Senator Charles Levi Woodbury to Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, April 1, 1856

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.

In my judgment the time has come when the tariff may be set on a permanent footing of low duties and equitable adjustments. To reaffirm at this juncture the cardinal principles of the advalorem and foreign valuations, to establish the free trade policy on the admitted basis of its general welfare and to reduce the unnecessary and enormous revenue now derived from customs, would carry important consequences in the political world which none can better estimate than yourself. I should not write thus frankly, did I not presume you were occupied with the proposed revision. The confidence all these great interests repose in you make this a happy moment for your effecting permanent good, and with your permission, it would give me great satisfaction to aid in bringing the interests here to that communication, which would possess you of their views, and show that they approved this question in a spirit of concession heretofore unknown to them. Allow me to renew the expressions of my sincere esteem.

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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