Why Trump's tariffs won't last
Two administrations tried super-high tariffs; they both got swept away
When the U.S. imposed the highest tariffs in its history nearly 200 years ago, the effects were dramatic.
The “Tariff of Abominations,” passed by Congress and signed by President John Quincy Adams in 1828, contributed to the election of Andrew Jackson that year. It set off a constitutional crisis in the early 1830s when South Carolina asserted a right to nullify federal laws. Only a compromise to reduce the tariff prevented a violent rebellion.
President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” already has touched off the worst market sell-off since Covid, vaporizing more than $6 trillion of value. That is only the beginning of a set of consequences that make it likely Trump’s tariffs will go the way of “The Tariff of Abominations” and the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930.
Such drastic policy changes contain the seeds of their own destruction — but don’t underestimate the damage that could be caused along the way.
Loving tariffs
Still, it’s not hard to see why Trump loves tariffs. He can impose them unilaterally without having to build support in Congress (unless the courts or Congress decide to rein him in). Imposing them allows him to dominate the world spotlight; he led every news organization’s agenda for the past several days.
Trump can revel in the mock aggression of declaring a war — a trade war — without the costs of fighting an actual war. Countries and companies may now rush to the White House to negotiate deals to reduce their tariff burdens and to promise to build U.S. manufacturing plants Trump can sell to his base as victories. He can scratch his 40-year-long itch that the U.S. is being victimized by other nations who have trade surpluses.
And there’s also no mystery about the economic effects of Trump’s tariffs. If they remain in effect, they will chill world trade, bolster inflation, further lower stock valuations and discourage investment in the U.S.
Just one example of the self-inflicted havoc ahead: The Trump administration is already talking about trying to find billions of dollars to bail out American farmers who lose overseas markets due to the tariffs.
The Trump recession
A resulting recession will have Trump’s name clearly stamped on it, even if he tries to blame it on Joe Biden. Tell people who are thrown out of work or who have to pay $10,000 more for a car that their sacrifice is liberating and you’ll get laughed at.
Republicans will pay the price in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. A foretaste of that came this week with Democrats’ decisive victory in a judicial contest in the swing state of Wisconsin. And that was the day before “Liberation Day” and ahead of the stock market dropping off a cliff.
If Trump were a student of history or economics, he’d know this already. The Hawley-Smoot tariffs of 1930 contributed to a two-thirds drop in international trade, and eventually to a century of much freer trade which elevated living standards around the world. The Tariff of Abominations of 1828 also had dire effects, especially within the United States. In both cases, tariffs were soon reduced from peak levels.
‘A Corrupt Bargain’
The ‘Tariff of Abominations’ had its roots in the 1824 election, one of the most controversial in U.S. history. Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote. He had 99 votes in the electoral college, compared to John Quincy Adams’ 84, but with two other candidates in the race, he lacked the needed majority required for election as president.
Thus the choice was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Adams successfully bargained for the support of key state delegations. He gained the support of one rival, Henry Clay, whom Adams soon named Secretary of State.
Jackson and his supporters reacted with fury, calling Clay a “Judas” and alleging “a corrupt bargain.” As Daniel Howe wrote in his history of the period, What Hath God Wrought, the ensuing partisan battle lasted the entire length of the Adams presidency. (As many have pointed out, Jackson would have come in second in the electoral college were it not for the advantage granted the slaveholding states by the Constitution.)
The big divide
Tariffs divided America into warring regions. The South’s slave-based agricultural economy needed free trade to find markets for its biggest exports. The North’s emerging manufacturing industries sought the opposite: high tariff walls to protect its enterprises from cheap imports of clothing and other goods.
In the midst of this unresolvable tension, Henry Clay devised a rationale for high trade duties that purported to serve the national, rather than regional, interest. He called it “The American System.”
“We must naturalize the arts in our country,” Clay said, “by the only means which the wisdom of nations has yet discovered to be effectual—by adequate protection against the otherwise overwhelming interest of foreigners. This is only to be accomplished by the establishment of a tariff.”
As Douglas Irwin wrote in Clashing Over Commerce, Clay wanted an activist federal government that would build transportation and banking systems to spur growth of manufacturing and of a consumer market in the U.S.
Instead of exporting southern cotton to English textile mills, it would be sold to northern factories to produce clothing for all parts of the nation. Clay lampooned opposition to a tariff, saying it was wrongly “regarded as a monster, huge and deformed—a wild beast, endowed with tremendous power of destruction, about to let loose among our people…”
The South was unpersuaded by Clay’s “system,” and they were joined in their opposition by Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who favored free trade that benefited the shipping industry of New England. But in 1824, Congress did increase tariffs modestly. A far more controversial measure came before Congress four years later.
