Page:Life and Select Literary Remains of Sam Houston of Texas (1884).djvu/187

Rh and complicated as part of a system for promoting home manufactures by placing a heavy duty on manufactured goods brought into the country from European countries, especially from England. Nor, again, was the importation of the States, then as now, restricted to a few all-absorbing centers, such as New York now is; for imports came into all the Southern as well as Northern ports, from Portland, Me., to Charleston, S. C.; and even into the ports on the Gulf. The New England States, it is true, were the chief manufacturing States; but as the raw material, especially wool and cotton, used in the factory, was purchased from the woolbreeding and cotton-growing sections, their manufacturing interests were greatly overbalanced by their commercial interests; the interference with which, caused the prospect of a war with Great Britain, and led to the call of the Hartford Convention, December 15, 1814. The main moving interest which led to that convention, as any careful student of its records, and of Dr. T. D. Woolsey's admirable analysis, must perceive, is that which is made last to appear; in the suggestion that the Constitution be so amended as to provide: "that Congress should lay no embargo on vessels belonging to citizens of the United States, for more than sixty days; nor, except by vote of two-thirds, interdict commercial intercourse between the United States and foreign nations." The return of Daniel Webster to Congress in 1823, and his retention there during the very four years spent by Houston, was significant of a transition era which culminated eight years later in South Carolina nullification acts. Sent from Massachusetts to the special session of Congress met in May, 1813, as an opposer of the war with Great Britain, he made that maiden speech, on June loth, which brought out his leadership on questions of international law. Remaining till the close of the war, to accomplish the great end of a return to specie payments and of a national banking system which should overcome the commercial losses of a purely State bank currency, Webster retired from public office, to devote himself to private business. Though urged to take a place in the Senate, he declined; when in 1823, he, by preference, entered the House, as the branch of the Government where bills providing revenue must originate. There he showed such a knowledge of the import trade, and such a mastery of the consequences of laying duties for revenue on various articles, that he was able to give shape to the tariff, so as to promote at once the ends of commerce and of revenue. It was not until he entered the Senate, in 1827, that this mastery of the tariff system was turned to the promotion of manufacturing as distinct from commercial interests. All this part of legislation was of course new to young Houston, as he sat for the same four years