Essays on the Restrictive System, Delivered to the Senior Political Class of William and Mary College.

Thomas Roderick Dew (1802-1846), professor of political economy and later president of the College of William & Mary, emerged in the late 1820s as one of the most influential intellectual defenders of slavery and the plantation system in the antebellum South, his subsequent Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 providing what became the standard scholarly justification of slavery deployed across the region in the decades before the Civil War. In the present volume, composed of his lectures delivered to the senior political class at William & Mary, Dew argues against the "Tariff of Abominations" of 1828, the protectionist measure enacted to shield the manufacturing industry of the northern states and widely resented in the South as a transfer of wealth from agricultural exporters to northern industrialists. Dew opposes the tariff on dual grounds: as an instrument that disproportionately burdened the southern slave-holding states, whose economies depended upon the export of cotton and tobacco and the importation of finished goods, and as a violation of the principles of neoclassical economics and free trade then being articulated by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and their successors. The lectures thus stand at the intersection of two of the defining controversies of the Jacksonian era - the constitutional crisis over the tariff that culminated in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, and the broader sectional argument over the political economy of slavery - and offer an early demonstration of the rigor and rhetorical command that would soon establish Dew as the foremost academic voice of the proslavery South.