Reciprocity and Henry C. Carey’s Traverses on “The Road to Perfect Freedom of Trade”

Abstract

Free trade and protectionist doctrines have long had ambiguous relationships to bilateral trade deals, known throughout the nineteenth century as “reciprocity” arrangements. Henry C. Carey, “the Ajax of Protection” in the nineteenth-century United States, embodies the ambiguity from one side of the controversy. Carey’s early adulthood in the mid- to late 1820s was a time when the forerunners of the Whig Party pursued reciprocity at least partly as a means of fostering protection. In the 1830s, Carey, too, endorsed reciprocity—because he stood for free trade and believed reciprocity would promote it. In the 1840s and 1850s Carey changed his mind, decided that protection was the real “road to perfect freedom of trade,” and for that reason opposed reciprocity with Canada. In the 1870s he remained a protectionist but reconciled his doctrine with reciprocity. This article attempts to explain the changes in the disposition toward reciprocity of America’s foremost protectionist thinker from the Second Party System to the generation after the Civil War.

Henry C. Carey’s “Zone Theory” and American Sectional Conflict

“…He wrote his 1847 magnum opus, The Past, the Present, and the Future , with the hurry and zeal of a man struck by an epiphany. The vision he beheld “lying in bed one morning” showed all at once why his long-standing skepticism of David Ricardo’s rent theory was well founded; where precisely the theory required correction; why the true theory implied the necessity of tariff protection for the United States; and why the chosen means of US territorial expansion were amiss (Meardon 2011, p. 316). It was no accident that the epiphany followed close on the heels of Congress’s declaration of war against Mexico and passage of the liberal Walker Tariff Act , both in the summer of 1846.…”

“…Taking a bird’s-eye view of several communities developing naturally in this fashion, one sees a number of “little pyramids, with heights proportioned to their breadth and depth” (Carey 1872, p. 286). Thus Carey’s “‘pyramid theory’ of development” (Meardon 2011, p. 317).…”

Henry Carey’s Rural Roots, “Scientific Agriculture,” and Economic Development in the Antebellum North

“…In 2000, the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics series brought out a revised biography of Marsh and, soon after, a new edition of Man and Nature . Meanwhile, Carey has generated recent interest from historians of economic thought pursuing questions as diverse as international trade, financial crisis, and humanity’s impact on the environment (Foster 1999; Perelman 1999; Meardon 2011 and 2015 [this volume]; Magness 2015 [this volume]).…”

“…Citing endless historical examples spanning the globe, Carey concluded that “everywhere” population growth resulted in an “increased power over land” (Carey 1848, pp. 24, 48; see also Meardon 2011, especially pp. 22–27).…”

The Political Economies of Secession

“…Lasting wealth came instead from production and exchange between neighbors, a process he believed elevated labor, morality, collective wealth, and national sentiments (Carey 1848, p. 311). His vision, as he wrote in 1847, was of locally defined “little pyramids” of diversified wealth combined under one “Great Pyramid,” the nation (Meardon 2011, pp. 317–329).…”