First published 1892
Tariff History of the United States
Tariff History of the United States by F.W. Taussig is available as a free PDF and EPUB download at freecapitalists.org, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. The file here is the Fifth edition (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), reprinted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute 2010.
- F.W. Taussig
- First published
- 1892
- Edition here
- Fifth edition (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), reprinted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute 2010
- Format
- PDF and EPUB
- Pages
- 364
- ISBN
- 978-1-61016-132-9
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
The Mises Institute has completely retypeset F.W. Taussig’s definitive work on the tariff of the 19th century in the United States, a history that in some sense is the most important ever written because it was so decisive in leading to the sectional conflict culminating in the Civil War.
This book has never been surpassed as pure economic history. This might be the first new presentation of the book to appear in 100 years.
It is not economic history as that phrase has come to be understood in recent years. It is more than a litany of facts and data manipulated with econometrics. This is super-charged, very interesting history of real people, institutions, and policies and their effects. Taussig shows how the tariff policies had an enormous influence on the direction of U.S. industrial development, and the conflicts caused by intervention.
He was of course a free trader, like most economists of his generation. But the case for free trade here is not just a matter of theory, but emerges from within the historical narrative. It is the kind of economic history that anyone can read and love. Knowing the details here provides a window into a time and helps explain what might otherwise be completely lost on the casual observer.
5th edition
- The Argument for Protection to Young Industries
- Industrial History of the Colonies and of the United States before 1808
- The Cotton Manufacture
- The Woollen Manufacture
- The Iron Manufacture
- The Early Protective Movement and Tariff of 1828.
- The Tariff, 1830–1860
- Tariff Legislation, 1861–1909
- The War Tariff
- The Failure to Reduce the Tariff after the War.
- How Duties were Raised above the War Rates
- The Tariff Act of 1883
- The Tariff Act of 1890
- The Tariff Act of 1894
- The Tariff Act of 1897
- The Tariff Act of 1909
- Imports and Duties, 1860–1907
- Duties of 1861, and those of 1864 which were retained, without change till 1883
- Revenue from internal taxes and from the tariff, 1860–1907
- Product, Imports, and Foreign and Domestic Prices of Copper, 1875–1886
- Product, Imports, and Foreign and Domestic Prices of Steel Rails, 1871–1908
Which edition this is
This volume collects journal essays and lectures Taussig, a Harvard economics professor, published individually and revised repeatedly from 1882 through 1909, assembled into one continuously updated tariff history. This fifth edition, the one this archive hosts, added the closing chapter on the 1909 Payne-Aldrich Act and dropped an earlier chapter on "Some Aspects of the Tariff Question" that had appeared in the third and fourth editions.
Original 1910 text is in the public domain; the Ludwig von Mises Institute's 2010 introduction and typesetting are licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY 3.0).
Verified against the title page, copyright page, and "note to the first/fifth edition" pages of the hosted pdf (pages 4-8), 2026-08-04.
Chapter by chapter
What's in Tariff History of the United States
11 chapters. Page numbers are this edition's.
- Part I: Protection to Young Industries as Applied in the United States
-
Chapter I: The Argument for Protection to Young Industriesp. 12
Tests the young-industries case against early American manufacturing history chapter by chapter: cotton's real stimulus was the Embargo and the War of 1812, which cut off imports more completely than any tariff, and wool followed a similar path, but twenty years of heavy protection failed to modernize iron-making, which shifted to cheaper anthracite fuel only after duties began falling in the 1840s.
-
Chapter II: The Early Protective Movement and the Tariff of 1828p. 64
Traces how the farm distress following the panic of 1819 built a genuine popular movement for protection, which Jacksonian politicians then loaded with duties on raw materials New England needed, hoping the region would kill its own tariff; New England swallowed it instead, producing what came to be known as the Tariff of Abominations.
-
Chapter III: The Tariff, 1830-1860p. 98
Follows duty rates from the high protection of 1832 through the Compromise Tariff's scheduled cuts, the brief high tariff of 1842, and the moderate acts of 1846 and 1857, testing the common claim that each swing caused the era's booms and busts; finds cotton and most textiles grew steadily regardless of the rate, while only crude iron production tracked the duty closely.
