Mr. Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, said: "No nation can be perfectly independent which depends upon foreign countries for its supply of iron. It is an article equally necessary in peace and in war. Without a plentiful supply of it, we cannot provide for the common defense. Can we so soon have forgotten the lesson which experience taught us during the late war with Great Britain? Our foreign supply was then cut off, and we could not manufacture in sufficient quantities for the increased domestic demand. The price of the article became extravagant, and both the Government and the agriculturist were compelled to pay double the sum for which they might have purchased it, had its manufacture, before that period, been encouraged by proper protecting duties."
Sugar cane, at that period, had become an article of culture in Louisiana, and efforts were made to persuade her planters into the adoption of the Free Trade system. It was urged that they could more effectually resist foreign competition, and extend their business, by a cheap supply of food, than by protective duties. But the Louisianians were too wise not to know, that though they would certainly obtain cheap provisions by the destruction of Northern manufactures, still, this would not enable them to compete with the cheaper labor supplied by the slave trade to the Cubans.
The West, for many years, gave its undivided support to the manufacturing interests, thereby obtaining a heavy duty on hemp, wool, and foreign distilled spirits: thus securing encouragement to its hemp and wool-growers, and the monopoly of the home market for its whisky. The distiller and the manufacturer, under this system, were equally ranked as public benefactors, as each increased the consumption of the surplus products of the farmer. The grain of the West could find no remunerative market, except as fed to domestic animals for droving East and South, or distilled into whisky which would bear transportation. Take a fact in proof of this assertion. Hon. Henry Baldwin, of Pittsburgh, at a public dinner given him by the friends of General Jackson, in Cincinnati, May, 1828, in referring to the want of markets, for the farmers of the West, said, "He was certain, the aggregate of their agricultural produce, finding a market in Europe, would not pay for the pins and needles they imported."