Tariffs built America
by | April 16, 2025
The Father of the Constitution was also the father of tariffs. Indeed, the first piece of legislation passed was James Madison’s Tariff Act. Madison, known as the Father of the Constitution, saw tariffs as a driving purpose of the Constitution and a sustaining force of the new government.
The United States was deep in debt after the American Revolution and its previous system of government had made it impossible to either pay its debts or form a national economic policy. And without it, individual states and powerful figures would be corrupted by British and French agents into manipulating the country and eventually doom the nation to collapse in a civil war.
As I described in my book, ‘Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left’, Rhode Island’s radicals had nearly scuttled the Constitution over economic policy. And when the Tariff Act was passed, Rhode Island still had not joined, and some suspected it never would, and instead would go on serving as an entry point for dumping foreign cargoes into America.
That collaboration with British economic warfare against the new country led to threats of annexation until the radicals ruling Rhode Island finally agreed to join the constitutional union.
The American Revolution had been fought and won, but British economic warfare threatened to bring the nation to its knees, cutting off American ships from British territories, while dumping British cargoes in an unregulated fashion in the United States. Much like President Trump, Madison understood that the only thing that might put a stop to this were national tariffs.
The Tariff Act of 1789, immediately following the Constitution, almost wholly financed the federal government created by that magnificent document, while also keeping it small enough so that it would not balloon in size the way that it did once income taxes were introduced during the Civil War, the Progressive Era, and catastrophically during the New Deal and Great Society.
Without tariffs, there would have been no Constitution and no United States of America.
The economic imbalance between America and Britain had been one of the foundational causes of the American Revolution, but simply pushing British governors and armies out of the Colonies had not actually changed the imbalance in trade or the ability of the British to set all the rules. As long as the British government had the ability to set a unified economic policy while the American Colonies were a mass of widely varying rules with states selling out each other, America might be legally independent, but would never be economically independent.
The next generation of American foreign and economic policy would be taken up by that great question of achieving national independence. Including Madison’s presidential administration.
Madison’s greatest tariff challenge came after the War of 1812. The Father of the Constitution had been forced to flee the nation’s capital during the British assault. In a haunting recreation of the way the Founding Fathers had been forced to flee during the American Revolution, the president found a horse and huddled in a country house trapped by the storm. While the White House was burned, Madison and the country survived.
But the war still wasn’t over.
The British, having once again failed to conquer America by force, turned back to economic warfare, dumping large amounts of products at low prices in the United States in order to cripple its already shaky manufacturing whose poor state had been credited with the country’s near defeat. The growing industrialization of warfare had already made it obvious that wars would not be won by courageous charges or compelling rhetoric, but by factories like the ones that would determine the outcome of the future Civil War, not to mention the coming two world wars.
If America could not maintain an independent industry, then it would also have no future.
Madison, like other Founding Fathers, also understood that tariffs were not just a means of economic warfare or a scheme to finance the government, but also a means of building up American industries. And his Tariff of 1816 is regarded as the first true ‘protectionist’ tariff.
The British had wanted to bury American industry under a flood of cheap imports, instead it was they who were forced to rethink their economic policies. Less than a decade after, the British Parliament passed the Reciprocity of Duties Act. The United States had used tariffs to create mutual trade agreements with other nations making America less dependent on British trade. The road to improving America’s balance of economic power with Britain remained a very long one, but it was tariffs that slowly forced British concessions for American trade from the West Indies to Manchester.
American political leaders and presidents had attempted to convince Britain along with other nations of the moral and economic virtues of free trade only to get nowhere. British thinkers could articulate those virtues better than we could. Practicing them was another matter. What did work was the strategic use of trade barriers to build relationships from a position of strength.
And that is what President Trump is trying to do.
It’s possible for good people to disagree about tariffs, and like any other form of warfare, it’s possible to win or lose. In the generations since the American Revolution, some restrictionist policies were successful in building up the domestic economy and making America respected abroad, while others brought domestic economic misery and were laughed off abroad.
But much like blanket opposition to war is foolish, so is the blanket opposition to tariffs.
A school of libertarianism arose that asserts that restricting Chinese imports is no different than banning us from buying a glass of lemonade from a child’s roadside stand. Under this ideology, nation states don’t exist, only individuals do, and nothing must interfere with ‘free trade’ even when it’s a malicious effort by an enemy state to bring us to our knees and then enslave us.
Had we followed this ideology from the beginning, there would have been no America.
We don’t have to imagine too hard what Madison would have done about China. Or the course Alexander Hamilton, who argued that, “preserv[ing] the balance of trade in favor of a nation ought to be a leading aim of its policy” would have pursued to resist China’s economic warfare.
Good people may disagree about any specific application of tariffs, but we should not forget that America was built on tariffs and that the Father of the Constitution was also the father of tariffs.
Trump has seriously bungled his “Liberation Day” tariffs. First he reduced them to ten percent for all countries except China. Then he eliminated the tariffs on cell phones, computers, cell phone and computer chips, and most other electronic products. These just happen to be what we mainly import from China.. He has now begun to talk about exempting cars imported from China as well. These public remarks must please Tesla, meaning Musk, who manufactures most Teslas in China. Bit it has infuriated the chief executives at Ford, Fiat-Chrysler, and nearly all the other independent car manufacturers in the U.S.
A chief executive has to stick to his guns if he wishes to be effective. During his first three months in office, Trump has done a lot of wobbling. Not the best way to start off his presidency.
I agree with Daniel’s main point, that tariffs can be, and actually have been, for centuries a legitimate means of both raising revenues forstates and protecting their domestic manufacturers, and markets, from unfair competition. However, a few corrections as to matters of fact. Most historians agree that it was Alexander Hamilton, not James Madiso, who was the prime mover in persuading Congress, and President Washington, to approve tariffs as a means both of financing the USG.
It took almost 50 years for the tariff to pay back all the creditors who had paid for the American Revolution, since the Continental Congress had refused to pay even one penny for it. The main creditor was fFance, who had provided the Americans with most of the weapons and other supplies needed to pay for the American Revolution. But by 1837, the national debt created by the need to pay for the revooution had all been paid back, with interest, thanks tothe tariff.
However, the tariff also had one unfavorable consequence in early American history. The Southern states hated it. Since most manufacturing in the early U.S. was in the North, especially New England, it made it difficult for Southern cotton growers to sell their products outside the United States, especially to England, where there was a huge market for cotton, It also made imports from Europe to the South cost more. Many Southerners actually cited their indigantion at having to pay for the tariffs as one of the reasons for the South’s secession and the civil war that followed.