System, Process, Agency, and Contingency in the Study of Antebellum Policymaking: The Tariff of 1846

"It is mentioned as a remarkable coincidence," observed the New-York Tribune on July 31, 1846, "that one vote carried the Tariff of 1824; one vote the Tariff of 1828; one vote in each House carried the Tariff of 1842; and by one vote in the Senate the Tariff of 1846 has become a law." The Tribune got its figures wrong, but the pattern it identified was nonetheless significant, and certainly no coincidence; the tariff was a fiercely contested issue during the antebellum period, and the fate of legislation on the subject was typically decided by extremely small margins.¹ This was particularly true for the Walker Tariff of 1846, the prompt for Horace Greeley's editorial, which squeezed through the Senate by twenty-eight votes to twenty-seven toward the close of a grueling eight-month session. Even more remarkable, this highly partisan measure, christened for a Democratic secretary of the treasury, sponsored by a Democratic president, and submitted to sizeable Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, would have failed were it not for the support of a single Whig senator at a crucial moment. Analysis of the passage of the Tariff of 1846 through the Senate shows how accounts that focus on the potency of the Democrat-Whig party system may be supplemented by an attention to other factors—the importance of rules and timing within the lawmaking process, the agency of legislators with their own personal agendas, and the contingencies that kept the outcome uncertain until the final roll call—in order to better understand antebellum policymaking.

The tariff, a tax levied on imports, benefited American producers by discouraging foreign competition, but at the cost of increased prices for consumers. Supporters of high duties gravitated toward the Whigs, whose activist economic program embraced protection for manufacturers, while advocates of low duties generally found the Democratic mantra of "limited government" more congenial, with its corollary preference for free trade. Consequently, while recognizing that debates over the tariff were also influenced by the evolution of global and regional economies, changing diplomatic relations with commercial partners, and cycles of boom and bust, several generations of scholars have cited them as an important dividing line between the two parties, both in and out of the legislature. To quote but one of the more recent examples, Martin Shefter asserts that "conflicts between those Americans who benefited from British international hegemony and those who feared being undersold by British industry provided the economic and social foundation for the U.S. system of competitive party politics."²

In Shefter's formulation, Democrat-Whig competition serves as a classic example of a "system," in which the thoughts and actions of participants, including policymakers, are shaped by the relations which constitute that system. The concept of "party systems" gained prominence among political scientists in the mid-twentieth century as a means of dividing American political history into distinct periods, each characterized by a different configuration of partisan alignments and corresponding behavior by voters and politicians.³ Historian Richard L. McCormick then adapted it to explain the extraordinary reach and resilience of the major parties from the 1830s to the early 1900s; their political supremacy during this "party period," he surmised, was in large part attributable to their efficacy as "vehicles for managing the limited sort of economic policies that nineteenth-century conditions called forth."⁴ This hypothesis tallied with the findings of quantitative studies of congressional roll calls, much in vogue at the time, which emphasized "the effectiveness of the two-party system in ordering the work of the national legislature."⁵ It was soon endorsed by new political histories of the era; Joel Silbey, for example, in a chapter titled "Partisan Government in a Partisan Political Nation," affirms that "party was the paramount force in the shaping of public policy in both Congress and the state legislatures."⁶

More recent analyses, however, while still acknowledging the power of partisanship, have shifted attention to other factors that influenced antebellum policymaking.⁷ In The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Michael F. Holt...