The American System

5 Key excerpts on "The American System"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Rise and Fall of the American System

  Nationalism and the Development of the American Economy, 1790-1837

  • Songho Ha(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This study builds on Howe’s research and details The American System, the most significant political programme of the early 1800s that sought the economic and moral improvement of American society. I argue that The American System lay at the centre of political and social transformation in the early republic. Its emergence as an intellectual notion among reform-minded Americans since the start of the presidency of George Washington, its sophistication during the Jeffersonian era, its implementation under the presidencies of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, and its failure in the wake of the levelling tendencies of the Jacksonian period and the economic chaos of the Panic of 1837, bore important repercussions for the antebellum political, economic and social life of the United States. Proponents of The American System envisioned a country that was politically united, internationally free of European conflicts, economically diversified and culturally advanced. To realize this vision, political leaders like Henry Clay of Kentucky and John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts implemented protective tariffs, executed internal improvements of roads and canals, opened a national bank and sold federal land to raise revenue. Not content with merely economic reforms, they sought to improve the intellectual and social quality of American life by creating observatories, building libraries, investing in steam technology and organizing a national university. As such, The American System represented to its framers nothing less than an attempt to create an economically unified and culturally refined nation.

  The American System and Nationalism

  The American System refers to a programme for the economic and cultural development of the United States espoused by such important politicians as Henry Clay (1777–1852; US Congressman, US Senator, Secretary of State, Presidential candidate) of Kentucky and John Quincy Adams (1767–1848; Secretary of State, President, US Congressman) of Massachusetts.

  It was first and foremost a political expression of American nationalism. The term American System’ also signified a political proposal to promote American nationalism against European domination through economic independence. The history of the term, and the context in which Clay used it, indicates that he clearly perceived it as a political phrase demanding the separation of the States from the political and economic influence of Europe.

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  Capitalism and Individualism in America

  • Gavin Benke(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Baxter, 1995 ). This position, though, was not unanimous. By the time debate got underway, though, it was clear that different sections of the country had different economic interests. Manufacturers in some states wanted a degree of protection from the rough and tumble of international trade. Southern states, by contrast, worried over losing access to overseas markets. It was during this time that Clay (in 1820) articulated The American System, which advanced an active management of the American economy via a tariff. Above all, Clay’s American System was in line with thinking that the United States’ economy needed to be capable of functioning on its own, and not be reliant on trading partners across the ocean. Even if it was not consistently articulated in a clear manner, these early debates about the structure of American political economy had significant implications for the fortunes of individual Americans.

  Significantly, these heated political debates early in the nation’s founding unfolded alongside a well-established system that was rooted in unfreedom for large groups of people – slavery. (Some historians have gone so far as to argue that the presence of slavery in North America provided the rhetorical and conceptual framework for the American Revolution and articulations of American freedom). The slave system in North America complicated the connections between capitalism and individualism that philosophers established in their own work.

  In many regards, slavery represents one of the first true economic systems in the United States. Though a superficial look at a slave plantation suggests the relic of an earlier system in the midst of a dynamic commercial modernity, it has become clear that American capitalism would not have developed in the same way without American slavery. The connection between capitalism and slavery is one example of racial capitalism

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  Henry Clay and the American System

  • Maurice G. Baxter(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  We have the same country. . . . The sun still casts its genial and vivifying influence on the land.” The cause, he felt, was the sharp contraction of postwar demand for American goods abroad, a situation that would not change. European restrictions of American imports, especially the British corn laws, appeared unyielding. Admittedly, the quantity of cotton exports had risen rapidly, yet lower prices provided less income to planters. 34 Predictably, Clay’s cure for the malady was development of a home market for domestic products. “Let us counteract the policy of foreigners, and withdraw the support we now give to their industry, and stimulate that of our own country.” Legislation, as in the present bill, was therefore essential. It would establish “a genuine American System.” 35 This term would become a staple in the political vocabulary of the antebellum era. Clay did not invent it, for Hamilton had used it more than a quarter century earlier. Later Jefferson did also. And in a different context, Clay himself had employed the expression in a congressional speech in 1820, urging recognition of Latin American independence and a common commercial interest with that part of the hemisphere. 36 But now it became synonymous with a protective tariff and later would extend to other policies. The American System rested on the idea of harmonizing all segments of the economy for their mutual benefit and of doing so by active support from an intervening national government. In several respects, Clay thought, the United States could adopt the British model of industrialization, helped substantially by restrictions upon foreign trade except for an indispensable flow of American cotton to its thriving textile mills. The South, he believed, should not fear British retaliation on cotton if the proposed tariff bill passed, for that country would never overlook its own interest. Here he countered arguments widely advanced against the pending bill

