Chapter XLVIII

ALUM SALT. THE ABOLITION OF THE DUTY UPON IT, AND REPEAL OF THE FISHING BOUNTY AND ALLOWANCES FOUNDED ON IT.

I look upon a salt tax as a curse--as something worse than a political blunder, great as that is--as an impiety, in stinting the use, and enhancing the cost by taxation, of an article which God has made necessary to the health and comfort, and almost to the life, of every animated being--the poor dumb animal which can only manifest its wants in mute signs and frantic actions, as well as the rational and speaking man who can thank the Creator for his goodness, and curse the legislator that mars its enjoyment. There is a mystery in salt. It was used in holy sacrifice from the earliest day; and to this time, in the Oriental countries, the stranger lodging in the house, cannot kill or rob while in it, after he has tasted the master's salt. The disciples of Christ were called by their master the salt of the earth. Sacred and profane history abound in instances of people refusing to fight against the kings who had given them salt: and this mysterious deference for an article so essential to man and beast takes it out of the class of ordinary productions, and carries it up close to those vital elements--bread, water, fire, air--which Providence has made essential to life, and spread every where, that craving nature may find its supply without stint, and without tax. The venerable Mr. Macon considered a salt tax in a sacrilegious point of view--as breaking a sacred law--and fought against ours as long as his public life lasted; and I, his disciple, not disesteemed by him, commenced fighting by his side against the odious imposition; and have continued it since his death, and shall continue it until the tax ceases, or my political life terminates. Many are my speeches, and reports, against it in my senatorial life of thirty years; and among other speeches, one limited to a particular kind of salt not made in the United States, and indispensable to dried or pickled provisions. This is the alum salt, made by solar evaporation out of sea water; and being a kind not produced at home, indispensable and incapable of substitute, it had a legitimate claim to exemption from the canons of the American system. That system protected homemade fire-boiled common salt, because it had a foreign rival: we had no sun-made crystallized salt at home; and therefore had nothing to protect in taxing the foreign article. I had failed--we had all failed--in our attempts to abolish the salt tax generally: I determined to attempt the abolition of the alum salt duty separately; and with it, the fishing bounties and allowances founded upon it: and brought a bill into the Senate to accomplish that object. The fishing bounties and allowances being claimed by some, as a bounty to navigation (in which point of view they would be as unconstitutional as unjust), I was under the necessity of tracing their origin, as being founded on the idea of a drawback of the duty paid on the salt put upon the exported dried or pickled fish--commencing with the salt tax, and adjusted to the amount of the tax--rising with its increase and falling with its fall--and that, in the beginning allowed to the exportation of pickled beef and pork, to the same degree, and upon the same principle that the bounties and allowances were extended to the fisheries. In the bill introduced for this purpose, I spoke as follows:

"To spare any senator the supposed necessity of rehearsing me
a lecture upon the importance of the fisheries, I will premise
that I have some acquaintance with the subject--that I know
the fisheries to be valuable, for the food they produce, the
commerce they create, the mariners they perfect, the employment
they give to artisans in the building of vessels; and the
consumption they make of wood, hemp and iron. I also know that
the fishermen applied for the bounties, at the commencement
of our present form of government, which the British give to
their fisheries, for the encouragement of navigation; and that
they were denied them upon the report of the then Secretary of
State (Mr. Jefferson). I also know that our fishing bounties and
allowances go, in no part, to that branch of fishing to which
the British give most bounty--whaling--because it is the best
school for mariners; and the interests of navigation are their
principal object in promoting fishing. No part of our bounties
and allowances go to our whale ships, because they do not
consume foreign salt on which they have paid duty, and reclaim
it as drawback. I have also read the six dozen acts of Congress,
general and particular, passed in the last forty years--from
1789 to 1829 inclusively--giving the bounties and allowances
which it is my present purpose to abolish, with the alum salt
duty on which all this superstructure of legislative enactment
is built up. I say the salt tax, and especially the tax on alum
salt (which is the kind required for the fisheries), is the
foundation of all these bounties and allowances; and that, as
they grew up together, it is fair and regular that they should
sink and fall together. I recite a dozen of the acts: thus:

"1. Act of Congress, 1789, grants five cents a barrel on pickled
fish and salted provisions, and five cents a quintal on dried
fish, exported from the United States, in lieu of a drawback of
the duties imposed on the importation of the salt used in curing
such fish and provisions.

