civil War. If Atkinson’s

“mugwump, independent” club idea was to be implemented, he promised that the free

Philpott to Bowker, 29 Nov. 1883, 11 Dec. 1883 Box 89, Bowker Papers, NYPL; Million, 21 June 1884, 128. 27 For the significance of the Randallite protectionist Democrats in the 1880s, see also Poulshock, “Pennsylvania and the Tariff.” 247 traders would “hold the balance of power between these two bitterly contending parties. .

. . We can do this. It was what Peel did in 1842 and 1846 and Gladstone later.”28

Atkinson’s Peelite recommendations for Cobdenite principles, however, went largely ignored. Morrison’s two tariff bills failed, and the Democratic party’s protectionist wing, led by Randall, became further alienated from the party’s low tariff majority.29 Atkinson himself had had enough. He dejectedly threw up his pragmatic hands: “the Democrats are a mob”; Morrison’s other tariff adviser, Cobdenite J. S.

Moore, was concocting “false issues”; Mongredien’s Cobden Club pamphlet dedicated to the American farmer continued to mislead Westerners as to the ill effects of the protective tariff; and the American free trade clubs’ current methods were accomplishing little except antagonizing and consolidating the protectionist opposition. “Reason will not prevail,” he dejectedly concluded to Bowker. “I am out of it and shall do nothing more except to write my own articles. . . . With the pending struggle I will have nothing to do.”30

Amid Morrison’s failed bills and such internal dissent within the Cobdenite ranks,

Listian nationalists once again showed that they were better at using economic panics to

their political advantage than their Cobdenite cosmopolitan counterparts. Cobdenite

Harvard Professor Frank Taussig, in his Tariff History of the United States, was the first

28 Atkinson to Wells, 2 Feb. 1886, 29 June 1886; Atkinson to Bowker, 2 Sept. 1886, carton 17, Atkinson Papers. 29 For the fallout between the Randall Democrats and the Cobdenites, see Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, chap. 4. 30 Atkinson to Bowker, 22 Dec. 1886, carton 17, Atkinson Papers. For a detailed study of Democratic infighting over the tariff issue, see Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 90-108. 248 to observe that the origins to “this common assertion” that free trade bred economic panics were to be found in the writings of Listian Henry C. Carey, “who has been guilty of many curious perversions of economic history, but of none more remarkable than this.”31 The panic of 1883 was no exception, and helped to undermine popular support for tariff reform in 1884. Anglophobic protectionists like New York’s D. G. Harriman in turn noted that the London Daily Telegraph regretted the 1884 bill’s failure, that “A Bill to establish in America what the English call free trade, had just been defeated. . . . The measure was of enormous importance for English manufacturers, as it would have enabled them to export goods to the United States without the crushing duty now imposed. The fate of the Bill was watched with intense interest by Englishmen.” Cobden

Club member and Congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox’s vote for the Morrison Bill was, according to the New York Tribune, “but carrying out the instructions of that club.”32

“The Carey school,” Edward Atkinson wrote wearily the following year, “have

inoculated the people of this country so completely with the idea that Great Britain

desires free trade in order to break us down that this is one of the chief obstructions to

31 John Edwards Russell, The Panics of 1837 and 1857. An Address Delivered Before the New England Free Trade League May 21, 1896, 1-2; F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States: A Series of Essays (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888), 118. 32 Morrison to Wells, 2 March, 28 May 1884, reel 7, Wells Papers; Williamson, Atkinson, 146-7; D. G. Harriman, “American Tariffs from Plymouth Rock to McKinley: A Complete and Impartial History of our Tariff Systems, 1620-1891,” Defender 52 (New York, 1892), 56; and New York Tribune, 29 Oct. 1884, 8. Cox, author of Free Land and Free Trade: The Lessons of the English Corn Laws Applied to the United States (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880) and a devoted student of Francis Wayland at Brown University, considered Wells his “teacher” in the free-trade “cause.” Cox to Wells, 23 April 1880, reel 6, Wells Papers; William Van Zandt Cox and Milton Harlow Northrup, Life of Samuel Sullivan Cox (Syracuse, N.Y.: M. H. Northrup, 1899), 59, 71. 249 building ourselves up.”33 Grover Cleveland’s presidency at least offered a glimmer of

hope.

Cleveland’s Cobdenite Cabinet

Upon receiving the Republican presidential nomination, James G. Blaine utilized

the various Listian arguments of maintaining high wages through high tariffs and

harming British exports through a hemispheric customs union, policies that also helped

drum up support among German and Irish immigrants. In further Listian fashion, he also

sought government subsidization of American steamships in order to increase foreign

commerce. More importantly to him was maintaining a strong internal home market

while opening up the markets of North and South America through trade agreements,

much as he had attempted in 1881 while briefly state secretary.

Blaine also warned of the consequences of overly globalizing the American

economy through free trade. Particularly, he sought protectionist support from fence-

sitting American farmers, men and women who might otherwise be forced to compete

with “the grain fields of Russia and from the distant plains of India” if free trade with the

world were established. For the industrial worker, he likewise offered up the frightening

picture of American labor in “unfair competition” with Chinese contract and European

pauper labor. His was a localized global vision, one that did not seek free trade with “all

33 Atkinson to Moreton Frewen, 21 Dec. 1885, quoted in Williamson, Atkinson, 149. 250 the world,” but prohibitive trade within the Western Hemisphere. His was the global vision of a Gilded Age Listian nationalist.34

Alternatively, Cleveland’s 1884 presidential campaign had generally “avoided the issue as well as they could,” as an American friend informed John Bright.35 Cleveland’s election nevertheless offered an end to the Republican party’s protectionist emasculation of the U.S. economy. American and British Cobdenites saw the promise of bringing an eventual end to the protective system which had been “taking from our people their sense of manly rivalry, of robust desire to compete on fair fields of contest, of self reliance,” as a Cleveland state department official wrote to Bright. Cobdenite J. Sterling Morton believed that with the establishment of free trade under Cleveland, “we shall so assert

American manhood and American inventive genius that we shall not be afraid to compete in the markets of the world.”36 In the eyes of the free trader, protectionism not only enslaved American commerce, but also threatened American manliness.37

Cleveland himself admitted that he knew little about the tariff issue when he entered office. Mugwump tariff reformer Carl Schurz recollected that Cleveland told him

34 Draft copy of nomination acceptance speech, July 1884, reel 10, James Gillespie Blaine Family Papers, LOC. 35 Edward L. Pierce to Bright, 19 Nov. 1884, Add. 43390, Vol. VIII, John Bright Papers, British Library, London, England. See also, G. Patrick Lynch, “U.S. Presidential Elections in the Nineteenth Century: Why Culture and Economics Both Mattered,” Polity 35 (Autumn 2002), 41-49. 36 National Conference of Free Traders, 2-3. A year later, Morton traveled to Europe for the primary purpose of attending the annual Cobden Club dinner, and expressed his “large-scale” disappointment when the dinner was canceled. James C. Olson, J. Sterling Morton (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1942), 327. 37 U.S. State Department Official [Bayard?] to Bright, 26 Aug. 1886, Add. 43391, Vol. IX, Bright Papers. For an examination of the interaction of late nineteenth-century gender and foreign policy, see Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 251 upon his election, that “I am ashamed to say it, but the truth is I know nothing about the tariff. . . . Will you tell me how to learn?” Cleveland reiterated his ignorance on the issue to the New York World, the pro-free trade periodical formerly under the editorship of

Tilden Democrat Manton Marble (Cobden Club member, 1872), and famous for publishing the free trade articles of David Wells’s friend, adviser, and former government assistant, “The Parsee Merchant,” J. S. Moore.38

America’s Cobdenites worked to shape Cleveland’s tariff views. According to

Cleveland biographer Allan Nevins, “from the moment of his election the tariff reformers had exerted every possible ounce of pressure upon Cleveland, talking with him, writing him letters, and sending him books.” Cobdenites David Wells, Henry Ward Beecher, and

R. R. Bowker sent Cleveland a petition just before his inauguration concerning the obscene growth of surplus revenue brought about by the continued maintenance of the excessive “war” tariff, and Cleveland gave their opinions special attention. Thomas

Bayard wrote Wells that Cleveland “fully respects and values the ‘Independents’ and I do not think Horace White and his friends and associates will feel themselves without

38 Henry L. Stoddard, As I Knew Them: Presidents and Politics from Grant to Coolidge (New York and London: Harper, 1927), 152. Moore himself had been greatly influenced by the philosophy of Cobden and Bright during his time in Manchester, England in the late 1830s, and had been a Cobden Club member since 1873. “James Solomon Moore,” Appletons’ Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events of the Year 1892 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1893), 561; Wells on J. S. Moore at the 1873 Cobden Club annual dinner, Free Trade and Free Enterprise, 47; and J. S. Moore, The Parsee Letters; Addressed to Horace Greeley, Sahib, by Adersey Curiosibhoy, Parsee Merchant of Bombay; As Originally Published in the New York “World.” (New York: American Free Trade League, 1869). 252 weight or just influence.” The Democratic leadership correspondingly asked Cobdenite editor Horace White’s advice concerning cabinet appointments and policy.39

Upon Cleveland’s election, Wells himself was invited to a meeting with the president and his cabinet. They “talked tariff and silver,” Wells recounted. Already an advisor to congressmen like Samuel Cox, William Morrison, John G. Carlisle, and Roger

Q. Mills, as well as cabinet members Treasury Secretary Daniel Manning and Secretary of State Thomas Bayard, Wells realized that he and President Cleveland would be very close: that Wells would essentially be a cabinet member regarding economic issues.40

Along with Horace White and Wells, Cobdenites Edward Atkinson, Manton

Marble, R. R. Bowker, and Professor Arthur Latham Perry similarly became unofficial economic advisors for various members of Cleveland’s administration. Marble, for instance, made a large amount of Treasury Secretary Manning’s final decisions and wrote many of his reports; R. R. Bowker helped craft Cleveland’s 1887 annual message;

Professor Perry was even offered the position of treasury secretary upon the death of

Manning in 1887; and Cobdenite Jacob Schoenhof was made Cleveland’s consul to

Tunstall, England, where, upon his arrival, he jokingly searched “for the barrels of British gold which he had heard the Cobden Club was sending over to this country to corrupt

American politics, and break down the American tariff.” Noticeable political and

39 Nevins, Cleveland, 280-81; Joyner, Wells, 168; Shearman to Cleveland, 31 Jan. 1885, microfilm, reel 5, Grover Cleveland Papers, LOC.; Bayard to White, 10 Dec. 1884, quoted in Logsdon, White, 320. 40 Cox to Wells, 23 April 1880, 17 Dec. 1882, reel 6; Morrison to Wells, 5 Apr. 1877, reel 5; 14 Jan. 1882, reel 6; 7 Sept., 14 Dec., 1884, reel 7; Carlisle to Wells, 20 March 1883, reel 6; Mills to Wells, 29 Feb. 1876, reel 4; Manning to Wells, 8 Sept. 1886, reel 7; Bayard to Wells, 27 May 1880, reel 6; 15 Feb. 1884, reel 7, Wells Papers; David Earl Robbins, Jr., “The Congressional Career of William Ralls Morrison” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1963), 53, 56, 146-50; James A. Barnes, John G. Carlisle, Financial Statesman (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1931), 45, 79, 80. 253 ideological battle lines over free trade had been drawn, and President Cleveland turned to the Cobdenite leadership among the Mugwumps for economic advice.41

Enhancing the ideological divide, President Grover Cleveland and his cabinet openly tended toward Anglophilia amid a time of pronounced Anglophobia. Most conspicuous of all to Cleveland’s protectionist opponents during his two administrations was of course the Cobden Club membership of many of Cleveland’s cabinet members and close advisors: Secretary of State Thomas Bayard (Cobden Club member, 1883);

Secretary of War William C. Endicott (Cobden Club member, 1877); Speaker of the

House of Representatives John G. Carlisle during Cleveland’s first administration, and treasury secretary in Cleveland’s second (Cobden Club member, 1883); Secretary of the

Interior L. Q. C. Lamar (Cobden Club member, 1877); Secretary of Agriculture in

Cleveland’s second administration J. Sterling Morton (Cobden Club member, 1883); along with the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee William R. Morrison

(Cobden Club member, 1876), and the aforementioned unofficial cabinet advisors

Bowker, Atkinson, Marble, White, Perry, and Wells.42 America’s most prominent

41 George T. McJimsey, Genteel Partisan: Manton Marble, 1834-1917 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1971), 237-52; Perry to Francis Lynde Stetson, 28 Oct. 1885; Perry to Daniel S. Lamont, 27 Oct. 1885, reel 22, Cleveland Papers; Arthur Latham Perry, Williamstown and Williams College (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 697; Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, 49; Everett P. Wheeler, Sixty Years of American Life: Taylor to Roosevelt, 1850 to 1910 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1917), 177. See also Terrill, “David Ames Wells,” 550, 552; David A. Lake, “International Economic Structures and American Foreign Economic Policy, 1887-1934,” World Politics 35 (July 1983), 528; and Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 110-11. 42 Chicago Inter Ocean, 15 Oct. 1888, 8; 11 July 1877; The Cobden Club. Report and List of Members for the Year 1903; Potter to Bayard, 13 April 1883, Box 63, Bayard Papers, LOC. William Endicott was the son-in-law of Cobdenite merchant George Peabody, Endicott’s daughter married Joseph Chamberlain, and his son, William C. Endicott Jr., joined the Cobden Club in 1877 and was active in the Anti-Imperialist League. Charles Fairchild, Cleveland’s treasury secretary from 1887-89, became a member of the Cobden Club in 1891. 254 Cobdenites thus dominated Cleveland’s administrations. With so many Cobdenites so close to Cleveland, a thunderous Listian response was rather predictably in the forecast.

In the years surrounding Cleveland’s election, protectionists regrouped. The

Industrial League of America, created in Chicago in 1880, found common cause with the

Protective Tariff League, which was formed in 1885, and they strengthened their ties throughout the country. The Industrial League’s publications included the widely disseminated Tariff League Bulletin and a weekly entitled The Defender. By the turn of the century, the league developed connections with 5,668 newspapers and distributed well over 14 million pages of literature.43 The Industrial League became the Iron and

Steel Association in 1888, and for many years to come would flex substantial political muscle in the Congressional Ways and Means Committee.44 The Southern Protective

League would be formed in 1889, home market clubs sprung up in areas like Chicago and

Boston, and more specialized groups like the Arkwright Club for Boston textile manufacturers, the Irish-American Protection Union of New York, and the New York

Association for the Protection of American Industry (founded in 1883) were set up to offset the influence of their local free trade counterparts.45 America’s economic nationalists had thus arrayed themselves to take on Cleveland’s Cobdenite administration.

The Cleveland “Conspiracy”

43 New York Tribune, 22 July 1885, 4; 20 Jan. 1899, 5. 44 Tarbell, Tariff in Our Times, 173-74. 45 Nelson W. Aldrich, The Trap for New England: Unsoundness of the Argument for Free Raw Materials and Insincerity of the Democratic Offer (Boston: The Home Market Club, 1892), 2; New York Tribune, 1 June 1890, 1; 19 Nov. 1896, 3; 17 Jan. 1883, 8. 255

Charges of a British conspiracy against the Cleveland administration began during the 1884 presidential campaign, and continued following Cleveland’s first message to

Congress in 1885. In it, Cleveland, along with Wells’s close friend, Secretary of State

Bayard, “showed plainly” to his political adversaries “that his administration would be favorable to the interests and influence of England and Canada” by opposing “the building of the Nicaraguan canal and the annexation of territory to the United States.”

Cleveland and Bayard viewed this canal attempt—under the previous administration’s proposed 1884 Frelinghuysen-Zavala Treaty—as a violation of the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer

Treaty, which guaranteed neutrality and shared control of any future canal ventures between the United States and Britain. The 1884 proposal was a clear challenge to

England, and could have led to armed conflict as well as a virtual American protectorate in Central America. Cobdenite Bayard wrote David Wells that he feared intervention would inevitably lead to an overseas empire, signaling the end of the Republic.46

Listian nationalist James Blaine had alternatively supported American control over any canal attempts in Central America. One campaign pamphleteer even coined the canal zone “America’s Egypt,” meaning that any isthmian canal needed to be under the sole control of the United States and would thereby bring the same military and trade benefits that the Suez brought the British in Egypt. According to the 1884 campaign

46 Harlen Eugene Makemson, “Images of Scandal: Political Cartooning in the 1884 Presidential Campaign” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002), 145-46; Bayard quoted in Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 91. 256 pamphlet, only Blaine’s Anglophobic defense of the Monroe Doctrine would properly see this isthmian venture through to the end.47

Cleveland’s Cobdenites proved the pamphleteer correct. The incoming administration desired none of this, preferring to keep clear of any military dispute with

England and to eschew formal imperial expansion. In Cleveland’s address, according to

Listian pamphleteer Patrick Cudmore, he had therefore also “openly avowed that he favored free trade and hostility to American manufacturers”; England was fortunate that it had “found such willing and ready friends” in the president and his cabinet.48 The

Cleveland administration exhibited early its Cobdenite anti-imperial leanings and its cooperative spirit toward Britain.

Cleveland similarly disentangled himself from the Arthur Administration’s designs in the Congo. U.S. commercial interest in Africa had been growing since the

Europeans began scrambling for the continent in the early 1870s. By 1883, even as the

European powers ratcheted up their African colonial expansion either for prestige, economic exploitation, national security, or some mixture in between, U.S interest in the

“Dark Continent” had also reached the national stage when Arthur redrew American attention to Africa in his 1883 annual message. Aggressive expansionists in Congress followed up on Arthur’s message, some asking that the United States offer protection to

47 James Morris Morgan, America’s Egypt: Mr. Blaine’s Foreign Policy (New York: Hermann Bartsch, 1884). For Blaine and his state secretary successor Frelinghuysen’s attempts to overturn the Clayton- Bulwer Treaty, see Pletcher, Awkward Years, 28-33, 63-67; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment, 136-38. 48 Patrick Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration: Free Trade, Protection and Reciprocity (New York: P.J. Kennedy, 1896), 3. 257 its African missionaries, others believing that the Congo would make a good dumping- ground for the South’s “excess” cotton produce and freed black population.49

From among the possible tools of globalization at their disposal, these American expansionists decided upon first establishing a steamship line between New Orleans,

Charleston, and the Congo River. The African Trade Society at this time similarly sought a steamship and mail service between Liberia and New Orleans. The International

African Association, under the auspices of Belgium’s Leopold II, desired U.S. recognition in the early 1880s, which Arthur gave in April 1884. Germany’s Bismarck, fearing imperial rivalry and possible German commercial exclusion in the Congo, thereafter called for a conference in in the fall of 1884. State Secretary

Frelinghuysen then sent Listian John A. Kasson to attend. The conferees agreed upon outlawing the slave trade, rules for colonizing the African interior, and establishing international freedom of commerce and navigation.50

It was essentially an early “Open Door” policy (a term famously coined by John

Hay in the late 1890s) for West Africa. While some newspapers, businessmen, politicians, and missionaries favored the resolutions, opponents of the Berlin conference

49 American interests were also drawn, and foiled by British meddling, in the creation of a railway from the Persian Gulf to Tehran in 1886. See John S. Galbraith, “Britain and American Railway Promoters in Late Nineteenth Century Persia,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 21 (Summer 1989): 248-262. 50 Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789-1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 113; Milton Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865-1890 (De Kalb: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 144-56; Pletcher, Awkward Years, 309-24. For the European Scramble for Africa, see, for instance, Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 (New York: Random House, 1991); Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan Press, 1981 [1961]); and Henri Brunschwig, French Colonialism, 1871-1914: Myths and Realities (New York, Washington, and London: Frederick A. Praeger, 1964 [1960]). 258 looked askance upon its connotations for possible U.S. territorial and political entanglements in Africa. The popular Mugwump organ the Nation, for instance, questioned why Americans would want to have a helping hand in the European carving up of the mythical Dark Continent. It also noted, with tongue in cheek, how odd it was that a Republican administration could give its support to turning the Congo region into a free trade paradise when they should have encouraged instead “a good tariff” to stimulated local industries “in the manner prescribed by the American economist Henry

C. Carey” rather than covering the region “with the deadly upas tree of British free trade.” Dripping with irony, the Nation warned that now the Congo will “be speedily flooded with the products of the pauper labor of Europe,” factories will close, and “the

Cobden Club, too, will distribute its poisonous literature far and wide.”51

Like the proposed Nicaraguan canal plan, the treaty’s ratification was timed to come up for a vote in 1885. The International African Association had even cleverly couched its manifesto in Cobdenite language, claiming that its rule of governance and commerce coincided with the doctrine of John Bright and Richard Cobden. Such language was not enough to procure support from Cleveland and his Cobdenite cabinet.

Cleveland feared the treaty’s possible political and colonial entanglements, and promptly revoked recognition and refused even to submit the treaty for Senate approval.52

51 Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust, 144-156; LaFeber, New Empire, 53; Nation 40 (1 Jan. 1885): 8-9. 52 United States Department of State, Index to the Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the First Session of the 49th Congress (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885-1886), 259. Blaine would afterward take renewed interest in the Congo in 1890, with one expansionist predicting to Blaine that Central Africa promised to be “the greatest market for our domestic cotton goods outside our own domains.” Quoted in Lysle E. Meyer, “Henry S. Sanford and the Congo: A Reassessment,” African Historical Studies 4 (1971), 36. 259

Goldbugs and Greenbacks: Morality and Conspiracy

With the African treaty and the Nicaraguan canal fading to the background of the

national political landscape, Chicago’s Inter Ocean repeated its unsubstantiated charge that the Cobden Club had contributed funds to Grover Cleveland’s 1884 election: a charge, it claimed, that “is not doubted by any intelligent, fair minded person in this country.” The pro-free trade New York Times came to the Cobden Club’s defense, arguing that “the bugbear and fright” of the club was “nothing other than supreme silliness and deception.” The organization in fact had limited funds and members. The club was “important and formidable,” rather, because its members were “for the most part men of high ability and distinguished record, and so of large personal influence, and represent the most advanced economic thought and liberal politics, in every highly civilized nation,” the United States included.53

The New York Times’s 1885 defense did not stop the throwing of subsequent political jabs at the Cobdenite administration over the issue of national bimetallism, the free coinage of both gold and silver which had come to an end in 1873 with the de facto

American turn toward the gold standard, only to be partially revitalized in the compromise Bland-Allison Act of 1878. Cleveland, Treasury Secretary Daniel Manning,

Wells, White, Atkinson, and Secretary of State Bayard remained inveterate supporters of the gold standard and favored the suspension of silver coinage. Like Cobden and Bright,

53 Chicago Inter Ocean, 3 Oct. 1891, 12; New York Times, 12 Jan. 1885, 3. 260 America’s Cobdenites believed that inflationary policies—from greenbacks to national bimetallism—were uncivilized, and led to moral and economic decay.54

Cobdenite economist and Massachusetts politician Amasa Walker, for instance, was one of the earliest adversaries of silver agitation and considered the greenback a

“fictitious currency” that exhibited a particularly “false and pernicious” character;

Atkinson believed that “the Government cannot assume the functions of a by issuing convertible currency,” and considered the currency question “the great moral question of today”; Wells once recommended that the treasury secretary should begin burning greenbacks until they attained parity with gold, but even this process would have been “too slow” for Walker. Similarly, since the late 1860s, Horace White had taken special aim at silverite interference in government, and Cobdenite Professor Frank

Taussig believed silver agitation was “born of restlessness and ignorance,” and castigated

“inflationists” for tinkering with the currency as a remedy for “real or fancied evils.”55

Alternatively, silverites—particularly Greenbackers, silver mining interests, and indebted farmers—immediately began characterizing the Cleveland administration as

54 Hamer Stansfeld, Money and the Money Market Explained, and the Future Rate of Discount Considered, an appeal to Richard Cobden and John Bright (London, 1860); William Graham Sumner, The History of American Currency (New York: John F. Trow & Sons, 1878); David Ames Wells, Robinson Crusoe’s Money (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1876); and Tucker, Mugwumps, 59-72. 55 Walker to McCulloch, 4 Feb. 1867, vol. 3, Hugh McCulloch Papers, LOC; Amasa Walker, The Science of Wealth: A Manual of Political Economy. Embracing the Laws of Trade, Currency, and Finance (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1866), 223, 360; Hamer Stansfeld, Correspondence on Monetary Panics, With the Honorable Amasa Walker, Late Secretary of States for Massachusetts (London, 1860); Atkinson to McCulloch, 17 Nov. 1867, vol. 3, McCulloch Papers; Atkinson to Henry Ward Beecher, 1 Oct. 1867, carton 14, Edward Atkinson Letterbook, Atkinson Papers; David Ames Wells, The Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1875); Logsdon, White, 330-36; Horace White, Coin’s Financial Fool; or the Artful Dodger Exposed, a Complete Reply to “Coin’s Financial School” (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1895); Frank W. Taussig, The Silver Situation in the United States (Baltimore: Guggenheimer, Weil & Co., 1892), 113. 261 pro-British. Agrarians and other silverites perceived the “goldbugs” in office to be in partnership with England. Listian Henry Carey had enunciated such a theory since the mid-1860s, suggesting that an increase in the money supply would help end the postwar economic downturn, diminish the influence of the Bank of England within the U.S. financial system, and strengthen American protectionism by further discouraging imports.56 He stated, for instance, that “that monetary steadiness and safety are to be found in the direction of establishing for ourselves a standard different from that maintained by Britain.”57

The silverites also argued that the price of silver had decreased sharply throughout

the world at this time. Silver’s devaluation was due in large part to the appreciation of

gold stemming from the prevailing gold standard system in the United States and Britain.

Cheap silver, they continued, allowed British merchants to purchase more silver with

their gold. Silverites instead sought silver coinage in the United States, with or without an

international bimetallic agreement.

The Indian rupee, silverites further noted, was silver-backed, which—combined

with the British merchants’ vast amounts of silver bullion—allowed them to purchase

enormous quantities of Indian wheat and cotton. Thus, lower silver prices—compounded

by the ease and lower costs of Indian wheat transports to Europe via the recently

constructed Suez Canal—effectively subsidized Indian exports and forced American farm

56 Rodney J. Morrison, Henry C. Carey and American Economic Development (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), 69-70. 57 Quoted in Morrison, Carey and American Economic Development, 70.

262 products from European markets. Missouri Democratic Congressman Richard Bland thought that America’s “gold policy is driving the products of our silver mines to India, there to be used as money to employ Hindoos [sic] to raise wheat, corn, and cotton in direct competition with the farmers of America.” Senator Thomas M. Bowen of Colorado argued further that Cleveland’s monometallic policy provided England “the cudgel, or the bludgeon rather, with which to gradually drive us from the world’s markets.”58

In an attempt to appease the silverites, Cleveland sent Manton Marble as a special envoy to gauge Western European sentiment regarding international bimetallism at a conference in Europe in 1885.59 Marble was as yet a gold monometallist, as well as a long-time free trader, Cobden Club member, former editor of the New York World, and close friend of David Wells and Horace White. With the British intractable on the gold issue, Cleveland’s bimetallism scheme turned into a sham; the conference came to naught. A Republican congressman ironically commented afterward that the silverites were “doubtless indebted” to Cleveland for appointing “a man to such a position when he was a notorious member of a foreign institution every British member of which is hostile to the coinage of the white metal.”60

58 Crapol, America for Americans, 148-50; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 73-74; Congressional Record [hereafter CR], 48 Cong., 2 Sess., 7 April 1886, 3207, 8 March 1886, 2180; Minutes of 9 Feb. 1872, CC MSS; Terrill, “David Ames Wells,” 554. 59 International bimetallism, while not preferable to the gold standard, was considered much more “sound” than the unilateral bimetallic advocacy of many silverites. 60 McJimsey, Genteel Partisan, 153-4, 218, 228; Marble to Bayard, 7 July 1885, Box 217, Bayard Papers; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 5 May 1888, 3757-58. Marble, “a confirmed advocate of the gold standard,” drafted Cleveland’s silver letter against bimetallism in 1885, but returned from his Europe mission a confirmed international bimetallist. Marble, upon his conversion, quickly grew to loathe the political independence and strict gold adherence of White, Wells, Atkinson, and Perry, particularly following Cleveland’s 1888 defeat. McJimsey, Marble, 223-5, 231-7, 250-1. 263

The “Great Debate” of 1888

As the end of the decade approached, the 1880s depression and had come to an end and the tariff question—the “Great Debate”—superseded the silver issue following Cleveland’s 1887 annual message, although Cleveland did send Cobdenite goldbug Edward Atkinson as his commissioner to Europe to ascertain sentiment (or the lack thereof as it turned out) concerning the bimetallic issue that same year, amid protests as to Atkinson’s “reputation as a gold-monometallist.”61 Heavily influenced by

Cobdenites Wells and Bowker, and following pressure from low-tariff Midwestern and

Southern Democrats, the annual message was devoted to a call for tariffs for revenue only and corresponding increases to the free list, further marginalizing the Democratic party’s protectionist wing and creating political waves both at home and upon the shores of Great Britain.62

61 Bayard to Atkinson, 28 April 1887; Atkinson to C. S. Fairchild, 16 May 1887; Atkinson to Fairchild, 23 May 1887; Atkinson to Fairchild, 24 Oct. 1887, carton 3; Bayard to Atkinson, 11 March, 31 March, 6 May 1887, folder 6; Aug. 27, 1887, folder 7, carton 12, Atkinson Papers; Edward Atkinson, Bi-metallism in Europe. Report Made by Edward Atkinson to the President of the United States, Oct. 1887 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887); Williamson, Atkinson, 142, 148-9; Belford’s Magazine 2 (Dec. 1888), 92; Henry B. Russell, International Monetary Conferences (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898), 346-50. Atkinson reported directly to future Cobden Club member (1891) Charles Fairchild in the Treasury Department. For detailed treatment of the “Great Debate,” see, for instance, Joanne Reitano, The Tariff Question in the Gilded Age: The Great Debate of 1888 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Charles W. Calhoun, Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Campaign of 1888 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008); J. Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1903), 127-133; and Douglas A. Irwin, “Higher Tariffs, Lower Revenues? Analyzing the Fiscal Aspects of ‘The Great Tariff Debate of 1888,’” Journal of Economic History 58 (March 1998): 59-72. 62 Poulshock, “Pennsylvania and the Tariff,” 303-4. 264 Outspoken Cobdenite, single-tax proponent, and labor advocate Henry George— who, like Cobden, closely tied land reform to tariff reform—described the message as “a manly, vigorous, and most effective free-trade speech,” and stumped for Cleveland’s reelection in 1888.63 Wells and Atkinson felt that their faith in Cleveland had been vindicated. The Chicago Tribune—derisively called “the Cobden Club’s Chicago

Tribune” by its protectionist counterpart, Inter Ocean—came to Cleveland’s defense, arguing that Western farmers were harmed greatly by high protectionism. Belford’s declared that “the free-trade fight is on . . . Grover Cleveland may yet be the standard- bearer in a victorious campaign for human rights against combined monopolies.” The

New York Reform Club—created “under the auspices” of the New York Free Trade

Club—distributed 926,000 copies of the message. James Russell Lowell, at the

Massachusetts Tariff Reform League’s 1887 annual dinner, admitted that “I feel myself strongly attracted to Mr. Cleveland as the best representative of the higher type of

Americanism that we have seen since Lincoln was snatched from us.” Political scientist

David A. Lake classifies Cleveland’s address as the moment in which the American tariff was “internationalized . . . as a more active instrument for promoting exports,” and chronologically begins his study of U.S. commercial policy with the speech.64

63 Henry George, Protection or Free Trade (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1911 [1886]), 324; Henry George quoted in Thomas Hudson McKee, ed., Protection Echoes from the Capitol (Washington, D.C.: McKee &Co., 1888), 155; Elwood P. Lawrence, Henry George in the British Isles (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957), 83, 84; , Louis F. Post, The Prophet of San Francisco: Personal Memories & Interpretations of Henry George (New York: Vanguard Press, 1930), 114-124. 64 Joyner, Wells, 172; Fleming, Bowker, 217; Terrill, “David Ames Wells,” 553; Chicago Tribune, 11 Dec. 12 Dec. 1887; Chicago Inter Ocean, 3 May 1888, 4; Chicago Inter Ocean, 4 May 1890; Officers and Committees, Members, Constitution, By-Laws, Rules, Reports, etc., 1889 (New York: Reform Club, 1889), 101-105; Reform Club to Worthington Chauncey Ford, December 1887, folder 1887, box 2, Ford Papers; 265 Protectionist Senator William Frye of Maine declared that Cleveland had “thrown down the gauntlet of ‘free trade,’” and provided as proof a litany of British praise for his message. The Tariff League Bulletin noted that Cleveland “and his Cobden Club assistants . . . shrewdly seek to secure by gradual approaches the citadel of Protection which they dare not attempt to carry by direct assault.” According to the Republican

Campaign Text-Book, a British member of Parliament cabled the New York Herald that

“the Cobden Club will henceforth set up a special shrine for the worship of President

Cleveland, and send him all its publications gratis. Cobden founded free trade; Cleveland saved it. Such is the burden of the song all through England to-day.” The Text-Book also stated that London’s Pall Mall Gazette warned “English free-traders would be well advised if they moderated the ecstasy of their jubilation over President Cleveland’s message. Every word which they say in its favor will be used as a powerful argument against the adoption of its recommendations.” Such warnings came too late. According to the Republican National Committee, “they had already let the Democratic Free-Trade cat out of the Cleveland bag, and all the Free-Trade efforts in Great Britain and America cannot get it in again.”65

“James Russell Lowell’s Speech at the Dinner of the Tariff Reform League, Boston, December 24,” Our Day: A Record and Review of Current Reform, 2 vols., (Boston: Our Day Publishing Company, 1888), I, 110; David A. Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939 (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 6. Charles Francis Adams, Jr. was the first president of the Massachusetts Tariff Reform League (founded in April 1884), Wells, Sumner, and William Endicott were among its vice presidents, and William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., its secretary. As it grew it changed its name to the New England Tariff Reform League in 1888, followed by the New England Free Trade League in 1894. By 1895, it had about 1300 members in twenty states. New York Tribune, 21 Nov. 1894, 3; 1 May 1896, 8; Constitution of the New England Free Trade League with a List of the Officers and Members, April 1, 1895 (Boston: New England Free Trade League, 1895). 65 Protection against Free Trade. Speech of Hon. William P. Frye, of Maine, on the President’s Message, in the Senate of the United States, January 23, 1888 (Washington, D.C.: Gray & Clarkson, 1888), 1-2; 266

Figure 5: “Cleveland Will Have a Walk-Over.” Republican magazine Judge depicts Grover Cleveland balancing precariously on a fraying rope, holding a balancing pole labeled “Free Trade Policy” and carrying the Democratic Party donkey and John Bull on

James G. Blaine, “Views upon the Recommendation of the President,” in What Shall We Do with It? (Meaning the Surplus) Taxation and Revenue Discussed (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1888), 15-24; Tariff League Bulletin, 2 Nov. 1888, 205; George Francis Dawson, The Republican Campaign Text-Book for 1888 (New York, 1888), 87. For a detailed look at the 1887 tariff message, see Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, chap. 5. For the national and international monetary issue, see also Cobden Club member Francis A. Walker’s International Bimetallism (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1896); H. W. Brands, The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years’ War Over the American Dollar (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006); Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly tradition and the Politics of Finance in America, 1865-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Ted Wilson, Battles for the Standard: Bimetallism and the Spread of the Gold Standard in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 267 his back. John Bull’s back pocket is stuffed with “Cobden Club Free Trade Tracts.” Judge, 25 Aug. 1888.

Although Cleveland denied that his message was a free trade tract, his political enemies believed he had “boldly proclaimed himself a free trader, and openly avowed hostility to protection in any form.” The Philadelphia Press begrudgingly thanked

Cleveland “for his bold, manly, and unequivocal avowal of his extreme free-trade

purposes.” Inter Ocean called the message a “Cobden Club homily. . . . The President has issued a free-trade pamphlet in which no argument is educed that has not been used by the Cobden Club organs till it has become stale and threadbare.” One Republican congressman noted that “the message of the President . . . has the unqualified endorsement of every British paper. . . . They declare that his message reads like an extract from some old speech of John Bright.” A former governor of Ohio thought that

“that big boy in the White House” sounded in his speech “like an ardent youth fresh from the Cobden Club.” Another critic noted that his message “was only a reiteration” from the club’s pamphlets, showing that Cleveland “had read them closely and with a good memory. The President was evidently an easy convert to Cobdenism.” If Cleveland and his Cobdenites wanted the upcoming presidential election to center around the tariff debate, the protectionists were more than willing to comply, while simultaneously twisting the lion’s tail.66

66 Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration, 4; Philadelphia Press quoted in , The American Nation: A History Volume 24, National Problems, 1885-1897, ed. by Albert Bushnell Hart, 27 vols. (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907), 65; Chicago Inter Ocean, 7 Dec. 1887, 268

Figure 6: “Under which Emblem?” Above, the Tariff League Bulletin explains to its readers a month before the 1888 presidential elections that they must choose between the “battle shields of the two parties”—either the shield of the Cobden Club [left], which will “bind you in perpetual poverty,” or the American Protective League [right], representing American manufactures, commerce, and agriculture alike. Tariff League Bulletin, 8 Oct. 1888, 166.

Listian nationalist James G. Blaine was interviewed in Paris by a reporter for the

New York Tribune, and his response was widely circulated. Blaine labeled Cleveland’s speech a free trade measure, as it called for a tariff for revenue only, and warned that it would drastically lower the treasury surplus, deluge U.S. markets with the dumping of foreign imported goods, and barbarically force the country’s manufacturing economy back into agricultural subsistence. Blaine suggested that the treasury surplus could instead easily be lowered through increased military spending and by lowering excise

4; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 5 May 1888, 3757; Washington Post, 26 Dec. 1887, 4; Curtiss, Protection and Prosperity, 626. 269 taxes. The South needed industrial protection more than any other section, Blaine added, and, while the United States needed foreign markets, free trade was not the way to gain them. The president’s message went even further than the Walker Tariff of 1846, Blaine warned. He called instead for a “new political economy” one that protected the home market and developed Southern industry through protective tariffs, increased defense spending, and increased foreign trade “in all practical and advantageous ways, but not on the principle of the Free Traders.” Listian Blaine’s articulation of a “new political economy” was of course that of the imperialism of economic nationalism.67

The subsequent proposed Mills Bill of 1888—considered a resurrection of “the insidious craftiness of the Cobdenites and their American allies” by a protectionist pamphleteer—attempted to enact the tariff reforms mentioned in Cleveland’s 1887 message, lowering tariff rates by a modest 7 percent. The enlarged free list included many South American raw materials, which, unlike the subsequent McKinley Tariff, would have thereby allowed for freer trade with Latin America without the signing of prohibitive or retaliatory reciprocity treaties. Democrat Roger Q. Mills from Texas was himself considered “an out-and-out free-trader,” although he would not become a member of the Cobden Club for some time (1909), likely owing to his silverite sympathies. Cobdenite J. S. Moore in particular was singled out on the floor of Congress as the primary author of this perceived pro-British bill, as he had been working closely with the House Ways and Means Committee throughout Cleveland’s first term, as had

67 New York Tribune, 8 Dec. 1887. Blaine had started to woo Southern voters with protectionism on the 1884 campaign trail. See Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 138. 270 Edward Atkinson and David Wells.68 Thereafter, under the direction of Cobdenites

Manton Marble, John G. Carlisle, and Henry Watterson, the Democratic party platform of

1888 explicitly supported Cleveland’s tariff message and the Mills bill.69

Figure 7: “The Transfusion of Blood—A Proposed Dangerous Experiment.” Judge portrays “Dr. Mills” [middle] talking to a healthy “American Workingman” into giving sustenance to the ailing “English Industries” intravenously through the “Mills Bill.” Among the other attempted remedies is “Cobden Tonic.” Judge, 7 July 1888.

