Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat During the War Between the States

The latter, in particular, then a young member of the House of Representatives, espoused the Northern side of the controversy, and subsequently became known, as we have seen, as the father of the system. Much undeserved obloquy has beer thrown upon Mr. Clay, for this supposed abandonment of his section. The most that he claimed, was that a temporary protection, of a few years' duration only, should be given to these infant manufactures, until they should become self-sustaining. In later life, when he saw the extent to which the measure was pushed, he did, indeed recoil from it, as Mr. Calhoun, with keener intellect, had done, years before. The wedge, being thus entered, was driven home by the insatiable North.

In less than twenty years, or during the early part of General Jackson's administration, the public debt was paid off, and it became necessary to reduce the tariffs, to prevent a plethora in the public treasury; but the North, by this time, had ‘waxed fat,’ and like the ox in the scriptures, began to kick. From incidental protection, it advanced, boldly, to the doctrine of ‘protection, for the sake of protection’—thus avowing the unjust doctrine, that it was right to rob one section, for the benefit of the other; the pretence being the general good— the ‘general welfare’ clause of the Constitution as well as the expression ‘We, the people,’ in the Preamble, being invoked to cover the enormity. Under the wholesale system of spoliation, which was now practised, the South was becoming poorer, and poorer. Whilst her abundant cotton crops supplied all the exchanges of the country, and put in motion, throughout the North, every species of manufacturing industry, from the cut-nail, which the planter put in the weather-boarding of his house, to the coach in which his wife, and daughters took an airing, it was found, that, from year to year, mortgages were increasing on her plantations, and that the planter was fast becoming little better, than the overseer of the Northern manufacturer, and the Northern merchant. A statesman of England once declared, that ‘not so much as a hob-nail should be manufactured, in America.’ The colonial dependence, and vassalage meant to be proclaimed by this expression, was now strictly true, as between the North, and the South. The South was compelled to purchase her hob-nails, in the North, being excluded by the Northern tariffs, from all other markets.