Tyranny Unmasked

TYRANNY UNMASKED A LIBERTY CLASSICS EDITION .]{}ttN "IA_I {_}_ TYRANNY UNMASKED John Taylor EDITED BY F. THORNTON MILLER Liberty Fund INDIANAVOLIS This is a Liberty Classics Edition published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. x /p-./ The cuneiform inscription that serves as the design motif for our endpapers is the earliest-known written appearance of the word "freedom" (amagi), or "liberty." It is taken from a clay document written about 23oo 8.c. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash. Foreword and other editorial additions © I992 by F. Thornton Miller. All rights reserved. All inquiries should be addressed to Liberty Fund, Inc., 8335Allison Pointe Trail, Indianapolis, IN 4625o. This book was manufactured in the United States of America. Frontispiece from Virginia State Library and Archives. Oil painting attributed to William J. Hubard. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Taylor, John, 1753-1824. Tyranny unmasked / John Taylor : edited by F. Thornton Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-86597-1o4-8 (hardcover). -- ISBN o-86597-1o5-6 (pbk.) I. Tariff---United States. 2. United States--Politics and government--I817-1825. I. Miller, Frederick Thornton. II. Tide. HFI754.T4 1992 382'.7'o973--dc2o 92-26255 CIP IO98 76543 zI CONTENTS FOREWORD ix SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY *** XXlll PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xxvii TYRANNY UNMASKED SECTION ONE - Unmasking the Protecting-Tariff Policy and Its Advocates from Many Perspectives 3 SECTION TWO Arguments Against the Protecting Duty Summarized Through an Analysis of Its Major Consequences 99 SECTION THREE A General Discussion of Tyranny and the Choice that Americans Face 193 INDEX 269 FOREWORD hen John Taylor supported James Monroe's campaigns for president, he informed the candidate that upon taking office he would find his old friend in the opposition. Taylor stated that he intended to live and die a "minority man." He made the frequent inquiring into the measures of government his life's work. To ful- fill this task, he wrote Tyranny Unmasked. He and other Old Republi- cans believed that, without their vigilant watch over the federal government on behalf of the people, individual liberty would be sacrificed? John Taylor of Caroline County, Virginia, was born in I753. Or- phaned as a young boy, he was adopted by his maternal uncle Edmund Pendleton. One of Virginia's most distinguished citizens, Pendleton served from the Revolution to his death in I8o3 as head of the state's highest court. Taylor studied at William and Mary and then read law in his uncle's office. He served as an officer in the Continental army and the Virginia militia during the Revolution. After the war, he had a successful law practice. Following marriage to Lucy Penn, daughter of the signer John Penn of North Carolina, he retired from the law to spend the remainder of his life as a planter. His home was Hazlewood, on the Rappahannock River near Port Royal. Taylor was an advocate of scientific farming. He wrote the agricul- tural treatise Arator and was the first president of the Virginia Agricul- tural Society. Like other members of the Virginia gentry, he fulfilled his public duty, serving in the state legislature (i779-8i, i783-85, and I796-x8oo) and as a representative of Virginia in the United States L Taylor,A PamphletContaininga Seriesof Letters(Richmond:E. C. Stanard, I8o9). See "Letters of John Taylor," Taylor to Monroe, 22 February i8o8, x5 Januaryand 8NovemberI8o9, Io February,I2 March,and 26October I8iO,and 3IJanuary18HinJohnP. BranchHistoricalPapersofRandolph-MaconCollegeed., William E. Dodd, vol. z (I9o8)::z91-94,298-306, 3o9-3II, 315-I9. ix FOREWORD Senate (I793-94, I8o3, and I822-24). He was serving as a senator when he died on 2: August 1824. Taylor was a leading espouser of Country, or agrarian, republicanism, which derived mainly from the writings of the eighteenth-century English Country opposition. Advocates of the ideology included Viscount Bolingbroke [Henry St. John], and Cato [John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon]. This perspective originated in a provincial outlook toward London and the central government and in a belief that there was a division between the simple, virtuous farmers in the country and the wealthy noble courtiers at the king's court. While the former looked to the best interests of the whole, the latter, corrupted by wealth and power, thought only of their self interests. The opposition believed this corruption violated the principles of the ancient English constitution, altered the checks and balances, and, unless opposed, would end English liberty. The Country opposition rose against the corrupt Court and believed it had won with the glorious Revolution of :688. But William III and the Whigs