As expected, reaction to the bill was mixed. Outraged Republicans alternatively declared that the Mills Bill would further reduce the wages of Irish-American laborers.

They alleged that the Cobden Club, with its hundreds of members within British

Parliament, had infiltrated Congress and was behind the Mills Bill—that “the executive,

68 Curtis, Protection and Prosperity, 623; Ida M. Tarbell, The Tariff in Our Times (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 155; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 5 May 1888, 3761, 3757-59, 12 May 1888, 4062-63; New York Times, 7 May 1888, 5; Tarbell, Tariff in Our Times, 159; Washington Post, 9 May 1888, 2. Atkinson corresponded frequently with the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, William L. Wilson, as well as committee member C. R. Breckenridge. 69 McJimsey, Genteel Partisan, 248-9. 271 judicial [referring to newly appointed Supreme Court Justice and Cobden Club member

L. Q. C. Lamar], and legislative branches of the Government are represented in force in a foreign organization hostile to every American interest.” And who were the American supporters of the bill? “A few men anxious to surrender our markets . . . to foreign possession . . . American pets of the British free-trade aristocracy.” Fueling such fiery charges, some of the bill’s most vocal proponents included Cobden Club members such as Congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox—a free trader since “corn-law times”—and

Democratic Speaker of the House John Carlisle. Some Anglophobic Democrats even jumped into the fray. Irish-born New Jersey Congressman William McAdoo “inveighed vehemently against the Cobden Club” and “everything British,” but especially “against the Democratic party for its attempt to supplant the star-spangled banner everywhere by the British union jack.” Listian nationalist William McKinley, in his minority dissent of the bill, regarded it “not as a revenue-reduction measure, but as a direct attempt to fasten upon this country the British policy of free foreign trade,” and “inspired by importers and foreign producers . . . who want to diminish our trade and increase their own.” With the presidential election fast approaching and an intractable congressional, such bipartisan opposition proved successful; the Mills Bill came to naught.70

70 Robbins, “William Ralls Morrison,” 56; Curtis, Protection and Prosperity, 623; Tarbell, Tariff in Our Times, 155, 159; letter of S. S. Cox, reprinted in Free-Trader (March 1870), 171; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 5 May 1888, 3761, 12 May 1888, 4062; New York Times, 7 May 1888, 5; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 5 May 1888, 3757-9, 12 May 1888, 4063; Washington Post, 9 May 1888, 2; McKinley, excerpt from minority report, 2 April 1888; McKinley in the House of Representatives, 18 May 1888, microfilm reel 8, William McKinley Papers, LOC. J. S. Moore and William Morrison had also tried passing a similar bill in 1886 with the help of David Wells and Edward Atkinson. See Tarbell, Tariff in Our Times, 143; Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, 50; and Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 102-3. 272 Conclusion

The charges of a British conspiracy were beginning to wear noticeably on Grover

Cleveland’s 1888 presidential campaign, even as he signed off on a bipartisan bill calling for an inter-American peace conference. The Cleveland Administration’s Cobdenite handling of Nicaraguan and African affairs, a virulent fisheries dispute with Canada that quickly took on global proportions (discussed in the following chapter), as well as various charges of a transatlantic goldbug and free trade conspiracy led up to what would become the final nail in Cleveland’s 1888 campaign coffin.

A die-hard Republican in California named George Osgoodby concocted a clever scheme apparently in order to steal as many Irish votes as possible for the Republican presidential nominee, Benjamin Harrison. Osgoodby decided to write to the British minister to the United States, Lionel Sackville-West, as one “Murchison,” an Englishborn naturalized American. Osgoodby tricked the British minister into insinuating that the

Democrats—and the Cleveland Administration in particular—were pro-British regarding free trade, whereas “Mr. Harrison is a high-tariff man, a believer on the American side of all questions and undoubtedly an enemy to British interests generally.” Claiming to act on behalf of other fellow British countrymen, he asked Sackville-West whether they would

“do England a service by voting for Cleveland and against the Republican system of tariff.”71

71 George Osgoodby to Sackville-West, 4 Sept. 1888, reprinted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1971), II, 1680-81. 273 Sackville-West fell into the trap, writing to “Murchison” that the Democratic

Party “is, I believe, still desirous of maintaining friendly relations with Great Britain,” and that Cleveland would follow through on the promises made in his 1888 message.

Osgoodby passed the reply among his friends, and it ended up in the hands of the rabidly

Republican Los Angeles Times. By October, the “Murchison Letter” controversy spread throughout the country’s protectionist press. In response, Cleveland quickly had

Sackville-West dismissed in the hopes of diffusing the politically volatile situation.72

On the eve of Sackville-West’s dishonorable discharge, Cleveland precipitously notified reporters that another campaign trick was about to be launched against him days before the election. He was to receive a series of complimentary resolutions “purporting to come from some English club of the Cobden order” for his administration’s actions regarding “the tariff question,” and that the press should “not give much credence to the rumour.” Such a rumor never materialized, but the Murchison incident, along with the amiable settlement of a fisheries dispute and the administration’s fallout with Tammany

Hall, left a political scar leading up to the elections.

The damage done by the “Murchison Letter” remains uncertain. Cleveland, however, although winning a slim margin of the popular vote, lost the electoral vote and the 1888 election to Harrison. The New York Times directly connected Cleveland’s loss to his administration’s friendly relationship with England. The newspaper “pardoned” the

“poor Irishmen” who voted against Cleveland “for their credulity” in believing Cleveland

72 Sackville-West to Osgoodby, 13 Sept. 1888, reprinted in Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, II, 1682. 274 would “surrender to British influence” owing to his administration’s close ties to the

Cobden Club.73

With Blaine ready to assume control of Harrison’s state department, the protectionist New York Tribune’s Whitelaw Reid as minister to France, and William

McKinley holding the fiscal reins in Congress, the Listian nationalists were ready to strike back. Cleveland’s Cobdenite path toward closer Anglo-American relations, the gold standard, anti-imperialism, and freer trade was about to take an abrupt volte-face under the Listian administration of Benjamin Harrison.

Yet American and Canadian Listians alike would first have to overcome the renewed demand for North American commercial union. Listians throughout North

America had not counted on the Cobdenite response to a contentious fisheries dispute between the United States and Canada in the late 1880s. 100 years before NAFTA, North

America’s Cobdenites would join together in calling for continental commercial unity, forcing in return an extreme Listian response.

73 London Times, 30 Oct. 1888, 5; Robert F. Wesser, “Election of 1888,” in Presidential Elections, ed. Schlesinger, II, 1644-45; New York Times, 14 Nov. 1888, 4. See also Nevins, Cleveland, 428-31; Charles S. Campbell, “The Dismissal of Lord Sackville,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (March 1958): 635- 648; and T. C. Hickley, “George Osgoodby and the Murchison Letter,” Pacific Historical Review 27 (Nov. 1958): 359-70. 275 Chapter 6: 100 Years before NAFTA: Canadian-American Conflict and the Cobdenite Demand for North American Commercial Union, 1885-89

The political and economic “special relationship” between the United States and

Canada is taken for granted in the twenty-first century, just as Canadian-American conflict was taken for granted in the long nineteenth. The close fight between Canada’s

Listians and Cobdenites over the future of North American globalization became frenzied by the late 1880s. Offering a remarkable historical reflection of the debates over NAFTA in the 1980s, the origins of today’s special relationship are to be found in the Gilded Age.

In particular, the onset of yet another Canadian fisheries dispute in the 1880s spurred Cobdenite demands for North American free trade unity and Canadian Listian calls for British imperial federation, thereby further exacerbating the ideological battle between North America’s Cobdenite cosmopolitans and Listian nationalists. The episode played a sizeable role in the development of Canadian globalization and future North

American integration.1

1 For previous work on this episode, see, for instance, George T. Denison, The Struggle for Imperial Unity: Recollections & Experiences (London and New York: MacMillan and Co., 1909); Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); Ian Grant, “Erastus Wiman: a Continentalist Replies to Canadian Imperialism,” Canadian Historical Review 53 (1972): 1-20; Robert Craig Brown, Canada’s National Policy 1883-1900: A Study in Canadian- American Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 161-169; Peter B. Waite, Canada 1874- 1896: Arduous Destiny (Toronto and Montreal: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 205-8; John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002 [1994]), 54-62; Gary Pennanen, “American Interest in Commercial Union with Canada, 1854-1898,” Mid-America 47 (Jan. 1965): 24-39; Charles Callan Tansill, Canadian- American Relations, 1875-1911 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943), 372-411; Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 1885-1897 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1940), 521-561; Donald F. Warner, The Idea of Continental Union: Agitation for the Annexation of Canada to the United States, 1849- 1893 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1960); and David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade 276 This 1880s political fight started bringing to a head the late nineteenth-century conflict over the future of North American globalization. The political and ideological struggle for North American union that occurred 100 years before NAFTA offers as well a much needed reinterpretation of Gilded Age Canadian-American relations. The debate took on global proportions as Canadian Liberals and Conservatives sought to use the tools of modern globalization to advantage in order to determine the country’s ultimate political and global economic reorientation.

The Canadian Fisheries Dispute and the Demand for Commercial Union

As seen by its reversal of the Arthur administration’s policies toward Nicaragua and the Congo, the Cleveland Administration’s Cobdenite approach found broad application in its desire to avoid foreign entanglements, and conflicted with those who thought that Britain’s imperial reach ought to be stripped of its Western Hemispheric handholds. Pro-British charges, in turn, were leveled against Cleveland over a northeastern fisheries dispute with Canada (its foreign policy yet under the ultimate control of England) in which several American ships had been seized by Canadian authorities between 1885 and 1887. In March of 1887, Congress authorized Cleveland to deny Canadian fishermen access to American waters. Cleveland, however, refused to use this aggressive response, preferring instead to negotiate—a diplomatic approach that

and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 219-236. 277 gained the support of Canadian and U.S. Cobdenites, but also brought Anglophobic fury down upon his administration.2

The fisheries dispute became still more tense when the English appointed as their delegate in the issue Joseph Chamberlain, at the time still a prominent member of the

Cobden Club, not yet a fervent imperial protectionist, and hated by American Irish men and women for his vocal opposition to Irish home rule.3 Senator Harrison Holt

Riddleberger of Virginia incriminated that Cleveland’s non-aggressive diplomacy was further proof that the Cleveland administration was “a pro-English organization.” A

Republican congressman afterward pointed out in the House of Representatives that

Cobdenite Secretary of State Thomas Bayard’s name, upon being mentioned by

Chamberlain in Birmingham, England, provoked “cheers of the multitude,” drowning

Chamberlain out and “almost set in motion the walls of the building.” Bayard’s release of the British vessels, “coupled with his cringing apology to the British foreign office for not releasing them sooner, eminently qualify him for membership in the Cobden Club,” the congressman concluded. The majority report of the Republican-controlled Foreign

Relations Committee even concluded that “the President of the United States may be

2 Edward Crapol, America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Westport, 1973), 146; Pletcher, Diplomacy of Trade and Investment, 221-23; Charles S. Campbell, Jr., “American Tariff Interests and Northeastern Fisheries, 1883-1888,” Canadian Historical Review 45 (Sept. 1964): 212-28; James Morton Callahan, American Foreign Policy in Canadian Relations (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1937), 363-82. James G. Blaine also covered the longstanding fisheries controversy in great detail in Twenty Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield with a Review of the Events which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860, 2 vols. (Norwich, CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1886), II, 615-37. 3 For the broader effects of and foreign policy, including the fisheries dispute, see M. J. Sewell, “Rebels or Revolutionaries? Irish-American Nationalism and American Diplomacy, 1865-1885,” Historical Journal 29 (Sept. 1986): 723-733. 278 under influence of foreign and adverse interests.”4 Once again, Cleveland’s ameliorative approach to Anglo-American relations had opened him up to partisan attack and charges of a transatlantic conspiracy.

Cleveland therefore attempted an outwardly tough retaliatory response in order to shake such charges. But his facade of Anglophobic ferocity was apparently transparent enough to those closely following the issue in Canada and the United States. The

Canadian newspaper the Week observed that, “according to Mr. Blaine and the

Republican press, he [Cleveland] has been ‘euchred,’ has been convinced of stroking the lion’s mane and giving it sugar sticks.” The newspaper agreed, suggesting that “there is no occasion for Canadians to lose either head or heart over President Cleveland’s so- called retaliation message to Congress. It is intended exclusively for home consumption, and, after the Presidential election, will cease to have the slightest interest for its distinguished aught, who would doubtless be willing to have it not only forgotten but obliterated after that event.”5 The Republican political humor magazine Judge in turn depicted John Bull and “free trade” hiding transparently behind the retaliation message

[figure 8].

4Congressional Record [hereafter cited as CR], 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 2 Aug. 1888, 7155-57; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., May 5, 1888, 3757; Majority Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations on the Fisheries Treaty, Senate Misc. Doc. No. 109, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 1888, 17; Crapol, America for Americans, 161. 5 Week, 30 Aug. 1888, 633-34. 279

Figure 8: “Too Thin!” Judge insinuates that John Bull, holding a free trade bill behind his back, hides behind Cleveland’s transparent message of retaliation over the fisheries dispute. Judge, 15 Sept. 1888.

Matters were further exacerbated when Cobdenites Bayard and Chamberlain thereafter came to an unofficial agreement preventing further seizures. According to a

Republican pamphleteer, Bayard had requested nothing more than “a feeble note for an explanation” in the face of England and Canada’s “insults to the American flag and the injuries to American rights.” Outraged by the issue’s peaceful settlement, San Francisco’s

Republican newspaper the Evening Bulletin colorfully wrote that Cleveland “is just as much an Anglo-maniac as the dude who turned up his trousers and spread his umbrella on a fine day in New York, because they had just had a dispatch at his club that it was

280 raining in London.”6 Maintaining peaceful Anglo-American relations in the Gilded Age was a dangerous political business.

The Rise of Canada’s Listian Nationalists

Another important development during the fisheries dispute was the resurgence of the movement for Canadian-American commercial union, led by Goldwin Smith, who numbered among the most cosmopolitan of Cobdenites. Born in England, educated in the classics, a journalist, intellectual radical, Cobden Club member, and Regius Professor of

Modern History at Oxford, Smith had immigrated to North America in 1868, taking up an unpaid professorship at Cornell University in upstate New York. While a great admirer of the United States, he soon found the era’s rampant Anglophobia suffocating. Three years after his arrival, Smith moved to Toronto where he remained.7

Smith had been an early proponent of Canadian independence. In The Empire

(1863), Smith advocated what one critic rather aptly described as “the Manchester

Colonial Theory.” In it, Smith called for the demilitarization and independence of the settlement colonies, Canada included.8 Following Canadian confederation in 1867, Smith

6 Charles W. Calhoun, Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Campaign of 1888 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 143; Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration, 3; San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 15 Aug. 1888, 2; Washington Post, 17 Aug. 1888, 4. 7 Christopher A. Kent, “Smith, Goldwin (1823-1910),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/article/36142; Paul T. Phillips, The Controversialist: An Intellectual Life of Goldwin Smith (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2002), 45-53. 8 “A Canadian” [Egerton Ryerson], Remarks on the Historical Mis-Statements and Fallacies of Mr. Goldwin Smith in his Lecture “On the Foundation of the American Colonies,” and his Letters on the 281 thereafter became the lead advocate for commercial—and eventual political—union between Canada and its growing trading partner to the south, as the two countries were already tied so closely through trade, Anglo-Saxon heritage, and natural geographical nearness.

The “Manchester Colonial Theory” had grown in popularity in Canada from the

1840s onward. Nor was freer commerce between the two neighbors an entirely new idea.9 Canada and the United States had previously tried limited reciprocity from 1855 to

1866, for example, the existence of which Edward Atkinson believed had kept the two countries from armed conflict during the Civil War, and which William Cullen Bryant and the American Free Trade League had unsuccessfully sought to maintain in 1866.10

Emancipation of the Colonies” (Toronto: Leader Steam Press Establishment, 1866 [1863]), 14; Goldwin Smith, A Series of Letters, Published in “The Daily News,” 1862, 1863 (Oxford and London: John Henry and James Parker, 1863). See also Smith, England and America: A Lecture, Delivered by Goldwin Smith, Before the Boston Fraternity During his Recent Visit to the United States (Manchester: A. Ireland and Co., 1865), vii-x, 30. 9 Craufurd D. W. Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought: The Political Economy of a Developing Nation 1814-1914 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1961), 59-70. For histories of Canadian commercial policy see O. J. McDiarmid, Commercial Policy in the Canadian Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946); and J. H. Perry, Taxes, Tariffs, and Subsidies: A History of Canadian Fiscal Development (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1955). 10 Edward Atkinson, Taxation and Work: A Series of Treatises on the Tariff and the Currency (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 105; Memorial of the American Free Trade League to the Senate and House of Representatives (Feb. 1866). For more on the reciprocity treaty, see Lawrence H. Officer and Lawrence B. Smith, “The Canadian-American Reciprocity Treaty of 1855 to 1866,” Journal of Economic History 28 (1968): 598-623; Robert E. Ankli, “Canadian-American Reciprocity: A Comment,” Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 427-431; Lawrence H. Officer and Lawrence B. Smith, “Canadian-American Reciprocity: A Reply,” Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 432-434; Robert E. Ankli, “The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854,” Canadian Journal of Economics 4 (1971): 1-20; D. C. Masters, The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 (Toronto, 1936); and S. A. Saunders, “Reciprocity Treaty of 1854: A Regional Study,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 2 (1936): 41-53; J. Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1903), chap. 2. 282 Such reciprocity, however, had been destined to come to an end, especially as Canada and the United States respectively turned to protectionism in 1858 and 1861.11

Thereafter, Canadian governments, Conservative and Liberal alike, broached the

United States on reinstating reciprocity for many years following the treaty’s 1866 termination and Canadian confederation in 1867. American Cobdenites Wells, Bryant,

Arthur Latham Perry, and Cyrus Field in turn lent their support to the American

Commercial Reciprocity League, with the objective of informing the North American public of “the advantages of freedom of commercial intercourse between Canada and this country.” Cobdenite William Graham Sumner in turn frequently called for commercial union between Mexico, Canada, and the United States in the pages of the International

Free Trade Alliance publication New Century. And Cobdenite Henry George, in his widely popular Protection or Free Trade (1886), advocated for free trade and its corresponding spirit of “fraternity and peace” to fight against that “spirit of protectionism

. . . national enmity and strife.” He proposed as a first step the elimination of trade barriers between the United States and Canada, thereby making “the two countries practically one.”12

11 See A. A. Den Otter, “Alexander Galt, the 1859 Tariff, and Canadian Economic Nationalism,” Canadian Historical Review 63 (1982): 151-78; D. F. Barnett, “The Galt Tariff: Incidental or Effective Protection?” Canadian Journal of Economics 9 (1976): 389-407; Jane Flaherty, “Incidental Protection: An Examination of the Morrill Tariff,” Essays in Economic and Business History 19 (2001): 103-118; and Phillip W. Magness, “Morrill and the Missing Industries: Strategic Lobbying Behavior and the Tariff, 1858-1861,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Summer 2009): 287-329. 12 Henry George, Protection or Free Trade: An Examination of the Tariff Question with Especial Regard to the Interests of Labor (New York: Henry George, 1886), 352-53; Melville Egleston to David Wells, 11 Jan. 1876, reel 4, microfilm 15, 662-9P, Wells Papers; New Century (Dec. 1875), 3-6; (Feb. 1876), 53-4. 283 In 1883, R. R. Bowker took aim at the formal imperialism of economic nationalism, exemplified by former President Grant’s desire “to annex San Domingo . . . that we could then trade freely with her. Why not without the cost of annexation,”

Bowker asked, and why only with San Domingo, and not also with South America,

Canada, and the world? “Let us have at least ‘reciprocity’ with our neighbors as the first step toward free trade,” Bowker concluded in proper Cobdenite language, and let

“America be the apostle among nations of the gospel of ‘peace on earth, good-will among men.’”13

Edward Atkinson also took a prominent role in the Gilded Age affair. He frequently communicated with Canadian commercial unionist Erastus Wiman, and offered his advice on the subject to the New York Chamber of Commerce, which in late

1887 had appointed a special commission to look further into this growing demand for unrestricted reciprocity with Canada. Atkinson’s off-handed suggestion that the United

States might buy New Brunswick and Nova Scotia in order to end the fisheries dispute and alleviate Canada’s debt also—to his surprise—gained remarkable traction, and was thereafter touted by the Boston Herald. A year later, Wiman reinforced to Atkinson that the “vast majority of the Canadian people is unalterably opposed to annexation,” except perhaps after half a century of commercial union. “At present,” however, “the tariff is a

13 R. R. Bowker, [proof copy] Free Trade the Best Protection to American Industry (New York: New York Free Trade Club, 1883), Box 89, Bowker Papers, NYPL. 284 barrier that completely separates them, and as long as it exists it will have that effect,” and “the fishery question . . . is of the same family as the tariff question.”14

Friedrich List’s ideas had of course also found a welcome audience in late nineteenth-century Canada.15 J. B. Hurlbert of Ontario, Toronto businessman Isaac

Buchanan (founder of the Association for the Promotion of Canadian Industry in 1858), and John MacLean (a founding member of the Ontario Association of Manufacturers in

1867) all used List’s writings to encourage protectionism in order to foster national development beginning in the 1850s.16 Correspondingly, at about the same time that

North American Cobdenites were coming to the conclusion that eventual continental commercial and political union were ultimately necessary for peace and prosperity between the two neighbors, Canada’s Conservative party coalesced around a strong platform of protectionism, having been frustrated time and again in its previous attempts to reestablish reciprocity with the United States by the likes of James G. Blaine, who worried about reciprocity’s possibly detrimental effects upon Maine’s industries.17

14 Wiman to Atkinson, 17 Nov. 1887; 22 Nov. 1887; 2 Dec. 1887; 6 Dec. 1887; Commercial Union with Canada. Preamble and Resolution Adopted by the New-York Chamber of Commerce, at its Regular Meeting, 3d November, 1887; F. H. Thurber [Chairman of the special committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York] to Atkinson, 7 Nov. 1887, carton 3; Atkinson to Butterworth, 28 Sept. 1887; Atkinson to Taussig,31 Oct. 1887; Atkinson to Wiman, 3 Aug. 1888, carton 18; Wiman to Atkinson, 4 Aug. 1888, carton 4, Atkinson Papers. 15 Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought, 46-59. For some of the era’s Canadian protectionist arguments, see A. Baumgarten, Industrial Canada: The Duty of Development and How to Accomplish It (Montreal, 1876); A Freeholder, To the Freeholders of Canada: Political Facts for Consideration with a Short Treatise on Free Trade and Protection (1877); R. W. Phipps, Free Trade and Protection, Considered with Relation to Canadian Interests (Toronto, 1878); and J. R. Lithgow, Tariff Literature, Letters to the People (Halifax, 1878). 16 Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought, 46-52. 17 James G. Blaine to S. D. Lindsey, 3 July 1874, reel 7, James Gillespie Blaine Family Papers, LOC. For previous Gilded Age attempts at reciprocity with Canada, see A. H. U. Colquhoun, “The Reciprocity 285 With John A. Macdonald as its most prominent spokesman, the Conservative

“National Policy” came into being in March 1879; tariff rates on manufactured goods were raised from about 17 percent to between 30 and 40 percent, alongside specific ad valorem duties to protect Nova Scotia’s iron, steel, and coal industries, Ontario and

Quebec’s manufactures, and Ontario’s petrol industry. This Listian national policy also emphasized government-subsidized internal improvements, particularly the speedy completion of the transcontinental railway, which promised to expand Canadian trade throughout the globe. Philadelphia’s protectionist paper, the North American, observed

that this Canadian protectionist upswing “is the bitterest pill that the followers of Cobden

have had to swallow for some time.”18

By 1880, Conservative spokesmen and news outlets like the Toronto Globe also

began to label the so-called Continentalists as unpatriotic conspirators. Goldwin Smith

was quick to respond, countering that there was “no conspiracy except the mutual interest

of the two nations gave it birth.” His own desires, Smith noted, only followed the

precepts of the Cobden Club; and the club’s aims of world peace and free trade could

only be accomplished through continental union. He also pointed out that the continental

union movement was predominantly economically motivated, “though it brings political

feelings into play,” and—much like the Liberal Republican and Mugwump organizations

Negotiation with the United States in 1869,” Canadian Historical Review 8 (1927): 233-242; Ronald D. Tallman, “Reciprocity, 1874: The Failure of Liberal Diplomacy,” Ontario History 65 (1973): 87-105; and Rodney J. Morrison, “The Canadian-American Reciprocal Trade Agreement of 1874: A Pennsylvanian’s View,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102 (Oct. 1978): 457-68; and Allen P. Stouffer, “Avoiding a ‘Great Calamity’: Canada’s Pursuit of Reciprocity, 1864-1870,” Upper Midwest History 4 (1984): 39-55. 18 Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought, 55-59; North American, 20 Sept. 1878. 286 in the United States—it was largely a nongovernmental one, led by businessmen and journalists rather than politicians. Smith also predicted that the recurring fisheries dispute might “be kindled again” and “bring this question to a head.”19 And so it happened in

1887. When the Liberals officially came out in support of unrestricted reciprocity with the United States after the outbreak of the fisheries dispute in 1887, Canada’s

Conservative Listian nationalists made sure to emphasize a longstanding and politically palatable fear associated with the scheme: the dual loss of Canadian independence and

British imperial ties stemming from American annexation.

Conservative fears of American filibustering were grounded in historical precedent. Americans had forcibly attempted to take Canada, for instance, during the

American Revolution and the . Another attempt arose following the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, when Britain started to end tariff preferences that had maintained a protected market for a variety of Canadian products (see chapter 1). In response to the adverse effects of the English metropole’s newfound free trade activity, some merchants in Montreal created the Free Trade Association, while others turned to the United States for more direct intervention. In 1849, the latter drew up the unsuccessful Annexation

Manifesto, which sought “friendly and peaceable separation from British connexion, and a union upon equitable terms” with the United States that included reciprocal free trade.

Furthermore, as the 1855 reciprocity treaty between the United States and Canada fell apart at the end of the American Civil War, American demands for Canadian annexation

19 Goldwin Smith, “Canada and the United States,” North American Review 131 (July 1880), 14, 15, 17- 18, 19, 24-25. 287 frequently gained public attention, whether owing to Civil War Anglophobia, as payment over the Alabama claims, or to garner votes for the Republican party by promising to satiate both America’s land-hungry expansionists and its growing number of

Anglophobic Irish nationalists who enjoyed any twisting of the lion’s tail.20

Listian nationalist Alexander T. Galt (1817-1893)—Canadian businessman,

Conservative politician, and author of Canada’s protectionist 1858 tariff—expressed his own fears of American annexation following the coming to power of the Gladstone government in 1868. Galt had been unable to shut his eyes “to the fact that” the

Gladstone Administration wanted “to get rid of us [Canada].” The Cobdenite leadership in London had “a servile fear of the United States and would rather give us up than defend us.” He became so disappointed that the British liberals wanted to rid the Empire of “burdensome” Canada, and so fearful of impending American annexation that he even considered full Canadian independence as the only solution throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s.21

Three other events also weighed heavily on the looming possibility of U.S.-

Canadian union: the confederation of Canada’s provinces in 1867; Republican Secretary of State William Seward’s expansionist designs in the late 1860s; and, following the 1871

Treaty of Washington, the withdrawal of most of Britain’s military forces from Canada.

20 Annexation Association of Montreal, Annexation Manifesto of 1849 (Montreal, 1881); Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought, 61-62; Robin W. Winks, The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States (Montreal & Kingston: Harvest House, 1998), 166-7. See also James Morton Callahan, American- Canadian Relations Concerning Annexation, 1846-1871 (Bloomington: Indiana University Studies, 1925). 21 Galt, 14 Jan. 1867; Galt to Cartier, 14 Sept. 1869; Granville to Galt, 15 March 1870, MG 27 ID 8 Vol. 3, Alexander Tilloch Galt Papers, LAC. 288 Such events would alternatively spur Galt and others toward a desire for “Greater

Britain.”22

Such a desire steadily picked up intellectual steam, particularly following the influential 1883 publication of J. R. Seeley’s The Expansion of England. Seeley was, rather ironically, Cobdenite Goldwin Smith’s regius professorial counterpart at

Cambridge University. In Expansion of England, Seeley expounded that, while the

British Empire may have come about in “a fit of absence of mind,” for “Greater Britain” to come into existence Canada and Australia would purposely have to “be to us as Kent and Cornwall.”23 Seeley’s publication received a great deal of transatlantic attention for decades to come and provided much of the intellectual framework for the burgeoning imperial federation movement and for America’s own imperial turn in the late nineteenth

22 See, for instance, David M. L. Farr, “Sir John Rose and Imperial Relations: An Episode in Gladstone’s First Administration,” Canadian Historical Review 33 (Jan. 1952): 19-38. 23 J. R. Seeley, Expansion of England (London: Macmillan, 1883), 8, 63. For the idea and development of “Greater Britain,” see especially Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton and Oxford, 2007). See also Bell, ed., Victorian Visions of Global Order; E. H. H. Green, “The Political Economy of Empire, 1880-1914,” in Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, ed. by Andrew Porter (New York, 2001), III, 346-71; Jack Gaston, “The Free Trade Diplomacy Debate and the Victorian European Common Market Initiative,” Canadian Journal of History 22 (1987): 59-82; J. E. Tyler, The Struggle for Imperial Unity 1868-1895 (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1938); C. A. Bodelson, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (London: Heinman, 1960); J. E. Kendle, Federal Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 3; and Kendle, The Colonial and Imperial Conferences, 1887-1911 (London: Longmans, 1967). For a general introduction to the controversy surrounding American tariff policy and Canada, see Stephen Scheinberg, “Invitation to Empire: Tariffs and American Economic Expansion in Canada,” Business History Review 47 (Summer 1973): 218-238; and Simon J. McLean, The Tariff History of Canada (Toronto: Warwick Bros. & Rutter, 1895). 289 century and beyond.24 Fittingly, a letter from Seeley was read aloud at the first meeting of the Imperial Federation League (IFL, 1884-93) in England.25

Yet, as Galt’s sentiments demonstrate, such demands for imperial federation were by no means solely coming from Seeley and the English metropole. America’s aggressive expansionist designs and growing Canadian nationalism spawned as well the “Canada

First” party, formed by George T. Denison (1839-1925) and W. A. Foster in 1868, the same year that Gladstone’s Cobdenite government came to power and Charles Dilke first coined the term “Greater Britain.”26 Denison and Foster’s nationalism was tied intimately to love of the Mother Country. Denison himself hoped for a future confederation of the British Empire. Foster in turn guided the group into political action, and the Canadian National Association was created in 1874; notably, the first goal of its platform was the desire for “connection” and “consolidation” of the British Empire. A decade later, Canada’s Listians were among the leaders of imperial federation and preference.27

Galt was himself a founding member of the IFL, as were Charles Tupper (1821-

1915), high commissioner for Canada, and Oliver Mowatt, premier of Ontario. Goldwin

Smith diminutively described this proposed imperial federative connection between the colonies as but a “slender filament”; while “the distance . . . shortened by steam and

24 Ernest R. May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1991 [1967]), 129-30, 155, 171, 184, 205. 25 A. L. Burt, Imperial Architects (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1918), 217. 26 George T. Denison, The Struggle for Imperial Unity (London: MacMillan, 1909), 10-11, 50-5; and Charles Dilke, Greater Britain (London: MacMillan, 1868). 27 Burt, Imperial Architects, 218; David M. L. Farr, “The Imperial Federation League in Canada, 1885- 1894” (MA thesis, University of Toronto, 1946), 59. 290 telegraph” worked well to strengthen a despot’s rule, it did little to further representative government. Geography was against the scheme, and, he warned, “few have fought against geography and prevailed.”28 Smith derisively called the idea a “Jingo fallacy” that “Canada is to be divorced economically from the Continent . . . incorporated by an

Imperial Zollverein with Great Britain, South Africa, and Australia . . . this scheme is a chimera,” he scoffed, “and must fail.”29 Amid such Cobdenite opposition, Galt and other

Canadians wrote prolifically on the subject of imperial unity in the years after Canadian confederation.30

Owing to the interest and motivation of Canada’s imperial unionists, the initial

Canadian chapter of the IFL was established in Montreal in May 1885. Soon thereafter,

representatives from all the self-governing colonies met in London in April 1887 for the

first Colonial Conference, the idea for which had been proposed by Montreal

businessman Peter Redpath the year before. Canadian delegates kept much of the

discussion focused on the future of British imperialism and globalization: imperial

defense; the development of telegraphic communications connecting London to all the

colonies; the Canadian Pacific Railway; a uniform imperial postage; a steamship line

28 Goldwin Smith, The Political Destiny of Canada (Toronto: Willing & Williamson, 1878), 9, 20-21. 29 Burt, Imperial Architects, 218; Farr, “Imperial Federation League,” 59. 30 See for instance, Alexander Galt, The Relations of the Colonies to the Empire: Present and Future (London: M’Corquodale and Company, 1883); Jehu Mathews, A Colonist on the Colonial Question (Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, and Co.,, 1872); Thomas Macfarlane, A United Empire (Montreal, 1885); and George Hague, Imperial Federation: The Position of Canada (Montreal: Imperial Federation League in Canada, 1886). Some of the most innovative ideas concerning imperial federation were devised by Canadians. With none other than J. R. Seeley as judge, the London Chamber of Commerce, for instance, awarded F. H. Turnock of Winnipeg first prize for his unicameral representative imperial council proposal in 1887. See Seymour Ching-Yuan Cheng, Schemes for the Federation of the British Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), 89-92. 291 between Vancouver and Hong Kong; postal services with Australia, India, and China via

Canada; and the laying of an undersea Pacific cable from Vancouver to Australia. All were seen to be necessary developments as “the intercommunication between the various parts of the British Empire is growing with amazing rapidity.”31 It was in late 1887, as well, that the IFL in Canada, with Denison as a vice president, became more active, moving its branch headquarters from Montreal to Toronto “specifically to oppose the local agitation for closer economic relations with the United States.”32

“Canada for Canadians”: The Debate over North American Unity

Alongside such efforts toward imperial federation, agitation for North American union also increased sharply in 1887. The idea’s most recent incarnation had been around at least since the repeal of reciprocity in 1866, Canada’s 1867 confederation, and the

1873 onset of the late nineteenth century’s Great Depression. In 1876, for instance, U.S.

Congressman Elijah Ward had called for commercial union in the House of

Representatives, and continental union generally appeared more feasible with increases in

Canadian-American trade, railroad connections, travel, tourism, and immigration.33

31 Imperial Federation League, The Imperial Conference of 1887 (London: Imperial Federation League, 1887), 9, 17, 19, 27-8; Proceedings of the Colonial Conference, 1887 (London: Colonial Office, 1887), 5- 7; Proceedings of the Colonial Conference of 1887 in Relation to Imperial Postal and Telegraphic Communications through Canada (Ottawa: Brown Chamberlin, 1888), 4, 8-9, 11, 83-6, 90-118, 132-55; Richard Jebb, The Imperial Conference: A History and Study (London: Longmans, Green and CO., 1911), 1: 9; Paul Knaplund, “Intra-Imperial Aspects of Britain’s Defence Question, 1870-1900” Canadian Historical Review 3 (1922), 136. 32 Farr, “Imperial Federation League,” 100. 33 Smith, Political Destiny of Canada, 71-72. 292 Goldwin Smith, foreseeing an “impending fiscal war,” had once again asserted in 1880 that Canada’s destiny lay in American commercial union. The idea of freer trade became ever more popular following the onset of another economic downturn during the mid

’80s.34

Such commercial calls were duly met with opposition from Canada’s imperial federationists and Listian Conservatives like John Macdonald (1815-1891), who wrote to his friend Charles Tupper in 1884 that Canadians “can’t agree to a Zollverein . . . our manufactures are too young and weak yet . . . they would be crushed out just now.” But such disagreements were relatively mild; commercial union did not become a part of serious North American debate until the late 1880s. Inspired in part by the successful commercial union of the German states in 1871, proponents of a North American

Zollverein were a motley mixture: Erastus Wiman (1834-1904), Canadian citizen, president of the Great North-Western Telegraph Company, and resident of New York

City; Samuel Ritchie, Ohio businessman and President of the Central Ontario Railway;

Benjamin Butterworth and Robert Hitt, Republican representatives in the U.S. Congress;

American Cobdenites such as R. R. Bowker, Edward Atkinson, Henry George, and David

Wells; Edward Farrer, editor of the Toronto Mail; and of course Goldwin Smith himself.35 Their calls for a North American Zollverein rose in pitch amid growing

American Anglophobia and the outbreak of the virulent fisheries dispute in 1885-87,

34 Congressional Record, 44, 1 Sess., 3158-64; Smith, “Canada and the United States,” 14-25. 35 Macdonald to Tupper, 28 July 1884, John Macdonald Papers, LAC; Tansill, Canadian-American Relations, 381-82; Williamson, Atkinson, 163. 293 which reached a fevered pitch upon the Canadian seizure of U. S. shipping vessels, and as the United States increasingly sought freer access to restricted Canadian waters.

Congressman Benjamin Butterworth submitted a bill to the U.S. House of

Representatives in February 1887 calling for full reciprocity between the United States

and Canada. He did so as a response to the “controversies . . . growing out of the

construction of treaties affecting fishing interests.” Commercial union would “remove all

existing controversies and causes of controversy in the future.” Wiman told a reporter

from the Toronto Globe that while the Butterworth bill might pass the House, the Senate

seemed especially obstinate. Nevertheless, Wiman held out hope the senators might

realize that commercial union was “the best settlement of the Fishery question.” Edward

Atkinson similarly approved “most heartily” of Butterworth’s desire for commercial

union, although Atkinson wrote Butterworth that, “looking at it from a free-trade

standpoint,” he would have liked to see such a union with Mexico as well.36

In April, Congressman Robert R. Hitt of Illinois proposed a similarly

unsuccessful bill, which called for commercial union in order to end permanently “our

troubles with Canada” while still allowing for each nation to set their own tariffs and “set

limitations upon fishing privileges. . . . In one sense, there would be a business

annexation of each nation by the other; but it would be in a harmony of interests, a

growth and development of both that would lead both to greatness, independence and

peace.” Although the Butterworth and Hitt bills failed, this small group of Republican

36 “Butterworth Bill,” reprinted in Erastus Wiman, ed., Commercial Union in North America. Some Letters, Papers, and Speeches (Toronto: Toronto News Company, 1887), 5; Toronto Globe, 15 Oct. 1887; Atkinson to Butterworth, 28 Sept. 1887, carton 18, Atkinson Papers. 294 congressmen, which also included Republican Senator John Sherman, yet expressed their desire for “Canada to be part of the United States,” and continued to favor a Zollverein.37

Even a hard-line protectionist paper like the Philadelphia American, which had

recently asked Goldwin Smith for his views on the subject, came out in favor of

commercial union: “In language, in faith, in culture, in governmental methods the two

countries more closely resemble each other than either resembles any other in either the

old or the new world. Why, then, not establish absolute freedom of commercial

intercourse between them?” Countering the free trade dimensions of commercial union,

the newspaper instead saw this as a way of further protecting the already protected

economic interests of the two countries:

The establishment of such an arrangement would have an additional advantage to

the protected industries of both countries, in that it would impart a permanence to

the protective polity in both which it does not now possess. For the sake of this

freedom of national intercourse the people of both would stand by Protection, as

its abandonment, unless simultaneous in both, would involve the re-establishment

of the custom-house line—a line which now sunders our continent, intercepts

natural intercourse, and breeds disagreements between the two great Anglo-Saxon

nationalities of the New World.38

37“Hitt Bill,” reprinted in Wiman, Commercial Union, 6-7; CR, 50 Cong., 1 Sess., 7286, 7 Aug. 1888. 38 “The Way Out of the Canadian Difficulty,” Philadelphia American, reprinted in Wiman, Commercial Union, 10. 295 Such sentiments had been expressed as early as 1880 by the president of the Philadelphia

Board of Trade and former minister to Britain, John Welsh, in response to comments by

Cobden Club secretary T. B. Potter before the New York Free Trade Club, as well as by

Philadelphia protectionist Wharton Barker when the subject of Canadian reciprocity came before the House Ways and Means in the spring of that year.39 The adverse effects of

Canadian tariff walls on American goods were therefore also turning some protectionists

toward reciprocal relations. U.S. free traders and more than a few protectionists thus

favored North American union, albeit with alternate desired ends in mind.

