America Was Not Founded by 'Tariff Men,' Contrary to This Painting in Trump's White House
Free trade is "a direct affront to our Founding Fathers," President Donald Trump said during his first presidential campaign.
In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country's founding people and ideas. Read more here.
Last year, President Donald Trump unveiled a gold-framed painting that features himself in the center, flanked by figures who shared some degree of his enthusiasm for taxing imports: Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley. Below their faces are the words The Tariff Men.
Tariffs have long occupied a central place in Trump's idiosyncratic understanding of America's origin story. In his first presidential campaign, a decade ago, Trump declared that free trade is "a direct affront to our Founding Fathers," who "understood trade" and believed tariffs were needed to ensure the new nation's economic independence. "Two hundred forty years after the Revolution," the candidate lamented, "we have turned things completely upside-down." With tariffs, he concluded, "it's time to declare our economic independence once again."
Trump and his appointees have kept hitting that theme since then. Earlier this year, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer used his stage time at Davos to lecture everyone about the "Hamiltonian economic system" of the Founding, which "American leaders slowly forgot" as they abandoned tariffs and industrial policy for free markets. Vice President J.D. Vance has been telling a similar story. "I believe America's wealth was built by an American system" of trade protectionism and industrial subsidies, he said in 2021. "I…don't believe it was built by what folks often call neoliberalism, or classic liberalism." Trump's lawyers sprinkled their arguments in the recent Supreme Court tariff case with appeals to the Founders, especially Hamilton.
Following the progression of Trump's "tariff men" painting, they tell a story of an America that emerged from the Revolution in a state of economic precarity. With political independence won on the battlefield, they say, Hamilton turned his attention to economic independence from British trade, using the tools of tariffs and industrial policy to solidify the Revolution. Next Clay, while serving in the House and later as secretary of state, formalized these policies as the "American System" in the 1820s—a tripartite program of tariffs, central banking, and internal improvement subsidies to preserve and cultivate American wealth. Lincoln and McKinley picked up the mantle in the 19th century, culminating in a period of sustained tariff protectionism after the Civil War and into the early 20th century.
An element of conspiracism enters the story at this point, with anti-protectionist interlopers derailing the American System from its historic place as the engine of American wealth. A hollowing out of the American economy allegedly followed, until Trump arrived to right the ship and bring us back to our tariff-centric Founding.
This is essentially the tale told by Oren Cass, whom Vance has dubbed "one of the smartest thinkers about political economy in the country." In Cass' account, "the American tradition from the founding was one of aggressive protectionism and support for domestic industry." Free trade, by contrast, "emanat[ed] from Britain as self-serving ideology" to prop up its empire at the expense of the world. After almost 175 years of economic independence, the United States finally succumbed to free trade propaganda in the wake of World War II.
If this account sounds familiar, it's basically a Trumpian adaptation of an older protectionist mythology that has percolated for decades. In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan similarly characterized free trade as "a betrayal of the country as it was structured by Washington and Hamilton and Madison," and traced an identical "lost" lineage from Hamilton to Clay to Lincoln and McKinley. So did the cult leader Lyndon LaRouche, who penned a paranoid tract accusing economist Milton Friedman of seducing America with free trade dogmas and thereby subverting its protectionist founding. (The LaRouche book's co-author, David Goldman, is currently a senior adviser to Trump's State Department and a recurring presence in the "national conservative" movement.)
A conspicuous omission complicates these and other attempts to enlist the American Founding in the cause of Trump's tariff agenda. Amid their many historical appeals, the text of the Declaration of Independence is nowhere to be found. Specifically, they never discuss the Declaration's indictments of the British Crown for "cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world" and "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent"—actions that bear more than a passing resemblance to Trump's attempts to rewrite the entire U.S. tariff schedule by executive order.
As those passages hint, the White House has a key part of its history backward. Far from intending to create a Hamiltonian tariff republic, the American colonies explicitly rebelled against British restrictions on their ability to trade with the rest of the world.
Some two years before he drafted the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson prepared a list of protests for the Virginia delegates to the First Continental Congress. His "Summary View of the Rights of British America" aimed to secure a peaceful redress of the mounting tensions with London, stopping short of separation. Although Jefferson didn't attend the Congress himself, his eloquent document established him as someone who could articulate the colonists' grievances. That's why he was selected to draft the Declaration in 1776.
When you compare the two documents, the origin of the Declaration's trade clause becomes immediately apparent. A key passage from Jefferson's earlier document declares the colonies' interests in "the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world, possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right, and which no law of their own had taken away or abridged."
To build his case, Jefferson surveyed the legal history of Britain's relationship with its American colonies. He invoked a 1651 agreement between Virginia's House of Burgesses and the English commonwealth, which held that "the people of Virginia have free trade as the people of England do enjoy to all places and with all nations" and that "Virginia shall be free from all taxes, customs & impositions whatsoever," absent their consent. Parliament attempted to unilaterally alter this relationship—at first gradually, through seldom-enforced Navigation Acts that required shipment through England and on English vessels, and later through the more famous revenue taxes on sugar, tea, and printed paper products.
