institution" confirmed what Nature already had decreed. But the
planters were now beginning to feel keenly the competition of the new
cotton lands of the Gulf plains. As production increased, the price of
cotton fell. "In 1816," writes Professor Turner, "the average price of
middling uplands...was nearly thirty cents, and South Carolina's
leaders favored the tariff; in 1820 it was seventeen cents, and the
South saw in the protective system a grievance; in 1824 it was
fourteen and three-quarters cents, and the South Carolinians denounced
the tariff as unconstitutional."[11]

Men of the Clay-Adams school argued that the tariff stimulated
industry, doubled the profits of agriculture, augmented wealth, and
hence promoted the well-being of the nation as a whole. The Southern
planter was never able to discover in the protective system any real
advantage for himself, but as long as the tariffs were moderate he was
influenced by nationalistic sentiment to accept them. The demand for
protection on the part of the Northern manufacturers seemed, however,
insatiable. An act of 1824 raised the duties on cotton and woolen
goods. A measure of 1827 which applied to woolens the ruinous
principle already applied to cottons was passed by the House and was
laid on the table in the Senate only by the casting vote of Vice
President Calhoun. The climax was reached in the Tariff Act of 1828,
which the Southerners themselves loaded with objectionable provisions
in the vain hope of making it so abominable that even New England
congressmen would vote against it.

A few years of such legislation sufficed to rouse the South to a deep
feeling of grievance. It was no longer a question of reasonable
concession to the general national good. A vast artificial economic
system had been set up, whose benefits accrued to the North and whose