In reaction to the fisheries controversy and Butterworth and Hitt’s promising

proposals, Goldwin Smith helped organize Commercial Union Leagues throughout

Ontario, and worked closely with Farmers’ Institutes.40 With Smith as the Commercial

Union League president, the organization became the nucleus of the Canadian free trade

movement, and, anticipating Conservative reaction, Smith made sure to play down the

annexation angle. Thereafter, Smith and Wiman set out on a speaking tour of Canada

beginning in 1887.41

As to the idea’s growing Canadian popularity, at Lake Dufferin, Ontario, Wiman

pointed out that on the issue of unrestricted reciprocity, “no other subject occupied so

39 John Welsh, Protection under the Guise of Free-Trade as Practiced by Great Britain and Ireland Compared with Protection as Practised by the United States of America (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1880), 14-15; Welsh, Tariff Tract No. 1. 1880: Free Trade and Protection (Philadelphia: The American Iron and Steel Association, 1880), 6; Wharton Barker, Our Canadian Relations. A Letter to Hon. James A. Garfield, Philadelphia, April 27th, 1880 (Philadelphia: Press of Edward Stern & Co. 1880), folder 1884, box 1, Worthington Chauncey Ford Papers, NYPL; Pennanen, “American Commercial Union with Canada,” 28-31. 40 Willison, Laurier, II, 123-4. 41 For a descriptive overview of Wiman’s “economic” continentalism, see Grant, “Erastus Wiman.” 296 large a space in the private talk among members [in Ottawa]. To the exclusion of almost every other subject, it had been discussed day in and day out.” He suggested to his audience a proposal for the lifting of all tariffs: “the barriers should be completely obliterated that hitherto had prevented the freest intercourse between the two countries.

The proposition, while so exceedingly simple in its statement, was freighted with consequences the most tremendous in its possible effects.” If fulfilled, Canada’s “would be the destiny to teach the ages hereafter, that on the broad continent of free America, side by side with a republic speaking the English language, governed by English laws, and influenced by English literature.” The United States already practiced free trade among its various states, he granted. But “the complete and unrestricted interchange of commodities between the great commonwealths on this continent had contributed more than anything else to the building up of a great interior means of communication, and these arteries of commerce had served, in a greater degree than any other, to bind the people together.”42 Continental free trade was but the next logical step for the Anglo-

Saxon cousins.

Unlike Smith, who considered the transcontinental railroad “the grand enterprise of the anti-continental policy” and financially foolish and irrational when Canada should have been focusing primarily on North-South trade and communication, Wiman was not nearly so condemnatory. He felt that the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway was

“one of the greatest achievements of modern times,” offering Canada “a means of

42 Erastus Wiman, Commercial Union between the United States and Canada: Speech of Erastus Wiman at Lake Dufferin, Ontario, July 1, 1887 (Toronto: Toronto News Company, 1887), 4, 5. 297 communication within itself and a connection with the United States.” Alongside

Canada’s interconnected and “wonderful system of waterways . . . a complete interchange of products” between the North American nations would follow, while canals, railways, telegraphs, “and every other avenue of communication and transportation would be benefited by the activity which would result.”43

Canadian immigration to the United States was a further problem that commercial union would easily fix, Wiman argued. The census of 1860 reported about 250,000

Canadians in the United States; the census of 1885 reported 950,000. Here, instead of pulling on the purse strings of Canadian commerce, Wiman pulled upon the heartstrings of Canadian mothers:

If commercial union could accomplish nothing else than keep our young men at

home, it would be a boon of the greatest magnitude . . . if the clear blue eyes of

the little baby girl look inquiringly into the mother’s anxious face, what fate does

she read there? Why, if her brothers and half the boys of the neighborhood are

leaving the country, how hopeless is her life likely to be. The chances for the baby

girl are immensely lessened for a useful womanhood. The sweet love that

brightens life may never come to her. . . . The budding womanhood will wait in

vain for the sturdy farmer boy who should win her. . . . Mothers must think of

these things, and with a far-seeing vision which a mother’s love will prompt,

43 Smith, “Canada and the United States,” 22, 16-17; Wiman, Commercial Union between the United States and Canada, 6-7. 298 should take an interest in this great movement, the effect of which would be to

keep the boys at home, and thus secure the happiness and the future of the sweet

girls of this fair land.44

The Canadian debate over commercial union was exhibiting itself as a microcosmic reflection of the ideological debate occurring between Listians and

Cobdenites throughout the globe. Wiman observed that Canada’s manufacturing industries were hostile to the idea. But why? “What is it that the manufacturer of the

United States has which the Canadian manufacturer has not? Free fishing privileges would only spur growth. And, “as to the opposition’s cheap talk about patriotism . . . it was impossible to conceive a higher patriotism than that which would develop in the largest degree the resources now latent” in Canada. Furthermore, while some have said that “commercial union was but a step to annexation” and would lead to discrimination of

English goods, both considerations formed “the strongest argument” for North American free trade. It was “hardly worth considering that the interests of British manufacturers and

British merchants should stand as a permanent barrier against the free admission of

American goods into Canada.”45 Canada, “has striven to make Liverpool as near as

Boston, London as New York, and it has failed,” remarked another continental unionist in

1888; for too long North America had ignored “Nature’s unity . . . from Southern Gulf to

44 Wiman, Commercial Union between the United States and Canada, 18. 45 ibid., 8, 16. 299 the white line of northern snow, making in itself a prairie empire that would feed half the world.”46

John Macdonald was of course among those Listian leaders of the Conservative opposition who worried that commercial union was but another term for annexation. So too was John Hague, an outspoken proponent of “Canada for Canadians.” He gave a powerful speech before the Toronto branch of the IFL in January 1889, in reply to the

“promoters of the Annexation of Canada” to the United States. “I lift up a protest against the sacrifice of Canada on the altar of American ambition,” he bellowed. North American union was “a barbarous conception,” a plot hatched by some in the United States, from the shores of which “false wrecher’s lights are now burning, luring us on to destruction, and alas! Amongst ourselves we have a few who give aid and impulse to the conspirators against our country by declaring the light of the wrecker to be the beam of hope.” These disciples of Goldwin Smith sought “to sacrifice Canada on the altar dedicated to their double-headed deity, ‘Nature, and Geography,’” and “wish to tie the red arteries between the heart of England and the hands of Canada, so as to stop the circulation of trade life flowing freely across the deep which Britannia rules.” Just two years ago, Francis

Wiman’s agitation had “burst upon us like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, in full panoply and with a shout of war” as growing numbers of Americans thought Canada

“ripe for entering the Union.” Wiman was “seeking to seduce Canada into what in Free

Trade language is an ‘act of war’ against Great Britain . . . Wiman’s school . . . are

46 W. H. H. Murray, Continental Unity: An Address (Boston: C. W. Calkins, 1888), 19, 7. 300 preaching ‘a gospel based upon the logic of dynamite and assassination,’—the assassination of a nascent nationality.”47

As the timbre and temper of the debate grew respectively more shrill and heated, in Canada and the Canadian Question Goldwin Smith expressed sentiments similar to

Wiman’s, particularly that a union “like that into which Scotland entered with England . .

. would give to the inhabitants of the whole Continent as complete a security for peace . .

. as is likely to be attained by any community or group of communities on this side of

Millennium,” as Canadians and Americans shared “geography, commerce, identity of race, language and institutions.” There were no barriers left except along fiscal and political lines. Edward Farrer’s Toronto Mail likewise supported a customs union, vowing that reciprocity would bring an end to the fisheries dispute: “the only objection to it from this side of the line is that it might endanger British connection.”48

On 13 October 1887, Sir Richard Cartwright, the former Dominion Finance

Minister, staunch enemy of protectionism, one of Canada’s four Cobden Club members,

and now a prominent member of the Canadian Liberal party, pronounced to his audience

that “the advantages of commercial union to both countries . . . are so great that scarcely

any sacrifice is too severe to secure them.” He argued rather presciently (as examined in

chapter 8) that “refusal or failure to secure free trade with the United States is much more

likely to bring about just such a political crisis as these parties affect to dread than even

47 John Hague, Canada for Canadians. A Royalist “Roland,” for the Annexationist “Oliver” (Toronto: Hart, 1889), 5, 10, 16, 13, 19. 48 Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question (London: MacMillan, 1891), 268, 278-79; Toronto Mail, 1 March, 2 Sept. 1887. 301 the very closest commercial connection that can be conceived.”49 To the joy of

Cobdenites and the dismay of Listians, the policy of commercial union was becoming firmly entrenched in the Canadian Liberal party platform.

With the added support of J. D. Edgar and Wilfrid Laurier, the new head of the

Liberal party, the Liberals adopted a resolution of unrestricted reciprocity in November,

with a stipulation that both countries would retain ultimate control of their own tariff

policies.50 A few months later, and with U.S. State Secretary Bayard’s support,

Cartwright introduced a bill in the Canadian House of Commons asking for “full and

unrestricted reciprocity.” Upon the bill’s defeat, Goldwin Smith consoled Bayard, writing

him that it was not the “decision of the Canadian people, but simply that of Parliament

elected before Commercial Union had come into the field”; the next elections would tell

“a very different tale,” he promised. Smith was further encouraged by the friendly

disposition of the Cleveland Administration, and he held out hope that commercial and

even political union could yet be achieved. The movement, after all, was indeed

spreading quickly.51

Conclusion

49 Cartwright quoted in Prosper Bender, “Canada: Reciprocity, or Commercial Union,” Magazine of American History 19 (1888), 24. 50 Willison, Laurier, II, 141; Robert M. Stamp, “J. D. Edgar and the Liberal Party: 1867-96,” Canadian Historical Review 45 (1964), 108-112; Tansill, Canadian-American Relations, 400-401; and Waite, Arduous Destiny, 191-193. 51 Tansill, Canadian-American Relations, 404, 408-409. 302 The battle between Listian nationalists and Cobdenite cosmopolitans over the future of North American relations became ever more virulent even as the fisheries dispute reached a peaceable settlement. In January 1888, a “travelling Commissioner” of

London’s Pall Mall Gazette noted that “Commercial Union is the coming question for

Canada. . . . My own experience is that outside of Ottawa . . . three out of five of the most intelligent men I have met are enthusiastic Commercial Unionists.”52 As noted by historian J. S. Willison, “for the next three years all the energies of the Liberal press and the Liberal leaders were devoted to educating the country to acceptance of the proposition.” Comparing their free trade movement to that of the earlier one in England,

Goldwin Smith felt quite certain of the North American movement’s ultimate success.

Whereas the Anti-Corn-Law League had taken seven years to fulfill its goals, he noted,

“in less than a year the Commercial Union Club has seen the policy which it advocates adopted by one of the great political parties as the principal plank of the party platform.”53

Canadian and British Conservatives and manufacturing interests predictably attacked the Liberal platform. Joseph Chamberlain, Birmingham manufacturer-turned- politician and head of the diplomatic mission to resolve the fisheries dispute, was outraged. He responded that commercial union with the United States essentially “means

52 Quoted in W. R. Graham, “Sir Richard Cartwright, Wilfrid Laurier, and Liberal Party Trade Policy, 1887,” Canadian Historical Review 33 (1952), 12-13. 53 Willison, Laurier, II, 150; Handbook of Commercial Union: A Collection of Papers Read before the Commercial Union Club, Toronto, with Speeches, Letters and Other Documents in Favour of Unrestricted Reciprocity with the United States, ed. by Mercer Adam, Introduction by Goldwin Smith (Toronto: Commercial Union Club of Toronto, 1888), xxx-xxxi, xxxiii. 303 political separation from Great Britain.”54 As yet a member of the Cobden Club and not the hard-line imperial tariff reformer he would later become, in Toronto Chamberlain called instead for commercial union with “all the world.” Listian Conservatives had also included an amendment to Cartwright’s bill that protected Canada’s infant industries, in order that free trade with the United States “may not conflict with the policy of fostering the various industries and interests of the Dominion.”55

The Toronto branch of the IFL passed a resolution calling for imperial preference at its 1888 annual meeting. Imperial federationist Denison also called upon fellow imperial loyalists in Canada “to rally round the old flag and frustrate the evil designs of traitors.” Canadians, Denison warned, needed to be especially wary with their dealings with the United States, which was “very hostile to Canada; I believe they always have been. I believe they will endeavour to destroy our national life by force or fraud whenever they can, with the object of absorbing us.” While Smith and Wiman crisscrossed Canada’s countryside, the IFL sent their Canadian spokesmen George Parkin and Principal Grant to Australia to garner enthusiasm for the IFL and to help foment “the spirit of Imperialism among the people of that colony and New Zealand,” where they gave “the movement an impetus . . . which has not been lost.”56 The issue was reaching a head. Canada’s position within the global economy hung in the balance. The North

American political and ideological showdown was about to reach its climax following the

54 Quoted in Tansill, Canadian-American Relations, 399. 55 Toronto Globe, 31 Dec. 1887; Canada, Debates of the House of Commons (15 March 1888), 194. 56 Denison, Struggle, 92, 124-127. 304 passage of the 1890 McKinley Tariff by the Listian Republican administration of

Benjamin Harrison.

305 Chapter 7: “A Sea of Fire”: The Listian Harrison Administration, the

McKinley Tariff, and the Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1889-

93

[Henry Carey] had not hesitated to express his opinion that the best thing which could

happen to the United States would be to have the ocean which rolled between the two

continents converted into a sea of fire so impassable that if Dives was in Europe and

Lazarus in Pennsylvania they could not under any circumstances enter into commercial

correspondence.

David Ames Wells.1

Protection is spreading the world over, and the mission of the Cobden Club will, before

many years, be over, when they see they can in no country or colony obtain a foothold.

Tariff League Bulletin, 9 Nov. 1888.2

The British have been waiting with an abiding faith in their Cobden theories for the

world to acknowledge their supremacy in manufacturing and to tear down their tariff

walls. . . . John Bull laughed sneeringly at their lack of faith in the creed of Cobden and

1 David Ames Wells, Free Trade and Free Enterprise: Report of the Proceedings at the Dinner of the Cobden Club (London: Cassell, Petter & Gilpin, 1873). 2 “Protection in New Zealand,” Tariff League Bulletin, 9 Nov. 1888, 213. 306 waited for time to teach the American, the German and the Frenchman the error of their

ways. But time has done just the opposite. . . . Verily, Cobden’s theory was unsound.

Lowell Daily Courier, 17 Aug. 1891.

Despite Edward Atkinson’s promise to David Ames Wells that he would “keep clear of the Philadelphians altogether,” from the mid-1880s to the mid-1890s, Atkinson and Philadelphia’s Henry Carey Baird (1825-1912) kept up a brutally candid correspondence on their opposing visions of the past, present, and future of American political economy. Not surprisingly, Atkinson differed “fundamentally” with Baird on trade and fiscal issues. Atkinson was a prominent Cobdenite free trader who considered protectionism a “perversion of the taxing power of the United States,” and “among the worst of the sequels of slavery.” He was also an outspoken critic of “the wretched silver business,” and an unabashed Anglophile. Baird alternatively was a Listian disciple of his uncle, Henry Charles Carey, an advocate of free silver coinage, and an inheritor of his uncle’s Anglophobic worldview. Baird was consistently shocked at Atkinson’s feigned lack of knowledge of the economic philosophy of Baird’s uncle, particularly that it was

Carey who placed “a tremendous crowbar at the base of the edifice of the Ricardo-

Malthusian dismal philosophy, and is now toppling the accursed system to its fall.”

Atkinson’s persistent attacks against protectionism proved him to be a “lunatic” for single-mindedly seeking his system of cheapness. “You are for free-trade and that only of the foreign sort, when there can of necessity be no free-trade at home”; cheap foreign commodities resulted in an idle labor force that might otherwise have been employed in

307 the home market, “and the philosophy which aims at these things should be denounced, and the philosophers themselves put down.”3

Baird sought to educate Atkinson on Pennsylvania’s rich intellectual tradition,

especially on the soundness of Listian nationalism. Atkinson in turn hoped that Baird

might at least grudgingly come to accept some of the basic tenets of Cobdenism.

Recalcitrance was met with recalcitrance. Baird proved particularly intransigent,

ideologically proud of the material fruits procured from Gilded Age protectionist

productivity. Atkinson’s replies were “very funny” to Baird, reminding him “of the action

of a herd of buffalo that kick up a dust under cover of their retreat.” Atkinson, in an

attempt to match Baird’s “dogmatic effusion,” again expressed his incomprehension of

Carey’s ideological shift from free trade to protectionism. Baird pointed out that

Atkinson’s confusion was to be expected because, unlike Atkinson, Carey had “labored

for the elevation of man” and his wages, whereas Atkinson favored “cheap raw materials,

cheap labor, and cheap men.” Since Atkinson had called into question Carey’s

ideological change of heart, Baird correspondingly questioned whether David Ames

Wells had ever truly been a disciple of Carey, and believed that “the people who accept

him as a prophet and a teacher of economic doctrines, must be shallow indeed.” While

Special Commissioner in the early 1860s, Wells was already probably “preparing to

throw off the mask which he has since so completely discarded. I venture to say that Mr.

Wells was never in his life an earnest protectionist,” even as he now duplicitously posed

3 Atkinson to Wells, 5 April 1890, carton 20; Atkinson to Baird, 29 July 1885, carton 17; Baird to Atkinson, 7 Jan. 1885, carton 3; Baird to Atkinson, 20 April 1892; 22 April 1892, carton 5, Edward Atkinson Papers, MHS. 308 “before the world . . . as a man who once sat at the feet of Carey, but who finally saw the truth.” Baird suggested that unless Atkinson and Grover Cleveland “can do something better in the direction of convincing the American people of the truth of the British free trade ideas” they “had better retire from the field,” since Carey’s protectionist philosophy would continue to enlist “in its behalf strong and earnest men, who in former days were

British free traders.”4

In a reincarnation of Friedrich List’s stages of development, Baird argued that the

South had not progressed in the proper order of civilized development for much of the nineteenth century, as the section had jumped headfirst into free trade without first developing its industries. The South thereafter had remained in a state of barbarism; the

Civil War was but an outgrowth of such Southern barbarity, “produced by more than half a century of British free trade,” thereby rendering “the development of diversified industries . . . hopelessly impossible.” Adherence to British free trade had squandered the

South’s “labor-power” and finances that otherwise would have worked to lift the

Southern people “up into prosperous and civilized human beings.” Through infant industrial protectionism, “the beneficent influence of Carey’s sublime teachings will . . . direct the movements of this people; while the ‘malignant influence’ of the Atkinsons and the Wellses will, when once the South becomes fully civilized, be cast aside among the most accursed of all the devices for the enslavement of mankind.” The South’s free trade in raw materials had enslaved its people and stunted its development for too long. The

4 Atkinson to Baird, 22 Jan. 1891, carton 20; Baird to Atkinson, 23 Jan. 1891; Baird to Atkinson, 3 March 1893, carton 6, Atkinson Papers. 309 New South, however, was finally on the proper Listian track, Baird concluded, containing as it did a mixed economy of manufacturing and agriculture in order to spur the region’s advancement from barbarism to civilization.5

Atkinson, in a last reply, wished to add but one final comment to this “pleasant correspondence.” Atkinson noted that they differed in their view of the system of labor in the South, particularly that it was free trade with the North, not infant industrial protectionism, that had stimulated the New South’s economy:

Slavery was protection carried to its logical conclusion. The capitalist not only

directed and controlled the laborer but he owned him. That system of protection

of the true Carey type defeated itself and destroyed itself. Since then, the South

under the beneficent influence of free trade with the North, has started on the road

to wealth and prosperity. We need only the fourth corner stone well established on

which to build for the future; free soil, free speech, free men, free trade.6

Atkinson admitted that he would only be satisfied, “after a sufficient period of adjustment,” to not only establish what Baird called “British free-trade,” but “absolute free trade. . . . Anything else I think belonging to the days of paganism, ignorance and

5 Baird to Atkinson, 6 Feb. 1893, carton 6, Atkinson Papers. 6 Atkinson to Baird, 7 Feb. 1893, carton 22, Atkinson Papers. 310 greed.”7 Atkinson may have become moderate in his methods, but he was certainly extreme in his vision for America’s economic future.8

Henry Carey Baird’s convictions were no less extreme. Henry Carey and

Friedrich List’s protectionist pulse beat strongly within his intellectual veins, as it did among their other American disciples: students like William “Pig Iron” Kelley (R-PA);

Congressman William McKinley (R-OH); New York Tribune editor Whitelaw Reid,

Benjamin Harrison’s ambassador to France (1889-1892) and his vice-presidential running mate in 1892; and the “Plumed Knight” of Maine, James G. Blaine, the incoming

Republican secretary of state. Protectionist legislation was of course high on their agenda.

Entwined with their high tariff advocacy, and in marked contrast to the Cobdenite foreign policy of the previous Cleveland Administration, the Harrison Administration embraced

List’s developmental theories. In doing so, the Listian administration practiced the imperialism of economic nationalism, in large part as a response to the growing informal imperial influence of Britain in South America and the Pacific.9 The administration’s

7 Atkinson to Baird, 6 March 1893, carton 23, Atkinson Papers. 8 Atkinson to Baird, 8 March 1893, carton 23, Atkinson Papers. 9 For Britain’s imperialism of free trade in Latin America, see John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review (1953): 1-15; P. Winn, “British Informal Empire in Uruguay in the Nineteenth Century,” Past and Present 73 (Nov. 1976): 100-126; Alan Knight, “Britain and Latin America,” in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford history of the British Empire, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122–43; D. MacLean, “Finance and ‘Informal Empire’ before the First World War,” Economic History Review 29 (May 1976): 291-305; W. M. Mathew, “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Peru, 1820-70,” Economic History Review 21 (Dec. 1968): 562-579; Charles Jones, “‘Business Imperialism’ and Argentina, 1875-1900: A Theoretical Note,” Journal of Latin American Studies 12 (1980): 437-444; Roger Gravil, The Anglo-Argentine Connection, 1900-1930 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 24-7; Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820-1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 161; Christopher Abel and Colin Lewis, eds., Latin America, Economic Imperialism and the State: The Political Economy of the External Connection from Independence to the Present (London: Athlone, 1985); H. S. Ferns, Britain 311 imperial implementation was made possible by the passage of the revolutionary 1890

McKinley Tariff, and put into practice through the Harrison Administration’s subsequent aggressive expansionist designs upon the “uncivilized” markets in Latin America and the

Pacific.

The Resurgence of the Listian Nationalists

Cleveland’s presidential loss, the rise to power of a Listian administration, and the mounting outspoken attacks against free trade once again disheartened American

Cobdenites and put the protectionists on the offensive. Anti-free trade ideological ranks further swelled with the addition of Protestant adherents to the Social Gospel, who generally viewed the inequalities associated with the Social Darwinian laissez-faire system as immoral and unchristian.10

The Listians found further intellectual support in 1890 with the publication of

Alfred Thayer Mahan’s highly influential study The Influence of Sea Power upon

History. In it, Mahan lavished praise upon that “man of great practical genius,” the seventeenth-century French protectionist Jean-Baptiste Colbert. According to Mahan, and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960); Ferns, “The Baring Crisis Revisited,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 241-73; D. C. M. Platt, “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations,” Economic History Review 21 (Aug. 1968): 296-306; Platt, “Further Objections to an ‘Imperialism of Free Trade,’ 1830-60,” Economic History Review 26 (Feb. 1973): 77-91; Andrew Thompson, “Informal Empire? An Exploration in the History of Anglo-Argentine Relations, 1810-1914,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (May 1992): 419-436; A. G. Hopkins, “Informal Empire in Argentina: An Alternative View,” Journal of Latin American Studies 26 (May 1994): 469-484; Rory Miller, “British Investment in Latin America, 1850-1950,” Itinerario 19 (1995): 21-52; and Matthew Brown, ed., Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce, and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2008). 10 Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, 169-197. 312 Colbert had managed to implement “the whole theory of sea power” through his expansion of naval power and central state authority in order to increase production, shipping, and the monopolistic exploitation of colonial economies to benefit the home market.

Mahan subscribed to the realist proverb “In time of peace prepare for war,” a

maxim that Listian nationalists like James G. Blaine also agreed with wholeheartedly.

Mahan further believed that government policies ought to aid in the growth of industry

and market expansion, and that peaceful commerce of necessity rested upon “a

thoroughly strong navy.” He extolled the Anglo-Saxon national character and the

corresponding “unique and wonderful success” of the British-style settler colonial

system, a system that Americans were quite capable of replicating within “any fields

calling for colonization.” While the United States’s geographical distance was “in one

way a protection,” it was one that would quickly disappear with the development of an

isthmian canal. In contrast to the Southern and Cobdenite desire for a small and

inexpensive naval force and their counterargument that a large navy did not guarantee

greater trade, Mahan believed a strong American navy would thereafter prove essential to

protecting “one of the great highways of the world.” Thus, Mahan persuasively argued

that the growth of protectionism, imperialism, global connectivity, and navalism were

entwined. Harrison’s secretary of the navy, Benjamin Tracy, would correspondingly

oversee the creation of a new fleet of battleships, adding another justification for a high

tariff and adding to the material benefit of American steel producers and the country’s

313 coastal states.11 Such were the powerful protectionist forces that took the ideological fight to Cleveland’s Cobdenites with renewed vigor.

Throughout the 1888 campaign trail, for instance, Harrison’s campaign had accentuated the supposed ties between Grover Cleveland and England. In political posters and cartoons, Cleveland was depicted bowing before John Bull or standing under the

British flag in contrast to Harrison under the stars and stripes. Republican slogans included “Cleveland runs well in England” and “America for Americans—no Free

Trade.”12 Cobdenites like David Wells, Henry Ward Beecher, and MIT’s Francis Amasa

Walker may have deemed the farmers of the West as “the most fertile field . . . for the dissemination of the virus of free trade,” but the American Protective League reported triumphantly in the Tariff League Bulletin that Des Moines, Iowa’s local “Cobden Club and American Free Trade organ”—Cobdenite Henry Philpott’s the Million—had recently been suspended now that Iowa’s farmers had seen through the paper’s “thin guise of duplicity and anti-American interest.”13 Republicans also worked to obtain the Irish vote

11 A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1894 [1890]), 70-71, 27-28, 331, 82-83, 56-58, 33-34, 88; Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 37-52. In contrast to Mahan’s praise, Adam Smith had previously taken Colbert to task for his preferential protectionism in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. by Edwin Cannan (New York: The Modern Library, 1937 [1776]) 627-628. For the Cobdenite critique of navalism, see, for instance, “The Uses of a Navy,” Nation (18 April 1889): 319-20; “Commerce and Big Guns,” Nation (16 Dec. 1897): 470; Edward Atkinson, “A Forecast of the Future Commercial Union of the English-Speaking People,” American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty-Third Meeting held at Brooklyn, N.Y. August, 1894 (Salem: Permanent Secretary, 1895), 416. 12 Harry J. Sievers, Benjamin Harrison Hoosier Statesman, 1865-1888 (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1959), 408; Alfred E. Eckes, Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 38-41. 13 Tariff League Bulletin 1: 4 (Oct. 1887), 25. 314 by quoting the London Times, which had stated that the “only time England can use an

Irishman is when he emigrates to America and votes for free trade.”14

Opposition to the Cobden Club grew as well. Membership in the Anti-Cobden

Club of Philadelphia had grown to over 1,500, and the club’s president, David Martin, was appointed by Harrison to the high federal position of Collector of Internal

Revenue.15 Republican campaign tracts explicitly tied Cleveland to the Cobden Club.

These pro-Harrison protectionists argued that voters had to choose between a Republican leader of “American Workingmen and Capitalists” on the one hand, and the “Cobden

Club, British Manufacturers, and the Calhoun Autocracy of the South with Cleveland at their head” on the other. Cleveland “shrinks form the use of the term ‘Free Trade,’ and in fact declares that those who taunt him with being a Free Trader are deceiving the country,” yet “it is certain that the arguments which President Cleveland urges are those which Cobden used to employ forty-five years ago.” Voters should “assume that there is a private understanding between the Cobden Club of England and the President of the

United States,” especially considering that Cleveland was “indebted . . . to the Cobden

Club of England for his political promotion, and is now surrounded by a cabinet composed of members of that club.”16

14 John Devoy, “Irish Comments on an English Text,” North American Review 147 (Sept. 1888), 289. 15 Civil Service Record 10 (June 1891), 120-22. 16 Home and Country Protection Brotherhood Club, England against America! (Brooklyn: Standard-Union Print, 1888), 1, 5, 11-12. 315 The protectionists temporarily gained the upper hand through their onslaught.17

Cleveland’s 1887 tariff message, his cabinet’s connections to the Cobden Club, the failed

Mills Bill, the amicable settlement of the Canadian fisheries dispute, and Sackville-

West’s political blunder in the Murchison affair all helped garner charges of a British conspiracy against Cleveland and win Anglophobic votes for Harrison, thereby harming

Cleveland’s chances for reelection and—although Cleveland narrowly won the popular vote—ultimately paving the way for the presidency of Benjamin Harrison.18

The new Republican administration found its spokesmen from among the party’s

Listian intellectuals. The aging James G. Blaine took control of the State Department and immediately went to work on developing his vision of a Western Hemispheric protectionist Zollverein (excepting Canada of course), while Republican congressmen looked to middle-aged Ohio Representative William McKinley, the “Napoleon of

Protection,” for economic leadership.

McKinley’s rise to Republican prominence had occurred nearly as rapidly as

Blaine’s. McKinley first entered Congress’s doors in 1876, at the age of thirty four. A cigar smoking, clean shaven, good-natured congressman and respected orator, he almost single-mindedly tied his political fortunes to the Republican party’s majority adherence to tariff protection, particularly to the philosophy of Henry Carey. As David Wells

17 In 1888, for instance, the New York Free Trade Club changed its name to the less contentious New York Reform Club. Curtiss, Protection and Prosperity, 627. By 1891, alternatively, the Reform Club boasted almost 2000 members in forty-three states. See Officers and Committees, Members, Constitution, By-Laws, Rules, Reports, etc., 1891 (New York: Reform Club, 1891), 18-45, 49-88. 18 For more detailed historical and historiographical treatments of Benjamin Harrison, see the biographical work of Harry J. Sievers; Homer E. Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987); and Charles W. Calhoun, “Benjamin Harrison, Centennial President: A Review Essay,” Indiana Magazine of History 84 (1988): 135-160. 316 acknowledged in early 1893, Carey “is regarded as almost the originator of the theory of protection as taught by Pennsylvania and advocated by Mr. McKinley, and stands in relation to it very much as the prophet Mohammed does to the religion of Islam.”19

Pennsylvania’s William “Pig Iron” Kelley, Henry C. Carey’s longtime congressional protégé, was particularly helpful in McKinley’s Listian development. In the late 1870s, Kelley took young McKinley under his protectionist wing, and McKinley was often referred to as “Pig-Iron Kelley’s lieutenant.” Under Kelley’s tutelage,

McKinley came to see high protective tariffs as essential to maintaining high wages for

American labor and industrial development.

Like many Midwesterners, McKinley was also sympathetic to the inflationary

argument of the silverites. He had even voted for the 1878 Bland-Allison Act which

promised limited silver coinage, although in doing so he had ignored his own party’s

majority opposition to it. As he moved quickly through Republican political ranks, he

became adept at avoiding the subject of silver, although his earlier pro-silver position

would come back to haunt him in the 1890s.

But for McKinley, monetary issues were always a distant second to that of the

tariff, and he entered national politics just as the tariff issue began to dominate the

national scene. He soon established himself as the congressional expert when it came to

defending the Republican party’s protectionist position. In the early 1880s, McKinley

also found himself in one of the most enviable and powerful positions as a member of the

House Ways and Means Committee. He thereafter played an instrumental part in insuring

19 David Ames Wells, “Tariff Reform: Retrospective and Prospective,” Forum (Feb. 1893), 703. 317 that the Arthur Administration’s 1883 “Mongrel Tariff”— initially meant to lower tariffs and decrease the federal surplus—retained a strong protectionist bent. He was likewise a pivotal force in blocking Cobdenite William Morrison’s tariff reduction bills in 1884 and

1886; he endorsed both James G. Blaine and the 1884 Republican platform of high tariffs and international bimetallism; and he railed thunderously against Cleveland’s 1887 annual message on tariff reform.20

For McKinley, protectionism epitomized American nationalism, and became akin to a religious conviction. He believed that free trade would “bring American labor down to the standard of the poor white labor of Europe,” and that “free trade, or a revenue tariff

. . . has no respect for labor.” Alternatively, America’s protected manufacturers did not, as free traders would have Americans believe, “bring cholera—they bring coin.” In 1885, he proclaimed himself “a high protectionist,” and that he would not mind if “the tariff were a little higher.” He juxtaposed the Republican protectionist teachings of Hamilton,

Clay, and Lincoln with the Democratic “fallacies of Cobden and Bright and Calhoun, and the leaders of the Southern Confederacy,” and he frequently denounced the “hypocritical cant” and “false and alluring appeal” of Cobdenism. He characterized U.S. tariff reformers as “blind followers of Cobden,” and suggested that their appeal to cheap products would degrade “American manhood.” He had also famously crafted the dissenting minority report and gathered together some of his most invective orations for

20 Ida Tarbell, The Tariff in Our Times (New York, Macmillan and Co., 1911), 185-6; H. Wayne Morgan, McKinley and His America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1963), 54-66, 69, 74-78, 106-8; Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1903), II, 259-97; J. Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1903), 177-226; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 53-55. David Wells helped craft the Democratic minority report to the Mongrel Tariff. 318 his condemnation of the proposed 1888 Mills bill, which he claimed drew its inspiration from the “Cobden school of political science” in its aim of “free-trade or a revenue tariff,” and which “all Europe is watching the progress . . with the deepest concern and anticipating the rich harvest which awaits them when our gates shall be opened” and “our industrial defenses torn down.” His Anglophobic Listian attacks upon the Mills bill were particularly persuasive, and thrust him further into the national spotlight.21

While McKinley’s general sentiments regarding the protective tariff—that it was essential for raising revenue while also protecting infant industries and American laborers—persisted until his death, his Listian outlook regarding foreign markets from the mid 1880s to the late 1890s took quite a progressive turn, especially amid the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. In the mid-1880s to the early 1890s, he yet viewed global affairs in stark terms: “America as against the world,” he once put it. During this period, he described the Democrats as “the pro-British party,” allied “with the manufacturers and the traders of England, who want the American market.” A closed home market sustained

American industries and thus American labor, he believed, until the market became fully prepared for international competition. The “markets of the world” were as yet “a snare and a delusion. We will reach them whenever we can undersell competing nations, and

21 Robert M. La Follette, Robert La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison, WS: The Robert M. La Follette Co., 1913); William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley from his Election to Congress to the Present Time (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1893), 190, 351, 290-335, 528, 489, 117-18, 340, 593; McKinley, Mills Bill.—Tariff Legislation. Speech of Hon. William McKinley, Jr., of Ohio, in the House of Representatives, May 18, 1888 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1888), 5, 28-29; Morgan, McKinley and his America, 108-14. 319 no sooner.” In 1890, McKinley therefore initially expressed some doubt concerning

James Blaine’s possible addition of a reciprocity provision to the McKinley Tariff.22

By the time McKinley entered the oval office in early 1897, however, he would be a full-fledged fan of foreign markets, requesting that “especial attention should be given to the reenactment and extension of the reciprocity principle of the law of 1890, under which so great a stimulus was given to our foreign trade in new and advantageous markets for our surplus agricultural and manufactured goods.” He also called for “the making of commercial treaties, the end in view always to be the opening up of new markets for the products of our country.” By 1899, he made the observation that the tariff debate had disappeared, as the whole country turned its “attention to getting trade wherever it can be found. . . . We have turned from academic theories to trade conditions, and are seeking our share of the world’s markets.”23 McKinley’s evolving protectionist doctrine epitomized the progressivism of the late nineteenth-century Listian nationalists.

Listian Politics and the Passage of the 1890 McKinley Tariff

When Benjamin Harrison took office in early 1889, Congressman William

McKinley was still suspicious of the promised benefits of trade reciprocity and foreign markets. The Republicans, controlling all three federal branches of government for the first time in many years, went quickly to work instituting renewed protectionism under

22 McKinley, Speeches, 350. 23 William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley (New York: Doubleday and McClure Co., 1900), 6-7, 198-99. 320 the guidance of McKinley, now chairman of the House Ways and Means. The subsequently crafted tariff bill moved with relative ease through the Republican- controlled House of Representatives, despite loud Democratic and Cobdenite opposition.

From 1889 to 1890, Atkinson had attempted to rid William McKinley’s bill of its more objectionable aspects by maintaining correspondence with the bill’s most outspoken opponents, men like Democratic Congressmen John Carlisle, William L. Wilson, and

Roger Q. Mills. Atkinson at one point asked the latter gentleman to come to Boston to meet with a small group of New Englanders in order to discuss the proposed tariff measure. When their opposition appeared futile, Atkinson even encouraged Mills to switch tactics altogether by adding as much as he could to the new tariff’s dutiable list in order to “load it down,” thereby turning various manufacturing interests against it. More generally, McKinley’s rising influence within the Republican party suggested to

Atkinson “that the old party which I esteemed so much in former days has committed political suicide by making McKinley its leader.”24

Edward Atkinson also urged the various tariff reform leagues to set up a coordinated petition campaign to help sway the debate in the Ways and Means

Committee and to offset the protectionist propaganda. Yet he expressed his own private doubts to T. B. Potter, founder of the Cobden Club, about bringing freer trade to the

United States in the near future: that the country’s prosperity would not force “people’s attention . . . to the excess of taxation.” He also fully expected to “be charged with being a member of the Cobden Club and subject to the subtile [sic] influence of British gold”

24 Atkinson to Mills, 7 May 1890, carton 20; Atkinson to Dawes, 5 Feb. 1890, carton 19, Atkinson Papers. 321 for his efforts.25 The ultimate passage of the 1890 McKinley Tariff—the dissenting minority report having been devised by Cobdenites John G. Carlisle and David A.

Wells—only supported Atkinson’s doubts, although some were soon to be alleviated. The

Democratic congressional sweep in November 1890, just a month after the bill’s passage, was seen as a particularly encouraging sign to Atkinson and his Cobdenite friends regarding a possible popular condemnation of the current state of high protectionist legislation.

The new tariff ultimately contained a reciprocity provision, signifying a demonstrable shift in U.S. protectionism for decades to come. Listian Secretary of State

James G. Blaine was the mastermind behind the new tariff’s reciprocity provision, inspired by the Pan-American Congress being held in Washington at the same time as the tariff was crafted, backed with the blessing and support of Harrison himself, and developed with the advisory aid of Listian John A. Kasson. The provision provided the admittance of some agricultural goods from South American countries on an individual basis in return for their own duty-free acceptance of U.S. goods. But the reciprocity provision also had sturdy protectionist strings attached. In particular, the signatories were prohibited from establishing reciprocity treaties with any country other than the United

States. McKinley himself found the idea intriguing, but was not yet interested enough to try and sway the more reluctant congressional Republicans on the Ways and Means

Committee. The proposed provision therefore did not initially make it into the first draft

25 Atkinson to Wells, 2 Jan. 1890; Atkinson to Potter, 31 Dec. 1889, carton 19, Atkinson Papers; Edward Atkinson, Taxation and Work: A Series of Treatises on the Tariff and the Currency (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 266. 322 put before the House of Representatives. Robert La Follette afterwards recalled being most surprised by

the misunderstanding in many minds of the Republican doctrine of reciprocity. It

was astonishingly confused with what might be called the Democratic doctrine.