These measures culminated in an aggressive assertion of parliamentary power to impose legislation on the colonies "in all cases whatsoever," through the Declaratory Act of 1766, and then a retaliatory flexing of that power in 1774, when the crown closed the port of Boston and suspended Massachusetts' colonial charter and government. Several of the most egregious instigations of the American Revolution thus came down to Britain's taxing and suspension of American trade.
Similar themes appear throughout the pre-Declaration protests against the crown. As early as 1763, James Otis denounced "the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land, or houses, or ships, on real or personal, fixed or floating property" as "absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the Colonists." Otis' ordering of these measures mattered, as he considered taxes on trade to be the wellspring from which all other unilateral assertions of the crown's taxing power flowed. Samuel Adams would distill these arguments into a rallying cry: "For, if our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands, and every thing we possess or make use of? This, we apprehend, annihilates our charter right to govern and tax ourselves."
The restriction of trade similarly precipitated the crown's militarization of the colonies, with accompanying suspensions of long-held civil rights and liberties. In 1761, Otis brought suit against the crown's use of "writs of assistance" to conduct warrantless searches in Boston. These too had their origins in trade, as Otis' clients—a group of 63 merchants—objected to the use of the writs as a limitless enforcement tool for tariff collection. John Adams, who observed Otis' unsuccessful pleading in court as a young attorney, would later recount that it was "then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years…he grew up to manhood, and declared himself free."
The significance of trade to the Revolution's origins helps to resolve a long-observed paradox about the colonists' motives. Despite the Revolution's reputation as a tax revolt, Americans paid relatively low tax rates compared to people in England proper. The total sum was "paltry," and most of Parliament's new revenue measures were "moderate and often short-lived," to quote economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. They nonetheless sparked a political upheaval against the assertion of a novel and foreign authority.
The issue was not the tax rate; it was the fact that Parliament could claim a tax power over trade, and thus over all else. To the lawyer Jefferson, the crown's regulation of trade was a "nullity"—the "true ground on which we declare these acts void is, that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us." Or as an elderly Captain Levi Preston, a veteran of the Battle of Concord, reportedly told a young interviewer in 1843, "We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to."
It would be a mistake to conclude that the Founding generation's understanding of tariffs ended with their political objections to the manner of implementation. Several leading Founders were voracious consumers of political economy. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin assisted his friend George Whatley in preparing a pamphlet arguing for free trade. Anticipating Adam Smith's more famous The Wealth of Nations, Franklin's notes on the manuscript observe that "No Nation was ever ruin'd by Trade; even, seemingly, the most disadvantageous." Several years after the Declaration, John Jay responded to an inquiry from the Spanish government by pledging that the new nation would pursue free trade. American sentiments, he explained, favored "Every Man being then at Liberty by the Law to cultivate the Earth as he pleased, to raise what he pleased, to manufacture as he pleased, and to sell the Produce of his Labor to whom he pleased, and for the best Prices without any Duties or Impositions whatsoever."
Yet a tariff system emerged in the early republic, giving a sliver of credence to Trump's narrative. The new Constitution of 1787 rectified the lack of a national tax power by authorizing "imposts," or import taxes. They were primarily revenue devices, however. Even Hamilton, by far the most protectionist of the primary Founders, restricted his tariff recommendations to relatively low revenue-maximizing rates in his famous 1791 Report on Manufactures. Far from breaking with the allegedly British doctrine of free trade, most Americans saw their former nation as a leading source of protectionism in the world. George Washington lambasted Britain for its own "unwise" and self-defeating "restriction of our trade, and her heavy imposts on the staple commodities of this Country" after the resumption of peace.
It is true that the United States embarked on a more protectionist course in the 19th century, following at times Clay's American System doctrine. Although Trump tries to situate this tradition in the Revolution's lineage, that is far from the truth.
Clay first proposed his tariff scheme in a celebrated speech in 1824, a generation after most of the Founders' passing. After James Madison received a copy, he wrote to the Kentucky congressman to express his concerns: "Candor obliges me to add that I cannot concur in the extent to which the pending Bill carries the Tariff, nor in some of the reasonings by which it is advocated."
At nearby Monticello, an 82-year-old Jefferson read Clay's bill with even deeper misgivings. The American System, in his view, laid claim to a federal "power to do whatever they may think, or pretend, would promote the general welfare, which construction would make that, of itself, a complete government, without limitation of powers." He concluded that Virginia would likely have to abide such a measure if it passed, forgoing the unthinkable alternative of disunion. But the author of the Declaration of Independence had one final act in his political career. He drafted a resolution denouncing the American System's "usurpations…against which, in point of right, we do protest as null and void, and never to be quoted as precedents of right."
"Null and void." It was the same terminology Jefferson had deployed a half-century prior to condemn Parliament for trampling Americans' right to trade freely with the world.