"N.B. Duty on salt, at that time, six cents a bushel.

"2. Act of 1790 increases the bounty in lieu of drawback to
ten cents a barrel on pickled fish and salted provisions, and
ten cents a quintal on dried fish. The duty on salt being then
raised to twelve cents a bushel.

"3. Act of 1792 repeals the bounty in lieu of drawback on dried
fish, and in lieu of that, and as a commutation and equivalent
therefor, authorizes an allowance to be paid to vessels in
the cod fishery (dried fish) at the rate of one dollar and
fifty cents a ton on vessels of twenty to thirty tons; with a
limitation of one hundred and seventy dollars for the highest
allowance to any vessel.

"4. A supplementary act, of the same year, adds twenty per cent.
to each head of these allowances.

"5. Act of 1797 increases the bounty on salted provisions to
eighteen cents a barrel; on pickled fish to twenty-two cents
a barrel; and adds thirty-three and a third per cent. to the
allowance in favor of the cod-fishing vessels. Duty on salt, at
the same time, being raised to twenty cents a bushel.

"6. Act of 1799 increases the bounty on pickled fish to thirty
cents a barrel, on salted provisions to twenty-five.

"7. Act of 1800 continues all previous acts (for bounties and
allowances) for ten years, and makes this proviso: That these
allowances shall not be understood to be continued for a longer
time than the correspondent duties on salt, respectively, for
which the said additional allowances were granted, shall be
payable.

"8. Act of 1807 repeals all laws laying a duty on imported
salt, and for paying bounties on the exportation of pickled
fish and salted provisions, and making allowances to fishing
vessels--Mr. Jefferson being then President.

"9. Act of 1813 gives a bounty of twenty cents a barrel on
pickled fish exported, and allows to the cod-fishing vessels
at the rate of two dollars and forty cents the ton for vessels
between twenty and thirty tons, four dollars a ton for vessels
above thirty, with a limitation of two hundred and seventy-two
dollars for the highest allowance; and a proviso, that no
bounty or allowance should be paid unless it was proved to the
satisfaction of the collector that the fish was wholly cured
with foreign salt, and the duty on it secured or paid. The salt
duty, at the rate of twenty cents a bushel, was revived as a war
tax at the same time. Bounties on salted provisions were omitted.

"10. Act of 1816 continued the act of 1813 in force, which,
being for the war only, would otherwise have expired.

"11. Act of 1819 increases the allowance to vessels in the cod
fishery to three dollars and fifty cents a ton on vessels from
five to thirty; to four dollars a ton on vessels above thirty
tons; with a limitation of three hundred and sixty dollars for
the maximum allowance.

"12. Act of 1828 authorizes the mackerel fishing vessels to take
out licenses like the cod-fishing vessels, under which it is
reported by the vigilant Secretary of the Treasury that money is
illegally drawn by the mackerel vessels--the newspapers say to
the amount of thirty to fifty thousand dollars per annum.

"These recitals of legislative enactments are sufficient to
prove that the fishing bounties and allowances are bottomed upon
the salt duty, and must stand or fall with that duty. I will now
give my reasons for proposing to abolish the duty on alum salt,
and will do it in the simplest form of narrative statement; the
reasons themselves being of a nature too weighty and obvious to
need, or even to admit, of coloring or exaggeration from arts of
speech.