The Republican doctrine, as expounded by Blaine, is based upon the protection of

all American industries that can economically be conducted in this country. It

then places a high tariff on articles . . . that cannot be produced in this country

except at excessive cost . . . to enable the President to make a trade with foreign

countries by offering to them a reduction of duties on articles which we do not

care to protect, in exchange for the reduction of their duties on articles which we

wish to protect but which we wish also to export. It is a kind of double protection

for American industries—protection of the home market against foreigners, and

extension of the foreign market for Americans.

Blaine’s proposed provision was, La Follette reiterated, the opposite of the Democratic free trade doctrine.26

26 William McKinley, The Tariff in the Days of Henry Clay and Since. An Exhaustive Review of Our Tariff Legislation from 1812 to 1896 (New York: Henry Clay Publishing Co., 1896), 139; Morgan, McKinley and his America, 129-30; Kasson to Blaine, Dec. 26, 1888, reel 11, Blaine Papers; La Follett, Autobiography, 111-14; Washington Post, July 26, 1890, p. 1. The bill was also tied up with Blaine’s retaliatory measures against an ongoing European boycott of American pork. See Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 292-301; John L. Gignilliat, “Pigs, Politics, and Protection: The European Boycott of American Pork, 1879-1891,” Agricultural History 35 (Jan. 1961), 11-12. 323 Getting reciprocity into the McKinley bill proved difficult. Blaine went to great lengths to gain congressional support, promising that increased U.S. exports to Latin

America would follow reciprocity and would be combined with a U.S.-subsidized pan-

American railroad and steamship lines. McKinley led the protectionist charge in the

House debate, claiming that the tariff bill—yet bereft of its reciprocal punch—was but fulfilling the Republican mandate of the 1888 elections. McKinley’s protectionist convictions showed throughout, and he advocated “it because enveloped in it are my country’s highest development, and greatest prosperity . . . out of it come the greatest gains to the people . . . the widest encouragement for manly aspirations, with the largest rewards, dignifying and elevating our citizenship, upon which the safety and purity and permanency of our political system depend.”27

The embryonic U.S. tin plate industry gained particularly strong protectionist

support, as did duties on farm goods for the purpose of blocking Canadian and European

importations of various foodstuffs, both as a way to garner Western agrarian support and

to demonstrate that the new tariff was more than just an Eastern manufacturer’s bill. Still

reticent regarding reciprocity, McKinley expressed his own sympathy with his fellow

Republicans’ fears of Blaine’s proposed policy, but he did not exclude the possibility of

its future addition. Thus, without the inclusion of Blaine’s reciprocity provision, the

House bill passed upon party lines: 164 Republicans in favor to 142 Democrats in

opposition. Now it was the Republican-controlled Senate Finance Committee’s turn with

27 CR, 51 Cong., 1 sess., 6256-59; McKinley, Speeches (1893), 397-430. For the initial struggle between Blaine and McKinley over reciprocity, see also William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of the Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 32-34. 324 the bill, and the committee was headed by none other than elderly Vermont Senator

Justin Morrill—author of the Republican party’s first protectionist legislation back in

1861—who quickly designated a younger protectionist senator, Nelson Aldrich, to take the legislative lead. When the bill finally reached the Senate floor, it contained over 400 new amendments.28

Senate Republicans were not yet entirely unified behind the legislation. The small group of Silver Republican senators representing the Western states realized that their bloc vote could potentially swing the McKinley Bill’s success or failure, and decided to use their pivotal position to gain silver concessions from their fellow Republicans. The sound-money Republican majority reluctantly conceded a modest silver bill in order to maintain tariff cohesion. The resulting Sherman Silver Purchase Act thus temporarily united the Republican party’s free silver, international bimetallic, and gold wings, thereby garnering the votes needed to push McKinley’s high tariff bill through the Senate.29

Blaine also used this senatorial confusion to his advantage, and once again began machinations to put in place his Listian reciprocity provision that would spread American influence throughout Latin America, maintain the Republican policy of protection, and increase foreign exports. It was no easy task. Republican opposition in the Senate

Finance Committee caused him so much irritation that at one point he created quite a

28 Morgan, McKinley and his America, 130-151. 29 Fred Wellborn, “The Influence of the Silver Republican Senators, 1889-1891,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 14 (March 1928), 467-71; H. Wayne Morgan, “Western Silver and the Tariff of 1890,” New Mexico Historical Review 35 (1960): 118-28; Jeannette P. Nichols, “Silver Diplomacy,” Political Science Quarterly 48 (Dec. 1933), 579-80. Led by Senator Henry Teller of Colorado, the small contingent of Silver Republicans would bolt upon the 1896 Republican National Convention’s endorsement of gold. 325 buzz around the capital when he furiously smashed his expensive silk hat out of frustration.

Blaine also gave impassioned pleas before McKinley’s House Ways and Means

Committee, and garnered agrarian support for reciprocity by stating that the bill as it stood would not open up any new markets for agricultural products. In particular, he wrote an open letter to a member of the Senate Finance Committee wherein he warned that Great Britain was securing wheat from India, and Russia was rising as another competitor in the European wheat market. Blaine argued that the United States needed

“to use every opportunity for the extension of our market on both of the American continents.” In part owing to Blaine’s persistence, William McKinley was coming around to the idea that American industries were already reaching adulthood, or at least adolescence. He also saw the extended free list and reciprocity provision as a way to sugar-coat the bill for Mid- and Northwestern consumption by offering farmers new export markets in Latin America and Europe. With this newfound support from

McKinley in the House, Blaine’s hard-fought reciprocity provision was finally incorporated. The bill also allowed for the president to raise or lower rates in retaliation if a country offered unequal reciprocal rates. Harrison signed the bill into law on October 1.

McKinley afterwards described the tariff as “protective in every paragraph, and American in every line and word. It recognized and fully enforced the economic principle of protection, which the Republican party from its birth had steadfastly advocated.” It was

326 as Harrison had wanted, a system of reciprocity that did not “attack the protective system.”30

Through a mixture of determination and political maneuvering, Listian Blaine was thus instrumental in adding the reciprocity provision to the McKinley bill. He had done so against the protestations of various powerful protectionists who still stubbornly favored the home market over potential foreign ones. Where America’s Cobdenites could claim some small measure of success stemming from Cleveland’s 1887 message, the reciprocity provision of the McKinley bill can be viewed as an indelible mark of progress for the future of American Listian nationalism. Enough protectionists had finally begun to recognize the maturation of American industry that they overruled the anti-reciprocity opposition, those men who were still unwilling or unable to admit that some of America’s once-infant industries now needed foreign markets alongside the domestic. Following the passage of the McKinley Tariff, prohibitive and retaliatory reciprocity would become a common theme in U.S. protectionist legislation. In 1890, therefore, the decades-long

Listian era of Republican tariff policy—protectionism mixed with reciprocity—was firmly established. The bill’s granting to the executive branch the power to impose retaliatory duties further eased the way for the application of the imperialism of economic nationalism.

30 Morgan, McKinley and his America, 130-151, 143; David S. Muzzey, James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days (New York: Dodd, Mead Co., 1934), 437-450; Joseph Smith, Illusions of Conflict: Anglo- American Diplomacy Toward Latin America, 1865-1896 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), 144; Blaine letter, reprinted in Gail Hamilton, Biography of James G. Blaine (Norwich, CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1895), 686; Hilary A. Herbert, “Reciprocity and the Farmer,” North American Review 154 (April 1892): 414-423; Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest, 75-91; McKinley, The Tariff in the Days of Henry Clay and Since, 141; Harrison to Blaine, 1 Oct. 1891, in Albert T. Volwiler, ed., The Correspondence between Benjamin Harrison and James G. Blaine, 1882-1893 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1940), 202. 327 Soon after the bill’s enactment, other protectionists duly fell under Blaine’s reciprocity spell. With such prohibitive reciprocity, the act was, according to the protectionist New York Tribune, “not in conflict with a protective tariff, but supplementary thereto.” Other Republican journals similarly began to fall into line.31

The New York Times reported on this change of view within the protectionist press. Within a year after the bill’s passage, the Tariff Protection League’s news organ, for example, had come to understand Blaine’s “largeness of view,” after initially condemning his reciprocity scheme as a traitorous assassination of protectionist principles, nor, as the New York Times noted, was it alone in its conversion. “Now the

same high-tariff journals talk as glibly in praise of those projects, in defense of which Mr.

Blaine smashed his silk hat in the committee room, as they do in advocacy of the

abominations which are regarded as Mr. McKinley’s peculiar property . . . they strive to

soften the ire of dissatisfied Republicans by pointing out the beauties of ‘reciprocity.’”32

The free trade press rather predictably waxed disconsolate. The Chicago Tribune,

for instance, argued that it was a “commercial folly” of “economic stupidity”; its

reciprocity provision was “the safeguard of protection.”33 The New York Reform Club

publication Tariff Reform labeled it “A Bungling Attempt to Patch up Protection,” and “a

sad commentary upon the home market theory” in its edition dedicated to the subject.34

The pro-free trade New York Times in turn covered what it termed the “Tax Eater’s

31 New York Tribune, 31 Aug. 1890, 6. 32 New York Times, 29 Aug. 1891. 33 Terrill, “David Ames Wells,” 550; James A. Barnes, John G. Carlisle, Financial Statesman (New York, Dodd Mead & Co., 1931), 189-92; Chicago Tribune, 3 July 1890, 4. 34 Tariff Reform, 30 March 1892, 19. 328 Banquet,” held in honor of William McKinley, the “hero of the hour,” in the newly remodeled and massive Madison Square Garden. The lavish affair was a veritable nationalistic mockery of the era’s cosmopolitan London and New York free trade club dinners. The enormous dinner hall was swathed in red, white, and blue, and lined with

American palms and creeping vines. The mottos of the various states covered the gallery’s front, each motto set in a rosette made of American flags. The food was served on crockery from Trenton. The 500 attendees, the smoke of domestic cigars encircling their heads, sipped on American wines from California, New York, and Ohio and made toasts with four varieties of American-crafted champagne. The menu offered “Chicago

Sausages,” “chicken, Maryland style,” “Washington tenderloin,” and “Long Island asparagus.” The less-than-objective Times reporter could not help but notice that among the finely tailored suits of the attendees, not one contained even “a vestige of homespun,” and he predicted that the same probably went for the “underwear warming the sleek bodies of those who sat at the table.” Near the end of the festivities, McKinley rose to speak amid great applause. He praised the prohibitive pieces of his legislation, took swipes at Grover Cleveland and Roger Mills’s failed attempts at revenue reform a couple years back, and concluded with a respectful nod to “that great statesman, James G.

Blaine” and his reciprocity provision.35

Following such protectionist festivities, the 1892 Democratic party plank denounced the tariff’s reciprocity element as retaliatory and antithetical to Democratic doctrine. With his eye on the 1892 presidential prize, Cobdenite Grover Cleveland

35 New York Times, 30 April 1891. 329 weighed in, describing the measure as a lame limp “in the direction of freer commercial exchanges. If ‘hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,’ reciprocity may be called the homage prohibitory protection pays to genuine tariff reform.” Thomas G. Shearman, an

American Cobden Club member since 1883, wrote the London Times that the tariff bill had been “framed, advocated, and carried out in a spirit of hatred towards England, and in the hope of destroying many of her industries and ruining many of her people,” as the

Republicans had themselves argued on the 1888 campaign trail. The Harrison

Administration knew well how to twist the lion’s tail—and tie it in a knot, too.36 With the newfound support of William McKinley, the Listian “Plumed Knight” had once again proven himself particularly adept at counteracting the Cobdenite opposition.

Harrison’s Imperialism of Economic Nationalism

While the McKinley bill was being prepared between 1889 and 1890, James

Blaine and William E. Gladstone, a Cobdenite and former British prime minister, publicly exchanged their views on the U.S. economy. Gladstone predicted that the United

States, to the benefit of both countries, would “outstrip” England in “the race” once the

United States adopted a policy of free trade. Blaine responded by arguing that Britain had maintained a policy of protectionism so long as it was to its advantage, and similarly

36 McKinley, The Tariff in the Days of Henry Clay and Since, 159-60; London Times, 6 Oct. 1890, 5; Grover Cleveland, Addresses, State Papers and Letters, ed. by Albert Ellery Bergh (New York: The Sun Dial Classics Co., 1908), 337; London Times, 14 Sept. 1891, 11. For the global British reaction to the tariff, see also Marc-William Palen, “Protection, Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890-94,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38 (Sept. 2010): 395-418. 330 moved afterward to free trade; Gladstone “speaks only for the free trade party of Great

Britain and their followers on this side of the ocean.” Blaine feared that a move away from protection in 1890 would result in economic recolonization by Britain, wherein the

United States would essentially become a British dependency like Canada or Australia.

According to Blaine, British encouragement of free trade was anything but altruistic. He then recalled Cleveland’s 1887 free trade message noting “how exactly he adopts the line of argument used by the English Free-Trader.”37 Blaine and Gladstone’s give and take garnered great transatlantic coverage.

Edward Atkinson himself had “never seen such an exhibition of conscious ignorance” as in Blaine’s reply to Gladstone, especially his misrepresentation of England in the 1840s under Peel’s reforms, his “attempts to connect commercial crises with changes in the American Tariff,” and “misstatements . . . so glaring” as to be “absolutely dishonest,” without evidence, and “wholly inconsistent with the facts.”38 On the other hand, Atkinson acknowledged that Blaine did have his hand on the executive and legislative “tiller.” After all, he had been able to obtain Republican votes from every part of the country for the McKinley bill, and the administration had yet to fully use its trump card. “What is their trump card? Reciprocity,” Atkinson noted with some prescience, months before the successful insertion of the reciprocity provision and the bill’s ultimate passage.39

37 William Gladstone in , et al., Both Sides the Tariff Question by the World’s Leading Men (New York: Alonzo Peniston, 1890), 20, 57, 64, 61. 38 Atkinson to Dawes, 5 Feb. 1890, carton 19, Atkinson Papers. 39 “Memorandum,” 6 June 1890, carton 20, Atkinson Papers. 331 The revolutionary tariff measure followed on the heels of the publication and dissemination of an inflammatory map that suggested how Canada might be divided and incorporated through American annexation [figure 9]. A controversy between the United

States and Britain surrounding fur-seal hunting in the Bering Sea was also ratcheting up when, upon taking office, Harrison declared that pelagic sealing by British vessels was illegal. Arrests followed. The controversy reached a critical point between 1890 and

1891, as American newspapers warned of a possible outbreak of war. Anglophobic sentiment swelled. Blaine himself fell ill amid the compromise, wherein a satisfactory solution was found that appeased both the British and American governments while leaving the Canadians outraged when they did not receive any payment for damages suffered at the hands of the United States. The issue made Canadian-American relations all the more acerbic for years to come.40

40 Charles S. Campbell, Jr., “The Anglo-American Crisis in the Bering Sea, 1890-1891,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (Dec. 1961): 393-414; Campbell Jr., The Transformation of American Foreign Relations, 1865-1900 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 122-125; Paul Gibb, “Selling out Canada? The Role of Sir Julian Pauncefote in the Bering Sea Dispute, 1889-1902,” International History Review 24 (Dec. 2002): 817-844. For a general overview of Harrison’s “aggressive” foreign policy, see Socolofsky and Spetter, Presidency of Benjamin Harrison, 125-156. 332

Figure 9: “A Map of the United States May Look Like This After the Annexation of Canada.” Above is the alleged New York World map reprinted in a pamphlet distributed to the Toronto Branch of the Imperial Federation League. John Hague, Canada for Canadians. A Royalist “Roland,” for the Annexationist “Oliver” (Toronto: Hart & Company, 1889).

Canadian-American relations further deteriorated when Republican opposition did not allow for the development of Canadian-American reciprocity under the McKinley

Tariff. Canada was also notably excluded from Blaine’s Pan-American protectionist vision, as were the British West Indies. The Pan-American conference convened in

333 Washington D.C. from 1889 to mid-1890, and the exclusion of the two British colonies indicated that it was a decidedly anti-British affair.41

The Pan-American movement had been a pet project of Blaine’s for some time now, desirous as he was to see Britain’s influence in Latin America replaced by the

United States. He had supported federal subsidization of steamship lines between the

United States in Brazil as early as 1878, and he had nearly succeeded in bringing the

Latin American states to the conference table as state secretary under James Garfield, but

Garfield’s 1881 assassination also had killed the proposed conference. Blaine’s Pan-

American vision in 1881 had involved bringing perpetual peace to North and South

America, ousting Britain from its dominant trading position in Latin America, and cultivating commerce within the Western Hemisphere so as to “lead to a large increase in the export trade of the United States.”42

The Pan-American conference of 1889-90 was a decidedly Listian enterprise, and one the British followed with due attention. Blaine sought a Western Hemispheric

Zollverein, one that kept out commercial competition from Europe and Asia through the adoption of hemispheric high-tariff walls, while allowing American exports privileged access to Latin American markets through the establishment of prohibitive reciprocal trade. Through the reciprocity agreements, the Latin American signatories’ excess raw materials would in turn receive privileged access to U.S. markets. The conferees initially

41 Smith, Illusions of Conflict, 130-154. 42 ibid., 130-154; A. Curtis Wilgus, “James G. Blaine and the Pan American Movement,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (Nov. 1922): 662-708; Russell H. Bastert, “A New Approach to the Origins of Blaine’s Pan American Policy,” Hispanic Historical Review 39 (Aug. 1959): 375-412; James G. Blaine, Political Discussions: Legislative, Diplomatic, and Popular 1856-1886 (Norwich, CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1887), 411. 334 sought hemispheric unification not only through a customs union, but also through common silver coinage, a pan-American railroad system, increased port communications, an international bank, a uniform system of weights and measures, and international arbitration of disputes. The delegates from Argentina quickly found themselves in disagreement with the American proposals, and viewed Blaine’s plan as little more than a ploy to dominate the markets of Latin America. The other Latin American delegates chose one side or the other. Stalemated, little came about from the conference aside from the creation of a permanent Pan-American headquarters in Washington D.C. and a general resolution in favor of reciprocity treaties. Although Blaine’s Pan-American conference fell into shambles, he was able to procure some of his desired reciprocal trade agreements between 1891 and 1892 owing to the McKinley Tariff’s reciprocity provision

(see chapter 8).43

The Harrison Administration’s imperial impulse was put on further display when

Harrison, Blaine, and Mahanite Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Franklin Tracy began actively seeking naval bases and coaling stations in the Caribbean and the Pacific. In the

Caribbean, the administration looked to Mole St. Nicholas in Haiti in 1891 as a future

American coaling station, and as a naval base to protect any future isthmian canal. The

43 Smith, Illusions of Conflict, 130-154; David M. Pletcher, “Reciprocity and Latin America in the Early 1890s: A Foretaste of Dollar Diplomacy,” Pacific Historical Review 47 (Feb. 1978): 53-89; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 237-279; David Healy, James G. Blaine and Latin America (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001), chap. 9; Edward P. Crapol, James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 65-66, 111-136; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 162-63; John D. Martz, “Economic Relationships and the Early Debate over Free Trade,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 526 (March 1993): 25-35. Reciprocity treaties were signed with Brazil, Spain (for Cuba and Puerto Rico), the Dominican Republic, the British West Indies, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. 335 United States government had never recognized the provisional government of Haiti that had been in power since 1888. This meant that neutrality laws did not technically apply.

Military aid was funneled to Haitian insurgents after Harrison sent naval vessels to intimidate the Haitian government. These U.S. actions sped up the provisional government’s overthrow. Frederick Douglass was then sent as the U.S. minister to meet with the new leader, Hyppolite. Part of Douglass’s mission was to secure a coaling station at Mole, and he was given further support for the undertaking with the arrival of

U.S. Admiral Gherardi. Hyppolite firmly refused both men’s entreaties. With no other option than to seize the port by force, Blaine, Harrison, and Tracy turned instead to obtaining Samana Bay in the Dominican Republic. Rumors of the proposal were enough to outrage the Dominican public, who quickly sent the Dominican state secretary into exile. Caribbean pride and Yankeephobia had foiled Harrison, Tracy, and Blaine’s

Caribbean designs, as the Pan-American conference had similarly been undone.44

The Harrison Administration’s imperial efforts in the Pacific bore more fruit, or at least more sugar. At the Berlin Conference of 1889, for instance, Blaine made sure that

American interests in Samoa were maintained, particularly U.S. control over Pago Pago, which had been an important naval and coaling station along the U.S. trade route to Asia for many years. Samoa was once again divided up between the United States, Germany,

44 Healy, Blaine, 180-204; Crapol, Architect of Empire, 129-30; Alice Felt Tyler, The Foreign Policy of James G. Blaine (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965 [1927]), 91-96; Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1940), 94-109; Allan Spetter, “Harrison and Blaine: Foreign Policy, 1889-1893,” Indiana Magazine of History 65 (Sept. 1969): 214-227. 336 and Britain. A decade later, under William McKinley’s presidential watch, American

Samoa would properly be added to the new American empire.45

Finally, the McKinley Tariff had the effect of a “body blow on the Hawaiian sugar economy,” as historian Robert Ferrell described it, thereby triggering the Hawaiian revolution that began in January 1893. Simply put, since 1876, the United States had established reciprocal trade relations with Hawaii, and, since 1884, a naval base at Pearl

Harbor in order to take advantage of Hawaii’s possible strategic and commercial role in accessing the Asia market. The McKinley Tariff thereafter displaced Hawaiian sugar from its favored position of unfettered access to the protected U.S. market.

The change in policy precipitated an economic depression in Hawaii, as sugar made up 93 per cent of the country’s exports. The 1890 tariff forced Hawaiian sugar growers into direct competition with the rest of the world’s sugar producers, particularly those of Latin America and the heavily subsidized beet sugar industry in Europe. The new bill allowed raw sugar to enter the United States duty free, in part so that the

Europeans would lift their embargo on American pork. The tariff also granted a substantial bounty to domestic sugar producers. Hawaii’s revolutionary leaders— predominantly U.S. businessmen—believed that only American annexation could solve the myriad problems surrounded the islands’ depressed sugar trade and Queen

Liliukalani’s power grab. At first, many Hawaiian sugar producers, with scarce labor

45 Sylvia Masterman, The Origins of International Rivalry in Samoa, 1845-1884 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1934); G. H. Ryden, The Foreign Policy of the United States in Relation to Samoa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933); Paul M. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German- American Relations, 1878-1900 (Dublin: Irish University Press, 1974); Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 227-253; Miton Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865-1900 ( Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 198-204. 337 forces, opposed the revolution and annexation as they feared that U.S. prohibition of

Chinese labor would apply to Hawaii, as well. Yet fear of either despotism or anarchy superseded their labor worries. Those in favor of annexation believed the Hawaiians were unfit for self-government and hoped Hawaiian sugar producers might thereafter receive the same bounty U.S. domestic producers had procured, thereby bringing an end to the depression.46

Blaine, his June 1892 state department successor John Foster, and Harrison himself were more than happy to oblige the Hawaiian annexationists, especially when the

U.S. minister to Hawaii and Blaine’s close friend, John Stevens, intimated that Britain would annex the islands if the United States did not. Anglophobic sentiment was further raised when it was reported that the Hawaiian attorney general, a Canadian, preferred establishing an oceanic cable and steamship line with Vancouver and a treaty of reciprocity with Canada.47

With this added Anglophobic impetus, Alfred Thayer Mahan also threw his neo- mercantilist support to the annexationist scheme. With the added backing of the prominent navalist, the Harrison Administration backed up its support for the

46 Robert Ferrell, American Diplomacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 329; Walter LaFeber, Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Volume II: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 94; Merze Tate, “British Opposition to the Cession of Pearl Harbor,” Pacific Historical Review 29 (Nov. 1960): 381-394; Eric T. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 74-78; Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964 [1936]); Richard D. Weigle, “Sugar and the Hawaiian Revolution,” Pacific Historical Review 16 (Feb. 1947): 41-58; William A. Russ, Jr., “The Role of Sugar in Hawaiian Annexation,” Pacific Historical Review 12 (Dec. 1943): 339-350; George W. Baker, “Benjamin Harrison and Hawaiian Annexation: A Reinterpretation,” Pacific Historical Review 33 (Aug. 1964): 295-309; Gignilliat, “Pigs, Politics, and Protection,” 3-12. 47 Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 205. 338 annexationists with naval power. U.S. sailors landed on Hawaiian shores to protect

American property and to intimidate the royalists in mid-January 1893, marking the revolution’s start. The queen was deposed the next day. Secretary of State John W. Foster desired speedy annexation, and crafted a treaty that the Senate might ratify before

Harrison stepped down from office in early March. To hurry ratification, Foster turned down the annexationists’ controversial requests for funding improvements at Pearl

Harbor, a clause allowing for the laying of an oceanic cable between Honolulu and the

United States, and a provision that would have allowed the Hawaiians to preserve their liberal contract labor system. The treaty of annexation was signed on 14 February 1893, but was nevertheless stalled in the Senate, and would await the disapproving eye of the incoming Cobdenite administration of Grover Cleveland (see chapter 9). The Listian’s implementation of the imperialism of economic nationalism in the Pacific would have to wait.48

Free Trade Strikes Back

Protection is the cry

That we raise the echoes by,

. . . Every shop and every mill

Knows the great McKinley bill

48 Alfred T. Mahan, “Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power,” Forum 15 (March 1893): 1-11; Spetter, “Harrison and Blaine,” 227; LaFeber, Cambridge History, 94; Love, Race over Empire, 73-78. 339 . . . Reciprocity we claim.

Is the glory of Jim Blaine,

Every man will vote for Harrison and Reid.

Excerpt from “Campaign Song,” Protection and Reciprocity 1: 4 (Oct. 1892).

The above excerpt from Protection and Reciprocity proved precipitous, whether

in the elections of 1890 or 1892. The promised benefits of the McKinley Tariff and its

reciprocity provision had not materialized in time to maintain the Republican majority in

Congress, as the Cobden Club in London happily noted.49 With the 1890 Pan-American

Congress turning into a “fiasco,” Atkinson had written to English Cobdenite William

Fowler that he foresaw “a political revolution in the autumn elections.” Atkinson’s

prediction, as was often the case, came to fruition; the November 1890 congressional

elections returned control of the House to the Democrats in a landslide of 236 Democrats

to 88 Republicans. West Virginia’s William L. Wilson, a leading Democratic tariff

reformer in the House, vowed to Edward Atkinson that “the organization of the next

House will be aggressively Tariff reform,” albeit with a “cautious and conservative”

temper.50

Singling out Wells in February 1891, Congressman William McKinley observed

with some rancor that

49 The Annual General Meeting of the Cobden Club, 1893, 3-4, 7. 50 Atkinson to Fowler, 14 June 1890, carton 20; Wilson to Atkinson, 2 Dec. 1890, carton 4, Atkinson Papers. 340 The Democratic victory had its uses. It established beyond dispute or controversy

the existence of a partnership between Democratic free trade leaders in the United

States and the statesmen and ruling classes of Great Britain . . . is it any wonder

that the chief of Democratic tariff reformers, Mr. David A. Wells . . . should have

felt himself constrained to advise his co-partners across the Atlantic to be more

circumspect, telling them that they were retarding the cause they wished to

promote by their too open demonstration of rejoicing?51

In a press release, McKinley charged that the “conspiracy between importers and free trade to raise prices and charge it upon the McKinley Bill was successful, but conspiracies are short-lived and soon expire. This one has already been laid bare and the infamy of it will still further appear.”52 Johnstown, New York’s partisan Daily

Republican also commented on this seeming swing toward freer trade within the

Democratic party and national politics, that “mugwumps and other theorists may construe the victory as an indorsement [sic] of Cobdenism,” but the “Protectionist Democrats of the Randall School” were growing restless. The Cobdenites might have “command of the

Democratic hosts,” but “when the battle is on,” the protectionist Democrats will be welcomed within the protectionist ranks, and “as Protectionists, not as Republicans, we

51 McKinley, reported in the London Times, 14 Feb. 1891, 7; London Times, 14 Nov. 1891; Gerald W. McFarland, Mugwumps, Morals & Politics, 1884-1920 (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), 65-67. 52 Quoted in Quentin R. Skrabec, Jr., William McKinley: Apostle of Protectionism (New York: Algora Publishing, 2008), 99; and Edward Thornton Heald, The William McKinley Story (Canton, OH: Stark County Historical Society, 1964), 61. 341 will teach politicians that no party can win by fighting under the banner of the Cobden

Club . . . the American policy of Protection is a sacred institution.”53

Harrison, in his 1892 letter of acceptance of the Republican presidential nomination, made sure to note the adverse impact of the reciprocity treaties and the

McKinley Tariff upon British trade. He also noted that British exports to Latin America had dropped significantly, owing “directly to the reciprocity policy of the United States.”

The Republican national platform supported international bimetallism and resolutely defended its policy of protection mixed with reciprocity, noting that it had “enlarged markets” and would “eventually give us control of the trade of the world.” A common

Harrison campaign slogan was “Protection and Reciprocity,” and a pro-Harrison publication appeared under that title as well, quoted above. The avowedly anti-British reciprocity issue, however, was not enough to get Harrison reelected in 1892. Neither

Harrison nor Blaine were able to campaign as they had in 1888, owing to a variety of personal issues and the rising Populist movement, which took away a sizeable chunk of

Republican votes.54

Nor had American Cobdenites given up on their hope for freer trade during the reign of Harrison and Blaine, although the Listian administration certainly tried their patience. During this period, free trade clubs were formed in Maryland, Illinois,

53 Daily Republican, 28 May 1891. 54Republican National Convention. Proceedings of the Tenth Republican National Convention, 1892 (Minneapolis: Harrison and Smith, 1892), 167, 86; Donald Marquand Dozer, “Benjamin Harrison and the Presidential Campaign of 1892,” American Historical Review 54 (Oct. 1948): 49-77. 342 Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.55 In Massachusetts, Edward Atkinson and other

Cobdenites were similarly instrumental in creating what were called Question Clubs.

Numbering about seventy five, these clubs formulated lists of hard-hitting questions regarding the tariff that were then sent to protectionist politicians and publicized in newspapers in the hope of causing public embarrassment.56

Cobdenite Henry George observed that “radical free trade is rapidly gaining

ground.” The Free Trade Club of Cleveland, Ohio in turn sought to “drain” America’s

“dooryards of the foul stagnant miasmatic pool of protection” at their commemoration of

Richard Cobden’s birthday in June of 1889. Presaging Cleveland’s reelection, they noted

that free trade was “a potent, living factor of progress and power for this country,” and

would “at no distant time . . . become an adopted system of our people in their march

onward and upward to the highest altitude of National prosperity.”57

For its part, the New York Reform Club—once referred to by Rome, New York’s

Roman Citizen as the “twin sister of the Cobden Club”—debated the Protective Tariff

League throughout the country in the lead-up to the 1890 elections, and frequently

published in its journal Tariff Reform the writings of various Cobdenites such as David

Wells, Roger Q. Mills, William Lloyd Garrison, Jacob Schoenhof, Horace White, and

55 Wells to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., 12 May 1892, Folder 3, Box 2, Charles Francis Adams Jr. Papers, MHS. New York Tribune, 14 June 1889, 6; 28 March 1892, 3; Tingley, “American Cobden Clubs,” 55-56, 59. 56 Williamson, Atkinson, 149-50. 57 George to T. F. Walker, 17 Oct. 1890, reel 5, Henry George Papers, NYPL; Ohio Free Trade Club, Richard Cobden’s Birthday (Cleveland: Ohio Free Trade Club, 1889), 18, 19. 343 Thomas G. Shearman.58 At its massive 1890 annual banquet in celebration of “the triumph of Tariff Reform in the late election” of November, with over 500 attendees, the

Reform Club’s president proudly announced that the club had spent upwards of $55,000 during the 1890 elections, emphasizing as well for their Republican detractors that none of it was “British gold.”59

Free trade literature was furnished by the club for “salting Protectionist meetings,” as well as agrarian centers in Iowa and Ohio. Hundreds of newspapers also received and printed the club’s tariff reform literature on a weekly basis. Tariff Reform

was itself replete with depictions of Anti-Corn-Law agitation, filled with articles

denouncing the McKinley Tariff, and decrying the supposedly harmful effects of

protection upon the laborer and the farmer, particularly the latter group as Southern and

Western Populist agitation picked up momentum. The most urgent demand for their

literature came from “rural sections that have hitherto been protectionist,” owing to the

continued depreciation of their lands and business returns. Tariff reform clubs sprouted

up throughout Missouri, and agitation grew as well in South Dakota, New Jersey, and

Maryland.60

58 Roman Citizen, 22 Nov. 1890; Report for 1890, with Summary Financial Statement (New York; Reform Club, 1890), 10; New York Tribune, 8 Sept. 1890, 6; 29 Sept. 1890, 6. 59 Tariff Reform, 30 Dec. 1890, 2, 4. 60 Reform Club, Officers and Committees, Members, Constitution, By-Laws, Rules, Reports, &c (New York: Albert B. King, 1890), 118-19, 122-28. 344

Figure 10: “Daniel O’Connell.” The New York Reform Club publication Tariff Reform republished the above poster, copies of which “the American Protectionists have been circulating.” In order to connect their movement to the Anti-Corn-Law League and gain Irish-American support, Tariff Reform noted that the cartoon was identical to the “poster used in 1844 by the British monopolists” against Ireland’s Daniel O’Connell “in his fight for free bread and cheaper food for Irish laborers.”Tariff Reform, 15 June 1889, 113.

More Americans were also looking toward the country’s southern neighbor as a potential partner in trade reciprocity, a topic of discussion since the proposal of a reciprocity treaty in 1859. Such sentiment resurfaced following Mexican reaction to U.S. duties on lead: duties put in place in the late 1880s and continued under the McKinley

Tariff. Mexico, in retaliation, had implemented its own duties on American meats and ship tonnage. Such retaliatory tariffs had their desired effects; aside from Colorado’s

345 miners, who gained most from the lead duties, U.S. interest in freer trade with Mexico found renewal.61

Mexico was of course not the only country that Americans were looking toward with reciprocity in mind. Edward Atkinson observed to Canadian businessman and commercial union advocate Erastus Wiman that “that there is a point in which the protectionist and the free-trader can come together,” and that was the issue of Canadian reciprocity. The industrial and agricultural areas bordering the two countries along New

Hampshire and Maine were increasingly coming to understand that freer trade in a variety of raw materials was mutually beneficial. American duties on Nova Scotian coal, for instance, had been an area of complaint from New England manufacturers since the abrogation of reciprocity in 1866. This complaint resurfaced even more heatedly following the McKinley Tariff’s passage. Atkinson was himself “very glad to contribute to this line of thought.”62

Condemnation of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of July 1890 was also finding bipartisan support, as the bill satisfied neither America’s silverites nor its goldbugs.

Atkinson at first expressed little worry as he believed the increasing demand for silver in

61 Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 10-11; Edward McPherson, ed., The Tribune Almanac for 1893 (New York: The Tribune Association, 1893), 43-44; El Paso Board of Trade, A Compilation of Resolutions, Statistics, and Useful Information Pertinent to the Mexican Silver-Lead Ore Question (El Paso, TX: Times Publishing Company, 1889); Pletcher, “Reciprocity and Latin America,” 75-76; George E. Paulsen, “Fraud, Honor, and Trade: The United States-Mexico Dispute over the Claim of La Abra Company, 1875-1902,” Pacific Historical Review 52 (May 1983), 187-88; Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 173-190; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998 [1963]), 28, 46-52; David M. Pletcher, The Awkward Years: American Foreign Relations under Garfield and Arthur (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1961), 180-190, 338-39. 62 “How the Eastern States may Secure Cheap and Abundant Supplies of Bituminous Coal from Nova Scotia,” Free-Trader (Feb. 1870), 147-148; Peleg McFarlin, New England’s Lost Supremacy. Shall it be Regained? (Boston: New England Tariff Reform League, 1891); Atkinson to Wiman, 2 April, 27 May 1889, carton 19, Atkinson Papers. 346 South America and Africa would alleviate whatever problems might arise from the act itself.63 Furthermore, blame for the current agitation and its aftermath could now easily be laid upon Silver Republicans.

Overall, however, the Cobdenite supporters of Cleveland remained staunch

enemies of such free silver agitation. The group’s handful of international bimetallists—

seeking silver coinage solely on an international basis—were also strongly against the

national bimetallic movement, and feared Democratic support for a free silver platform.

Atkinson described the free coinage of silver as “the most foolish fraud that could be

committed upon an ignorant community.” He wrote Grover Cleveland that, while there

was “room for a difference of opinion on what is called Bimetalism [sic] . . . the free

coinage of silver . . . is condemned alike by every intelligent student of the currency . . .

whether bi-metallist or mono-metallist. I think it will promote a disaster or a panic such

as we have never seen.” Presaging the 1896 elections, Atkinson recognized that if the

Democrats “are going wrong on the Money question, I, and plenty more of my kind, will

join any other set of men, what ever party they belong to, and help them to break the

Democrats and crush them into powder; as they ought to be crushed if they behave like

fools.”64

Cleveland responded as Atkinson hoped he would, writing to the chairman of the

Reform Club that unlimited coinage of silver was “a dangerous reckless experiment.”

Atkinson remarked to David Wells in his usual prophetic manner that, “had he

63 Williamson, Atkinson, 154-57. 64 Atkinson to Edmund Hudson, 3 Jan. 1891; Atkinson to Cleveland, 9 Jan. 1891, carton 20, Atkinson Papers. 347 [Cleveland] not spoken on the silver question, he might have been nominated, but would have been defeated. Having spoken, he will be nominated and will be elected.” He similarly predicted that “the people are sick and tired of McKinleyism . . . they will quietly support Cleveland in the reform of the Tariff.”65

Atkinson encouraged the Democrats to focus on the Tariff Question, not silver, and he suggested to Wells that he use his ongoing debates with Cobdenite Henry George over the Single Tax to bring in the tariff reform issue. If George would thus “make the

Single Tax secondary” to free trade, “the alliance would be a very powerful one.” Henry

George was in apparent agreement, believing that Grover Cleveland should get the nomination “because the tariffits [sic] of all degrees fear him, and well justified their fear.

We should not permit any question to come up that will divert attention from the tariff fight. When men are attacked by wolves, they have no time to kill rats or fight gold- bugs.” In proper Cobdenite verbiage, George predicted that a united world “in the bonds of commerce and its guarantee of peace among the nations” was close at hand.66

Democratic Congressman William L. Wilson similarly had written Atkinson that the Democratic party offered the only hope for tariff reform, “and there is no hope for the

Democratic party except by pushing the Tariffs and avoiding the silver issue.” Wilson also suggested that “the Mugwumps can do much” by “keeping the Tariff issue to the

65 Cleveland to E. Ellery Anderson, 10 Feb. 1891 in Writings and Speeches of Grover Cleveland, ed. by George F. Parker (New York: Cassell Publishing Company, 1892), 374; Atkinson to Wells, 13 Feb. 1891, carton 20; Atkinson to Nordhoff, 10 Oct. 1892, carton 22, Atkinson Papers. 66 George to Louis Post, 31 March, 2 April 1891, reel 5, George Papers. 348 front to the exclusion of all others.”67 Cleveland duly won reelection on a tariff reform platform, although the victory would prove pyrrhic.

