The one excuse given for urging the passage of the Act of 1857 was that under the tariff of 1846 the revenues had become excessive, and the income of the government must be reduced. But it was soon found to be a most expensive mode of reaching that end. The first and most important result flowing from the new Act was a large increase in importations and a very heavy drain in consequence upon the reserved specie of the country, to pay the balance which the reduced shipments of agricultural products failed to meet. In the autumn of 1857, half a year after the passage of the tariff Act, a disastrous financial panic swept over the country, prostrating for the time all departments of business in about the same degree. The agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing interests were alike and equally involved. The distress for a time was severe and wide-spread. The stagnation which ensued was discouraging and long continued, making the years from 1857 to 1860 extremely dull and dispiriting in business circles throughout the Union. The country was not exhausted and depleted as it was after the panic of 1837, but the business community had no courage, energy was paralyzed, and new enterprises were at a stand-still.
It soon became evident that this condition of affairs would carry the tariff questions once more into the political arena, as an active issue between parties. Thus far, the new Republican organization had passively acquiesced in existing laws on the subject; but the general distress caused great bodies of men, as is always the case, to look to the action of the Government for relief. The Republicans found therefore a new ground for attacking the Democracy,--holding them responsible for the financial depression, initiating a movement for returning to the principle and practice of protection, and artfully identifying the struggle against slavery with the efforts of the workingmen throughout the North to be freed from injurious competition with the cheapened labor of Europe. This phase of the question was presented with great force in certain States, and the industrial classes, by a sort of instinct of self- preservation as it seemed to them, began to consolidate their votes in favor of the Republican party. They were made to see, by clever and persuasive speakers, that the slave labor of the South and the ill-paid labor of Europe were both hostile to the prosperity of the workingman in the free States of America, and that the Republican party was of necessity his friend, by its opposition to all the forms of labor which stood in the wy of his better remuneration and advancement.