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left the Capitol, “I have to-day made the renomination of Grant impossible,” and throughout the campaign he refused to believe that the Grant ticket would win.1
In 1871 and 1872 the tariff question was causing the Republicans a great deal of anxiety.
So firm a defender of protection as Senator Morrill had declared in 1870 that “it is a mistake for the friends of a sound tariff to insist on the extreme rates imposed during the war, if less will raise the necessary revenue.”
A bill prepared by David A. Wells, Special Commissioner of the Revenue, in 1867, reducing duties on raw material, had passed the Senate by a large majority, and received a vote of 106 to 64 in its favor in the House, but failed there because a two-thirds majority was necessary to reach it under a suspension of the rules.
The subject came up again in 1870, when Garfield, in the House, warned his protectionist friends that, unless they revised the tariff “prudently and wisely” they would have to submit to a reduction that would “shock, if not shatter, all our protected industries.”
Congress in that year passed a tariff bill, but it did not satisfy
1 I am assured on the most competent authority that the published statement that Sumner expected that he would be nominated for President at Cincinnati is unfounded.
New York, D. Appleton and Company, March 1903.
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