"1. Because it is an article of indispensable necessity in
the provision trade of the United States. No beef or pork for
the army or navy, or for consumption in the South, or for
exportation abroad, can be put up except in this kind of salt.
If put up in common salt it is rejected absolutely by the
commissaries of the army and navy, and if taken to the South
must be repacked in alum salt, at an expense of one dollar
and twelve and a half cents a barrel, before it is exported,
or sold for domestic consumption. The quantity of provisions
which require this salt, and must have it, is prodigious, and
annually increasing. The exports of 1828 were, of beef sixty-six
thousand barrels, of pork fifty-four thousand barrels, of bacon
one million nine hundred thousand pounds weight, butter and
cheese two million pounds weight. The value of these articles
was two millions and a quarter of dollars. To this amount must
be added the supply for the army and navy, and all that was sent
to the South for home consumption, every pound of which had to
be cured in this kind of salt, for common salt will not cure
it. The Western country is the great producer of provisions;
and there is scarcely a farmer in the whole extent of that vast
region whose interest does not require a prompt repeal of the
duty on this description of salt.

"2. Because no salt of this kind is made in the United States,
nor any rival to it, or substitute for it. It is a foreign
importation, brought from various islands in the West Indies,
belonging to England, France, Spain, and Denmark; and from
Lisbon, St. Ubes, Gibraltar, the Bay of Biscay, and Liverpool.
The principles of the protecting system do not extend to it: for
no quantity of protection can produce a home supply. The present
duty, which is far beyond the rational limit of protection, has
been in force near thirty years, and has not produced a pound.
We are still thrown exclusively upon the foreign supply. The
principles of the protecting system can only apply to common
salt, the product of which is considerable in the United States;
and upon that kind, the present duty is proposed to be left in
full force.

"3. Because the duty is enormous, and quadruples the price of
the salt to the farmer. The original value of salt is about
fifteen cents the measured bushel of eighty-four pounds. But
the tariff substitutes weight for measure, and fixes that
weight at fifty-six pounds, instead of eighty-four. Upon that
fifty-six pounds, a duty of twenty cents is laid. Upon this
duty, the retail merchant has his profit of eight or ten cents,
and then reduces his bushel from fifty-six to fifty pounds. The
consequence of all these operations is, that the farmer pays
about three times as much for a weighed bushel of fifty pounds,
as he would have paid for a measured bushel of eighty-four
pounds, if this duty had never been imposed.

"4. Because the duty is unequal in its operation, and falls
heavily on some parts of the community, and produces profit
to others. It is a heavy tax on the farmers of the West, who
export provisions; and no tax at all, but rather a source of
profit, to that branch of the fisheries to which the allowances
of the vessels apply. Exporters of provisions have the same
claim to these allowances that exporters of fish have. Both
claims rest upon the same principle, and upon the principle of
all drawbacks, that of refunding the duty paid on the imported
salt, which is re-exported on salted fish and provisions. The
same principle covers the beef and pork of the farmer which
covers the fish of the fisherman; and such was the law, as I
have shown, for the first eighteen years that these bounties
and allowances were authorized. Fish and provisions fared alike
from 1789 to 1807. Bounties and allowances began upon them
together, and fell together, on the repeal of the salt tax,
in the second term of Mr. Jefferson's administration. At the
renewal of the salt tax, in 1813, at the commencement of the
late war, they parted company, and the law, to the exact sense
of the proverb, has made fish of one and flesh of the other ever
since. The fishing interest is now drawing about two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars annually from the treasury; the provision
raisers draw not a cent, while they export more than double as
much, and ought, upon the same principle, to draw more than
double as much money from the treasury.

