What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

by Daniel Walker Howe

Clay’s system was “American” in a triple sense. Obviously, it purported to promote the welfare of the nation as a whole. But it was also “American” in its assertion of national independence against the “British system” of unregulated free trade. The Kentuckian feared that a passive policy of economic laissez-faire would leave America in a neocolonial relationship to Britain, the economic giant of the day. Britain, Clay pointed out, protected her own domestic interests with tariffs like the “corn laws” while pressuring other countries to practice free trade.66 In a third sense, Clay also used the term “American System” to apply to his hemispheric trade policy. He was willing, indeed eager, to include Latin America as part of his home market. Clay wanted to synthesize the Madisonian Platform with the Monroe Doctrine. The American System was directed against European, particularly British, commercial hegemony, not against sister republics of the New World.