Lobbyists and the Making of U.S. Trade Policy, 1816–1861 by Daniel Peart (review)

Current events certainly make this a good time to revisit the origins of American tariff policy. Historians once took antebellum tariff politics very (perhaps too) seriously, but they have demurred from the topic for years. The details of customs duties are many and tiresome. More importantly, the neo-Confederate insistence that tariffs, not slavery, caused the Civil War has made honest historians wary of giving the issue prominence. Daniel Peart disposes nicely of this problem by showing that the protectionist tariff of 1861 could not have passed had southern members of Congress simply stayed in their seats. Secession brought about the tariff rather than the other way around. The value of Peart's book goes beyond this nifty refutation, however. He has written a thoroughly readable study of antebellum tariff-making that not only provides a clear account of this important issue but also throws light on the era's broader policymaking process.

Peart's main contribution, as the title suggests, is to highlight the role of lobbying in a political system usually thought of as dominated by political parties, sectional interests, and moral reform movements. The book shines by triangulating private correspondence, newspaper reporting, and official congressional business to ferret out the ways that antebellum lobbyists operated. Very few histories of American lobbying reach back before the Civil War, but Peart shows that partisan and sectional balance during this period repeatedly opened space for lobbyists to shape tariff legislation according to their requirements. Here Peart echoes Corey Brooks's Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (Chicago, 2016), which shows how abolitionists became adept at turning small but disciplined voting blocs into swing factors that targeted the balance of power. Peart also finds intriguing parallels between tariff and abolitionist advocacy, especially in protectionists' early use of petition drives. For instance, I was struck by the fact that Lewis Tappan originated the idea for the innovative protectionist Harrisburg Convention of 1827 (75–76). Given Tappan's foundational role in the abolitionist movement, the connection helps redeem Peart's promise that a detailed examination of tariff-making policy—one that attends to "out of doors" advocacy as well as to congressional maneuvering—can tell us a lot about how policymaking really worked in this period.

The book's organization is well suited to elucidate the ways that lobbyists coordinated with one another and influenced members of Congress. Peart's chapters follow key antebellum tariff bills in sequence, producing a layered story of lobbying's development in the context of party formation and deepening sectionalism. In 1816, Congress pondered raising customs duties to sustain manufacturers that had sprung up during the previous years' international trade disruptions. Several regional groups of manufacturers sent emissaries to Washington. Peart foreshadows later developments by noting three salient aspects of this early lobbying effort: The lobbyists supplied detailed information about business conditions to government officials; they took the first steps toward coordinating their campaigns; and they already exhibited the fissures that would subsequently undermine their coalition. As tariff legislation became grist for partisan and sectional mills, manufacturers built larger, better funded, and more durable advocacy operations that disseminated pro-tariff arguments in public while buttonholing individual members of Congress to pass specific provisions into law. By the 1850s, lobbying had become professionalized and, it seems, increasingly corrupt. In telling this complicated story, Peart shows his mastery of policy mechanisms (e.g., minimum valuations) and political framing devices (e.g., "incidental" protection) without inducing reader coma. Well-placed quips from political insiders help keep things interesting.

The cost of Peart's approach to the subject is that he pays less attention to developments outside of Washington, DC, that made effective lobbying possible. No book can do everything, and Peart is careful to delimit the scope of his study at the outset. Still, the focus on individual tariff bills, while providing...