"5. Because it is the means of drawing an undue amount of money
from the public treasury, under the idea of an equivalent for
the drawback of duty on the salt used in the curing of fish.
The amount of money actually drawn in that way is about four
millions seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and is now
going on at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
per annum, and constantly augmenting. That this amount is more
than the legal idea recognizes, or contemplates, is proved in
various ways. 1. By comparing the quantity of salt supposed
to have been used, with the quantity of fish known to have
been exported, within a given year. This test, for the year
1828, would exhibit about seventy millions of pounds weight of
salt on about forty millions of pounds weight of fish. This
would suppose about a pound and three quarters of salt upon
each pound of fish. 2. By comparing the value of the salt
supposed to have been used, with the value of the fish known
to have been exported. This test would give two hundred and
forty-eight thousand dollars for the salt duty on about one
million of dollars' worth of fish; making the duty one fourth
of its value. On this basis, the amount of the duty on the
salt used on exported provisions would be near six hundred
thousand dollars. 3. By comparing the increasing allowances
for salt with the decreasing exportation of fish. This test,
for two given periods, the rate of allowance being the same,
would produce this result: In the year 1820, three hundred and
twenty-one thousand four hundred and nineteen quintals of dried
fish exported, and one hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven
hundred and twenty-four dollars paid for the commutation of the
salt drawback: in 1828, two hundred and sixty-five thousand two
hundred and seventeen quintals of dried fish exported, and two
hundred and thirty-nine thousand one hundred and forty-five
dollars paid for the commutation. These comparisons establish
the fact that money is unlawfully drawn from the treasury by
means of these fishing allowances, bottomed on the salt duty,
and that fact is expressly stated by the Secretary of the
Treasury (Mr. Ingham), in his report upon the finances, at the
commencement of the present session of Congress. [See page eight
of the report.]

"6. Because it has become a practical violation of one of
the most equitable clauses in the constitution of the United
States--the clause which declares that duties, taxes, and
excises, shall be uniform throughout the Union. There is no
uniformity in the operation of this tax. Far from it. It empties
the pockets of some, and fills the pockets of others. It returns
to some five times as much as they pay, and to others it returns
not a cent. It gives to the fishing interest two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars per annum, and not a cent to the farming
interest, which, upon the same principle, would be entitled to
six hundred thousand dollars per annum.

"7. Because this duty now rests upon a false basis--a basis
which makes it the interest of one part of the Union to keep
it up, while it is the interest of other parts to get rid of
it. It is the interest of the West to abolish this duty: it
is the interest of the Northeast to perpetuate it. The former
loses money by it; the latter makes money by it; and a tax
that becomes a money-making business is a solecism of the
highest order of absurdity. Yet such is the fact. The treasury
records prove it, and it will afford the Northeast a brilliant
opportunity to manifest their disinterested affection to the
West, by giving up their own profit in this tax, to relieve the
West from the burthen it imposes upon her.

"8. Because the repeal of the duty will not materially diminish
the revenue, nor delay the extinguishment of the public debt.
It is a tax carrying money out of the treasury, as well as
bringing it in. The issue is two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, perhaps the full amount which accrues on the kind of
salt to which the abolition extends. The duty, and the fishing
allowances bottomed upon it, falling together as they did when
Mr. Jefferson was President, would probably leave the amount of
revenue unaffected.

"9. Because it belongs to an unhappy period in the history of
our government, and came to us, in its present magnitude, in
company with an odious and repudiated set of measures. The
maximum of twenty cents a bushel on salt was fixed in the year
'98, and was the fruit of the same system which produced the
alien and sedition laws, the eight per cent. loans, the stamp
act, the black cockade, and the standing army in time of peace.
It was one of the contrivances of that disastrous period for
extorting money from the people, for the support of that strong
and splendid government which was then the cherished vision of
so many exalted heads. The reforming hand of Jefferson overthrew
it, and all the superstructure of fishing allowances which was
erected upon it. The exigencies of the late war caused it to
be revived for the term of the war, and the interest of some,
and the neglect of others, have permitted it to continue ever
since. It is now our duty to sink it a second time. We profess
to be disciples of the Jeffersonian school; let us act up to our
profession, and complete the task which our master set us."