Conclusion

In a final letter to Atkinson following Cleveland’s reelection in March 1893, an embittered Henry Carey Baird warned of the country’s feigned desire for free trade:

“What you see is a mere mirage, no more; all your propositions being false, society would not tolerate you or your societary nostrums, in practice in this country even for three months. Societary life based on Carey’s Philosophy is established in this land on a rock, and has come to stay and stay it will, because of its foundation in truth.”68 And so it seemed. From the McKinley Tariff to its imperial designs in the Caribbean and the

Pacific, the Listian policies of the Harrison Administration had laid the protectionist groundwork for the empire-building of 1898 and after. Furthermore, the effects of

American protectionism were being felt not only in American domestic politics, but throughout the globe. Listian nationalism was showing itself to be influential indeed.

67 Atkinson to Wells, 18 July 1890, carton 20; Wilson to Atkinson, 26 Dec. 1891, 11 Jan. 1892, carton 5, Atkinson Papers. 68 Baird to Atkinson, 7 March 1893, carton 6, Atkinson Papers. 349 Chapter 8: Cobdenism in Retreat: The Global Impact of the McKinley

Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890-94

And the bacilli of Cobden we

Will scatter to the gale,

. . . Till the hopeful British Lion drops

His elevated tail!

For the Major [McKinley] leads the column,

And so conquer sure we must;

On our banner is Protection,

Let Free Traders bite the dust.

Scotland’s Blackburn Standard, August 1891, showing in verse “how the people think

and write across the water.”1

The manufacturers of Great Britain don’t like the McKinley tariff bill. The manufacturers

of Germany don’t like the McKinley tariff bill. The manufacturers of France don’t like

the McKinley tariff bill. The Anglomaniac Free Traders of the United States don’t like the

McKinley tariff bill. This furnishes four excellent reasons why the bill should become a

law.

Fair Trade, 1890.2

1 “M’Kinley Leads the Column,” Blackburn Standard (England), 29 Aug. 1891, 5. 2 Fair Trade (England), 6 June 1890, 413. 350

Ironic sentiments such as those of the Blackburn Standard and the Fair Trade

League (1881-91) in England toward the passage of an extreme American protective tariff—the McKinley Tariff of 1890—exemplified the burgeoning crisis within Britain’s imperial system of free trade, both at home and abroad. Doubtless, the system’s free trade proponents had begun to wonder what had caused the rising economic crises and militarism of the late nineteenth century, when the Pax Britannica had just begun to appear triumphant. For starters, Britain’s industrial superiority and its maintenance of free trade abroad had inspired in turn a rival Listian national policy of infant industrial protectionism among its competitors and its colonies. The Cobdenite hands-off approach to imperial management had ironically allowed for the colonial implementation of Listian policies, often in imitation of, or retaliation to, the success of protectionist policies in

Europe and North America. In particular, Germany and the United States, engaging in government-subsidized internal improvements and high tariff walls, increasingly began to overtake Britain in the production of basic commodities like steel and pig iron, and pressured Britain through competition in foreign and colonial markets.3 Britain’s perceived economic decline relative to these rising powers, and the impact of the late- nineteenth-century “Great Depression” more generally, sounded the alarm to

Conservatives and protectionists throughout the British Empire who desired closer imperial ties between the metropole and colonies. Drawing ideological inspiration from

3 Andrew Thompson and Gary Magee, “A Soft Touch? British Industry, Empire Markets, and the Self- Governing Dominions, c. 1870-1914,” Economic History Review 56 (Nov. 2003): 694-696. 351 the writings of Friedrich List, they increasingly wanted an interconnected and interdependent Greater Britain. Britain’s Cobdenites in turn found themselves on the defensive.

Such demands for a protectionist imperial federation increased dramatically after

1890 in response to the American passage of the era’s highest tariff with an ad valorem rate of nearly 50 percent: the McKinley Tariff Act. British imperial historians have looked at many influential factors contributing to demands for imperial federation and protectionism, but they have largely overlooked the McKinley Tariff’s particular imperial impact.4 American historians have likewise tended to offer a predominantly national focus on the tariff’s origins and effects.5 Yet the bill’s passage sent economic and political shockwaves across the globe.6 The McKinley bill’s highly protectionist tariff rates and discriminatory reciprocity policies promised to keep British exports from

American markets and potentially close Britain’s previously lucrative markets in Latin

America and Canada, as well. In addition to England, Latin America, and Canada, it also

4 For a notable exception, see Edmund Rogers, “The United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain, 1873- 1913,” Historical Journal 50 (2007): 593-622. 5 See, for instance, Edward P. Crapol, America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1973), 173-79, 184-85; Howard Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and his America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1963), chap. 8; Joanne Reitano, The Tariff Question in the Gilded Age: The Great Debate of 1888 (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1994), 129-31; Clarence A. Stern, Protectionist Republicanism: Republican Tariff Policy in the McKinley Period (Oshkosh, WI: self-published, 1971), 21-42; and Tom E. Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874-1901 (Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1973), chap. 7. 6 Some case studies have also been made showing the economic influence of American manufacturers upon Britain during this period. See, for instance, R. A. Church, “The Effect of the American Export Invasion on the British Boot and Shoe Industry 1885-1914,” The Journal of Economic History 28 (June 1968): 223-54; S. J. Nicholas, “The American Export Invasion of Britain: The Case of the Engineering Industry, 1870-1914,” Technology and Culture 21 (Oct. 1980): 570-88; Mathew Simon and David E. Novack, “Some Dimensions of the American Commercial Invasion of Europe, 1871-1914: An Introductory Essay,” Journal of Economic History 24 (Dec. 1964): 591-605. 352 affected the British West Indies, South Africa, and Australasia. The McKinley Tariff should be viewed, then, in part as a nationalistic response to the cosmopolitanism of

Britain’s free trade empire.7 Alternatively, this geographically and politically far- reaching British reaction to American economic competition and protectionism can fruitfully be analyzed beyond the national level.

This chapter therefore takes a global historical approach to subjects previously viewed within the confines of national boundaries. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective of the British movement toward imperial federation by incorporating

American economic policies with those of the British Empire on a global scale. Late nineteenth-century American protectionism was intimately interlinked with the political and economic policies of the British Empire; as British free trade ideology pushed outward from the center, peripheral protectionists pushed back. Contrary to Listian nationalist William McKinley’s assertion that “this is a domestic bill; it is not a foreign bill,” the impact of the tariff was not only local.8 As one American protectionist modestly observed in his contemporary study of the tariff in 1890, “the McKinley bill, which is made for our own people, shakes the industrial markets of Europe from the British islands to the Danube.”9

7 Martin Daunton, “Britain and Globalization since 1850: I. Creating a Global Order, 1850-1914,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006), 3-4; Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4-5; Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 93-4, 286-7. 8 Congressional Record, 51 Cong., 1 Sess., 7 May 1890, 4250. 9 David Hall Rice, Protective Philosophy: A Discussion of the Principles of the American Protective System as Embodied in the McKinley Bill (Boston: George B. Reed, 1890), iii. 353 I argue that the McKinley Tariff’s policies helped call into question Britain’s liberal, free trade, global empire by drumming up support for an imperial, protectionist, preferential Greater Britain. Demands for imperial union and protectionism, in turn, increased demands in the colonies for national sovereignty and federation. Free trade

NGOs like the Cobden Club and their protectionist counterparts created further networks within the British World, and ratcheted up their oppositional struggle over the global future of the British Empire in the wake of the new American tariff.10 The McKinley

Tariff also sped up the demand for, and development of, more efficient transportation and communications—technological developments that made imperial federation all the more viable—within the British Empire. This is thus a global history of the McKinley Tariff’s impact upon the British Empire, as well as a study of the tariff’s effect upon the history of modern globalization.

The McKinley Tariff and the Demand for Imperial Unity

The abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 had marked the beginning of over two decades of British free trade, hegemonic preeminence, and relative hemispheric peace.

The Cobdenite worldview of a Pax Britannica had never seemed stronger; British hopes for international free trade and peace appeared within reach as the United States and

10 For recent studies on imperial networks and the British World, see, among others, Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850-1914 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, The British World: Culture, Diaspora and Identity (London: Taylor and Francis, 2003); and Philip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds., Rediscovering the British World (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005). 354 much of Western Europe had increasingly adopted less protective policies and the gold standard, to the respective benefit of British trade and finance.11 A series of events thereafter threatened the promised Pax Britannica: in 1873, a global depression struck; the European “Scramble for Africa” beginning in the early 1880s demonstrated that atavistic empire-building and conflict were still alive and well; the powerful House of

Baring collapsed in 1890; and, aside from Britain, Denmark, and the Netherlands, protectionism became the economic system of choice throughout Europe and the

Americas. A tariff war was waged between France and Italy from 1887 to 1892, for instance, and from the late 1870s higher tariffs were instituted in Belgium, Switzerland,

Germany, Austria-Hungary, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Russia.12

The most drastic measures were taken in the United States. In 1890, the

Republican-controlled Congress passed the highly protective McKinley Tariff owing to domestic political pressure, as well as a desire to protect American “infant industries” from the perceived onslaught of British manufactures and as a response to the nineteenth century’s vacillating and ongoing boom-and-bust economic cycle. The tariff, devised by

William McKinley, Republican Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, and

Listian State Secretary James G. Blaine cleverly combined the Republican party’s longstanding adherence to the protective tariff with a reciprocity policy that offered Latin

11 Scott C. James and David A. Lake, “The Second Face of Hegemony: Britain’s Repeal of the Corn Laws and the American Walker Tariff of 1846,” International Organization 43 (Winter 1989): 1-29. 12 Michael Tracy. Government and Agriculture in Western Europe 1880-1988 (New York: New York University Press, 1989 [1964]), 20-32. The effects of the McKinley Tariff were felt throughout Europe. 355 American nations concessions of such raw materials as sugar and wool following concessions of their own (see chapter 7).

The McKinley Tariff had a global impact: dozens of tobacco factories in Spanish

Cuba were closed, and the instability arising from the tariff’s reciprocity provisions

regarding Cuba’s sugar exports—upon their revocation in 1894—led to increased anti-

colonial agitation and rebellion; American protectionist policies generally inspired Indian

calls for protectionism, and speculators predicted that the McKinley Tariff would greatly

increase the consumption of copper within India and other silver-using countries to the

benefit of the copper mining industry; thousands were left jobless in Austria and

Germany, even driving the owner of a wool mill in Lichtenberg to suicide; and, although

former French ministers of commerce urged France to “hold entirely aloof from an

economic struggle with America,” France eventually sought the McKinley Tariff’s

repeal, as well.13 Surrounded by the high tariff walls of its international commercial

competitors and its own colonies, some within free-trading Great Britain began to

question the efficacy of Cobdenism—Listian nationalism and imperial union arose as

viable alternatives.

Such scattered protectionist rumblings had begun to coalesce in 1868. At the

height of the Pax Britannica, Britain’s Cobdenite Prime Minister, William Gladstone,

13 London Times, 1 Nov. 1890, 5; 27 Oct. 1890, 5; 10 Aug. 1891, 5; 13 Aug. 1891, 3; Moonshine (London), 22 July 1893, 39; Walter LaFeber, The New Empire, an Interpretation of American Expansion 1860-1898 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 120; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 216; Fair Trade, 9 Jan. 1891, 158; Blackburn Standard, 5 March 1892, 2; 29 Aug. 1891, 8; Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, 20 Oct. 1890, 3; and French Committee for the Repeal of the McKinley Bill, France and the United States (Paris: Comite Francais, 1894). 356 had sought to decrease government expenditures on colonial defense, provoking cries for increased imperial ties, first from within the colonies, and, more slowly, from the

Conservative party in England. British intellectuals and politicians in the colonies and at home, fearing the growing economic competition, protectionism, and potential of

Germany and the United States, began to question the utility of Britain’s policy of free trade, seeking instead a federated and protectionist Greater Britain.14

Whereas in the time of Adam Smith imperial federation had seemed an impossibility owing to the temporal and geographical distance separating the various areas of the British Empire, developments in modern transportation and communications—particularly the railroad, the steamship, and the telegraph—allowed for its renewed and realistic speculation.15 Disraeli himself had argued that the white colonies’ increased self-government should also have been tied to “a great policy of

14 For more on “Greater Britain,” see especially Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also Bell, ed. Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); E. H. H. Green, “The Political Economy of Empire, 1880-1914,” in Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 3, edited by Andrew Porter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 346-71; Jack Gaston, “The Free Trade Diplomacy Debate and the Victorian European Common Market Initiative,” Canadian Journal of History 22 (1987): 59-82; J. E. Tyler, The Struggle for Imperial Unity 1868-1895 (London: Longman, Green and Co., 1938); C. A. Bodelson, Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (London: Heinemann, 1960); J. E. Kendle, Federal Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), chap. 3; and Kendle, The Colonial and Imperial Conferences, 1887-1911 (London: Longmans, 1967). 15 For the Pacific telegraph cable, see Robert W. D. Boyce, “Imperial Dreams and National Realities: Britain, Canada, and the Struggle for a Pacific Telegraph Cable, 1879-1902,” English Historical Review 115 (Feb. 2000): 39-70. For broader studies of the connection between imperialism and technological advancements, see Lewis Pyenson, “Science and Imperialism,” in Companion to the History of Modern Science, edited by Robert Cecil Olby and Geoffrey N. Cantor (London and New York: Routledge, 1990); Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 63-119. 357 imperial consolidation, it ought to have been accompanied by an imperial tariff, by securities for the people of England.”16

Liberals, however, especially of the Cobdenite wing, continued to fight for the informal laissez faire system currently in place, and eyed those calling for imperial federation with great distrust.17 Imperial protectionists in Britain increasingly gained the ear, and later became the mouthpiece, of the Conservative party. While the “cheap loaf” remained immensely popular throughout the 1860s and 1870s, Conservative policymakers like Salisbury hesitantly began to question the liberal economic system, becoming “scornfully critical of the lofty claims of Cobdenite orthodoxy.”18 Lord

Randolph Churchill similarly wanted to overthrow the system, which, he argued, was

“the certain cause of the long continued depression in this country.” The oyster of the foreign markets needed to be opened with a “strong clasp knife, instead of being tickled with a feather.”19

16P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. British Imperialism, 1688-2000 (London: Pearson Education, 2002 [1993]), 185-91; T. E. Kebbel, ed., Selected Speeches of the late Rt. Hon. The Earl of Beaconsfield, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1882), II, 530. 17 Roger Mason, “ and the Tariff Reform Campaign, 1865-1910,” Journal of European Economic History 25 (1996): 171-188. Free traders had by no means developed a consensus regarding opposition to imperial federation. Adam Smith himself had concocted a free trade system of imperial federation, and some free traders in the 1890s sought to implement it in reality. See Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 581-588; and J. Shield Nicholson, “Tariffs and International Commerce,” in Britannic Confederation, edited by Arthur Silva White (London: George Philip & Son, 1892), 95-122. 18 Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, 2 vols. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), I, 1921-35, 337. See also Luke Trainor, “The British Government and Imperial Economic Unity, 1890-1895,” Historical Journal 13 (March 1970): 68-84. The “cheap loaf” was a term tied to British free trade, created following the repeal of the Corn Laws when the price of bread became more affordable. 19 Bradford Observer, 19 Sept. 1881, quoted in Benjamin H. Brown, The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881-1895 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 61. 358 The continued global depression, a series of English bad harvests and livestock epidemics in the late 1870s, along with increased protectionism from Britain’s competitors and colonies inspired the formation of protectionist imperial leagues, particularly in Birmingham, Sheffield, Wolverhampton, and various other manufacturing areas in England. Continued consolidation and cooperation led to the founding of the

National Fair Trade League in 1881. W. Farrer Ecroyd, the league’s founder, saw the free trade system as a failing enterprise. Inspired by the national economic philosophy of

Germany’s Friedrich List, British Listian nationalists Ecroyd and Birmingham manufacturer Sampson Samuel Lloyd led the vanguard against the liberal economic order in England.20 The fair traders sought minimal duties on manufactured imports, as well as stronger ties with the white empire, including preferential tariffs. The Imperial Federation

League was founded a few years later in order to bring further aid to the protectionist cause.21 Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, although active in their advocacy, these

protectionists had not yet been able to speak above a whisper without risking political

suicide, as the “cheap loaf” continued to maintain mass popularity and political support;

by the late 1880s, however, according to historian Benjamin Brown, “the whispering

became a tumult.”22

The political pariah status of imperial protectionists began to reverse significantly

following the passage of the McKinley Tariff in the United States. Brown notes that “it is

20 Brown, Tariff Reform Movement, 16-18; Tracy, Government and Agriculture, 41. Lloyd even produced the first British translation of List’s National System of Political Economy in 1885. 21 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 191. 22 Brown, Tariff Reform Movement, 58. 359 not too much to say that the shock caused by the McKinley Tariff did more than ten years of Fair Trade agitation to bring discredit to the Cobdenite school. While protectionists were striking hammer blows for retaliation, Cobdenites seemed to be clouting phantoms.”23 The Cheshire Observer noted the same, that “the Fair Trade movement will probably be strengthened by the operation of the new American tariff. . . . Mr.

M’Kinley’s measure must be a terribly bitter pill for the out-and-out Cobdenites who have been hoping against hope that the leading politicians of the United States might show some sign, however slight, of a possible conversion to Free Trade principles.”24

The Fair Traders also considered the McKinley Tariff the primary cause of the English depression that struck in 1891.25 Cases involving illegal child labor in Ireland even found the American tariff to blame.26 Listian Ecroyd predicted that the McKinley Tariff, because of its injurious effects upon British industries, “will probably hasten the decline of the Cobden Club.”27 Cobden Club member Sir Lyon Playfair in turn warned

American farmers that the McKinley Tariff would only increase Canadian, Australasian,

23 Joseph Smith, Illusions of Conflict: Anglo-American Diplomacy toward Latin America, 1865-1896 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), 143-45; Brown, Tariff Reform Movement, 76. 24 Cheshire Observer, 11 Oct. 1890, 5. 25 Sydney H. Zebel, “Fair Trade: An English Reaction to the Breakdown of the Cobden Treaty System,” Journal of Modern History 12 (June 1940), 183. See also Zebel, “Joseph Chamberlain and the Genesis of Tariff Reform,” Journal of British Studies 7 (Nov. 1967): 131-157; and Trainor, “British Government and Imperial Economic Unity,” 68-69. 26 Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, 21 Oct. 1890, 3. 27 London Times, 20 Oct. 1890, 3. 360 and Indian farmers’ desires for “the food market which the United States is so recklessly throwing away.”28

Some English Cobdenites found wry satisfaction in the United States’ continued adherence to what they considered outmoded mercantilism. Most British free traders, however, were outraged. The Cobden Club, its members apoplectic, called the McKinley

Tariff an “outrage on civilization,” promising “to destroy British trade,” and “to lead to the [American] annexation of Canada.”29 The London Times considered the McKinley

Tariff an unprovoked virtual “war on the British Empire” designed to appeal to Irish-

Americans and also as an attempt to annex Canada. Within a year, the Times, previously a strong supporter of the British free-trade system, now wrote that imperial federation “is the great task which lies before the British statesmanship of the future. With the colonies massed around us we can hold our own in the ranks of the world Powers. . . . Without them we must sink to the position of a merely European kingdom—a position which for

England infallibly entails slow but sure decay.”30

Cecil Spring-Rice, secretary to the British legation in the United States, wrote to

his brother that “we must reconcile ourselves to it [the McKinley Tariff] and look for new

28 Sir Lyon Playfair, The Tariffs of the United States in Relation to Free Trade (London: Cassell & Co., 1890), 17. 29 Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 196-97; Robert Giffen, “The Relative Growth of Free Trade and Protection,” 25 May 1892, Cabinet Memo, May 25, 1892, reprinted in Howe and Mark Duckenfield, eds., Battles over Free Trade, 3 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), III, 88; Annual General Meeting of the Cobden Club, 1893, 7. The Cobden Club, created in 1866 following the death of free-trade apostle Richard Cobden, also noted the “conflicting absurdities” of the bill and the upcoming World’s Fair in Chicago, wherein products would be exhibited that could be neither exported nor imported under the new tariff. Annual General Meeting of the Cobden Club, 1890, 9. 30 London Times, 6 Oct. 1890, 5; 18 June 1891, 9. 361 markets. A serious aspect of it is the reciprocity clause, which drives us out of the West

Indies and South America.”31 Charles Tupper, Canadian Prime Minister in 1896, remarked that the primary objective of the McKinley Tariff had been to paralyze British trade, ruin its industries, and strike “a severe blow at England’s great dependency, the

Dominion of Canada.”32

British leaders of the Fair Trade League claimed with some accuracy that export- oriented manufactures in such areas as Sheffield would be “almost annihilated.”33 In

Sheffield, even as the McKinley Tariff Act was pending, various manufacturers and

workers met to demand retaliation, with Sheffield’s mayor sending a letter to every other

mayor in the United Kingdom calling for action.34 A few months after the McKinley

Act’s new rates were implemented, Sheffield firms had been forced to reduce wages, and

the tariff sent thousands of “workers into the streets at a blow. . . . England is suffering

frightfully . . . from her inability to offer the slightest resistance to hostile tariffs, even to

one so unjust and so injurious as the M’Kinley Tariff.” In the same vein, the Cheshire

Observer warned that “the great danger of the M’Kinley Bill is that . . . English

manufacturers will transfer their machinery and foremen to the States, and set up

31 Spring-Rice to Ferguson, 6 Nov. 1891, in Cecil Spring-Rice, The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, ed. by Stephen Gwynn, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1929), I, 116. 32 Charles Tupper, Preferential Trade Relations between Great Britain and her Colonies: an Address Delivered before the Montreal Board of Trade, January 20, 1896, 23. 33 Lister, quoted in Brown, Tariff Reform Movement, 56. Many periodicals expressed outrage at the McKinley Tariff’s impact on England. See, for instance, Women’s Signal (London), 1 Feb. 1894, 74; Sporting Times (London). 17 Sept. 1892, 5; Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society, 1 April 1892, 82; Blackburn Standard, 17 Sept. 1892, 3. 34 London Times, 6 Oct. 1890, 13; 13 Oct. 1890, 14; 15 Jan. 1891, 8. See also Sheffield Independent, 5 May 1892, 7. 362 factories . . . we must adopt the policy of the Fair Trade League, which has for its aim the promotion of Free Trade within the Empire, and Protection against the rest of the world.”35 Howard Vincent, a leader of the IFL and an M. P. from Sheffield, also complained of increased economic emigration: “Four well-known English textile firms have moved a whole or a portion of their plant across the Atlantic. . . . A remedy is ready when the people awake”: a double dose of protectionism and imperial federation.36

Vincent continued to attack the Cobdenite policy of the British Liberal government, warning that such continued one-sided free trade invited the United States to

“strike us yet again.” The high protectionist walls throughout the world were “the doctrines of the Cobden Club in our faces.”37 Coinciding with the rise of consumer culture, the Women’s Herald of London came to the Cobden Club’s defense, promising the support of “women who indulge in that feminine mania, shopping,” as they found their purchases “for their households . . . dearer than before the McKinley law.” “The same result would be found her,” the Women’s Herald continued, “if protection were really tried. Women would resent it bitterly, and they would undoubtedly so influence public opinion as to abolish any tariff that might be imposed.”38 Even with this added feminine bolstering, the London Times noted that

35 Cheshire Observer, 25 Oct. 1890, 7. 36 London Times, 1 Nov. 1892, 12; 26 Apr. 1892, 10. 37 London Times, 15 Oct. 1890, 7. For industries moving from England to the United States, see, for instance, London Times, 29 Oct. 1890, 5. 38 Women’s Herald (London), 20 Aug. 1892, 3. 363 if Richard Cobden had no more cogent arguments . . . than those which his

bannermen are using . . . the economical principles with which his name is

associated would have owed but little to his advocacy . . . Free trade, we are told,

has numerous enemies in this country. Just now, with the Cobden Club as its

champion, it is in chief danger from its friends.39

In the heartland of the British Empire, imperial federation, protection, and preference appeared to be on the ascendency while Cobdenism floundered.

The McKinley Tariff and the British World

The McKinley Tariff’s effects were felt throughout the British World. An

American traveling among the British colonies observed in late 1891 that the perceived success of the U.S. system of protection had greatly shaken many colonists’ faith in the

British system of free trade.40 Increased American economic interests in South America

also caused a stir. British businessmen in Lancashire became excited, for example, over

the proposed reciprocity treaty between Brazil and the United States derived from the

reciprocity provisions of the McKinley Tariff. It was “menacing Great Britain’s

$31,000,000 of yearly exports to Brazil . . . but unfortunately Great Britain can do

nothing, as British free trade has deprived the Government of advantages which it might

39 London Times, 14 July 1890, 9. 40 Anti-Jacobin, “British Problems, as Viewed by an American Observer,” 19 Dec. 1891, 1182, Goldwin Smith Papers, microfilm reel 4, Cornell University Library, Cornell, New York. 364 have by trading with Brazil.”41 The Lancaster Gazette similarly noted that Englishmen needed to open their eyes “to the fact that this Blaine treaty is a blow to the success of our free-trade system.”42

The Foreign Office immediately began to reexamine whether it was in possession of a most-favored-nation agreement with potential signatories of reciprocity agreements in Latin America. There was apprehension that Brazil in particular would sign a reciprocity treaty with the United States, forcing the Foreign Office to propose its own unsuccessful treaty. British fears became reality in March 1891 when Brazil signed just such a treaty with the United States. The signing of the reciprocity treaty, along with the creation of a Brazilian republic, brought about renewed attention from European governments. American ministers in Rio de Janeiro began to suspect, albeit inconclusively, that British businessmen and officials “desired the restoration of the

[Brazilian] monarch in order to bring about the abrogation of the reciprocity agreement.”

Such reactions, historian Joseph Smith notes, showed that “the United States had indeed a club with which to beat much of the rest of the world”: especially Britain.43

The British West Indies also felt the effects of the McKinley Tariff, where more and more the protectionist “cry is raised about England’s Free Trade crushing out their life and retarding development.”44 The subsidized growth of European sugar-beet production by the late 1880s had already begun to displace British West Indian sugar,

41 London Times, 20 May 1891, 5; Smith, Illusion of Conflict, 147. 42 Lancaster Gazette, 23 May 1891. 43 Smith, Illusion of Conflict, 147-49, 156. 44 Anti-Jacobin, “British Problems, as Viewed by an American Observer,” 19 Dec. 1891, 1182, microfilm, reel 4, Smith Papers. 365 leading to a declining British refinery industry and unsuccessful calls for protectionist retaliation.45 Cecil Spring-Rice observed that “the object of the United States is either to obtain differential duties in the West Indies which would put Canada and Great Britain at a disadvantage, or else to force us to refuse an offer of that nature and by the ruin of our colonies to drive them into discontent and possibly annexation.” The West Indies found it

“difficult to refuse the inducement held out” by the McKinley Tariff, and they had already shown a proclivity toward commercial union with the United States throughout the mid-1880s.46 In 1891, Listian James G. Blaine, U. S. secretary of state under

Benjamin Harrison (1888-92), even claimed that the British West Indies had already been successfully brought within the commercial network of the United States. The British adopted a hands-off approach, perhaps in response to growing demands for local management of West Indian economic policy as was happening elsewhere in the Empire, allowing the West Indians to take control of negotiations with the United States. The

West Indians were therefore able to conclude an agreement with the United States in

February 1892.47

From 1885 to 1911, Canadians came to view the British West Indies much like the United States saw China: as a potential area of “unrivaled trade opportunities.”

Canadian trade commissions had been sent to the West Indies between 1888 and 1889.

The Canadians also correspondingly sent their finance minister, George E. Foster, to

45 Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 204-205. 46 London Times, 20 May 1891, 5, Charles Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1890), 99-100. 47 Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 180, 147-48; Spring-Rice to Lowther, 26 Oct. 1891, quoted in Smith, Illusions of Conflict , 148. 366 establish a trade agreement with the West Indies in 1890, particularly to reduce duties on sugar exports to Canada, spurring speculation among some in Trinidad that such offers stemmed from Canadian reaction to the McKinley Tariff.48 From Antigua, supporting such Trinidadian speculation, Foster wrote to Sir Mackenzie Bowell that “the steamer on which I am a passenger is filled with just the products which Canada can & should send to these islands. I find too a very warm & friendly feeling towards Canada—not lessened by the McKinley Bill.” Canada, desirous of its own “China market” and in response to the McKinley Tariff, nearly doubled its trade with the West Indies from $1.8 million in

1887 to $3.4 million in 1892.49

Similar concerns over growing global protectionism were expressed in South

Africa. Movement toward South African federation peaked during this period. The South

African Customs Union had been created in 1889, providing a uniform tariff on foreign imports, which was balanced by a promise of free trade within the various Customs

Union colonies and states themselves. The Cape Colony and Orange Free State were the first to join in 1889, followed by British Bechuanaland, Basutoland, and Bechuanaland

Protectorate in 1890, 1891, and 1893, respectively. Cecil Rhodes—who, along with his predecessor Sir John Gordon Sprigg, was one of the biggest proponents of South African federation—gave a speech on July 6, 1890, two months before becoming prime minister

48 Robin W. Winks, Canadian-West Indian Union: A Forty-Year Minuet (London: Athlone Press, 1968), 21, 22. As late as 1911, Canadian desire arose for annexing areas of the West Indies. See, for instance, Andrew Smith, “Thomas Bassett Macaulay and the Bahamas: Racism, Business and Canadian Sub- imperialism,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37 (March 2009): 29-50. 49Foster to Bowell, 17 Nov. 1890, quoted in Robert Craig Brown, Canada’s National Policy 1883-1900: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 223. For an anti- imperial federation view of West Indian economic issues, see John William Root, The British West Indies and the Sugar Industry (London: Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1899). 367 of the Cape Colony. In it, Rhodes called for “a South African Union . . . that we may attain to perfect free trade as to our own commodities, perfect and complete internal railway communication, and a general customs union, stretching from Delagoa Bay to

Walfish Bay.”50

In 1891, Rhodes, now prime minister of Cape Colony, wrote of his worries over the McKinley Tariff and his desire to expand federation throughout the empire in a letter to Sir John Macdonald, the Canadian prime minister, followed by a similar letter to Sir

Henry Parkes, premier of New South Wales. To Macdonald he asked:

Can we invent some tie with our mother-country that will prevent separation? It

must be a practical one, for future generations will not be born in England. The

curse is that English politicians cannot see the future. They think they will always

be the manufacturing mart of the world, but do not understand what protection

coupled with reciprocal relations means.51

Rhodes went further, even asking Parkes to rename the upcoming federation of Australia

“Dominion of Australia,” rather than the proposed “Commonwealth of Australia,” as the

50 A. J. Bruwer, “Protection in South Africa,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1923), 98, 99, 101. For Sir Gordon Sprigg’s desire for imperial federation and a customs union see Howard Vincent, Commercial Union of the Empire (1891), reprinted in Howe and Duckenfield, Battles over Free Trade, III, 69. 51 Rhodes to Macdonald, 8 May 1891, reprinted in London Times, 1 Sept. 1903, 6. The Cape Colony’s exports to the United States fell drastically during this period. During the quarter ending on Dec. 31, 1890, its exports to the United States totaled $85,400; for the quarter ending on June 30, 1891, its exports totaled only $13,475. Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries during the Years 1890 and 1891. Annual Reports of the Consuls of the United States on the Commerce, Manufactures, Industries, etc., of their Several Districts for the Above Years (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1892), 391. 368 latter “indicates a desire for separation” from the British Empire. Such a name change,

Rhodes thought, “would enormously strengthen our demands for preferential consideration as to our products.”52 Another influential South African politician, Jan

Hofmyer, also called for a protectionist response to the McKinley Tariff. He proposed an imperial preferential reprisal scheme which essentially called for import tariffs upon all foreign countries, “without disturbing the Free-trade attitude of the United Kingdom, or interfering with the diverse tariffs of the colonies.”53 Imperial federation, preference, and protection in Africa thus became ever more viable after 1890.

The Listian-Cobdenite Conflict in Australian Microcosm

There was a time when, in my earlier years, I was half caught by the fascinations of some

of the Cobdenic theories. . . . Fortunately for me the profounder reasonings of the

German school of economics came as a corrective.

Benjamin Hoares (Victoria, Australia).54

Australia, too, once again called for reform regarding imperial tariffs stemming in part from the McKinley Tariff, which had at least indirectly affected Australia’s wool

52 Rhodes to Parkes, May 1891, reprinted in London Times, 1 Sept. 1903, 6. 53 Edmund E. Sheppard, “The McKinley Bill and Imperial Federation,” Belford’s Monthly (New York: Belford’s Magazine Co., 1891), VI, 36-61. 54 Benjamin Hoare, Preferential Trade. A Study of its Esoteric Meaning (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1904), v. 369 industry when British exports to the United States plummeted upon the bill’s passage.55

As Edmund Rogers has recently demonstrated, the tariff battle within the British Empire was playing out in microcosm between free trading New South Wales and protectionist

Victoria, with the Cobden Club maintaining close ties with New South Wales’s leading free trader, Henry Parkes. The Cobden Club’s Louis Mallet “considered New South

Wales as the centre and hope of the Free Trade policy in Australia.”56

New South Wales had in fact been Australia’s central hub of Cobdenite ideology since the arrival from England of Robert Lowe, who, in the pages of his newspaper Atlas, passed on the laissez faire messages of Cobden, Peel, Adam Smith, and Jean-Baptiste

Say. By the 1860s, Henry Parkes thereafter established himself as the most profound prognosticator of the Manchester School in Australia, after being converted “one cold winter’s night” by Richard Cobden himself. He and other Australian Cobdenites also cited the writings of American Cobden Club members David Ames Wells and Amasa

Walker to try to show that the United States thrived in spite of its protectionist policies.57

55 Ernst Arthur Boehm, Prosperity and Depression in Australia 1887-1897 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 79. For earlier demands for imperial tariff reform, see Craufurd D. W. Goodwin, Economic Enquiry in Australia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966), 3-59; Cephas Daniel Allin, Australasian Preferential Tariffs and Imperial Free Trade: A Chapter in the Fiscal Emancipation of the Colonies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929); and John A. La Nauze, “Australian Tariffs and Imperial Control,” Economic Record 24 (1948): 218-34. For a general discussion of Australia’s late nineteenth-century protectionism, see Alexander J. Reitsma, Trade Protection in Australia (Leiden: H.E. Stenfert Kroese, 1960), 5-11. Victoria, for instance, saw its direct exports to the United States drop between the quarter ending on Dec. 31, 1890 and the quarter ending on June 30, 1891from $1,778,498 to $26,798. Commercial Relations of the United States, 1890-91, 408. 56 Edmund Rogers, “Free Trade versus Protectionism: New South Wales, Victoria, and the Tariff Debate in Britain, 1881-1900,” Australian Studies 1 (2009), 5. See also Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia, 3-59; and G. D. Patterson, The Tariff in the Australian Colonies 1856-1900 (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1968). 57 Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia, 42; J. A. La Nauze, “‘That Fatal, That Mischievous Passage,’ Henry Parkes and Protection, 1859-66,” Australian Quarterly 19 (June 1947), 59-60; Howe, Free Trade, 370 In similar fashion, Cobdenite Bernard Ringrose Wise—also of New South Wales— utilized the work of American Cobden Club members William Graham Sumner and

Frank Taussig in his defense of free trade, and in his denunciation of the disciples of “the morbid and diseased mind” of Friedrich List, a man who saw “wickedness in every action of Great Britain . . . just as the average American voter is instructed to beware of ‘British gold’ and the ‘Cobden Club.’”58

Protectionist defenders in Victoria responded in kind, using the writings of

Friedrich List, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, and Alexander Hamilton to support their arguments.59 This fiscal debate arose owing in large part, therefore, to the influx of

Listian political philosophy in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Melbourne merchant and politician George Ward Cole, for instance, published portions of List’s

National System of Political Economy and the speeches of Henry Clay for popular consumption from the 1860s to the 1870s. Beginning in 1860, the popular Melbourne

Age in turn became a leading mouthpiece for the protectionist doctrine. Furthermore, in

1866, the legislature of Victoria passed the McCulloch Tariff, the first proclaimed

120, 127, 140; Henry Parkes, Speeches on Various Occasions Connected with the Public Affairs of New South Wales 1848-1874 (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1876), 393-98; George H. Reid, Five Free Trade Essays: Inscribed to the Electors of Victoria (Melbourne, 1875). 58 B. R. Wise, Industrial Freedom: A Study in Politics (Melbourne: Cassell & Company, Ltd., 1892), 48ff., 138. 59 See, for instance, George Ward Cole, Protection as a National System Suited for Victoria: Being Extracts from List’s National System of Political Economy (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1860); David Syme, Outlines of an Industrial Science (Philadelphia: Henry Carey Baird, 1876); Francis Gould Smith, The Australian Protectionist (Melbourne: self-published, 1877), 26, 29-30; Smith, Danger Ahead! Anti Imperial Federation of Australasia (Melbourne: Australasian-American Trading Company, 1889). They also frequently cited J. S. Mill’s oft-quoted and misused defense of infant industries. Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia, 24-25. 371 protectionist tariff in the Australian colonies, and which shared much in common with

Listian Alexander Galt’s tariff which passed a handful of years earlier in Canada.60

Australian Cobdenites like Fred Haddon, editor of Melbourne’s Argus, had tried

to counter the growing influence of the “unscrupulous” Philadelphia-inspired Listian

nationalism by promoting freer trade in the Australian colonies from the 1870s. As help

in the cause, Haddon was introduced to David A. Wells through a letter of introduction

from the Cobden Club’s London secretary in 1874. By 1876, Haddon was requesting

articles from Wells, whose “Creed of Free Trade” in pamphlet form had already made

him “so well known in all the Australian colonies as a writer on free trade.” Wells’s

contributions to the Argus, Haddon suggested, “would have great weight with both free

traders and protectionists.”61

As the 1890s global depression approached, however, Listian nationalism held the

upper hand in Australasia, even within New South Wales. Tasmanian legislatures turned

to Victorian protectionists for economic advice, for example, and New Zealand would

soon “go further down the road towards McKinleyism” as a retaliatory response to

60 Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia, 13-17; G. W. Cole, How a Protective Tariff Worked in America: To the Editor of the Age (Melbourne, 1861); Cole, A Policy of Action, in Employment for the People (Melbourne, 1871). Similarly, see also William Robinson, Protection to Native Industry: A Lecture Delivered at the Melbourne Mechanics’ Institute, on Monday, 27th November, 1860, in Support of the Views Advocated by Those who are in Favor of a System of Protection to Native Industry (Melbourne: W. H. Williams, 1861); Archibald Forsyth, Free, Fair, and Protected Trade: Which is the Best for England, New South Wales and Australia? (Sydney: William Dymock, 1885); Forsyth, Freetrade or Protection (Sydney, n. d.); Forsyth, The Lines on Which a Federal Tariff Should be Based (Sydney, n. d.); Forsyth, “Relations between Capital and Labour Examined,” Australian Economist 1 (1888-90), 99-103. 61 Haddon to Wells, 4 March 1876, microfilm reel 4, David Ames Wells Papers, LOC. 372 Australian protective tariff policies.62 Significantly, Australian protectionists continued to use the writings of Henry Carey and Friedrich List to defend the maintenance of protectionism.63 In 1891, an older gentleman in Australia, over dinner with an American acquaintance, summed up the Australasian ideological crisis:

These wise chaps back in England, who spend their time in the British Museum,

are so busy posting up on what took place last century, they don’t seem to realize

that steam and electricity and the spread of education have introduced new

elements into political economy. They keep on telling us that Free Trade makes

everybody rich, and Protection makes everybody poor; yet as far as I can see the

countries with Protection are getting about all the prosperity that’s floating

around.64

Coupled with the economic impact of American protectionism, corresponding calls for imperial union grew louder in 1893 following the outbreak of a financial crisis brought about by substantial fraud by some Australian .65 The eventual opening of

62 Goodwin, Economic Inquiry in Australia, 30; Matthew Macfie, “Australia under Protection,” Economic Journal 3 (June 1893): 297-307; and W. P. Reeves, “Protective Tariffs in Australia and New Zealand,” Economic Journal 9 (March 1899): 36-44; Guy H. Scholefield, New Zealand in Evolution: Industrial, Economic, and Political (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), 321-23. 63 A. Duckworth, “Notes on Tariff Restrictions,” Australian Economist 2 (1890-93), 229-33; E. W. O’Sullivan, Protection or Stagnation; Which? (Sydney: Beatty, Richardson & Co., 1897). 64 Anti-Jacobin “British Problems, as Viewed by an American Observer,” 19 Dec. 1891, 1182, Goldwin Smith Manuscripts, microfilm, reel 4. 65 For the bank crisis, see Boehm, Prosperity and Depression in Australia 1887-1897, chap. 10; Charles R. Hickson and John D. Turner, “Free Banking Gone Awry: The Australian Banking Crisis of 1893,” Financial History Review 9 (Oct. 2002): 147-67; and, for reaction by the labor force, see Mark Hearn, “A 373 a Panama canal, some argued, would offer Australia and New Zealand a connection by way of the West Indies to Great Britain: through Canada, another route was potentially available.66 Sir Bevan Edwardes, a Major General, upon studying how best to strengthen

Australian defenses, noted “how mutually dependent the scattered parts of the Empire must necessarily be. . . . Canada, by the construction of that grand line of communication, the Canada Pacific Railway . . . will in the same way aid in the general national defence.”67

In 1894, Defense Minister of Victoria Robert Reid and Chief Secretary of

Queensland Thomas M’ilwraith journeyed to Britain, Canada, and the United States.

