BOSTON, [MASS.], April 1st, 1856.
DEAR SIR: I send you
a copy of the French Tariff whose promulgation has reached here in the last
mail. In the pendency of the proposed revision of our own, the new position of
France, possesses much [of] importance. Our constitutional and treaty
limitations necessarily make the task of revising a tariff, full of perplexity
and requiring mature analysis.
With all the aid the Treasury Department have furnished to the experience of Genl. [Charles Tillinghast] James,1 there are some features in his otherwise able bill, which are based on principles that cannot be justified in the free trade school of Statesmanship. There is a living faith in popular opinion eventually rendering to a patriot and a statesman the acknowledgment of his merit and forecast. You are beginning to experience this in the North. It has happened to me several times within a few weeks, conversing with leading merchants and manufacturers of this section, to hear from their lips those acknowledgments with regard to yourself that none of our party could ever have expected.
The policy you have
advocated is now successful and the manufacturers here, express their
unqualified confidence that you can arrange a revision of the tariff which
would be absolutely satisfactory to the South and agreeable to the North. From
the known accordance of my views with your policy, it could not have been
intended I should withhold these expressions from your knowledge.
1 A Democratic Senator in Congress from Rhode
Island, 1851-1857. He was elected as a protective tariff Democrat.
SOURCE: Charles
Henry Ambler, Editor, Annual Report of the American Historical
Association for the Year 1916, in Two Volumes, Vol. II, Correspondence of
Robert M. T. Hunter (1826-1876), p. 185-6
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