- Part II: Tariff Legislation, 1861-1909
-
Chapter I: The War Tariffp. 136
Shows how the Civil War's revenue needs, compounded by heavy internal excise taxes that manufacturers had to be compensated for, drove duties from the moderate levels of 1857 to the extreme rates of the 1864 act, which passed both houses in five days with almost no debate and became the foundation of protection for the next generation.
-
Chapter II: The Failure to Reduce the Tariff after the Warp. 150
Explains why the "temporary" war duties outlived the internal taxes they were meant to offset: reform bills repeatedly failed in the 1860s and 1870s, and even the ten-percent horizontal cut of 1872, bought by abolishing the tea and coffee duties to win protectionist votes, was quietly repealed in 1875 once the panic of 1873 shrank revenue.
-
Chapter III: How Duties Were Raised above the War Ratesp. 170
Documents cases where duties climbed above their wartime peaks rather than merely surviving: the 1867 wool and woollens act, drafted largely by the manufacturers who wanted it, nearly doubled the real duty on wool through a compensating-duty formula, and comparable increases followed on copper, steel rails, marble, and nickel, each benefiting a narrow circle of producers.
-
Chapter IV: The Tariff Act of 1883p. 198
Covers the first general tariff revision since the war, prompted by a Treasury surplus rather than principle: cuts on goods no longer facing import competition were purely nominal, while duties actually rose on cotton hosiery, dress goods, iron ore, and finer woollens that were still genuinely contested by foreign sellers.
-
Chapter V: The Tariff Act of 1890p. 216
Covers the McKinley tariff, the sharpest extension of protection since the war: duties on woollens, dress goods, and cotton hosiery were pushed to new highs, a new tin-plate duty was made conditional on domestic output actually growing, and raw sugar was admitted free while domestic growers were paid a bounty instead.
-
Chapter VI: The Tariff Act of 1894p. 244
Follows the Democrats' reform attempt after the political backlash against the McKinley act: the House bill was substantially watered down in the Senate, where a handful of pivotal votes let the sugar-refining trust keep its favored duty, leaving free wool as the one genuinely sweeping change that survived into the finished act.
-
Chapter VII: The Tariff Act of 1897p. 274
Covers the Dingley tariff, which restored the wool duties repealed in 1894 and pushed woollens and silks to new peaks, and explains why the act then held unchanged for twelve years: with American iron and steel now competitive with Britain regardless of the rate, the tariff question was crowded off the public stage by the rising controversy over trusts and monopolies.
-
Chapter VIII: The Tariff Act of 1909p. 306
Covers the Payne-Aldrich tariff, passed on a campaign pledge of downward revision: hides were freed and iron and steel duties trimmed further, but the wool and sugar schedules went untouched and duties on silks and fine cottons were quietly raised, while a new tariff board was created to gather the cost data Congress had never systematically had.
Questions
About this book and this copy
- What is Tariff History of the United States?
- A working economist's contemporaneous history of every major US tariff act from the Republic's founding through 1909, written as individual journal essays and lectures between 1882 and 1909 and revised into one continuously updated volume. This fifth edition adds the chapter on the 1909 Payne-Aldrich Act.
- Was Taussig a protectionist or a free trader?
- He writes as an economic historian assessing evidence rather than as a campaigner for either side, but the evidence in the book consistently cuts one way: chapter after chapter finds tariffs got credit for growth better explained by other causes, such as the Embargo and War of 1812 for cotton or cheap natural resources for iron and copper, while the tariff's clearest measurable effects were higher prices and duties that outlived their original rationale by decades.
- Why does the Ludwig von Mises Institute publish a book by a Harvard economist outside the Austrian school?
- Taussig taught in the neoclassical tradition at Harvard, not the Austrian school the Institute is named for. The Mises Institute republishes historically significant economic texts across schools of thought, and this book is valued as a detailed factual record of what each nineteenth and early twentieth century tariff act actually did and how it was passed.
- Is Tariff History of the United States free to download?
- Yes. The complete 364-page PDF and EPUB downloads directly from this page (2.5 MB). There is no signup, no account and no paywall.
- Can I reuse or republish Tariff History of the United States?
- This edition is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, so yes, on that licence's terms. Check the deed for what attribution it requires.
- Who wrote Tariff History of the United States?
- Frank W. Taussig, American economist, taught at Harvard, and worked on international trade. His articles and books on tariffs, both in theory and in careful empirical studies of industries and history, became the foundation of how modern trade theory is…
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