They were similarly worried about Australian defenses, especially the perceived threat of potential Asian, French, or German militancy, as well as of continued American protectionism. These fears acted as a further impetus for the speedy establishment of a

Canadian-Australian cable as well as enhanced imperial postal routes in order to create

“swifter” and “safer” communications with Britain.

The two men also focused their discussions around Australia’s need for an expanded wool market following the McKinley Tariff’s impact on British exports.

Offering a preview of the upcoming Inter-Colonial Conference in Ottawa, Reid attempted to persuade the Imperial Government to accept the Australian Constitution Act

Amendment, which would have allowed the Australian colonies to expand preferential

Wild Awakening: The 1893 Banking Crisis and the Theatrical Narratives of the Castlereagh Street Radicals,” Labour History 85 (Nov. 2003): 153-171. 66 George Robert Parkin, Imperial Federation, the Problem of National Unity (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892), 211. 67 Edwardes, quoted in Parkin, Imperial Federation, 201. 374 trade advantages throughout the Empire, especially with Canada, as well as repeal foreign treaties, such as those with Belgium and Germany. Reid told his British audience that

“we in Australia want to trade as freely with Canada and South Africa as Kent trades with

Surrey, or with Yorkshire. With the introduction of prohibitive tariffs and with foreign countries taking away our trade in all directions, our cry must be ‘Britain for the

British.’”68 The McKinley Tariff precipitated not only imperial unity, but also a demand for increased global communications in order to tie together the British Empire.

The McKinley Tariff and Canada’s Conspiracy of Annexation

As outlined in chapter 6, British anxiety over the close proximity of Canada to the

United States and the ominous threat of American annexation stretch back to the eighteenth century. By 1890, the potential for continental union between the United

States and Canada—either through political or economic means—had become a consistent and contentious theme in British-American relations, as well as within the

Empire itself. Owing to continued material and psychological distancing from the metropole, proponents of Greater Britain in England and Canada at times had very divergent views on the Canadian Question. J. R. Seeley, Regius Professor of Modern

History at the University of Cambridge, in Expansion of England (1883), for instance, thought that for “Greater Britain” to exist “Canada and Australia would be to us as Kent

68 London Times, 26 March 1894, 5; 20 March 1894, 5; Brown, Tariff Reform Movement, 122-23. 375 and Cornwall.”69 Cobden Club member Goldwin Smith, former Regius Professor of

Modern History at Oxford, a Cornell professor, and a Canadian resident, instead preferred to unite Canada and the United States in order to strengthen ties of trade and friendship and bring to an end any future potential conflicts between the continental neighbors, made all the more difficult as a majority of the Republican party at that time had believed that reciprocity (as exemplified by the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty between England and France) too closely resembled to them the evil of freer trade.70

These opposing proposals created political rifts throughout the British Empire.

When attempts at reciprocity with its southern neighbor failed in the years following the American Civil War and Canadian confederation, Canada turned to

American economic imitation; it sought to pay the United States “in their own coin” through a policy of high tariffs in order to promote its own manufactures in steel, textiles, and coal, as well as to strengthen internal trade through the construction of the Canadian

Pacific Railway with the largesse of British financial investment. Responding to critics of the measure, the Canadian Monthly and National Review pointed out that “those who talk idly of a ‘Chinese Wall’ seem to forget that it has been already erected by our neighbors.”

69 J. R. Seeley, Expansion of England (London: Macmillan and Co., 1883), 63. For a more critical analysis of imperial union, see, for instance, Alfred Caldecott, English Colonization and Empire (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891). 70 John Herd Thompson and Stephen J. Randall, Canada and the United States: Ambivalent Allies (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002 [1994]), 56; Goldwin Smith, The Empire, A Series of Letters Published in “The Daily News” (Oxford and London: John Henry and James Parker, 1863); “List of Members,” March 1866, CC MSS. For a good introduction to the amorphous use of “reciprocity,” see James Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1903), chap. 1. 376 Following the increase of Canadian tariff rates in 1879, direct American investment had in fact increased significantly in order to avoid having to pay them.71

When the McKinley Tariff was passed in 1890, unsurprisingly, Canadian agricultural exports to the United States—falling from $9 million in 1889 to $4.5 million in 1892—became seriously threatened, once again raising the Canadian call for unrestricted reciprocity with its neighbor to the south.72 Although many Canadians desired to maintain a liberal commercial policy with the United States, American refusal to make reciprocal treaties with Canada caused some once again to threaten retaliatory protection, which, according to Sir Alexander Galt—the first Canadian High

Commissioner in London and strong proponent of imperial federation—“is the only argument applicable in the present case.”73 Another Canadian detractor rhetorically asked, “if the United States persists in rejecting all reasonable propositions for reciprocity in trade, what can it expect other than a reciprocity in tariff?”74 The incorporation of

71 Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 56-7; Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 193. 72 Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 220. For a case study on the impact of the McKinley Tariff upon Ontario’s barley growers, see Ernest Dix, “United States Influences on the Agriculture of Prince Edward County, Ontario,” Economic Geography 26 (Jul. 1950), 181. 73 Skelton, Galt, 275. Total Canadian exports to the United States continued to fall, for instance, from $37,280,572 in 1891 to $33,830,696 in 1892, while its exports to Great Britain during that period rose by more than $20,000,000. Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Countries during the Years 1891 and 1892. Annual Reports of the Consuls of the United States on the Commerce, Manufactures, Industries, etc., of their Several Districts for the Above Years (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893), 274-75. 74 Robert H. Lawder, Commerce between the United States & Canada, Observations on Reciprocity and the McKinley Tariff (Toronto: Monetary Times Printing Co., 1892), 17. 377 Canada within Greater Britain quickly became a driving issue for proponents of imperial federation.75

Apparently unaware or unworried about such growing Canadian agitation, the

Listian secretary of state in the Harrison Administration, James G. Blaine, preferred

Canadian annexation over continued competition over fish and timber. Blaine publicly stated that he hoped for “a grander and nobler brotherly love, that may unite in the end” the United States and Canada “in one perfect union.”76 Lower tariffs were off the table for Blaine, who was “teetotally opposed to giving the Canadians the sentimental satisfaction of waving the British Flag . . . and enjoying the actual remuneration of

American markets.” In private, he told President Harrison that by denying reciprocity,

Canada would “ultimately, I believe, seek admission to the Union.”77

British Cobdenite Lyon Playfair warned that the 1890 tariff made it appear as though the United States were “making a covert attack on Canada,” in order that it might become part of a North American Zollverein or an additional American state. If the tariff act’s objective “really be (as the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald, thinks) to force the United States lion and the Canadian lamb to lie down together, this can only be accomplished by the lamb being inside the lion,” he warned.78 Lord Henry George

Grey of England, a longtime and vocal proponent for colonial self-government, free

75 Rogers, “United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain,” 602-603. 76 London Times, 17 Feb. 1891, 5. McKinley himself, however, was staunchly against commercial union. See Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 191-92. 77 Blaine, quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 60. For Blaine’s unwillingness to include Canadian reciprocity see Allan B. Spetter, “Harrison and Blaine: No Reciprocity for Canada,” Canadian Review of American Studies 12 (1981): 143-156. 78 Playfair, Tariffs of the United States, 18. 378 trade, and personally disgusted by the “absurdity of the McKinley tariff,” agreed with

Professor Goldwin Smith that, owing to their “many common interests,” the United

States and Canada needed “free intercourse with each other, that to impede such intercourse between them by artificial and needless obstacles is to commit a folly” injurious to both. Grey had severe reservations, however, concerning Smith’s radical

“conclusion that the incorporation of British America in the American Republic is therefore desirable.”79

With the support of Republican Congressman Robert R. Hitt of Illinois, however,

Canadian Liberals such as Erastus Wiman, a Canadian financier living in New York City,

and Edward Farrer, an editorialist for the Toronto Globe—siding with Smith—openly

worked toward a continental, free trade union, an idea which at first gained strong

support among Canadian farmers (see chapter 6). Canadian politician Mackenzie Bowell,

himself an opponent of the idea of continental or commercial union, noted in Ontario:

“There is no hiding the fact that the free trade idea with the United States, has a much

stronger hold upon the farmer’s mind than I could have believed, particularly along the

frontier countries.”80

But soon thereafter, more and more Canadians began to subscribe to the imperial

protectionist perception of the McKinley Tariff: that the bill was “a heavy blow struck

79 Henry George Grey, Commercial Policy of the British Colonies and the McKinley Tariff (London: Richard Clay and Sons, 1892), 66-68. 80 Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 208-9; Bowell to Macdonald, 17 Feb. 1891, vol. 190, MG26-A, Sir John A. Macdonald Papers, LAC. For Wiman’s desire for U.S.-Canadian commercial unity see, for instance, Erastus Wiman, The Greater Half of the Continent (Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co., 1889). Congressman Robert R. Hitt and Smith maintained close correspondence during the drafting of the McKinley Bill, as Hitt unsuccessfully attempted to include a Canadian reciprocity provision. See Hitt to Smith, 30 June 1890; and Hitt to Smith, 5 Sept. 1890, reel 4, Smith Papers. 379 alike at our home industries and at the prosperity and independence of the Dominion of

Canada—an unprovoked aggression, an attempt at conquest by fiscal war.”81 Such a reaction stirred “love for Queen, flag, and country,” according to Listian George T.

Denison, president of the British Empire League in Canada. This patriotic outpouring had been caused by “the belief that a conspiracy has been on foot to betray this country into annexation. The McKinley Bill was part of the scheme.”82 Unrestricted reciprocity was little more than “veiled treason,” John Macdonald similarly argued, intended “to starve

Canada into annexation.”83 He noted that the McKinley Tariff “so strongly hits our

agricultural classes that the disloyal opposition is working on them in concert with

Wiman and other American filibusters to promote unrestricted reciprocity with the

United States.”84 Such charges of a conspiracy, though false, proved effective.

Denison, who had once considered Goldwin Smith a close friend, by 1891 found

his speeches and writings to be of “a deliberate and treasonable design . . . to undermine

the loyal sentiment that held Canada to the Empire.” The two men began a war of words

that Canadians followed with great interest. Cobdenite cosmopolitan Smith, Denison

charged, had been attempting to undermine Canadian pride and patriotism for several

years, sneering especially “at ‘loyalty, at ‘aristocracy,’ at ‘jingoism’; by ‘perverting

81 London Times, 20 Oct. 1890, 3. 82 George T. Denison, The Struggle for Imperial Unity: Recollections & Experiences (London and New York: MacMillan and Co., 1909), 160. For more on the “Wiman conspiracy,” which Smith thoroughly debunked, see Goldwin Smith’s article in the New York Independent, “The London Times on Canadian Elections,” 11 Feb. 1892, Goldwin Smith Manuscripts, microfilm, reel 4; New York Times, “The Wiman ‘Conspiracy,’” 30 Apr. 1891, 9; and Sheffield Independent, 19 Feb. 1891, 5. 83 Macdonald, 18 Feb. 1891, quoted in Thompson and Randall, Canada and the United States, 61; Donald G. Creighton, John A. Macdonald, The Old Chieftain (Toronto: Macmillan, 1952-55), 546. 84 Macdonald to Tupper, 26 Sept. 1890, Vol. 285, MG26-A, Macdonald Papers. 380 history.’” Smith’s acceptance of the presidency of the Continental Union Association, which sought U.S.-Canadian continental union, was the last straw for Denison. “Smith’s conduct is treason of the worst kind”; in any other country, Denison asserted, he would have been lynched or imprisoned. By playing up loyalist sentiment and ratcheting up the fear of “national suicide” through annexation, Denison and other Imperial Federationists forced many Liberals away from the issues of Commercial and Continental Union in the

1891 elections.85

Denison and Macdonald’s efforts at labeling the continental and commercial

unionists as traitors paid off politically. Macdonald, owing in large part to such attacks

upon the opposition’s involvement in “a deliberate conspiracy, by force, by fraud, or by

both, to force Canada into the American union,” as well as the growing general Liberal

dissatisfaction with the program of Commercial Union, incrementally increased public

support for his National Policy.86 Macdonald and his allies were thus able to force the

elections of 1891 into a national referendum concerning Canadian-American relations,

pulling off a narrow victory over those favoring unrestricted reciprocity by working “the

‘Loyalty’ cry for all it was worth and it carried the country. . . . But,” Macdonald

cautioned, “we are not safe yet.”87

85 Denison, Struggle for Imperial Unity, 169, 171-77, 184, 191. 86Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 208, 211; W. J. Ashley, “Review: Canada and the Canadian Question,” Economic Review 1 (London: Percival & Co., 1891), 606. For the affects of the conspiracy charges on the 1891 elections, see Donald F. Warner, Idea of Continental Union: Agitation for the Annexation of Canada to the United States, 1849-1893 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1960), 218-30. 87 Macdonald to W. H. Smith, 8 April 1891, Vol. 534, MG26-A, Macdonald Papers. 381 Macdonald felt that Canada had reached precarious crossroads, telling a close friend that “the great contest that is now going on . . . will determine whether Canada is to remain British or become part of the United States. I can assure you, we are in great danger.”88 Emotionalism for the Mother Country appeared to be the best solution to the problems wrought by the McKinley Tariff. In a speech at Morrisburg in September 1890,

Macdonald had remarked soon before the McKinley Tariff’s passing that the Canadians

“are not going to cry like children” but respond with “manly spirit.” The markets of New

York could just as easily become the markets of London, he assured them. Macdonald called for the globalizing of Canadian trade and communications. He urged Canadians to seek new and open markets not only in Great Britain, but in the West Indies, Australia,

China, and Japan as well—markets all the more available upon the completion of the

Canadian Pacific Railway. Their “Australian fellow colonists” had also met the

Canadians with “the most perfect spirit of reciprocity,” and were desirous of greater trade relations. Macdonald encouraged, therefore, the laying of a cable—“the precursor to trade” —between Australia and British Columbia, and the creation of a steamship line.89

The London Times argued that Canadians ought “to take example and encouragement from the mother country and to adopt frankly and fully a policy of free trade” and promised that England could occupy “the vacated place” of the United States with respect to Canadian goods. Canada needed to gradually “unloose all the commercial

88 Macdonald to Kirby, 8 July 1889, quoted in Brown, Canada’s National Policy, 206. 89 Macdonald, reported in the London Times, 6 Oct. 1890, 13. See also London Times, 22 Nov. 1890, 7, and his speech in Halifax reported in Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser, 4 Oct. 1890, 2. For a U.S. protectionist response to his speech, see Joseph Nimmo, Jr., Canadian Protection Compared with the Provisions of the McKinley Tariff Act, A Reply to Sir John Macdonald’s Speech at Halifax (Oct. 1890). 382 fetters” from American bonds, and instead bind “more closely the unsevered link between the daughter and the mother country.”90 The McKinley Tariff thus created the backdrop for Canadian-American Commercial and Continental Union’s climactic nineteenth-century rise and ultimate demise. Canadian eyes instead increasingly gazed west to Australasia, south to the West Indies, and east to England.

By January 1893, the commercial bonds sought by Macdonald and the London

Times had been established. Canadian Minister of Trade and Commerce Mackenzie

Bowell informed his colleagues with delight that “the McKinley Bill, instead of destroying the trade of this country, has only diverted it from the United States to

England. . . . Our neighbours are cutting off their own noses to spite us.” Agricultural products to England increased from $3.5 million in 1889 to $15 million in 1892; during that time, animal and produce exports also increased from $16 million to $24 million.91

Such growing commercial ties doubtless fed the flame of imperial federation.

The Chimera of Imperial Federation

For too long imperial federation “has been scoffed at by the uninformed as a chimera, the idle vision of patriotic dreamers and impractical imperialists,” remarked the editor of Toronto’s Saturday Night, Edmund E. Sheppard. Yet the movement, he noted, was quickly gaining adherents in Australasia, South Africa, and Canada; “all that was

90 London Times, 18 Oct. 1890, 9. 91 Canada, Parliament, Debates of the Senate of the Dominion of Canada, 31 Jan. 1893, 29. 383 needed was an occasion to bring the question into practical politics, and that opportunity has been afforded by the McKinley Bill.” If the British Empire were to form an Imperial

Federation, he continued, “and a common tariff established . . . the United States will suffer, and will receive no sympathy.”92 Sheppard realized the implications and opportunities for imperial federation offered by the McKinley Tariff, writing that

All parts of the British Empire have been moved together by the. . . selfish and

unstatesmanlike provisions of the McKinley Bill. Every nation feels the sting of

your commercial contempt as expressed in that enactment, born in the brain of a

village politician, and enacted by a party of opportunists who are but the agents of

manufacturers and the engineers of a machine.93

Following the observations of imperialists like Sheppard, the IFL in Canada acted quickly to use the tariff to its advantage. It desired that “all Canadians, irrespective of party, unite to urge the adoption of the greater scheme of imperial federation, to open up new channels of trade with the scattered colonies of the Empire and with the mother country, to encourage and to foster trade in directions where it would not be subjected to sudden and uncontrollable interferences by foreign legislation.”94

Included within the idea of federation was the understanding that Canadians would share in all the privileges and responsibilities that full citizenship within the

92 Sheppard, “McKinley Bill and Imperial Federation,” 360, 364. 93 ibid., 365-66. 94 Imperial Federation, Nov. 1890, quoted in Tyler, Struggle for Imperial Unity, 190. 384 British Empire entailed. Imperial federationists considered continued Canadian dependency unsustainable: “No living organism can continue long in a condition of arrested development. It must grow to its full stature or petrify. Even dwarfing means death,” one advocate in Winnipeg remarked. “Besides,” he added, “who wants to belong to a nation of dwarfs?”95 Henceforth, both Canadian Liberal and Conservative commercial policies contained an imperial proclivity. The 1891 election and the

McKinley Tariff shifted the idea of commercial unity between Canada and Britain from a private one of the Canadian Imperial Federation League to an overt national policy.96

Sir Alexander Galt, in the hopes of affecting decisions within the metropole, warned Gladstone that the purpose of the McKinley Tariff was “to create a state of feeling in Canada hostile to the maintenance of the Colonial question,” its reciprocity treaties a threat to British trade in South America.97 Following the tariff act, Galt, along with members from the Canadian branch of the IFL, backed Howard Vincent, head of the

IFL in England, and James Lowther, both protectionist Conservative members of British

Parliament, in the creation of the United Empire Trade League (1891-1903) as the

95 George Monro Grant, Imperial Federation (Winnipeg: Manitoba Free Press, 1890), 1. See also Arthur H. Loring and R. J. Beadon, eds. Papers and Addresses by Lord Brassey, Imperial Federation and Colonisation from 1880 to 1894 (London: Longmans, 1895); F. P. de Labilliere, Federal Britain, or, Unity and Federation of the Empire (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1894); Denison, Struggle for Imperial Unity; and Frederick Young, A Pioneer of Imperial Federation in Canada (London: George Allen, 1902). 96 Tyler, Struggle for Imperial Unity, 190. For a discussion of the various Canadian options from a proponent of independence and federation, see James Douglas, Canadian Independence, Annexation and British Imperial Federation (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894). In response to the imperialists, proponents of union such as Goldwin Smith, , Theodore Roosevelt, and various other business and political figures in New York and Toronto founded the Continental Union League in 1892, albeit prematurely, with the League lasting only two years. See David Orchard, The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansion (Toronto: Stoddart, 1993), 78; and Denison, Struggle for Imperial Unity, 109. 97 Oscar Douglas Skelton, Life and Times of Sir A. T. Galt (Carleton: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 275. 385 successor to the Fair Trade League. The new league’s purpose, according to Vincent, was to extend British trade and strengthen commercial ties between Britain and its colonies for “the security of British capital, and the prosperity of British labour” throughout the

Empire.98 With Spain, Russia, and France following the American example of high protection, Vincent called for British commercial union to strengthen Greater Britain, rather than “for the benefit of the Universe,” as the Cobdenites espoused.99 Imperial federationists on both sides of the Atlantic effectively used the McKinley Tariff, “the chief helper in the cause,” to steer Canadian and West Indian trade from the United States to England and to increase demand for imperial unity.100

The year 1894 saw the climax of the colonial tariff reform and federation movement of the late nineteenth century at the Intercolonial Conference at Ottawa, “3000 miles from the shrine of the Free Trade fetish.” The new Canadian Conservative

Government called the conference in part “by the hope that its presence and deliberations would help to advertise the Imperial policy which they had been strenuously advocating as the great alternative to commercial union with the United States” in the wake of the

McKinley Tariff. With many of its Australasian attendees for the first time traveling across the Pacific by way of a new line of British steamers followed by a ride along the

Canadian-Pacific Railway, it was a purely colonial affair from inception to end, called for

98 London Times, 3 March 1891, 14. 99 Vincent, Commercial Union of the Empire (1891), reprinted in Howe and Duckenfield, Battles over Free Trade, III, 67. 100 Marquis Lorne, “Latest Aspects of Imperial Federation,” North American Review 156 (Oct. 1893), 490. 386 by Mackenzie Bowell, Canadian Minister of Trade and Commerce.101 Presaging the later imperial protectionism of the Ottawa Conference of 1932, delegates in attendance came from Canada, South Australia, New Zealand, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, New

South Wales, and the Cape of Good Hope. The Australian delegates were particularly excited to attend, hoping “that something might be done in regard to the Pacific Cable and the line of mail steamers in which we were interested. This business side of the matter was the one that claimed whatever attention was given to the enterprise.”102

More generally, the conference attendees desired British commercial unity, “cable connection . . . with all Colonies which form part of this tariff union,” and resolved to ask for: “Imperial legislation enabling the dependencies of the Empire to enter into agreements of commercial reciprocity, including power of making differential tariffs, with Great Britain or with one another”; a removal of current treaty provisions “which prevent the self-governing dependencies of the Empire from entering into agreements of commercial reciprocity with each other or with Great Britain”; and encouraged “the advisability of a customs arrangement between Great Britain and her Colonies by which trade within the Empire may be placed on a more favourable footing than that which is carried on with foreign countries.”103

101 Richard Jebb, The Imperial Conference: A History and Study, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911), I, 163, 167, 159. 102 Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, XXVI, 38. 103 Jebb, Imperial Conference, I, 168; II, 376. For the Ottawa Conference, see also Kendle, Colonial and Imperial Conferences, 17-18. For more on Gladstone and anti-imperialism see Bodelson, Studies in Mid- Victorian Imperialism, 87-114; and P. Knaplund, Gladstone and Britain’s Imperial Policy (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1927), chap. 4. 387 The Inter-Colonial Conference represented a significant new shift in the history of

British tariff reform, and its creation owed much to the McKinley Tariff’s passage. Yet the conference was a largely unsuccessful enterprise, as was the Fair Trade League, dissolved in 1891, and the Imperial Federation League, which came to an anticlimactic end in 1893. Why did the late nineteenth-century imperial protectionists fail? After all, from 1895 to 1902 imperial unity and protection ought to have had its greatest influence with a Conservative government under Lord Salisbury holding the imperial reins in

London, with Joseph Chamberlain, future champion of imperial Tariff Reform, as

Colonial Secretary, and with the City of London increasingly willing to sacrifice free trade for indirect taxation in the colonies.104 The rise of protectionism among Britain’s trading partners and its loss of a competitive edge in the race for industrial preeminence also ought to have strengthened the imperial coalition’s support for economic nationalism.105 Furthermore, with the onset of a “second fiscal revolution” marked by the McKinley Tariff’s passage and the increasing popularity of discriminatory reciprocity policies in Europe, the British business community had become increasingly discouraged by the Cobdenite system.106

104 Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, 185. 105 Steven E. Lobell, “Second Image Reversed Politics: Britain’s Choice of Freer Trade or Imperial Preferences, 1903-1906, 1917-1923, 1930-1932,” International Studies Quarterly 43 (Dec. 1999), 672-77. 106 Rogers, “United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain,” 602; Frank Trentmann, “The Transformation of Fiscal Reform: Reciprocity, Modernization, and the Fiscal Debate within the Business Community in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” Historical Journal 39 (1996), 1011-12. For a general discussion the nineteenth-century international monetary issue, see Francis A. Walker, International Bimetallism (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1896); Henry B. Russell, International Monetary Conferences (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1898); Angela Redish, Bimetallism: An Economic and Historic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Ted Wilson, Battles for the Standard: Bimetallism and the Spread of the Gold Standard in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 388 Added to this crisis concerning the liberal international order, British advocates of bimetallism had become closely tied to the imperial federation movement, as well. There were a growing number of farmers, manufacturers, and Conservatives—the “producers’ alliance”—in Britain who began to question the efficacy of the gold standard that, alongside the rapid rise of international protectionism, was blamed for the ongoing

“Great Depression” of the late nineteenth century. Such questions over continued maintenance of the gold standard arose owing to its deflationary tendencies as well as growing trade difficulties with silver standard areas. British farmers and manufacturers, suffering most from the economic depression, in particular began to call for both imperial bimetallism and protectionism, and none other than Listian nationalist Sampson Samuel

Lloyd led the charge.107 With this added monetary impetus, imperial federation’s failure thus might seem all the more perplexing at first glance.

It appears, however, that the movement was overly precipitous in three ways.

First, it underestimated the power of the City. Put simply, while London’s financial elites were willing to allow for some protection and silver usage (India) among the colonies, the general dismantling of both international free trade and the gold standard were out of the question. Britain’s Listian nationalists were outmatched by the “goldbug” Cobdenite cosmopolitans in the City. Pro-gold-standard Cobdenites were further successful by

107 E. H. H. Green, “Rentiers versus Producers? The Political Economy of the Bimetallic Controversy c. 1880-1898,” English Historical Review 103 (Jul. 1988): 588-612; Anthony Howe, “Bimetallism, c. 1880- 1898: A Controversy Re-Opened?” English Historical Review 105 (Apr. 1990), 378; Jeannette P. Nichols, “Silver Diplomacy,” Political Science Quarterly 48 (Dec. 1933), 580-84. Howe points out that there were minority segments among Cobdenites, the merchant class, and the City that favored bimetallism. See also Green’s response in “The Bimetallic Controversy: Empiricism Belimed or the Case for the Issues,” English Historical Review 105 (Jul. 1990): 673-683; and Green, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Economic Policy, 1880-1914: The Debate over Bimetallism and Protectionism,” in R. E. Dumett, ed., Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperialism: The New Debate on Empire (London: Longman, 1999), 44-67. 389 construing bimetallism’s inflationary prescriptions to potential skyrocketing food prices; as Gladstone portrayed it, bimetallism was little more than “protection in disguise.”108

Second, England’s bimetallic federationists found little support within Canada, otherwise a key ideological bastion of imperial federation. One reason for this is that the

City of London, through heavy investment, maintained informal financial imperial influence at the structural level within the Canadian (and Australasian) market.109

Another reason for the lack of support was that, in contrast to its southern neighbor,

“suspicion and distrust” of the banking system was nearly absent in Canada. Furthermore, as B. E. Walker, general manager of the Canadian Bank of Commerce pointed out in

1897, the various provinces making up the Dominion of Canada had resigned control of matters of currency and banking to the federal government alone, which allowed for “a sound and elastic currency and a banking system which ensures an equitable rate for borrowed money.” This also helps explain why, unlike in the United States, the 1896

Canadian elections were also notable for the absence of monetary issues. Although some agitation for international bimetallism was made on behalf of the silver mining interests

108 Green, “Rentiers versus Producers?” 595. 109 Andrew Dilley, “‘Rules of the Game’: London Finance, Australia, and Canada, c. 1900-14,” Economic History Review 63 (Nov. 2010): 1003-1031; Dilley, “Empire and Risk: Edwardian Financiers, Australia, and Canada, c. 1899-1914,” Business and Economic History Online 7 (2009): 1-12. The extent of the City of London financial imperial power has since been called into question. See Kubicek, Robert V., “Economic power at the periphery: Canada, Australia, and South Africa, 1850–1914,” in Dumett, ed., Gentlemanly capitalism and British imperialism, 113–27; and Jim McAloon, “Gentlemanly Capitalism and Settler Capitalists: Imperialism, Dependent Development and Colonial Wealth in the South Island of New Zealand,” Australian Economic History Review 43 (July 2002): 204-223. In response, see A. G. Hopkins, “Gentlemanly Capitalism in New Zealand,” Australian Economic History Review 43 (Nov. 2003): 287-97; Bernard Attard, “From Free-Trade Imperialism to Structural Power: New Zealand and the Capital Market, 1856-68,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35 (Dec. 2007): 505-527. 390 of British Columbia, for instance, neither bimetallic unionists in the United States nor the imperial bimetallists in England found much support in the agricultural areas of Canada, a country that had little history—aside from minor agitation in 1838 and 1880—of currency manipulation. As contemporary John Davidson observed, “the improvement in the means of communication, which has opened up new sources of supply and for the first time brought the silver standard countries into effective competition, has been the making, not the ruin, of agriculture in Western Canada.”110 Thus, the lack of support from the Dominion of Canada, which otherwise played an economically and geographically pivotal role regarding the idea of Greater Britain, further impeded the bimetallic federative movement in England.

Third, the protectionist movement toward federation was overly hasty in its attempt to overthrow the orthodoxy of free trade—England was not ready for its displacement, nor was the protectionist movement ever able to gain the emotional or political momentum akin to the Anti-Corn Law League.111 As Frank Trentmann has described, “free Trade . . . was the closest modern Britain ever came to a national ideology . . . a genuine national and democratic culture, reaching all classes and regions, mobilizing men, women, and children, and cutting across party political divides.”112 The

110 James Baker, International Bimetallism Speech before the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia (Jan. 24, 1894), held in the LAC; B. E. Walker [Gold Standard Defence Association, No. 26], Why Canada is Against Bimetallism (London, 1897), 4, 8; Goldwin Smith, Essays on Questions of the Day Political and Social (New York and London: MacMillan and Co., 1893), 26-35; John Davidson, “Canada and the Silver Question,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 12 (1898), 152, 143, 142. 111 Howe, “Debate: Bimetallism, c. 1880-1898,” 389. 112 Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. 391 “cheap loaf,” the City’s adherence to fiscal orthodoxy, the lack of any serious monetary controversy in Canada, Gladstone’s intransigence, and prolific propaganda spread by free trade proponents like the Cobden Club withered—and weathered—the oppositional onslaught of the imperial protectionists.

As much as free trade orthodoxy largely nullified moves toward imperial protection and federation in the era of the McKinley Tariff—and again a decade later during Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform movement—internal disunity among the imperial unionists played its part, as well. Those preferring preference often canceled out those wanting an imperial Zollverein or those just seeking retaliatory tariffs; imperial unionists who believed that increased commercial ties were the key to a successful Greater Britain found themselves at odds with others who put political unity or Salisbury’s

Kriegsverein—imperial defense—at the ideological vanguard. While the McKinley Tariff helped the imperial federation movement reach its late-nineteenth-century apex, such dissimilar means to the movement’s desired ends, along with the continued predominance of free trade and monetary orthodoxy, brought about the demise of imperial fair trade, federation, and unity. Nevertheless, American protectionism and the gold standard would continue to be issues of division between imperial protectionists and Cobdenites through the Edwardian period.113

113 Tyler, Struggle for Imperial Unity, 199-208, 45. This period has ably been connected to the subsequent Edwardian Era’s tariff reform and federation movement in Rogers “United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain, 1873-1913.” See also Andrew Marrison, “Insular Free Trade, Retaliation, and the Most-Favoured- Nation Treaty, 1880-1914,” in Andrew Marrison, ed. Free Trade and its Reception, 1815-1960: Freedom and Trade 3 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), I, 224-242. 392

The McKinley Tariff’s mixture of high protective tariffs and discriminatory reciprocity treaties created both real and perceived threats to British and colonial manufacturing and farming interests, harmed exports, and increased . It coincided with, and sped up demand for, national economic programs, bimetallism, and localized federation throughout the Empire, especially in Canada, where the McKinley

Tariff was viewed by many as an attempt at annexation, bringing about a contentious national election forcing Canadians to consider seriously whether to unite more closely with Britain or become enjoined with the United States. The McKinley Tariff also supported and enhanced global calls for a Greater Britain tied economically between

England and its white colonies, and led to closer intercolonial unity, exemplified by the

1894 Ottawa Conference. Such efforts served as the foundations for the Tariff Reform movement begun in the early years of the twentieth century by Joseph Chamberlain, and as a precursor to the 1932 Ottawa Conference, wherein a system of imperial protection would once again be discussed and developed.

The McKinley Tariff also acted as an impetus for better global communications and transportation in order to better connect the previously temporally and spatially disparate British Empire. Following the passage of the Tariff, demand increased rapidly for a trans-Pacific cable, a trans-continental Canadian railroad, steamship lines, a better imperial postal service, usage of the Suez Canal, and the possible benefits of one in

Panama: all to augment the defensive and commercial advantages of imperial federation

393 and trade, developments which American protectionists ironically viewed as a British attempt to “obtain possession of the American trade upon the Pacific Ocean. This was an act of war upon our commerce, waged by the British government with public funds.”114

The global impact of the McKinley Tariff of 1890 upon the British Empire exemplifies the global consequences of what has previously been viewed in terms of narrower domestic, imperial, or national affairs.

A global historical approach to the subject offers a more complex and clear picture of modern globalization in the late nineteenth century. The McKinley Tariff was in part a national economic backlash against the cosmopolitanism of this British-led hegemonic era. Ironically, the McKinley Tariff, in its response to the spread of British

Cobdenite cosmopolitanism, instead enhanced the desire for Listian nationalism throughout the British Empire, made all the more viable owing to the technological tools of globalization. As this chapter demonstrates, such an approach offers a fresh perspective to the history of Anglo-American relations. American Gilded-Age trade and foreign policies were so often interconnected with those of the British Empire. An examination of the global impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire thus demonstrates that tariff issues were inextricably intertwined with imperialism, modern globalization, and foreign relations, particularly when attempting to understand the ebb and flow of Anglo-American relations in the nineteenth century and beyond: especially with the promise of an American Cobdenite resurgence looming on the horizon.

114 Charles Heber Clark, “The Policy of Commercial War,” A Tariff Symposium (Boston: Home Market Club, 1896), 12. 394 Chapter 9: Republican Rapprochement: Cleveland’s Cobdenites,

Anglo-American Relations, and the 1896 Presidential Elections

If there is any one thing that has helped the growth of the Republican League of the

United States, it has been the thought of the interference in American politics made by . .

. the Cobden Club of England. This club has undertaken to propagate its cholera germs

of British Free-Trade on American soil. . . . Every one of the Republican League clubs in

the United States may be set down as an anti-Cobden club.

The Republican Magazine 1 (Oct. 1892), 382.

The people of England are opposed to our system and have manifested their opposition

and displeasure to it in many ways, more especially to the McKinley Bill . . . among other

things they have established the Cobden Club to educate our people by the publication of

books, pamphlets, etc., and the distribution of free trade medals in our colleges. The

leaders of the Democratic party . . . appear to be more anxious to help the English than

to help our own people, and are willing to adopt the English system—a tariff for revenue

only—even if it does transfer our manufacturing industries to England.

Thomas Knox.1

1 Thomas W. Knox, The Republican Party and Its Leaders: A History of the Party From Its Beginning to the Present Time. (New York: P. F. Collier, 1892), 264. 395 All the nations of Europe are protective in their policy. The Cobden Club has labored for

forty years without making a single national convert. All the great colonies of Great

Britain follow the American policy of protection. . . . They are all at peace. . . . We are a

protective nation, and we are the most peaceful nation on the face of the earth. Great

Britain champions free trade and promotes it at the cannon’s mouth.

Cyrus Hamlin.2

As the “reckless decade” of the 1890s dawned, railroads, steamship lines, cables, and canals crisscrossed the world’s continents and oceans, connecting the world’s markets, cultures, and policies at levels never imagined. The titans of industry reaped abundant rewards from America’s rapid industrialization; the colossus of capitalism seemingly reigned triumphant, as did American technological developments. New steam engines, the Bell telephone, and electric street lights were unveiled at the 1893 World’s

Fair in Chicago, for instance, illuminating further the marvels of modern globalization.

Yet these developments and discoveries also cast long shadows on globalization’s discontents. American democracy was in crisis, its future imperiled. Frederick Jackson

Turner, having read the 1890 census and having found inspiration from the writings of

Cobdenites Henry George and Francis Amasa Walker, introduced to the fair’s attendees his gloomy speculation about the end of the American Frontier and the corresponding end of American national self-reliance. Indian resistance to U.S. expansion continued to be

2 Cyrus Hamlin, “The Morals of the Protective Tariff,” A Tariff Symposium (Boston: Home Market Club, 1896), 8. 396 ruthlessly squashed even as continued suppression of African Americans made a mockery of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Alongside such crises surrounding American expansionism and democracy arose renewed critiques of globalization; growing global trade, after all, meant increased global competition. Prices on farm products fell to new lows. As corn and cotton prices plummeted, American farmers in the draught-stricken West and debt-ridden South grew restless and agitated.

Added to this, hundreds of thousands of immigrants poured onto U.S. shores, driving down the wages of the American laborer and exacerbating ethnic and racial tensions. The federal government, for its part, was noticeable only for its absence, appearing either uncaring or impotent in alleviating the suffering of so many struggling Americans.3

Cobdenite cosmopolitans and Listian nationalists in turn worked harder than ever to bring into their camp the poverty-stricken American laborer and farmer. The latter groups—exploited and desperate—took matters into their own hands. They organized, they marched, they went on strike. Labor unions sought federal regulation of abusive industrial practices while generally subscribing to the Listian argument that high tariffs led to high wages. U.S. Cobdenites fell increasingly out of favor, as most were reluctant to give in to the state interventionism advocated by protectionists, labor unions, and agrarians.4

3 H. W. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24, 90-253; Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 387-479. 4 Horace White and Amasa Walker, for instance, had long been laissez faire opponents to the demand for a government-enforced eight hour workday. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 397 The Populist party’s popularity grew, and they gained a number of seats in state and national government. Populist politicians preferred an elimination of all tariffs, particularly protective ones, seeking direct over indirect taxation. They saw protectionism as just one more way the government took care of industry at the expense of agriculture.

