trade hampered commercial progress and slightly encouraged American
manufactures by the mere seeking of capital for investment; the neutral
troubles of 1806 and the American prohibitions on intercourse increased
the transfer of interest; the war of 1812 gave a complete protection to
infant industries; the dumping of British goods in 1815 stirred
patriotic American feeling; British renewal of colonial system
restrictions, and the twelve-year quarrel over "retaliation" gave time
for the definite establishment of protectionist ideas in the United
States. But Britain was soon proclaiming for herself and for the world
the common advantage and the justice of a great theory of free trade.
America was apparently now committed to an opposing economic theory, the
first great nation definitely to establish it, and thus there resulted a
clear-cut opposition of principle and a clash of interests. From 1846,
when free trade ideas triumphed in England, the devoted British free
trader regarded America as the chief obstacle to a world-wide acceptance
of his theory.

The one bright spot in America, as regarded by the British free trader,
was in the Southern States, where cotton interests, desiring no
advantage from protection, since their market was in Europe, attacked
American protection and sought to escape from it. Also slave supplies,
without protection, could have been purchased more cheaply from England
than from the manufacturing North. In 1833 indeed the South had forced a
reaction against protection, but it proceeded slowly. In 1854 it was
Southern opinion that carried through Congress the reciprocity treaty
with the British American Provinces, partly brought about, no doubt, by
a Southern fear that Canada, bitter over the loss of special advantages
in British markets by the British free trade of 1846, might join the
United States and thus swell the Northern and free states of the Union.
Cotton interests and trade became the dominant British commercial tie