As political debates raged on whether to raise the protective tariff on imported goods, many groups around the country wrote Congress to support or protest the tariff. Most southern planters and farmers spoke out against the tariff, including the Virginia Agricultural Society of Fredericksburg. In January 1820, the organization sent a petition to Congress, from which the following selection is taken. In the aftermath of the panic, Congress passed the tariff of 1824, which raised duties on foreign imports.

That hostility, resulting from true republican principles, to partial taxation, exclusive privileges, and monopolies created by law, was the primary cause of our glorious and ever-memorable revolution.

That, although most of us are only the descendants of those patriots who achieved that revolution, by the lavish expenditure of their treasure and their blood, yet that we inherit enough of their spirit to feel equal aversion to similar oppressions; at the same time, we confidently trust that neither we, nor our sons after us, will ever be found backward or reluctant in offering up at the shrine of national good and national happiness any sacrifices, however great, which their promotion and preservation may obviously and necessarily require. But we have been taught to believe that a parental Government—a Government founded upon the immutable and sacred principles of truth, justice, and liberty—if she required sacrifices at all from those whom she is so solemnly bound to protect, would make them such as should operate equally upon every member of the community.

That we view with great concern, both nationally and individually, certain late attempts, on the part of various descriptions of domestic manufacturers, to induce your honorable body to increase the duties upon imports, already so high as to amount, upon many articles, nearly to a prohibition. This increased cost upon some of these may truly be designated a tax upon knowledge, if not a bounty to ignorance; such, for example, as the duty upon books in foreign languages, and upon philosophical, mathematical, surgical, and chemical instruments.

That, although these attempts are sustained under the plausible pretext of “promoting national industry,” they are calculated (we will not say in design, but certainly in effect) to produce a tax highly impolitic in its nature, partial in its operation, and oppressive in its effects: a tax, in fact, to be levied principally on the great body of agriculturists, who constitute a large majority of the whole American people, and who are the chief consumers of all foreign imports.

That such a tax would be a flagrant violation of the soundest and most important principles of political economy, amongst which we deem the following to be incontrovertibly true: that, as the interests of dealers and consumers necessarily conflict with each other, the first always aiming to narrow, whilst the latter, who form the majority of every nation, as constantly endeavor to enlarge competition; by which enlargement alone extravagant prices and exorbitant profits are prevented, it is the duty of every wise and just government to secure the consumers against both exorbitant profits and extravagant prices by leaving competition as free and open as possible.

Source: “Remonstrance against Increase of Duties on Imports,” House of Representatives, January 17, 1820, no. 570, 16th Cong., 1st sess., American State Papers: Finance, 3:447–48.