During this period agriculture, for the first time in our history, was
in a miserable condition. It is significant that for the first time too,
we had a protective tariff. Though our people made heroic efforts to
make for themselves those articles formerly imported, thus starting our
manufacturing interests, they had, of course, lost their export trade
and its profits. When the peace of 1814 came, we again began exporting
our produce, and aided by the short harvests abroad, and our own
accumulated crops, resumed the profitable business which for six years
our farmers and our people generally had entirely lost. Our first panic,
that of 1814, came as a result of our long exclusion from foreign
markets, being followed by the stimulation given business through
resumption of our foreign trade in 1814, which was immensely heightened
by the banks issuing enormous quantities of irredeemable paper, instead
of bending all their energies to paying off the paper they had issued
during the war.
But worse than the suffering entailed by this panic, was the engrafting
upon our economic policy of the fallacious theory made possible by the
Embargo and the Non-Intercourse Act, (which was equivalent, let me
enforce it once more, to that highest protective tariff, a prohibitory
one) that _all infant manufactures must be protected, that is,
guaranteed a home market_, though such home market be one where all
goods cost more to the purchaser than similar goods bought elsewhere,
and this in order that the compact little band of sellers in the home
market may make their profit.
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