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Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America by William K. Bolt (review)

William K. Bolt’s Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America deserves to be regarded as one of the boldest works of political history in recent years. Not “bold” in the sense of redefining historiographical knowledge, cracking open old paradigms, or making provocative new claims; rather, the boldness comes from the author’s sheer focus. In defiance of the inevitable eyerolls and exasperated sighs—for what would seem more excruciating than two hundred pages on tariff politics?—Bolt has stayed true to his purpose, insisting quietly, yet convincingly, that we cannot understand political development in the United States without grasping the significance of this deceptively mundane issue. The resulting work, the first in Vanderbilt University Press’s new series on Jacksonian America, is something of a small miracle. For many historians of early republican politics, the sheer persistence of tariff disputes feels like an obstruction to the flow of the narrative. We are impatient to see the narrative enriched with the human dramas of westward expansion and the “impending crisis”—yet in spite of our best storytelling instincts, tariff debates seem to reappear again and again like a bad penny throughout the antebellum years. Small wonder that historians tend to diagnose tariff battles as symptoms of the more profound sectional schism between slaveholding and “free” states. Slavery does play a crucial role in Bolt’s narrative, of course, but it is not the sole driving force of American history. For the tariff question, as Bolt shows, ultimately involved a litany of other questions, including the public lands, government regulatory powers, republican identity, and the moral economy of the American people. For better or worse, Bolt errs on the side of complexity and nuance rather than simplicity and elegance. He devotes voluminous pages to the debates that transpired on the floors of Congress and almost as many pages to the backchannel intrigues that shaped the course of politics in the Early Republic. Politics, here, has more vitality than the stagnant nouns we often use to categorize political ideologies; we see allegiances