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  • Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America by William K. Bolt
  • Max Matherne
William K. Bolt. Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2017. 320 pp. 46 illus. ISBN: 0826521363 (cloth), $69.95.

William K. Bolt's Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America deserves to be regarded as one of the boldest works of political history in recent years. Not "bold" in the sense of redefining historiographical knowledge, cracking open old paradigms, or making provocative new claims; rather, the boldness comes from the author's sheer focus. In defiance of the inevitable eyerolls and exasperated sighs—for what would seem more excruciating than two hundred pages on tariff politics?—Bolt has stayed true to his purpose, insisting quietly, yet convincingly, that we cannot understand political development in the United States without grasping the significance of this deceptively mundane issue. The resulting work, the first in Vanderbilt University Press's new series on Jacksonian America, is something of a small miracle.

For many historians of early republican politics, the sheer persistence of tariff disputes feels like an obstruction to the flow of the narrative. We are impatient to see the narrative enriched with the human dramas of westward expansion and the "impending crisis"—yet in spite of our best storytelling instincts, tariff debates seem to reappear again and again like a bad penny throughout the antebellum years. Small wonder that historians tend to diagnose tariff battles as symptoms of the more profound sectional schism between slaveholding and "free" states. Slavery does play a crucial role in Bolt's narrative, of course, but it is not the sole driving force of American history. For the tariff question, as Bolt shows, ultimately involved a litany of other questions, including the public lands, government regulatory powers, republican identity, and the moral economy of the American people.

For better or worse, Bolt errs on the side of complexity and nuance rather than simplicity and elegance. He devotes voluminous pages to the debates that transpired on the floors of Congress and almost as many pages to the back-channel intrigues that shaped the course of politics in the Early Republic. Politics, here, has more vitality than the stagnant nouns we often use to categorize political ideologies; we see allegiances [End Page 90] shifted, opinions flipped, compromises hashed out. Few books so perfectly recapture the feeling of uncertainty in the face of the unpredictable—and unintended consequences, as Bolt's work reminds us, are the iron law of political history.

Bolt perceives a direct correlation between tariff disputes and democratization. He argues that it was the American public, at the grassroots level, that repeatedly forced the tariff question back into politics. Beginning with a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, convention of manufacturers and mechanics, popular protests made it difficult for politicians to dislodge tariff reform from the congressional agenda. Even in South Carolina, that least democratic of all states, anti-tariff petitions and public meetings became the order of the day in 1828. Bolt goes so far as to claim that Andrew Jackson's "biggest mistake" as president "was his failure to perceive that nullification began as a grassroots movement" (118). Popular protests were not confined to the South, and they did not cease after the nullification crisis; as late as 1842, Pennsylvanians would protest against reduced tariffs.

The people's representatives in Washington, the usual stars of the story, come across as men reacting to this groundswell from below. Bolt is at his best when depicting the maneuvers of men like John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, both of whom sought shelter in euphemisms when discussing the 1824 Tariff. While some politicians demonstrate moments of decisiveness in this narrative, one is more often struck by their opportunism and calculation. We see Jackson taking his famously firm stand on the constitutionality of tariffs in 1832, and then we see both parties searching for moderate positions on the tariff avoid alienating constituents throughout the 1830s. Although tariff reform would gradually become a party litmus test after the Panic of 1837, we still find James Polk giving duplicitous promises to secure Pennsylvania's support in 1844—at the expense of the...

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