Yet their critique of the tariff was too extreme for many Cobdenites, many of whom still preferred the indirect British system of a tariff for revenue only rather than a complete elimination of duties and a sudden shift to direct taxation. The Populist condemnation of the deflationary gold standard further alienated them from the predominantly goldbug

Cobdenite free traders, as did the Populist call for the nationalization of American railways. In the early years of the 1890s, the laissez faire radicalism of Cobdenism thus found few friends among those subscribing to the new radicalism of labor and populism.

Such differences hint at the obstacles facing the reform efforts of Grover

Cleveland’s second administration. The onset of yet another economic depression just weeks after Cleveland took office only exacerbated the political and ideological tension.

Amid this troubling political backdrop and with the strong support of tariff reform groups throughout the country, Cleveland’s Cobdenites nevertheless swept into the executive for the second time, and the Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress in the winter elections of 1892.5 American Cobden Club members once again dominated

Cleveland’s executive, either through appointments or as economic advisers: Thomas

Bayard was made American minister to Britain; John G. Carlisle became Cleveland’s treasury secretary; Cobdenite Nebraska politician J. Sterling Morton found himself as

5 New York Tribune, 5 Jan. 1892, 6; 3 Dec. 1899, 1. 398 Secretary of Agriculture; A. B. Farquhar, Cobdenite cotton exporter and friend of Edward

Atkinson, had the ear of Grover Cleveland in the oval office regarding fiscal matters;

Cobdenite Professor Arthur Latham Perry similarly found himself preparing a “short, sharp, logical, and popular demolition of the whole silver pretensions” for the new cabinet; Atkinson speculated that, while neither he nor David Ames Wells would likely accept cabinet positions, they would be “in a better position as advisers,” especially as both he and Wells had already been advising leading members in both houses of

Congress on monetary and tariff reform issues.6

Cobdenite David Ames Wells regarded this outcome as a referendum for freer

trade. After more than thirty years of restricting foreign commerce, the American people

had “abandoned” this policy for “a more liberal system,” one that “would do much to

promote peace and good-will between the United States and the rest of the world, in place

of the fear, hatred, and distrust which all nations . . . now entertain toward this country.”

It would also aid in undermining the European protectionist system, which presently

fostered international hostility, militarism, and poverty.7 The founder of the Cobden

Club, Thomas Bayley Potter, seconded Wells’s pronouncements. Potter stated at the club’s 1893 London dinner that “during the last twelve months the most interesting event connected with our cause has been the change of policy in the United States, indicated by the election in November of Mr. Cleveland.” He suggested “that the people of the United

6 Arthur Latham Perry, Williamstown and Williams College (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), 697; Williamson, Atkinson, 178-9, 204-5. Among others, Atkinson and Wells kept up an advisory correspondence with Senators John Carlisle and Roger Q. Mills, as well as Congressmen William L. Wilson and William R. Morrison. 7 David Ames Wells, “Tariff Reform: Retrospective and Prospective,” Forum (Feb. 1893), 697, 714. 399 States have given their sanction to a change from the policy of Protection, and therefore I think the Club may congratulate itself” on the progress of its nearly three-decade long free trade propaganda campaign. Edward Atkinson wrote optimistically to his Cobdenite friend Charles Nordhoff in November 1892 that “the revolution has come.”8

Following the 1892 Democratic political sweep, Atkinson declared that the country had condemned “McKinleyism,” and “now demands to be governed . . . by those who represent the principle of Free Trade.” The road to freer trade and maintaining the gold standard, however, would not be an easy one. Atkinson compared the ensuing fight to the Civil War; the McKinley Tariff was “the first shot on Fort Sumter,” the “scare about silver is the first Bull Run.”9 Comparing the oncoming political fight to the bloodiest war in U.S. history was not entirely hyperbolic. The dueling ideological sides had long been sparring in the American political arena. Amid a rising tide of powerful

Republican, Democratic, and Populist opposition and a renewed economic depression, the second Cleveland Administration would staunchly defend the gold standard and the anti-imperial principles of Cobdenism: free trade, non-interventionism, and arbitration.

Much as they had once come together under the Republican banner of antislavery, the contentious presidential campaign of 1896 would in turn see America’s Cobdenite cosmopolitans and Listian nationalists arrive at a final political rapprochement in order to defeat the radical free silver platform of Jeffersonian .

8 Atkinson to Nordhoff, 28 Nov. 1892, carton 22, Edward Atkinson Papers, MHS; Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827-1905 (Boston: Old Corner Book Store, 1934), 178-9, 204-5. 9 London Times, 24 July 1893, 7; Edward Atkinson, Taxation and Work: A Series of Treatises on the Tariff and the Currency (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 110; Atkinson to Nordhoff, 13 July 1893, carton 23, Atkinson Papers. 400 The Panic of 1893 and Modern Globalization’s Discontents

Along with the election of an American “Free Trade President,” the 1890s saw the

revival of the free silver issue, which offered to reflate deflated prices, open up markets

in silver-standard China and Latin America, and thereby free the American farmer from

the dictates of the British market. Silver sentiment had grown in strength by the time

Cleveland took back the executive. The 1890 Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the

failure of the powerful financial firm Baring Brothers had led to the exportation of large

amounts of American gold overseas. The former had ended up adding surplus funds to

Eastern financial coffers, funds which quickly made their way into the hands of European

investors; the latter had undercut confidence in the international securities market, and

the subsequent large-scale sale of American securities led to a further drain on U.S. gold

reserves. A large American wheat crop and a coinciding European crop failure in 1891

had reversed this gold flight, but only temporarily. Even as Cleveland’s treasury secretary

appointment, Cobdenite John G. Carlisle, took over the department, the Treasury’s gold

reserves hit minimum levels.

When the Panic of 1893 struck, Cleveland’s goldbugs attempted to use the

depression to their political advantage.10 They quickly laid most of the fiscal blame on

America’s depleted gold reserves and deficit (owing in large part to the 1890 McKinley

Tariff’s elimination of the duty on sugar), as well as the generally injurious inflationary

10 On the Panic of 1893, see John Sperling, Great Depressions: 1837-1844, 1893-1897, 1929-1939 (Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1966); and Gerald T. White, The United States and the Problem of Recovery after 1893 (University, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1982). 401 effects of Congress’s overly sympathetic silver sentiment, as enacted in the 1890

Sherman Silver Purchase Act. The Cleveland administration pointed out that the

McKinley Tariff had failed in its most strongly touted objective: keeping the workingman and woman’s wages high. American gold proponents alternatively viewed the long-term financial success of England as proof that the gold standard was superior to free silver coinage or international bimetallism, and an essential ingredient for stability during an era dominated by unpredictable economic panics. By 1896, American goldbugs even began connecting the cheap labor systems of China, Japan, Siam, and India with those countries’ adherence to free silver coinage.11

Silverites alternatively interpreted the 1893 panic as a further demonstration of

American overreliance on gold. Agrarian free silver advocates perceived (correctly) that the shrinking supply of money in circulation and the falling price levels of the 1880s and

1890s were direct results of the demonetization of silver in 1873. Remonetization would put more money into circulation, they argued, bringing about currency inflation and lower interest rates and thereby relieving American farmers from their current economic plight. Furthermore, it seemed obvious to silverites that Great Britain, as the world’s creditor, had been the ultimate victor in the demonetization of silver. Silverites also assumed that the high ratio of silver to gold correlated with the collapse of the price of foodstuffs, thereby further aiding England, the largest importer of foodstuffs in the world,

11 “The Experience of Eastern Asia, the Great Home of Silver, with that Metal—an Object Lesson to America,” in confidential correspondence, Barrett [U. S. Legation, Bangkok, Siam] to McKinley, 8 Sept. 1896, microfilm reel 1, William McKinley Papers, LOC. 402 particularly from silver-backed India. Both sides of the local American fiscal debate thus utilized global trade and financial flows to bolster their arguments.

The issue of Indian wheat and cotton exports and their connection to bimetallism also remained an area of complaint by American farmers throughout the late nineteenth century, owing to India’s continued silver backing of the rupee. Silverite Senator Thomas

C. Power took it as “an accepted fact that an ounce of silver bullion will always purchase a bushel of wheat in India and pay its transportation to Liverpool.” American farmers believed they needed similar export capabilities. Sir Robert N. Fowler—a banker, ex- mayor of London, member of British Parliament, friend of Edward Atkinson, and Cobden

Club member—had even stated in 1886 that “the effect of the depreciation of silver must be the ruin of the wheat and cotton industries of America, and the development of India as the chief wheat and cotton exporter of the world,” a quote that was cited by silverites as proof of a British monometallic conspiracy.12

Foreign market competition from India and other silver-using countries thus helped bring together the bimetallic and protectionist elements in the United States, even as those same elements were conjoining in England (see chapter 8). Philadelphia’s

Listian nationalist Wharton Barker, for instance, argued in Bimetallism and Protection

Inseperable. Gold Mon-metallism means Free Trade (1896) that so long as the United

States remained on the gold standard its farmers would remain impoverished owing to

12 Thomas C. Power, Silver, the Friend of the Farmer and the Miner (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1893), 8, 10; H. E. Taubeneck, The Condition of the American Farmer (Chicago: Schulte Publishing Co., 1896), 51. Fowler was an early member (1866) of the Cobden Club and remained in close contact with Edward Atkinson. “List of Members,” Report of the Proceedings at the Annual Dinner, June 24, 1871 (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1871); Edward Atkinson to Wells, 8 July 1898, microfilm reel 8, David Ames Wells Papers, LOC. 403 their inability to compete with silver-backed countries. A mixture of bimetallism and protectionism alternatively would raise the price of U.S. farm products by increasing the gold price of silver in the British-controlled global market. This could be accomplished,

Barker put forth, through silver coinage in the United States. Such localized independent silver usage would increase the demand for silver while concurrently lowering demand for gold, and thereby bring up the global market price of silver. “Bimetallism and

Protection are inseparable,” he explained, while “Gold-monometallism and Protection” were “irreconcilably hostile.” Silver-using markets were essentially closed to gold- backed British and German manufactures, forcing these countries to glut European markets in direct competition with U.S. exports, thereby lowering U.S. agricultural prices to the detriment of the farmer. Such had been the pattern since the German and French demonetization of silver in 1873. The needs of U.S. silver miners, manufacturers, and farmers thus were not in opposition but overlapped, Barker suggested. At the same time that protective tariffs were stimulating the home market, national bimetallism would lessen the market competition of silver-using countries, raise the price of agricultural products, and thereby give farmers more money with which to buy U.S. manufactures.

The only proper U.S. tonic, Barker hammered home, was protective tariffs mixed with bimetallism.13

Some American bimetallists by this time even envisioned a North American bimetallic union that included the United States, Mexico, South America, and Canada.

13 Wharton Barker, Bimetallism and Protection Inseperable. Gold Mono-metallism means Free Trade. A Letter Addressed to the Members of the Manufacturers’ Club of Philadelphia, March 28, 1896, 5. 404 One proponent, under the name “Par,” sought “the most advantageous means of promoting reciprocal trade exchanges between the descendents of Columbus,” what he called the “Three Americas’ Trade Movement.” To the detriment of North American debtors, Par argued, the United States and Canada were in a position of “financial servility” to Britain, the great creditor. Rather, a “natural homogeneity of commercial interests . . . should bind all American republics in one zolverein, a Pan-American customs union.” Par used recent arguments for commercial union to strengthen his argument, noting, for instance, that Nova Scotia’s attorney-general in December 1887 had already called for “unrestricted commerce” in order to make Canada and the United

States “intimate and friendly.” Dr. Chauncey M. Depew of New York had similarly testified to the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee concerning potential competition from the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1889. Depew had observed that “if it were not for the political lines that separate Canada from the United States the natural tendency of the railroads would be north and south.” A politician from British Columbia had even predicted that “whenever the slight connection at present existing between Canada and the empire terminates . . . self-interest . . . will certainly bring about a union with the states.” With Europe’s earlier Latin Monetary Union as a prototype, Par recommended this union could best be accomplished through a bimetallic monetary union freed of

British financial control.14 Par thus offered another potential continental alliance, but one that was fiscal anathema to North America’s goldbug Cobdenites.

14 Par, The Three Americas. Their “Way Out” of Trouble. Monetary Science, International; and Domestic. “An American Monetary Union;” the Bond of the Western World (Washington, D.C., 1892), 5, 4, 127, 128, 130, 132. 405 Nor did such bimetallic arguments persuade many British, Canadian, or American financial lenders, who predominantly sided with the Cleveland Administration.15 Both

Wall Street and the City of London continued to prefer the deflationary system of gold

monometallism to an inflationary bimetallic system. Their continued adherence to the

gold standard stemmed in part from fears that debtors would quickly pay off their

obligations in inflated money and thereby undermine England’s and, to a lesser extent

New York’s, financial leadership, and in part because they ideologically believed that

such a non-international bimetallic system was immoral and unstable.

The U.S. government’s presumed complicity in the goldbug “plot” through its

continued backing of the gold standard increased silverite ire. Half measures such as the

Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 and the earlier 1878 Bland-Allison Act had done

little to defuse the tension. Wall Street bankers and Congress were nothing more than

servants and tools of the British, charged Western Republicans and Populists. The Panic

of 1893 in turn drove more supporters of the silver issue into the Populist party, to the

detriment of both the Republicans and the Democrats.16

With Wells and Atkinson once again as Cleveland’s economic advisors and with

Horace White’s and William Lloyd Garrison Jr.’s respective editorial support at the New

York Evening Post and the Nation, Cleveland maintained his staunch and increasingly

unpopular support for the gold standard throughout his second administration. Amid

15 See chapter 8 for the City of London’s opposition to bimetallism. For Canadian opposition, see Craufurd D. W. Goodwin, Canadian Economic Thought: The Political Economy of a Developing Nation 1814-1914 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1961), 71-106. 16 Bradley J. Young, “Silver, Discontent, and Conspiracy: The Ideology of the Western Republican Revolt of 1890-1901,” Pacific Historical Review 64 (May 1995): 243-265; Crapol, America for Americans, 201. 406 powerful opposition from the silver mining interests, he first began working for the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. His efforts alienated powerful Republican and

Democratic silverite congressmen and brought corresponding indictments of a transatlantic conspiracy, as well. The editor of the Populist National Bulletin, for instance, stated that Cleveland was by no means a Democrat. Rather, through his backing

of the gold standard and free trade, he showed himself to be a supporter of British

policies.17 In the summer of 1893, Cleveland’s opponents further asserted that the

president appeared, “through Minister Bayard, to have an understanding with England, as

he was copying everything British on tariff, free trade, and finance. He saw everything

through British glasses.” Cobdenite Bayard himself—Cleveland’s former state secretary

and now his minister to Britain—“was more English than the English themselves. . . . He

is a confirmed Anglomaniac” and “should be compelled to resign.” Following

Republican calls for his impeachment, Bayard was even censured by Congress in 1895

for speeches he had made in England and Scotland condemning the protectionist system

in the United States.18 A fiscal war was brewing, and the Cleveland Administration’s goldbugs stubbornly squared off against the rising tide of silverite fermentation.

Cobdenism’s Peelite Legacy: the Wilson-Gorman Tariff of 1894

17 Logsdon, White, 335; Crapol, America for Americans, 201; Jeannette Paddock Nichols, “The Politics and Personalities of Silver Repeal in the United States Senate,” American Historical Review 41 (Oct. 1935): 26-53. 18 Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration, 7; Congressional Record, 54 Cong., 1 Sess., 10 Dec. 1895, 114-26. 407 Cobdenism is not suited to the United States . . . the nearest approach in this country

recently has been in the change from a well defined protective tariff, as represented in the

McKinley bill, to the free or freer trade features of the Wilson bill.

Oswego Daily Times (NY), 29 Aug. 1896.

Repealing the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was a decidedly difficult affair, and one that only exacerbated the administration’s political opposition as Cleveland’s cabinet members and advisors turned their attention to the tariff. The rhetoric of antislavery continued to permeate the debate. David Wells argued in the pages of Forum that “the denial to any individual, for the benefit of some private interest, of the right to exchange the product of his labor, involves the principle of slavery.”19 Listian Albert Clarke returned rhetorical fire by maintaining that free trade brought about industrial slavery:

Freedom of trade, therefore, would be to them industrial slavery. . . . It cheapens

everything by degrading labor. It enables a strong country to destroy the

industries of a weak country. . . . England has thriven under free trade only at the

expense of other countries, and her manufactures have thriven only at the cost of

the ruin of her agriculture. Is it in accordance with human freedom to give the

strong this advantage over the weak? Yet this is the feast to which the Cobden

19 Wells, “Tariff Reform,” 702. 408 school invites young men who are imbued with love of humanity and who are

allured by the pleasant sound of freedom.20

Within this increasingly volatile political environment, the Democratic tariff reformers began work upon the last congressional attempt toward freer trade in the nineteenth century. The resulting Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act of 1894 modestly sought to undo some of the work of the McKinley Tariff of 1890, and initially would have allowed for renewed reciprocity with Canada. It was also correspondingly considered by the bill’s opponents to have been “passed in the interest of England.” Maryland’s conservative

Democratic Senator Arthur Pue Gorman was determined to neutralize the Wilson bill, and felt that “Cleveland’s whole energy has been directed to legislate for England and

Canada.”21

Cobdenite Treasury Secretary John Carlisle in turn had invited Wells and

Atkinson to offer their advice on the new tariff bill. They became advisors to the bill’s

author, Democratic Congressman William L. Wilson, chairman of the House Ways and

Means Committee. Under Cobdenites Wells and Atkinson’s guidance, Wilson—himself

an avowed tariff reformer and goldbug—developed a bill that, in order to be palatable to

the congressional majority, conservatively sought to lower tariffs and created a free list

comparable to that of the 1888 Mills Bill, while once again condemning the McKinley

20 Albert Clarke, “Free Trade is not Freedom,” A Tariff Symposium (Boston: Home Market Club, 1896), 9. 21 David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 230; Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration, 8. 409 bill’s “erroneously” titled reciprocity provision. The early version also contained a reciprocity clause that would have allowed for free entry of Canadian agricultural products. Atkinson speculated that the bill would receive support from both parties since

“McKinleyism has killed the Republican party.” He justified the bill’s moderate approach

“because the logic of our case is exactly the same as that of England 1840-42, and what I am trying to do is to follow and improve upon the methods of Sir Robert Peel and his successors.” To Cobdenite-turned-Listian Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts,

Atkinson suggested they could both agree at least that the McKinley bill “is dead. It began to die first in the house of its friends.” Republicans who once had a hand in shaping it, now admitted “that they have overshot the mark, that it kicked back and that they were as anxious to reform the Tariff as any of my old Free Trade friends.” To

Atkinson, tariff reform winds seemed sure, especially with William Wilson at the congressional helm, “a Free Trader by conviction on the most solid ground who will use wise judgment as Sir Robert Peel did in leading the reform.” Atkinson suggested that

Lodge join him in removing the tariff issue from politics, that “the true protection for

American industry is gradually to remove every type and form of artificial obstruction by which we are now prevented from extending our home market all over the world.”22 His

22 Festus P. Summers, William L. Wilson and Tariff Reform (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 73-74; Terrill, “David Ames Wells,” 551; William McKinley, The Tariff in the Days of Henry Clay and Since. An Exhaustive Review of Our Tariff Legislation from 1812 to 1896 (New York: Henry Clay Publishing Co., 1896), 201; J. Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York: The Baker & Taylor Co., 1903), 68; William L Wilson to Atkinson, 25 March, 8 Dec. 1892, carton 5; 23 Sept., 10 Oct. 1893; Carlisle to Atkinson, 24 Oct. 1894, carton 6; Atkinson to Nordhoff, 14 Feb. 1893, carton 22; Atkinson to Lodge, 29 Aug. 1893, carton 23, Atkinson Papers. For more comparisons to Peel’s reform, see also Edward Atkinson, “A Forecast of the Future Commercial Union of the English-Speaking People,” American Association for the Advancement of Science for the Forty-Third Meeting held at Brooklyn, N.Y. August, 1894 (Salem: Permanent Secretary, 1895): 407-419, 417. Much of what was termed the “Atkinson 410 appeal, however, fell on Lodge’s deaf Listian ears. Atkinson was also as yet unaware of much of Cleveland’s political capital had already been spent on overturning the Sherman

Act.

The House tariff bill that was sent to the Senate certainly went too far for

protectionists in both parties, and the Senate’s watered-down version did not go nearly far

enough for free traders like William Wilson, Senator Roger Q. Mills, and Grover

Cleveland. Considering the choice between a moderate, Democrat-crafted protectionist

bill and the current McKinley Tariff, Cleveland preferred the latter so that the

Republicans would not be able to shift the blame for the current economic panic upon the

Wilson-Gorman bill’s modest tariff reductions. He could not even bring himself to sign

the final product.

Cleveland’s inability to garner stronger Democratic loyalty on developing a low

tariff bill also upset Cobdenites David Wells and William R. Morrison, who was now a

congressional member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Yet Atkinson, ever the

optimist, saw even the bill’s moderate reductions as a good step, writing Wilson that

“Protection is intellectually dead,” and to another correspondent that the Wilson-Gorman

Tariff would provide “a greater measure of relief than that accomplished by Sir Robert

Peel in his great reform measure of 1843.” While the bill was not “ideal,” he wrote fellow

Cobdenite Charles Nordhoff, it “was as long a step as ought to have been made.” Its

Plan,” having first appeared in the Reform Club’s Tariff Reform, was incorporated into the Wilson Bill. Wells wrote to Atkinson that he was fine with the bill’s conservative lowering of tariffs for the sake of its passage. Late in his years, all Wells wanted was “to have something effectual done.” Harold Francis Williamson, Edward Atkinson: The Biography of an American Liberal, 1827-1905 (Boston: Old Corner Book Store, 1934), 184-90. 411 reform measures “will bear a close resemblance to Sir Robert Peel’s first measure of reform, which seemed at first very inadequate but which led to such prosperity and to such changes that the rest of the work followed almost without opposition.”23 The

Peelite legacy of the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws lived on in the 1890s free trade movement.

Wilson’s moderate tariff bill was apparently more acceptable to free traders in

England than t those in the United States. In September 1894, about a month after the bill’s passage, Wilson traveled to London where he was incessantly interviewed and affectionately termed “Tariff” Wilson and kept under the watchful eye of the protectionist press back home. J. Sterling Morton, Cleveland’s Secretary of Agriculture and a Cobden

Club member since 1883, also accompanied Wilson. Wilson told the London Chamber of

Commerce that, though “less than we had hoped and expected” the United States had

“just fought and just won the first battle” in the “arena of the greatest political conflict” in

American history. The Anglophobic Washington Post lashed out at Wilson for “abusing the institutions of his own country for the delectation of foreigners.” Wilson, after toasting the Queen alongside his English hosts, noted that America’s “protectionists have been building defenses to keep you out and other nations from competing with us in our home markets. The tariff reformers are breaking down these defenses.” His words, in the view of his opponents, showed “plainly why England was grateful for Wilson’s effort to give England control of the American market.” London’s Commerce, alternatively, called

23 Mills to Atkinson, 19 March 1894, carton 6; Wells to Atkinson, 22 June 1894, folder 29, carton 13, Atkinson Papers; Edward Atkinson to Wilson, 5 July 1894; Atkinson to M. D. Harter, 23 May 1894, carton 23, Atkinson Papers; Summers, William L. Wilson, 172-208. 412 Wilson “the most distinguished American statesman of the day, holding and representing as he does opinions so heartily in accord with those of his British hearers.” Whether from

American protectionist criticism or British free trade praise, Wilson’s bill brought with it renewed conspiratorial charges against the Cleveland administration.24

The protectionist press redoubled its attack. One paper even included a

Francophobic twist to the tale, writing that French interest in the Wilson bill was “shown

by the fact that an agent of the Cobden club is here working to secure the passage of the

House bill. He is not a myth. . . . The gentleman . . . represents a committee of French

manufacturers in the Cobden club.” Although aware of the powerful protectionist

opposition to the bill, the Cobden Club in England nevertheless held out hope that the bill

would “considerably reduce the duties generally which were set up by the disastrous

McKinley Act.”25

The protectionists also saw their position considerably strengthened in Congress

following substantial gains in the November 1894 elections, in part by blaming the

Wilson-Gorman Tariff for the continued depression, just as Cleveland had feared.

Edward Atkinson, however, did not view this resurgence “as a return to McKinleyism”

24 Summers, Wilson, 211-12; London Times, 28 Sept. 1894; Washington Post, 29 Sept. 1894; Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration, 8-9; London Commerce, 3 Oct. 1894. The 8 Oct. 1894 issue of Georgia’s Macon Telegraph, for instance, followed Wilson’s English travels with great interest. See also, Portland Morning Oregonian, 28 Sept. 1894, 2. Cobden Club member Congressman S. S. Cox was also charged by Republican Congressman Woodburn of Nevada of “being a parasite of the Cobden Club, and a sympathizer with the policies of Great Britain, free trade, anti-Irish sentiment, and all.” Washington Post, 25 Jan. 1896, 6. 25Milwaukee Sunday Sentinel, 11 Feb. 1894, 13; The Annual General Meeting of the Cobden Club, 1894, 5. 413 but because the Republican party was “much safer as a party on the silver question and on the question.”26

For their part, Listians renewed their attack upon Cobdenites like Atkinson. Henry

Carey Baird, nephew of Henry C. Carey, encouraged the South to “turn its back upon and flee from the economic fallacies of Mr. Edward Atkinson, as it would from the plague, the black death, or from leprosy, for these fallacies are microbes that breed a social leprosy.”27 Clearly, neither side of the ideological battlefield could claim a monopoly on hyperbole.

The Cosmopolitanism of Anglo-Saxonism

In recent decades, historians have brought renewed attention to the rise of Anglo-

Saxonism, particularly the movement’s racist underpinnings, its role in the development of Anglo-American Rapprochement, and its confluence with late nineteenth-century expansionism, Canadian-American relations, and American anti-imperialism.28 The motivation for Anglo-Saxonism—the belief in an English-speaking race, and often

26 Atkinson to Swire Smith, 10 Nov. 1894, carton 24, Atkinson Papers. 27 Baird, quoted in Williamson, Atkinson, 209. 28 See, for instance, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Michael L. Krenn, ed., Race and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Ages of Territorial and Market Expansion, 1840-1900 (New York: Garland Pub., 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1914 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Stuart Anderson, Race and Rapprochement: Anglo-Saxonism and Anglo-American Relations, 1895-1904 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981); Edward P. Kohn, This Kindred People: Canadian-American Relations and the Anglo-Saxon Idea, 1895-1903 (McGill: Queen’s University Press, 2005); and Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 414 containing a desire to unify the Anglo-Saxon world for the betterment of mankind— nevertheless contained more than racism; it also contained within it a strong spirit of cosmopolitanism.

Many American Cobdenites subscribed to the belief that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior and more civilized than the rest, especially following the intermingling of

Social Darwinian thought with Cobdenism in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

Many of the late nineteenth-century North American commercial unionists utilized

Anglo-Saxon arguments (see chapter 6), and David Ames Wells himself argued for

Anglo-Saxonism in the 1890s, as did Edward Atkinson. In “A Forecast of the Future

Commercial Union of the English-Speaking People” (1895), Atkinson called for bringing the Anglo-Saxon race throughout the world “into the closest commercial union.” This was to be accomplished through a universally shared gold standard to ease commercial transactions, demilitarization, and unrestricted trade, especially between the United

States, Canada, and Britain. In doing so, he dreamt that one day the English-speaking people would have “the peaceful control of the commerce of the world.”29

In the wake of the Venezuela boundary dispute of 1895, Atkinson even dabbled in the Anglo-Saxonist philosophy of British imperialists like J. R. Seeley and Macaulay.

Atkinson even wondered how much South America might have benefited from British rather than Spanish rule. He wrote J. Sterling Morton that it had been “a pity England did not take over the whole of South America . . . what a blessing to that continent English

29 David Ames Wells, “The United States and Great Britain. Their True Governmental and Commercial Relations,” in America and Europe: A Study of International Relations (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 3-72; Atkinson, “Forecast of the Future,” 415, 419. 415 rule would have been and would be now if it were possible.”30 Anti-imperialist Edward

Atkinson was beginning to express decidedly imperial leanings, although toward the

British Empire rather than an American one, further demonstrating the power and

influence of Anglo-Saxonism during the 1890s.

North American Cobdenites were also highly critical of ethnic and racial groups

that they viewed as incompatible with their vision of a united cosmopolitan world. Non-

whites, Jews, and French-Canadians—either through exclusion or exclusivity—were seen

as serious stumbling blocks toward the realization of the Cobdenite vision of continental

inclusion. Goldwin Smith for decades had himself numbered among the most vocal

advocates of Anglo-Saxonism. He correspondingly landed in hot water in the late 1890s,

for instance, when he tried to justify Jewish persecution in Europe, particularly in Russia.

A critic of Goldwin Smith’s took him to task for one such article that had appeared within

“the cosmopolitan pages” of the North American Review. In the article, Smith suggested

that Jews were not being persecuted solely because of their religion; it was primarily

“economical and social,” “because they refuse everywhere to live the life of the country

in which they dwell.” Smith explained “the whole trouble.” “The Jews . . . insert

themselves” into new countries “while they retain a marked and repellent nationality of

their own.” He took similar issue with Armenians, Gypsies, and the French-Catholic

separatists of Canada. Such nationalistic “exclusiveness” was certainly compounded by

30Atkinson to Senator Hawley, 2 Jan. 1896; Atkinson to D. C. Gilman, 4 Dec. 1895; Atkinson to Morton, 3 Jan. 1896, carton 56, Atkinson Papers. 416 Christian intolerance, Smith granted, but these groups’ maintenance of “tribal isolation” inherently led to their “unpopularity.”31

In a similar 1893 article entitled “Anglo-Saxon Union,” Smith further suggested that the future of Canada and the United States was of great importance in the wake of the McKinley Tariff and the imperial federation movement, both of which sought to sever

Canada from the continent. Another obstacle was the “isolation” of French Canadians, an isolation that has left them “backward . . . in education, in intelligence, and in industrial activity.” Yet, he concluded, the shared language and race of North America’s Anglo-

Saxon race would overcome these impediments.32

Thus, while Anglo-Saxonism certainly had a pronounced racist dimension, for

Cobdenite adherents it also contained a strong flavor of cosmopolitanism. This aggressive defense of Anglo-Saxonism found further outlets in the realm of foreign policy during the second Cleveland administration.

The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade? Hawaii, Venezuela, and Cleveland’s

Cobdenites

Expansionists once again criticized Cleveland’s cabinet for its Cobdenite hands- off approach to potential territorial acquisitions, from China to Central America. In China

31 Isaac Besht Bendavid, “Goldwin Smith and the Jews,” North American Review 153 (Sept. 1891), 257- 58; Goldwin Smith, “New Light on the Jewish Question,” North American Review 153 (Aug. 1891), 133, 137. 32 Goldwin Smith, “Anglo-Saxon Union: A Response to Mr. Carnegie,” North American Review 157 (Aug. 1893), 170-185, 177. 417 Market, for example, diplomatic historian Thomas McCormick has highlighted the

Cleveland Administration’s Cobdenite policy toward China.33 As to Central America, in a reminiscence of Cleveland’s first act of office in 1885 when he opposed the building of a proposed Nicaraguan canal, in early 1893 Cleveland quickly moved to halt Blaine and

Harrison’s recent attempts to annex Hawaii and to rid the United States of its influence in

Samoa.

As discussed in chapter 7, the 1890 McKinley Tariff played a crucial role in precipitating the Hawaiian revolution of 1893 and the ouster of Queen Liliukalani.

Particularly, the tariff had eliminated Hawaiian sugar’s preferential treatment in the U.S. market, compounded further by the 1893 depression. The Listian Harrison

Administration had been supportive of the annexationist movement taking root among

Hawaiian planters and economic nationalists in the United States. Opponents utilized a variety of arguments against annexation: that it was inconsistent with the principles of the founding fathers; it was contrary to the half-century precedent recognizing Hawaiian independence; it was inimical to the racial principles of Anglo-Saxonism; or it would lead to yet more undesirable, and probably militant, territorial additions.34

When Cleveland entered office, he and Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham

immediately scrapped the Harrison Administration’s annexation treaty. In later years,

Cleveland declared that “ever since the question of Hawaiian annexation was presented I

33 Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1967), 77, 105. 34 Thomas J. Osborne, Annexation Hawaii (Waimanalo: Island Style Press, 1998), 1-49; Love, Race over Empire, 73-114. 418 have been utterly and constantly opposed to it.” Although overlooking the ideological role of Cobdenism, biographer Allan Nevins rightly notes that Cleveland’s anti-imperial approach “brought out in sharp relief the conflict between Cleveland’s foreign outlook and the expansionist tendencies fostered by Blaine.” Cleveland’s consistent foreign policy was “radically different” from those of Seward, Blaine, and Hay, and “revealed the force of the economic and nationalistic impulses that were pressing for expansion overseas.”35

The imperial designs that the Listian nationalists sought in the Pacific were a far cry from Cleveland and Seward’s minimalist approach to Samoa, or Cleveland’s expressed desire in 1886 for more intimate relations with Hawaii in order to obtain “a stepping-stone” to the Asian market while maintaining the islands’ autonomy.36 In

January 1895 Cleveland was even willing to modify the Hawaiian treaty to allow Britain to develop a cable station on one of Hawaii’s uninhabited islands, further upsetting

Anglophobic congressmen who viewed it as yet another example of Cleveland’s pro-

British sympathies. Listian Henry Cabot Lodge responded a month later by attempting unsuccessfully to pass a bill that would have subsidized a rival American telegraphic cable from California to Hawaii.37

35 Grover Cleveland, “Statement to Associated Press,” 24 Jan. 1898, in Letters of Grover Cleveland, 1850- 1908, edited by Allan Nevins (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933), 491; Nevins, Cleveland, 549. 36 “Annual Message to Congress, December, 1866,” The Public Papers of Grover Cleveland March 4, 1885, to March 4, 1889 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889), 185. 37 Peter Trubowitz, Defining the National Interest: Conflict and Change in American Foreign Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 59. 419 From 1893 to 1894, America’s free traders proved instrumental in opposing

Hawaiian annexation, and played an important role in the Cleveland Administration’s

decision-making. Mugwump free trader Carl Schurz was particularly outspoken (his anti-

imperial argument had some influence on Secretary of State Gresham), and Roger Q.

Mills denounced annexation in the Senate. Free trade news organs like the New York

World, the New York Times, the New York Evening Post, and the Nation in turn blamed

Hawaii’s U.S-dominated and now economically unprotected “Sugar Trust” for the

agitation, although the sugar planters themselves were by no means united in calling for

annexation. Cleveland struggled to find a viable way out of the Hawaiian quandary the

Harrison administration had left for him.38

Edward Atkinson offered Cleveland one possible answer. Atkinson first described

his solution to the Hawaiian problem to his Cobdenite friends Secretary of Agriculture J.

Sterling Morton, U.S. minister to Britain Thomas Bayard, David Ames Wells, and A. B.

Farquhar, who also had direct access to President Cleveland.39 Atkinson’s proposal,

inspired by the demilitarization of the Great Lakes following the War of 1812, suggested

that Hawaii be turned into an open free trade port of call for various European powers

and Japan. His plan would have made Hawaii a safe zone, devoid of militarization by any

of the powers. It was, he added, in “the interest of the people of the islands that their ports

and harbors should be free to all,” and would encourage the “great powers” to lessen their

military expenditures. “May not,” he asked, “the sanctuary of free commerce be

38 Osborne, Annexation Hawaii, 17-39; Nevins, Cleveland, 549-562. 39 Farquhar to Atkinson, 2 Feb. 1895, carton 7; Atkinson to Bayard, 13 Feb. 1895; Atkinson to Wells, 13 March 1895; Atkinson to Farquhar, 11 Feb. 1895, carton 24, Atkinson Papers. 420 established in this great Pacific sea, where men may serve each other’s need without fear or ‘commerce destroyers’?”40

Farquhar immediately took Atkinson’s missive to the president, “where it received the most careful attention.” In response Cleveland called a confidential meeting.

Farquhar, Cleveland, and Cobdenite Secretary of Agriculture Morton read over

Atkinson’s proposal multiple times. Farquhar reported that Atkinson’s Hawaiian solution

“pleased the President. He fully agreed with our view of the case,” but also strongly believed that Congress would never go along. With Congress as an obstacle, Morton encouraged Atkinson instead to “start an outside movement in favor of making the

Sandwich Islands a free-trading center for all the world.” The United States could then enter into treaties with Britain, Japan, Germany, and France to bring about “a sort of inner sanctuary of commercial freedom,” whereupon a republican government could easily be maintained in Hawaii.41

Atkinson took Morton’s advice, sending out a barrage of letters to various free trade and pacifist news organs in order to drum up popular support for his plan.

Cobdenite William Lloyd Garrison Jr., editor of the Nation, responded bleakly by suggesting that Atkinson leave the Hawaiian issue alone and let the “tragic-comedy of the

‘Republican’ revolution . . . work itself out for the instruction of mankind.”42 Horace

40 Edward Atkinson, “The Hawaiian Problem,” New York Times, 12 March 1895; “Advice to the Jingoists,” New York Times, 17 May 1895. 41 Atkinson to Morton, 9 Feb. 1895, carton 24; Morton to Atkinson, 11 Feb. 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 42 Atkinson to Garrison, 22 Feb. 1895, carton 24; Garrison to Atkinson, 26 Feb. 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 421 White and E. L. Godkin were not so dismissive, and promised to print Atkinson’s proposal in the New York Evening Post. Godkin himself thought his plan was

“visionary,” but obtaining it would invariably involve a hard fight.43 The New York

Times printed Atkinson’s plan on multiple occasions, and the president of the American

Peace Society, Robert Treat Pain, also gave Atkinson’s plan his blessing and reprinted it in the pages of the society’s news organ, Advocate for Peace. The Peace Society’s secretary, Benjamin Trueblood, then engaged the support of London’s International

Arbitration and Peace Association in order to start a transatlantic movement for the neutralization of Hawaii.44

Reminiscent of former Secretary of State Bayard’s unsuccessful proposal for solving the Samoan issue in 1887, Atkinson also began advocating for an informal government made up of the United States and the European “great powers” that would make up an “Advisory Council . . . to whom all questions relating to foreign affairs might be submitted” by the ostensibly independent Hawaiian government.45 By seeking a diminution of Hawaiian sovereignty with respect to foreign policy, his plan therefore also advocated for a mild form of free trade imperialism.

Atkinson’s Anglo-Saxonist temperament became even more aggressive when the jingoist opposition began attempting “to create a prejudice against his [Cleveland’s]

43 Atkinson to White, 27 Feb. 1895, carton 24; Godkin to Atkinson, 1 March 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 44 Edward Atkinson, “The Hawaiian Problem,” New York Times, 12 March 1895; “Advice to the Jingoists,” New York Times, 17 May 1895; Robert Treat Pain to Atkinson, 15 Feb. 1895; Trueblood to Atkinson, 4 April 1895; Trueblood to Atkinson, 8 April 1895; Trueblood to Atkinson, 24 June 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 45 Atkinson to Farquhar, 15 Feb. 1895, carton 24, Atkinson Papers. 422 administration of the Hawaiian question by alleging that England is waiting to seize these islands.” Atkinson first denied the allegation, then digressed into a defense of British imperialism, arguing that “wherever England establishes her control or protectorate it is to the benefit of the masses of the people of that land, even though they resist the somewhat rough and tactless methods by which they themselves are benefited.”46 While his plan for a peaceful Pacific never came to light, Atkinson’s anti-imperial colors were certainly taking on imperial hues.

Cleveland’s ultimate Cobdenite touch in the Pacific drew corresponding Listian contempt. One Republican pamphleteer noted that “England, Cleveland, and the Free

Trade Democrats are opposed to annexation of any more territory. They want to keep the

United States indefinitely a manufacturing and commercial dependency of England.”

