persistent clamor for greatly increased
duties on manufactured goods. Centered
in Pennsylvania, this sentiment was also
strong in all the Middle Atlantic states,
southern New England, Ohio, and Ken-
tucky. In this area great numbers of
small manufacturing businesses had
sprung up during the years of trade re-
strictions, 1808-1809 and 1812-1814. The
European importations and the sharp
price declines of 1819-1820 bankrupted
many of these ventures and seemed to
many manufacturers to present difficul-
ties which could be overcome only if the
federal government promptly adopted
protective legislation.

If this depression-born enthusiasm for
protection had been confined merely to
the owners of manufacturing ventures,
the political pressures for high import
duties might not have been successful.
But, fortunately for the protectionists,
they now easily recruited enthuiastic sup-
port from farmers, workers, and printers.
American farmers were bitterly resentful
of declining prices. In March, 1817, farm
crops in Pennsylvania had reached their
highest monthly levels between the Revo-
lution and the Civil War; by 1821 they
had fallen by more than 50 per cent.
Grain farmers were especially affected.
For the whole period 1784 through 1861
the index of grain prices reached its high-
est annual average in 1816, its lowest in
1821. Wheat and wheat flour, the most
important cash crop in such states as
Pennsylvania and Maryland, suffered
especially. Philadelphia superfine flour,
which brought more than $14 a barrel in
the spring of 1817, had fallen to $4 and
even less four years later. The high prices
were in large part the result of short crops
in Europe which led to tremendous ex-
ports; the price decline coincided with the
almost complete cessation of such exports
after 1818. With prices so low that it
hardly paid farmers to haul wheat to
the mill, and with little prospect of a re-
vival of the European demand, the wheat
growers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Con-
necticut, and Ohio were easily persuaded
that their only hope lay in enlarging the
home market by protection to domestic
manufacturing. In addition, other farm-
ers, like the hemp growers of Kentucky
and the sheep raisers of Ohio, Pennsyl-
vania, and Vermont, ascribed their de-
pression hardships to foreign imports of
hemp and wool and sought a remedy in
higher duties.

Also from an entirely new group, the
workers in manufacturing, or mechanics
as they were called, came strong support
for protection. The depression of 1819-
1820 produced for the first time the phe-
nomenon in America of industrial un-
employment, of workers discharged from
manufacturing employment and depend-
ent upon charity for subsistence. The
number of unemployed in Philadelphia
in 1819 was estimated at from 7,288 to
20,000 out of a total population of about
110,000. Similarly, in the western manu-
facturing center of Pittsburgh, employ-
ment in 1819 had fallen to one third of
the total employed in 1815. Many of the
unemployed had been workers in textile
mills and iron works; others were un-
employed mechanics in small shops where
their interests were closely identified with
those of the master workmen or manufac-
turers. In their distress the workmen, like
their masters, blamed their condition on
foreign competition and demanded in-
creased duties. The Philadelphia shoe-
makers became so con verted to the pro-
tectionist viewpoint that they naively car-
ried their argument to its logical conclu-
sion, declared New Englanders "a species
of foreigners," and requested the gover-

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