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  The Tradition of Free Trade

  • Lars Magnusson(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  57

  The American System

  There are several meanings attached to what has gone down in history as ‘The American System’. Historically, in political terms the rise of The American System is most often connected with the British-American War, 1812–1814 and the protective policies developed by the Kentuckian economic nationalist Henry Clay. After the cease-fire English manufacturers flooded the American market with cheap wares hoarded during the war years. This especially incensed the manufacturing interest in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania which, for the coming decades, served as the main strongholds of protection and The American System.58 Hence, from this time until 1833 high protective tariffs on foreign (British) goods remained. During the 1830s, however, Andrew Jackson formulated a political programme which included lower tariffs. In this he was applauded by the Jeffersonians and the agrarian interest in the Southern states. What he achieved during the years 1833–1842 has been described by historians as the ‘compromise tariff’. Moreover, these moderate tariffs remained for most of the period up to the end of the 1850s (which has motivated some scholars to talk about ‘quasi-liberal emphasis on free trade’ during this period).59 In fact, industrial tariffs were lowered even further when the Democrat, James Knox Polk, was inaugurated as president in 1844. It was only during the 1850s with the rise of the new Republican Party that the tariffs began to rise again. As, for example, Judith Goldstein and before her Tom E. Terrill have shown, protectionism and the tariff became a rallying point for the Republican Party immediately before the Civil War. After the war industrial protection would bring the party further victories and it also influence other parties. Hence, in political terms The American System had its hey-day during the Postbellum period.60

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  Thirty Years' View (Vol. 1 of 2)

  or, A History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850

  • Thomas Hart Benton(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  "It is in vain, Mr. President, said he, that it is called The American System—names do not alter things. There is but one American System, and that is delineated in the State and Federal constitutions. It is the system of equal rights and privileges secured by the representative principle—a system, which, instead of subjecting the proceeds of the labor of some to taxation, in the view to enrich others, secures to all the proceeds of their labor—exempts all from taxation, except for the support of the protecting power of the government. As a tax necessary to the support of the government, he would support it—call it by what name you please;—as a tax for any other purpose, and especially for the purposes to which he had alluded—it had his individual reprobation, under whatever name it might assume.

  "It might, he observed, be inferred from what he had said, that he would vote against the bill. He did not wish any doubts to be entertained as to the vote he should give upon this measure, or the reasons which would influence him to give it. He was not at liberty to substitute his individual opinion for that of his State. He was one of the organs here, of a State, that had, by the tariff of 1824, been chained to the car of the Eastern manufacturers—a State that had been from that time, and was now groaning under the pressure of that unequal and unjust measure—a measure from the pressure of which, owing to the prevailing illusion throughout the United States, she saw no hope of escape, by a speedy return to correct principles;—and seeing no hope of escaping from the ills of the system, she is constrained, on principles of self-defence, to avail herself of the mitigation which this bill presents, in the duties which it imposes upon foreign hemp, spirits, iron, and molasses. The hemp, iron, and distilled spirits of the West, will, like the woollens of the Eastern States, be encouraged to the extent of the tax indirectly imposed by this bill, upon those who shall buy and consume them. Those who may need, and buy those articles, must pay to the grower, or manufacturer of them, an increased price to the amount of the duties imposed upon the like articles of foreign growth or fabric. To this tax upon the labor of the consumer, his individual opinion was opposed. But, as the organ of the State of Kentucky, he felt himself bound to surrender his individual opinion, and express the opinion of his State."

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