Henry Cabot Lodge in particular took the Cleveland Administration to task: “Under this

Administration, governed as it is by free-trade influences,” the great expansionist

Jeffersonian legacy of the Democratic party “has been utterly abandoned.” Cleveland has worked “to overthrow American interests and American control in Hawaii” and was

“eager to abandon Samoa.” The Democratic leadership has “been successfully

Cobdenized, and that is the underlying reason for their policy of retreat. . . . We have had something too much of these disciples of the Manchester school.”47

46 Edward Atkinson, “Jingoes and Silverites,” North American Review 468 (Nov. 1895): 554-560. For Bayard’s earlier Samoan plan, see, for instance, Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 231-32. The British had in fact briefly seized the Hawaiian islands in the Spring of 1843. See Pletcher, Diplomacy of Annexation, 208; Haynes, “Anglophobia, Annexation,” 121-22. 47 Cudmore, Cleveland’s Maladministration, 3-5; Lodge, “Our Blundering Foreign Policy,” 15. 423 Theodore Roosevelt privately expressed to Lodge similar outrage, that the

“antics” of the bankers and “Anglomaniacs generally are humiliating to a degree. . . . As you say, thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre.”

He then suggested that the imprisonment of the free trade editors of the New York

Evening Post and the New York World would give him “great pleasure” and that the

“peace at any price men” were only offering encouragement to the British.48 These two

former Cobdenites had moved far away indeed from their former free trade advocacy in

the early 1880s.

Cleveland’s actions in Nicaragua redoubled such charges. Jose Zelaya had taken dictatorial control of Nicaragua in 1893. In early 1894, he acted less than amicably toward British and American citizens in the country, even arresting Britain’s consul. In

April 1894 the British landed marines in Nicaragua in response. Cleveland and his administration’s first secretary of state, Walter Q. Gresham, took measures to make sure that the British would remain only temporarily. Cleveland’s nonaggressive response, however, led to labels of spinelessness; outraged jingoists cried out “for one day of

Blaine.” Edward Atkinson described this rise in Anglophobic jingoism as a “war upon

Domestic industry,” its origins found “in the extreme view of protection, of which the seeds were planted by Henry C. Carey, that all imports from other countries of goods which might be made in this country even at higher cost constitutes a war on domestic

48 Roosevelt to Lodge, 27 Dec.1895, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), I, 203-205. 424 industry.” The popular silverite publication Coin’s Financial School’s support for war with England further cemented the prevailing Cobdenite view that protectionists and silver sympathizers had become sinisterly entwined, as did Henry Cabot Lodge’s

“ridiculous” 1895 “attempt to force Great Britain to adopt a bimetallic treaty” by threatening to put “differential duties in this country (United States) upon the products of

Great Britain.” The American people were wiser, Edward Atkinson asserted, than to accept the position of “such a false prophet” as Henry Carey, who once said “he would regard a ten years’ war with England as the greatest material benefit that could happen to this country.” When the boundary dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela arose a year later, Cleveland was ready to act more decisively, enforce the Monroe Doctrine, and squelch his critics’ diatribes.49

Much like the fisheries dispute in the lead-up to the 1888 presidential campaign, the 1895 Orinoco River dispute between Venezuela and Britain allowed Cleveland to reposition himself outwardly as anti-British in the foreign policy realm. First, Cleveland renewed efforts to restore diplomatic relations between Venezuela and Britain in order to allow for arbitration.50 Second, in a special message, Cleveland articulated his desire to uphold the Monroe Doctrine, and called for the United States itself to determine the correct boundary line and to resist any British efforts to the contrary, fully aware that his

49 Edward Atkinson, “Jingoism, or War upon Domestic Industry,” Engineering Magazine 10 (Feb. 1896): 801-810; Williamson, Atkinson, 213; Atkinson, “Jingoes and Silverites,” 554, 558; Nevins, Grover Cleveland, 608. Canadian free traders similarly tied imperial protectionists to the silver craze. See, for instance, D. C. Marker [Montreal] to the editor of the Weekly Chronicle, “Canadian Jingoes and American Silverites,” 16 Nov. 1895, draft copy, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 50 Michel Chevalier, Free Trade and the European Treaties of Commerce (London, Paris, and New York: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1875), 36. 425 brazen words could lead to an Anglo-American crisis—which they at first appeared to do.

His language was inflammatory, as he outwardly out-jingoed the jingoes.

Edward Atkinson, not immediately privy to the president’s underlying rationale, reacted with great dismay to Cleveland’s militant message to Congress. J. Sterling

Morton suggested to Atkinson that the message undercut congressional jingoes and asked if it were “not possible that out of the present contention some boon to humanity and its advancement and exaltation” might come.51 Atkinson did not follow Morton’s line of thinking. He sent off a flurry of telegrams to various congressmen, cabinet members,

British officials, and President Cleveland himself to express his dismay.52 His friend and fellow Cobdenite A. B. Farquhar talked him down a few days later, following Farquhar’s own “long interview” with Cleveland on 22 December. Farquhar assured Atkinson that

Cleveland “wishes to have peace established between England and America upon so firm a foundation that it never can be interfered with,” but Cleveland also had to listen to the advice of both the late Secretary of State Gresham and his successor Richard Olney, who believed “that England’s action in Venezuela is a clear infraction of the Monroe Doctrine and certainly should be in a position to know.” As reported by Farquhar after his meeting with the president, Cleveland also claimed domestic motivations for his aggressive stance. Cleveland “evidently hoped that he would stir up some patriotism among

Congressmen by his message,” and thus “he would be able to get on full through to

51 Morton to Atkinson, 18 Dec. 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 52 Atkinson to George Hoar, 20 Dec. 1895; Atkinson to William L. Wilson and Sec. of Treasury Carlisle, 20 Dec. 1895; Atkinson to Morton, 20 Dec. 1895; Atkinson to Lord Farrer, 20 Dec. 1895; Atkinson to Cleveland, 20 Dec. 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. See also, Atkinson, “The Cost of an Anglo-American War,” Forum (March 1896), 74-88; and Atkinson, “Jingoism, or War upon Domestic Industry.” 426 relieve the Treasury” by halting the depletion of its gold deposits.53 Thus, along with maintaining peaceful Anglo-American relations, quieting the jingoes, and upholding the

Monroe Doctrine, Cleveland also hoped to garner congressional support for his flagging monometallic money agenda.

As Farquhar’s recounting of Cleveland’s motives suggests, the situation was not as dire as contemporaries like Atkinson at first believed. First, Cleveland was falsely playing the domestic jingo card for political gain. Second, Anglo-Saxon unionists, especially among the Cobdenite Anglophiles, called for a peaceful settlement through arbitration and were instrumental in maintaining lines of communication between the two countries. Third, British attention quickly became diverted owing to German agitation in

South Africa in early 1896.54

In line with the Cleveland Administrations’ previous encounters with Britain, a peaceful solution to the crisis was ultimately found in early 1897. Also, owing to his publicly aggressive stance on the issue amid the contentious 1896 presidential campaign,

Cleveland had become an anti-British hero overnight. He had realized that the Venezuela issue could potentially galvanize much-needed support to retain control of the

Democratic party, and had found a potential cause to cut off predictable Republican “pro-

53 Farquhar to Atkinson, 23 Dec. 1895, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. For more on Gresham and Olney in the dispute, see, respectively, Charles W. Calhoun, Gilded Age Cato: The Life of Walter Q. Gresham (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 214-220; George B. Young, “Intervention under the Monroe Doctrine: The Olney Corollary,” Political Science Quarterly 57 (June 1942): 247-280. 54 Jennie A. Sloan, “Anglo-American Relations and the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute,” Hispanic American Historical Review 18 (Nov. 1938): 486-506; T. Boyle, “The Venezuela Crisis and the Liberal Opposition, 1895-96,” Journal of Modern History 50 (Sept. 1978): D1185-D1212; Joseph J. Mathews, “Informal Diplomacy in the Venezuela Crisis of 1896,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50 (Sept. 1963): 195-212; T. W. Reid, Memoirs and Correspondence of Lyon Playfair (London: Cassell and Company, 1899), 402-26. 427 British” labels. William Wilson, now Cleveland’s postmaster-general, noted that, although he wished that Cleveland “had expressed himself less ‘warlike,’” “the

Venezuela matter has dwarfed or relegated to the background all other and lesser foreign questions on which the Republicans were getting ready to attack the administration for its

‘weak and un-American’ foreign policy, and to that extent has done us good politically.”55

Some among the silverite Populists were similarly skeptical, observing that the threat of war was being used “for the purpose of riveting the goldbug shackles,” and that

Cleveland’s “jingo message is all rot”; he “seeks by a show of Americanism, to recover some of the ground lost by his party by his culpable course, but it will fail.” Such

Populists were more perceptive than they realized; at the 1896 Democratic National

Convention, Cleveland ultimately lost the leadership of the Democratic party to William

Jennings Bryan—a one-time protégé of Nebraska’s goldbug free trade league leader,

Cobdenite J. Sterling Morton—but by now an avowed silverite. The peaceful settlement had been assured, according to one Anglophobic political journal, owing to “the little band of peace-at-any-price mugwumps who have denounced President Cleveland’s get-

55 William L. Wilson, 3 Jan. 1896, in The Cabinet Diary of William L. Wilson, 1896-1897, ed. Festus P. Summers (Chapel Hill, 1957), 5. Historians John A. S. Grenville and George B. Young similarly noted that Cleveland’s message “was a most skillful piece of work; it satisfied even the wildest jingoes without, in fact, involving the United States in any real danger of conflict.” John A. S. Grenville and George B. Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign Policy, 1873-1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 167. Walter LaFeber has argued that American activity during the Brazilian Revolution of 1893-1894 happened in response to Anglophobia and the depression of 1893, and was a precursor to the Venezuela crisis, in “United States Depression Diplomacy and the Brazilian Revolution, 1893-1894,” Hispanic American Historical Review 40 (Feb. 1960): 107-18. See also Walter LaFeber, “The Background of Cleveland’s Venezuelan Policy: A Reinterpretation,” American Historical Review 66 (July 1961): 947-67. For the influence of public opinion on the affair, see Marshall Bertram, The Birth of Anglo- American Friendship: The Prime Facet of the Venezuela Boundary Dispute: A Study in the Interaction of Diplomacy and Public Opinion (Lanham: University Press of America, 1992). 428 me-a-gun manifesto, to whom the world is now indebted for the prospects of peace between Great Britain and the United States.”56

The 1896 Elections: A Temporary Republican Rapprochement

Upon Bryan’s presidential nomination at the 1896 Democratic National

Convention in Chicago, William McKinley was told that now “the money issue is a vital thing.” McKinley disagreed. “I am a Tariff man, standing on a Tariff platform. This money matter is unduly prominent. In thirty days you won’t hear anything about it.”57

American Cobdenite Thomas G. Shearman in turn castigated “McKinleyism” before the

Cobden Club in England. He also held out hope that McKinley’s likely election might once again galvanize the American free trade movement as his 1890 tariff once had. He also sang self-congratulatory praises of the New York Reform Club, which had “done more for the cause of Free Trade in America during the last few years than any other private organization.”58 Neither the Cobden Club nor the Reform Club were successful, however, in overturning either the Populist tide, the Republican party from protectionism, or free silver’s continued bipartisan popularity. Bryan’s nomination at the further alienated many of the Democrat’s free-trading gold standard supporters, especially New

York City’s financiers and most members of the Cobden Club on both sides of the

56 Gunton’s Magazine 10 (April 1896), 308. 57 William T. Horner, Ohio’s Kingmaker: Mark Hanna, Man & Myth (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 179. 58 Charles Pelham Villiers, The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, June 27, 1896 (London: Cassell and Co., Ltd., 1896), 54-55. 429 ocean.59 To the chagrin of both McKinley and the Cobdenites, the “silver craze” would indeed temporarily overshadow the tariff issue over the forthcoming campaign.

Cleveland’s Cobdenites had at first sought to steer the 1896 Democratic party and the political debates back to tariff reform, but proved unable to control the “silver craze,” as J. Sterling Morton, Goldwin Smith, and other goldbugs often described it.60 The

Democratic party thereafter found itself split between Gold and Silver Democrats. With a silverite now leading the Democratic party, and a Listian heading the Republican ticket,

U.S. Cobdenites hoped to run a free trade, monometallic, independent ticket, much as they had when they created the Liberal Republican party in the early 1870s.Cobdenites

Edward Atkinson, Horace White, J. Sterling Morton, John Bigelow, Henry Watterson,

George Foster Peabody, and Charles Francis Adams Jr., for instance, gave their backing to the independent Gold Democratic wing. Atkinson himself, who for so long had avoided meddling directly in national party politics, was a driving force behind the

“Gold,” or “True,” Democratic convention in Indianapolis. Sound Money Clubs in turn raised large amounts of money to bring the monetary fight to the silverites. Atkinson wrote to Wells that the Gold Democratic organization reminded him of “the old Free-Soil

59Crapol, America for Americans, 208; Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77-81, 242-43; Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850- 1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). On the rampant Populist mistrust of the “goldbugs,” see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 70- 81. Regarding the Republican campaign, see Horner, Ohio’s Kingmaker, 118-212. For the convention and the goldbug revolt, see Richard Franklin Bensel, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 4. On the silverite campaign, see Stanley L. Jones, The Presidential Election of 1896 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 191-203. For a succinct overview of the 1896 election, see Brands, Reckless Decade, 254-86; and Brands, American Colossus, 480-497. 60 Farquhar to Atkinson, 4 May 1894, carton 6; Farquhar to Atkinson, 3 May 1895; Morton to Atkinson, 22 Aug. 1895; Goldwin Smith to Atkinson, 14 Aug. 1896, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. 430 Party in its origins and motive. It will as surely rule the country in four or eight years as that party did when it had gained its position under the name of ‘Republican,’ since so misused.” Cobdenites John Carlisle and J. Sterling Morton were in turn considered for the party’s presidential nomination, as was William L. Wilson. All three declined, and seventy-nine year old Senator John C. Palmer of Illinois was nominated instead, being himself a former Free Soil Democrat and Liberal Republican. The party platform touted the gold standard and a tariff for revenue only. Grover Cleveland soon gave his own backing to the convention’s choice, raising the delegates’ spirits higher.61

Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan was himself a devout Jeffersonian, not a Cobdenite, although he was certainly familiar with Cobdenism. Bryan had begun his political career in the early ‘90s fighting protectionism in Nebraska alongside

Cobdenite J. Sterling Morton; he had befriended German Cobdenite economist Theodor

Barth; he greatly admired Cobdenite British Prime Minister William Gladstone; and he included speeches from Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Robert Peel in his World’s

Famous Orations volumes.62 But Bryan’s greatest ideological influences invariably came from Leo Tolstoy and the agrarian-oriented writings of Thomas Jefferson.63

61 Atkinson to W.E. Russell, 10 July 1896, carton 25, Atkinson Papers; Logsdon, White, 346; Atkinson to Wells, 4 Sept. 1896, carton 25, Atkinson Papers; National Democratic Party Campaign Text-Book (Chicago: National Democratic Committee, 1896); David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,” Independent Review 4 (Spring 2000): 555- 575; James A. Barnes, “The Gold-Standard Democrats and the Party Conflict,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 17 (Dec. 1930): 422-50. 62 Paxton Hibben, The Peerless Leader, William Jennings Bryan (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1929), 116; Louis William Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Putnam, 1971), 63-64. See also James C. Olson, J. Sterling Morton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1942), 327, 331-32; “Dr. Theodor Barth, Noted Liberal, Dies,” New York Times, 4 June 1909; Paolo Enrico Coletta, William Jennings Bryan. 3 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964-69), I: 55; for 431 It is quite surprising, therefore, how little Bryan’s own contemporaries and historians since have given to his free trade proclivities. He fought incessantly for free wool and other raw materials, he carried William L. Wilson on his shoulders in triumph through the halls of Congress after the latter had called for tariff reductions in 1894, and years later he was instrumental in crafting the low 1913 Underwood-Simmons Tariff.64

Yet such was the case during the 1896 elections and after. Rather than being considered a free trader, he was labeled a radical, an anarchist, a socialist. Aside from a brief defense from the Economist—which observed that “it is not, of course, Socialism to support an income-tax, to condemn monopolies, or to demand tariff for revenue purposes only”— and reluctant support from a handful of moderate silver-supporting Cobdenites like

Henry George, Bryan received little but ridicule from the Cobdenite wing of the

Democratic party.65

Bryan’s admiration of Gladstone see William J. Bryan, The Old World and Its Ways, a Tour Around the World and Journeys Through Europe (St. Louis: The Thompson Publishing Company, 1907), 452-455, and William J. Bryan, Heart to Heart Appeals (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1917), 85. 63 All Bryan’s biographers discuss his Jeffersonianism. For Tolstoy’s influence, see Harry Walsh, “The Tolstoyan Episode in American Social Thought,” American Studies 17 (1976): 49-68; and Kenneth C. Wenzer, “Tolstoy & Bryan,” Nebraska History 77 (Fall/Winter 1996): 140-148. Bryan also admittedly avoided the term or label of “free trade,” as it gave Republicans such an easy political target and forced him “to spend a good deal of his time explaining what he means.” Although less accurate, he preferred instead “tariff reductionist” as it put “Republicans upon the defensive.” Bryan to Louis Freeland Post, 2 June 1909, Container 1, Louis Freeland Post Papers, LOC. 64 Coletta, Bryan, I, 61; Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1948), I, 71. See also, Underwood to Wilson, 17 April 1913, in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link, 67 vols. (Princeton, 1966-1992), XXVII, 322, 235-36. No articles have been written focusing on Bryan’s free trade efforts. While a number of biographies of Bryan have appeared in recent years, no Bryan biographer has written in detail upon Bryan’s work on the Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act, aside from a brief mention within the three volume biography of Bryan written about forty years ago by Paolo Coletta, in Bryan, III, 140. More generally, Bryan’s biographers have given cursory attention—if any at all—to his efforts toward free trade, focusing instead upon his work toward free silver coinage, his 1896 presidential run, his religiosity, or his foreign policy as secretary of state. 65 Louis F. Post, The Prophet of San Francisco: Personal Memories & Interpretations of Henry George (New York: Vanguard Press, 1930), 127-29. 432 In part, such attacks came about owing to Bryan’s Anglophobic Jeffersonian background. More importantly, Cobdenites feared his support for national bimetallism. In sympathy with the Populists, Bryan wanted to reorient American power through the establishment of the silver standard: “A silver standard, too, would make us the trading center of all the silver-using countries of the world, and these countries contain far more than one-half of the world’s population. . . . Why not reverse the proposition and say that

Europe must resume the use of silver in order to trade with us? . . . Are we an English colony or an independent people?” Such statements and Bryan’s free-silver advocacy generally, were more than enough to frighten transatlantic Anglophiles and goldbugs, and proved to be too radical even for international bimetallists like the president of MIT,

Cobdenite Francis Amasa Walker, and France’s famous international bimetallic spokesman, Henri Cernuschi.66

With the Republican platform officially unwilling to adopt silver coinage excepting an international agreement, the Gold Democrats and the GOP thereafter developed an unofficial sound-money alliance to defeat Bryan, and the Gold Democratic vote may even have helped McKinley carry Kentucky.67 That is not to suggest that the

Cobdenites were at all happy with the Republican nomination of Listian William

McKinley, but they were certainly relieved when he finally endorsed a sound money platform, by far the most decisive issue in the campaign. Thomas Shearman accurately

66 James Phinney Munroe, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1923), 355-6; Atkinson to Cernuschi, 2 May 1894, carton 23, Atkinson Papers. Walker had begun arguing against Carey’s protectionism at the age of seventeen. See “Mr. Carey and Protection,” National Era (Washington), 21 Jan. 1858. 67 Horner, Ohio’s Kingmaker, 161; Beito and Beito, “Gold Democrats.” 433 predicted to the Cobden Club that “the currency question” would likely cause “many thousand inflexible Free Traders to vote for him [McKinley],” although Shearman himself, ever the radical, threw his support behind the Gold Democrat nominee, Palmer, who ultimately attracted less than 200,000 votes.68 Charles Francis Adams Jr., after thirty years of political agitation, found himself “‘rounded up’ into McKinleyism as infinitely the less of two evils.” In despair of the elections and his family’s financial troubles following the 1893 panic, he melodramatically added that he had come to the conclusion that “life is a failure.”69 With more optimism and certainly less melodrama,

Edward Atkinson wrote Goldwin Smith that “McKinley is a respectable mediocrity, without mental capacity or comprehension either of the tariff question or of the money question”; his own eventual vote for McKinley was a difficult one, arising purely over

McKinley’s monetary stance.70 A mutual fear and distrust of Jeffersonian Bryan therefore forced the Listians and Cobdenites into a final, albeit temporary, rapprochement in 1896.

The Washington Post had erroneously reported that “the McKinley candidacy

expects to use the Cobden Club as a punching bag.” Rather, upon William Jennings

68 Fiftieth Anniversary, 55; New York Times, 30 Sept. 1900, 1. 69 Adams to Atkinson, 24 Sept. 1896, carton 7, Atkinson Papers. At this time and with even more pessimism, Henry and Brooks Adams sympathized with the silverites. Brands, Reckless Decade, 32-33, 37- 38. 70 Atkinson to Smith, 10 June 1896, carton 25, Atkinson Papers; Williamson, Atkinson, 211. 434 Bryan’s 1896 defeat to William McKinley, the club “was gratified at the election of

McKinley to the American Presidency, though he was merely the lesser evil.” Granted, if

Bryan the silverite had not been his Democratic opponent, the club’s leadership “would have thought McKinley the worst possible man for the Presidency,” the New York Times reported. Rather, the London-based club felt that free trade had not been an issue in the campaign, only the silver question had mattered. “If Bryan had been elected,” a

“commercial panic” would have ensued, as well as the club’s “loss of faith in the democracy of the world.” Much like the earlier Free-Soil party or the Mugwump revolt of

1884, Atkinson suggested that it was owing to the Gold (or National) Democratic bolt

“that McKinley has been elected by the vote of free-traders . . . hereafter the National

Democratic Party will, like the old Free-Soil Party, hold the balance of power, and although small in number they will in a forceful manner control events.” He held out hope that there would be “no return to McKinleyism,” as both agrarians and manufacturers were now aware of the need for foreign markets. “The tariff for revenue only must become well assured,” Atkinson predicted.71

Horace White was also more worried about Bryan’s ascendancy than McKinley’s.

After all, White explained, “a McKinley tariff is a curable evil, as we have already seen, while a fifty cent dollar is not.” A Bryan victory would be “a lapse from virtue”; righting

Bryan’s presidential wrongs would be “like attempting to put new life into a corpse.”72

Bryan’s nomination thus had the general effect of alienating businessmen, Cobdenites,

71 Atkinson to Fowler, 23 Nov. 1896, carton 25, Atkinson Papers. 72 “Prospects of a Bolt,” Nation (21 May 1896), 391; “The Gravity of the Crisis,” Nation (15 Oct. 1896), 282. 435 and even industrial workers owing to his support for a revenue tariff and an inflationary silver coinage policy. The subsequent election of McKinley in turn signaled the demise of the Populist party, which folded itself into the Democratic party. More importantly for transatlantic free traders, control of the Democratic party had effectively been wrenched from the American Cobdenite grasp, only to be held once again by its Jeffersonian wing.73

73 Washington Post, 22 May 1896, 6; New York Times, 25 Nov. 1896, 5; Worth Robert Miller, “The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (Jan. 2002), 65-66. 436 Conclusion

Conspiracy, n. The action of conspiring; combination of persons for an evil or

unlawful purpose, Oxford English Dictionary.

Free trade in the United States was not a conspiracy, although it was perceived as such by America’s protectionists. Rather, through my study of the controversial arrival and spread of Victorian free trade ideology—Cobdenism—and its Listian counterpart, I illuminate the very real and hard-fought battle over the future of globalization in the late nineteenth century, in the United States and throughout the globe. Cobden and List’s influences were felt throughout the era, affecting the United States and the British Empire in myriad ways, from the formation and reorientation of the Republican party, to the

American Listian impact upon the British Empire, to the anti-imperial Cobdenite presidencies of Grover Cleveland and U.S. Listian imperial expansionism.

Tracing these ideological underpinnings of globalization, then and now, is instrumental. Properly identifying this ideological conflict also further illustrates the richness of nineteenth-century American intellectual thought, as well as the differences not only between free traders and protectionists but within both ideological camps.

American Cobdenism took root primarily in the manufacturing-oriented New England states rather than in the South where agrarian-based Jeffersonian free trade had for so long held sway. Cobdenism was a different breed of free trade ideology, one that became most popular among Northeastern abolitionists rather than within the slaveholding South.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the progressive Listian nationalists in turn 437 struggled to bring on board those protectionists that yet refused to consider a foreign market alongside the domestic. With the two sides fighting internally and externally over the future of American industrialization and policymaking, along the way both Listian nationalism and Cobdenite cosmopolitanism helped shape American “free trade culture” and the ideological origins of American globalization.

The strong sentiment of Cobdenism and Anglophilia among the Liberal

Republicans and Grover Cleveland’s cabinets and advisors, as well as the peaceful settlement of various international crises with England—from the Oregon boundary dispute to the Alabama claims to the Venezuela border dispute—also calls for a reconsideration of the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain culminating in the “Great Rapprochement” from 1895 to 1914. The Cleveland

Administration’s handling, for instance, of the Nicaraguan canal, the fisheries dispute with Canada, the bimetallism issue, and the Venezuelan border crisis—most of which had created loud jingoistic calls for retaliation within the United States—were politically stage-managed in such a way as to maintain quietly amicable relations with the British government while offsetting Anglophobic opponents where possible. The Cleveland administrations espoused Cobdenite doctrine by eschewing formal imperialism and attempting various downward reductions of the tariff in order to develop freer trade in an era of extreme expansionism, protectionism, and Anglophobia. Thus, aided by its close transatlantic ties, particularly to the Cobden Club and a shared ideology of Cobdenism, the Cleveland administration strengthened the possibility of peaceful Anglo-American relations of the era and the turn-of-the-century “special relationship.”

438 Much as the ideology of free trade was not a conspiracy, neither was its

Cobdenite manifestation a shining example of British free trade imperialism in America.

But, upon closer study, it is easy to see how American Listian nationalists perceived a conspiracy surrounding Cobdenism in the United States. The strength of this perception certainly formed into a formidable stumbling block waylaying the late nineteenth-century free trade movement. But this is but one in a long list of reasons that helps explain why the Gilded Age American free trade movement failed to reach so many of its goals.

First, America’s Cobdenites were independent to a fault, seemingly never able to agree on the type or degree of policy change, or on which candidate to support. They were prone to infighting and internal distrust. Like their British imperial protectionist counterparts, America’s Cobenites disagreed over the proper methods of accomplishing their goals. They sought large-scale political support for their reforms, but were deathly afraid of the era’s social reform movements and an overly active federal government.

They were outmaneuvered politically and monetarily by the entrenched power of protected industries, and intellectually by the disciples of Friedrich List and Henry

Charles Carey. America’s Cobdenites proved particularly unable to use the era’s economic booms and busts as advantageously as their Listian opposition. Also, whereas the “cheap loaf” was effectively used in Britain to turn free trade into a national ethos, the

American people by and large found the Listian argument of high tariffs and high wages more agreeable than freer trade and cheaper goods. Nevertheless, following all their flaws, failures, and false starts, America’s Cobdenites would maintain a semblance of cohesion and optimism as they took the free trade fight well into the twentieth century.

439 The ideological battle would nevertheless continue. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and while Britain’s Cobdenites barely fended off the Listian counterattack of Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform movement, America’s Cobdenites continued their fight for free trade, gaining a brief glimpse of their goals during the

Progressive Era administration of Woodrow Wilson. Such limited success came about in part because bimetallism had stopped being such a divisive issue within the Democratic party. Following the discovery of massive gold deposits throughout the world in the late

1890s and the formal U.S. adoption of the gold standard in 1900, the Jeffersonian and

Cobdenite wings of the Democratic party were able to end their metallic fencing, as epitomized when Cobdenite Woodrow Wilson—who considered himself “of the brand of the Manchester School”—appointed William Jenning Bryan his secretary of state.74

Cobdenite Woodrow Wilson had begun his free trade advocacy in the early

1880s, becoming president, for instance, of Georgia’s Young Men’s Free Trade Club. As a young Anglophile, he had been a frequent reader of the Mugwump free trade organ the

Nation; his favorite authors were Richard Cobden and John Bright; and his favorite statesmen William Gladstone and Grover Cleveland.75 Wilson also numbered among a

handful of Americans to attend the Cobden Club’s International Free Trade Congress in

1908.76 Against the formidable opposition of Listians like Henry Cabot Lodge, President

74 Arthur S. Link, Road to the White House (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 7, 24, 127. 75 American Free Trader (April 1883), 3; Clifford F. Thies and Gary M. Pecquet, “The Shaping of the Political-Economic Thought of a Future President: Professor Ely and Woodrow Wilson at ‘The Hopkins,’” Independent Review 15 (Fall 2010): 257-277, 259. 76 Report of the proceedings of the International Free Trade Congress, London, August, 1908 (London: Cobden Club, 1908). 440 Wilson attempted further Cobdenite reforms in the international arena, desirous as he was for international free trade and arbitration through the League of Nations. American

Listians stymied many of Wilson’s internationalist goals, however, and the protectionists were able to regain the executive in the early 1920s.

The Great Depression that struck in the late 1920s proved instrumental for the reorientation of the global conflict between Cobdenite cosmopolitanism and Listian nationalism. American Listians could claim a pyrrhic victory with the passage of the extremely protective Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930. Alternatively, Free Trade Britain, for so long the home of Cobdenism, finally succumbed to protectionist demands, abandoned the gold standard, and joined in toto its colonial system of imperial preference in 1932.

These various fiscal policy changes had long-lasting effects. First, with Britain’s turn

from free trade and the longstanding American adherence to Listian nationalism,

American protectionists could no longer place the lion’s share of the blame for the

twentieth century’s Great Depression upon free trade or the British Lion; it was laid

instead at the feet of protectionism.

Under the auspices of FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, the United States

thereafter began instituting Cobdenite reforms in the 1930s, even as Britain’s own

Cobdenite system was being dismantled.77 Nevertheless, the United States still remained

77 Per A. Hammarlund, and the Decline of the State: The Thought of Richard Cobden, David Mitrany, and Kenichi Ohmae (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 13; F. W. Hirst, “Cobden and Cordell Hull,” Contemporary Review 155 (1939): 10-17; Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 274, 299, 304; H. Donaldson Jordan, “The Case of Richard Cobden,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 83 (1971), 45; Andrew Marrison, ed., Free Trade and its Reception 1815-1960, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1998), I, 291; and J. Pennar, 441 reticent to play the lead role in the international system. By 1947, the hoped for American free trade leadership yet appeared lacking. As historian Anthony Howe puts it, “a model of world economic order based on free trade universalism was at odds with contemporary reality.” Britain’s , at the time President of the Board of Trade and not yet prime minister, noticed that the world “had changed a great deal since Cordell Hull saturated the State Department at Washington with his almost religious convictions on the subject of Tariff Reductions.”78 It would take many more decades for Cobden’s free trade ideology to successfully supplant the American protectionist impulse, especially as

Friedrich List’s philosophy continued to gain adherents throughout the world. Listian nationalism was even used to justify Pan-German nationalism during the Second World

War, and was thereafter resurrected to legitimize the European Union.79

While Cobdenite cosmopolitanism currently holds sway among the American foreign policy elite, Listian nationalism is alive and well amid the present era of globalization.80 As economist Leonard Gomes notes, for instance, “whether they are conscious of the fact or not, development economists the world over owe a great debt to the memory of Friedrich List, for he was the champion of their cause against the ideology

“Richard Cobden and Cordell Hull: A Comparative Study of the Commercial Policies of Nineteenth Century England and Contemporary United States” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1953). 78 Howe, “From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana: Free Trade, Empire, and Globalisation, 1846-1948.” Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies 13 (2003), 141. 79 E. N. Roussakis, Friedrich List, the Zollverein, and the Uniting of Europe (Bruges: College of Europe, 1968); Gaswami, Producing India, 337. 80 David Levi-Faur, “Friedrich List and the Political Economy of the Nation-State,” Review of International Political Economy 4 (Spring 1997): 154-178. 442 of free trade.”81 By tracing the nineteenth-century ideological influence of Cobdenite cosmopolitanism and Listian nationalism from their antebellum roots to their postbellum conflicts, a new interpretation thus arises to help explain the shifting patterns of Anglo-

American relations, tariff policy, party politics, and the history of globalization from the latter half of the nineteenth century to today.82

Free trade’s triumph in the United States remains uncertain. While both

Democratic and Republican leaders continue to at least ostensibly glorify and defend the ideology of free trade, loud Listian cries for economic protection once again have arisen in the United States and throughout the globe in response to the current worldwide economic crisis. Optimistic prophets of globalization—the unwitting ideological heirs of

Richard Cobden—appear to have been precipitous in their predictions for the post-Cold

War liberal order; global free trade’s promised panacea of free trade and peace yet remains in question. The ideological conflict that arose in the nineteenth century has returned, as both sides continue their struggle over steering the course of globalization.

81 Leonard Gomes, The Economics and Ideology of Free Trade: A Historical Review (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003), 66, 83-89. 82 Bill Clinton has similarly been viewed as a Cobdenite. See Alfred Eckes, “Cobden’s Pyrrhic Victory,” Chronicles (Oct. 1995), 14-16. 443 Appendix: List of U.S. Cobden Club Members and Election Year

W.H. Ackerman (1883) Prof. James H. Dillard (1909) Charles Francis Adams (1868) Rev. J.L. Diman (1877) Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (1877) W. Earl Dodge (1883) Henry Adams (1869) William Dorsheimer (1878) John Quincy Adams (1869) William Downie (1873) W.E. Adams (1887) E.P. Doyle (1886) E. Ellery Anderson (1891) Prof. C.F. Dunbar (1877) M.B. Anderson (1872) Rev. G.L. Duncan (1877) Clement W. Andrews (1890) Abram L. Earle (1878) James Bryan Andrews (1882) Stephen Edwell (1870) Henry Armitt-Brorm (1876) Charles W. Eliot (1909) Edward Atkinson (1869) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1869) W.P. Atkinson (1877) William Endicott, Sr. (1868) William T. Baker (1887) William Endicott, Jr. (1877) George Bancroft (1870) Charles S. Fairchild (1891) Thomas Bayard (1883) Prof. Henry W. Farnam (1881) James B. Beck (1888), Senator, KY A. B. Farquhar (1892) Jake Bedaste (1869) Cyrus Field (1868) Henry Ward Beecher (1869) David Dudley Field (1869) James Beck (1881) Prof. (1909) Victor Bennet (1872) George W. Fithian (1891) John Bigelow (1866) William H. Forbes (1877) Poultney Bigelow (1879) Worthington C. Ford (1881) Albert Bolles (1873) L.F. Foster (1872) R. R. Bowker, (1880) S.F.S. Foster (1872) Samuel Bowles (1872) William J. Fowler (1881) Gamaliel Bradford (1875) Francis O. French (1880) Maj. C. R. Breckinridge (1891) James Garfield (1869) W.C.P. Breckinridge (1891) J.W. Garrett (1880) Gen. Roeliff Brinkerhoff (1886) Lt.-Com. H.H. Garringe (1883) Prof. John Graham Brooks (1888) Francis J. Garrison (1879) J. Twing Brooks (1886) William Lloyd Garrison (1869) James M. Brown (1872) William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. (1887) John Crosby Brown (1872) Lucius F.C. Garvin (1909) William Brownlee (1883) Henry George (1881) William Cullen Bryant (1869) Prof. Wolcott Gibbs (1877) Samuel B. Buggles (1870) Randall Gibson (1877) J.H. Burch (1879) Wolcott Gibson (1877) Ira Bursley (?) Prof. Franklin H. Giddings (1909) Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (1938) Prof. Daniel C. 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446 Bibliography

Abbreviations

CC MSS-Cobden Club Manuscripts, Records Office, Chichester, West Sussex, England CR-Congressional Record F.O.-Foreign Office, National Archives, Kew, England FRUS-Foreign Relations of the United States LAC-National Library and Archives, Ottawa, Canada LOC-, Washington D.C. MHS-Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA NYPL- New York Public Library, New York City, NY P.R.O.-Public Records Office, National Archives, Kew, England

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447 Macdonald, John, Papers, LAC McKinley, William, Papers, LOC (microfilm) Morrill, Justin S., Papers, LOC (microfilm) Post, Louis Freeland, Papers, LOC Schurz, Carl, Papers, LOC (microfilm) Seward, William H., Papers, LOC (microfilm) Smith, Goldwin, Papers, Cornell University Library, Cornell, New York (microfilm) Sumner, Charles, Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (microfilm) Tilden, Samuel, Papers, NYPL Walker, Amasa, Papers, MHS Wells, David Ames, Papers, LOC (microfilm)

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462 Moore, J. S. The Parsee Letters; Addressed to Horace Greeley, Sahib, by Adersey Curiosibhoy, Parsee Merchant of Bombay; As Originally Published in the New York “World.” New York: American Free Trade League, 1869.

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465

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466

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3. Newspapers and Periodicals

United States

American Free Trader

471 American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science Arena Auburn Bulletin (NY) Belford’s Magazine Boston Daily Advertiser Boston Investigator Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association Chicago Inter Ocean Chicago Tribune Civil Service Record Cleveland Herald Current Encyclopedia: A Monthly Record of Human Progress Daily National Intelligencer (Washington D.C.) Daily Republican (Johnstown, NY) Defender (Chicago) Emancipator (New York) Erie County Independent (upstate NY) Fayetteville Observer Floridian (Tallahassee) Forum Free-Trader (New York) Geneva Gazette (New York) Gunton’s Magazine Harper’s Weekly Home Market Bulletin (Boston) League (New York) Liberator (Boston) Lowell Daily Courier (MA) Macon Telegraph Million (Des Moines) Milwaukie Daily Sentinel Milwaukee Sunday Sentinel Moody’s Magazine Nation National Era (Washington) New Century (New York) New York Evening Post New York Independent New York Times Niles National Register (Baltimore) North American (Philadelphia) North American Review Oswego Daily Times (NY)

472 Penn Monthly Philadelphia American Portland Morning Oregonian Republic Roman Citizen (Rome, NY) San Francisco Evening Bulletin Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe) Single Tax Review South Carolina Temperance Advocate and Register of Agriculture and General Literature (Columbia) Syracuse Standard Tariff League Bulletin (Chicago) Tariff Reform (New York) Tax-Payers’ Union Circular (New York) Washington Post

Canada

Anti-Jacobin Belford’s Monthly Manitoba Free Press Ottawa Citizen Toronto Globe Toronto Mail Week Weekly Chronicle

England

All the Year Round Blackburn Standard Bradford Observer British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter Birmingham Daily Post Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald (Bury St. Edmunds) Cheshire Observer Daily News (London) Daily Telegraph (London) Economist European Times Fair Trade Fraser’s Magazine

473 Huddersfield Chronicle and West Yorkshire Advertiser Ipswich Journal (England) Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society Lady’s Newspaper (London) Lancaster Gazette Leeds Mercury Littell’s Living Age Liverpool Mercury London Commerce London Star London Times Manchester Times and Gazette Moonshine (London) Morning Chronicle (London) Morning Post (London) National Review Nottinghamshire Guardian (London) Once a Week (London) Preston Guardian Punch Royal Cornwall Gazette, Falmouth Packet, and General Advertiser (Truro) Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art Sheffield Independent Sheffield & Rotherham Independent Sporting Times (London) Standard (London) Women’s Herald (London) Women’s Signal (London) York Herald

Scotland

Blackwood’s Magazine (Edinburgh) Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh) Dundee Courier Glasgow Herald

Ireland

Belfast News-Letter

Austria

474 Die Presse (Vienna)

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