Page:Nullification Controversy in South Carolina.djvu/65

 CHAPTER II

NULLIFICATION ADVOCATED AND DENOUNCED (1830)

There were few citizens of South Carolina who did not feel some degree of hope that the session of Congress which began in December of 1829 would reform the tariff in a manner satisfactory to the South. But as the months of the session passed without action, the conviction rapidly, spread that the congressional prospect was hopeless. A report of the House Committee on Manufactures very early declared it inexpedient to make any alteration whatever in the existing protective system. But the question was not to be thus easily dropped. Proposals of change were submitted, and in the debates George McDuffie, of South Carolina, was a brilliant advocate of tariff reduction. He offered a bill which would in two years have reduced the duties upon all the prime necessities of life, including woolen and cotton goods, iron, etc., to the standard of the tariff of 1816. But even the genius of a McDuffie was without force against what seemed to be the grasp-46