Gloomy misanthropist?
John Quincy Adams knew that he wasn’t viewed as a particularly likable person. “I am a man of reserved, cold austere and forbidding manners; my political adversaries say a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage,” he wrote.
Yet his encylopedic personal diairies paint a more nuanced picture of the first son of a president to be elected president. He wasn’t a pro-tariff zealot, but wound up nudging along the passage of the bill and signing it.
On April 19, 1828, Adams complained that rain forced him to cancel his morning walk. “I walked out with [his son] George about a half an hour before dinner, and this was all the exercise, I could take in the day. The effect upon my Spirits superadded to that of the catarrhal cough which tortured me all the last Spring and is now returning upon me, is more than I can describe.”
He took solace in the garden later that spring. On May 6, he planted “Brazilian Squash seeds…Spanish Acorns, dry apple seeds, Persimmon seeds, Prune Stones” and an apricot pit. He was no optimist: “None of these except the Squash seeds do I expect to come up.”
But also on that day, Adams noted, “Mr Thomas the Senator from Illinois called to speak upon the subject of the Tariff Bill now before the Senate, and the fate of which is uncertain…The Senate are so nearly divided upon the Bill that its passage will probably depend upon the votes of the Members from Massachusetts— Mr Thomas thinks it will depend entirely upon Mr Webster, and considering his vote as doubtful, came to intimate a wish to me that I would interpose to fix his indecision.”
The next day, Adams spoke to Webster, who “expressed some doubt” about how he would vote on the tariff. What advice did Adams give to Webster? He doesn’t say.
And then on May 10, Adams talked with Senator Thomas again:
“Thomas is now satisfied that the Bill will pass the Senate.” Supporters of Andrew Jackson had given some support to the bill to cause political mischief for Adams, thinking it would die an embarrassing death somehow. But it didn’t, and the Senate passed an amendment hiking tariffs on woolen clothing to 45% and eventually 50%. Webster voted for the tariff.
Virginia’s John Randolph joked that the tariff, supposedly intended to protect manufacturers, actually was all about “the manufacture of a President of the United States.”
But it was Jackson who took the oath of office as president in 1829, after a bitter campaign. The incoming president failed to make a courtesy call to Adams, who refused to attend the inauguration. And when Harvard University gave Jackson an honorary doctor of laws in 1833, Adams protested that as “an affectionate child of our alma Mater, I would not be present to witness her disgrace in conferring her highest Literary honours upon a barbarian, who could not write a sentence of Grammar, and hardly could spell his own name.”
‘Null, void and not law’
The abominable tariff prompted Vice President John Calhoun to craft the audacious doctrine that states had the power to nullify the application of federal laws in their state.
The South Carolina politician, who resigned as vice president and joined the Senate, called the tariff act “unjust, unconstitutional, and oppressive.” Protesters in South Carolina burned Adams and Clay in effigy.
In 1832, a special constitutional convention in South Carolina declared the 1824 and 1828 tariffs “null, void, and not law” and said an attempt by the federal government to collect the duties would be “inconsistent” with the state remaining in the U.S.
Though the new president, Jackson, hailed from the South he wasn’t an archenemy of tariffs. Moreover, Jackson furiously opposed nullification as an encroachment on his power and contemplated using the military to collect tariffs. But no one really wanted a civil war over trade policy, and Congress struck a compromise, beginning a gradual process of cutting the average tariff from 62% in 1830 to less than 20% by 1859, Irwin wrote.
Consequences
While the harsh tariff didn’t survive, its consequences were plain. Adams’ defeat put Jackson in the presidency, which “brought to office a rush of executive authoritarianism, intemperate demagoguery, the spoils system under the guise of ‘reform,’ harsh racism, strong support for slavery, and anti-intellectual ignorance,” wrote Fred Kaplan, author of John Quincy Adams: American Visionary.
Unlike Trump’s policy, Jackson’s populism didn’t include supporting high tariffs. And he won re-election in 1932, defeating Henry Clay.
Most consequentially, the seed of secession was planted in the mind of southerners who chafed at their inability to prevent the high tariffs of the 1820s and who feared that northern opposition would eventually abolish the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
Tariffs are poison to presidents: Both Adams and Herbert Hoover, who signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff, served only one term. And Donald Trump is seeing public disapproval of his economic leadership soar.
I hope you agree that this would be a welcome place to share an op-ed I’ve released a touch early:
https://thequillandmusket.substack.com/p/trumps-tariffs-part-two?r=4xypjp