had their financial revolution, the English banking system was developed, and the national debt became an institution. A Court party was created and became established under the leadership of Robert Walpole. The opposition now added bankers and financial speculators to the list of those at Court who it believed wished to grow wealthy by robbing the country3 By the time of the Revolution, many Americans were using the Court-Country paradigm to explain to themselves and the world what they feared and why they resisted the imperial government. From this perspective, the American revolutionaries waged a successful Country z. Perez Zagorin, The Court and the Country: The Beginningof the English Revolution(New York:Atheneum, :970); IsaacKramnick,Bolingbrokeand His Circle: The Politicsof Nostalgiain the Age of Walpole(Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress,x968);and CarolineRobbins, TheEighteenth-CenturyCommon- weahhman:Studiesin the Transmission,Development,and CircumstanceofEnglish Liberal Thoughtj_om theRestorationofCharlesII until the Warwith the Thirteen Colonies(Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress, x959). FOREWORD opposition? In the I78os, however, the republican Patriots divided. Now that the distant threat to their liberty was removed, some Ameri- cans, many of whom became Federalists, began devising plans to restruc- ture and strengthen the republic. Anti-Federalists, Taylor among them, responded to the reform movement--and its main result, the Constitu- tion-with the same distrust they had shown earlier toward London. They feared that a new central government (eventually in Washington, D.C.) would replace the old one, and that, again, there would be a concentration of power over which they would have little control. Along with many Anti-Federalists, Taylor had wanted only a revi- sion of the Articles of Confederation (basically wanting things to stay asthey were). They wanted to keep apurely federal government wherein the states were sovereign, with power remaining at the state and local levels.After the Constitution was ratified, they hoped for a new conven- tion, or for amendments that would undermine the power of the federal government. 4In the meanwhile, they advocated the strict construction of the Constitution in order to restrict the administration of the federal government as much as possible. They developed an interpretation that denied that the Constitution was a fundamental or supreme law of the land. This view would be further developed and amplified in Taylor's writings, including Tyranny Unmasked. During the I79OS, Taylor was among the many Anti-Federalists who joined with the Republican opposition of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in its effort to drive Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists out of power. Drawing upon the Court-Country paradigm, the Republicans portrayed Hamilton as modeling his policies on Walpole's and building the Federalists into a Court party in America. Taylor publicized the view of the new Country opposition to Hamil- 3. BernardBailyn,TheIdeologicalOriginsoftheAmericanRevolution(Cambridge: HarvardUniversityPress,1967);Gordon S. Wood, TheCreationof theAmerican Republicx776-x787(Chapel Hill: Universityof North CarolinaPress, 1969). 4. Richard E. Ellis, "The Persistenceof Antifederalismafter I789," in Beyond Confideration:Originsof the Constitutionand AmericanNational Identity, ed. RichardBeeman,StephenBotein,andEdwardC. Carter (ChapelHill:University of North CarolinaPress, I987), 295-314. xi FOREWORD ton's Court in his pamphlet An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendency of Certain Public Measures. 5 Although Taylor joined in Madison's efforts during the I79os to organize the Republican opposition to Hamilton, he and other agrarian Republicans did not simply wish to replace the Federalist administration. They opposed a strong national government and blamed the Constitution for allowing Hamilton's success. Taylor wrote that "the public good, in the hands of two parties nearly poised as to numbers, must be extremely perilous.'6 The concomitant conflict between parties and interest groups would divide America and lead to disunion. Ameri- cans must return to those who represented the whole. A concern for upholding state rights was at the heart of Taylor's political thinking and runs through all of his writing, including Tyranny Unmasked. Taylor was an advocate of state rights, first, as an end in itself--in each state, Americans made up a single people and should be allowed to legislate for themselves in internal matters. The closer the exercise of power was to the citizen body at the local level, the more it could be trusted. Second, he believed state rights served as a means to watch and restrict the federal government,

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