During his first bid for the presidency, Donald Trump described free trade as an outright affront to the Founding Fathers.
In a special America 250 issue, Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here.
Earlier this year, a gilded portrait exposing him at the center, flanked by figures who shared his appetite for taxing imports—Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley—was unveiled by the president. Beneath their visages the label The Tariff Men appeared.
Tariffs have long held a prominent spot in Trump’s idiosyncratic narrative about the nation’s beginnings. In his first campaign for the presidency, roughly ten years ago, he stated that free trade is “a direct affront to our Founding Fathers,” who “understood trade” and believed tariffs were necessary to safeguard the new country’s economic autonomy. “Two hundred forty years after the Revolution,” he lamented, “we have turned things completely upside-down.” With tariffs, he concluded, “it’s time to declare our economic independence once again.”
Trump and his aides have continued to drive that message home ever since. Earlier this year, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer used his Davos platform to lecture audiences on the “Hamiltonian economic system” of the Founding, which “American leaders slowly forgot” as they moved away from tariffs and industrial policy toward free markets. Vice President J.D. Vance has echoed a similar tale. “I believe America’s wealth was built by an American system” of trade protectionism and industrial subsidies, he stated in 2021. “I…don’t believe it was built by what folks often call neoliberalism, or classic liberalism.” Trump’s lawyers have woven references to the Founders, particularly Hamilton, into their arguments in the recent Supreme Court tariff case.
Following the arc of Trump’s “tariff men” painting, the narrative frames an America that emerged from the Revolution amid economic insecurity. With political independence secured on the battlefield, Hamilton allegedly shifted focus toward economic independence from British trade, employing tariffs and industrial policy to buttress the Revolution. Clay, in the House and later as secretary of state, turned these ideas into the “American System” in the 1820s—a three-part plan featuring tariffs, a central bank, and subsidies for internal improvements designed to protect and cultivate American wealth. Lincoln and McKinley carried the banner in the 19th century, culminating in a lengthy period of tariff protection from the Civil War era through the early 20th century.
An element of conspiratorial thinking enters the narrative at this juncture, portraying anti-protectionist intruders as having derailed the American System from its rightful role as the engine of American wealth. A supposed hollowing-out of the American economy followed, only to be corrected when Trump stepped in to restore tariffs as the core of the Founding.
This is essentially the version advanced by Oren Cass, whom Vance has praised as “one of the smartest thinkers about political economy in the country.” In Cass’s view, “the American tradition from the founding was one of aggressive protectionism and support for domestic industry.” By contrast, free trade “emanat[ed] from Britain as self-serving ideology” designed to prop up its empire at the expense of others. After almost 175 years of economic independence, the United States allegedly bowed to free-trade propaganda in the aftermath of World War II.
If this account sounds familiar, it is largely a Trump-inspired update of an older protectionist mythology that has circulated for decades. In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan likewise depicted free trade as “a betrayal of the country as it was structured by Washington and Hamilton and Madison,” tracing a similar “lost” lineage from Hamilton to Clay to Lincoln and McKinley. Lyndon LaRouche, seen by many as a cult figure, wrote a paranoid tract accusing economist Milton Friedman of luring America with free-trade dogma and thereby undermining its protectionist founding. (LaRouche’s co-author, David Goldman, is now a senior adviser to Trump’s State Department and a recurring figure in the “national conservative” movement.)
A conspicuous omission complicates these and other attempts to marshal the American Founding in support of Trump’s tariff program. Amid their many historical appeals, the Declaration of Independence’s text itself is not quoted. Specifically, they omit any discussion of the Declaration’s charges against the British Crown for “cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”—actions that closely resemble Trump’s bid to rewrite the entire U.S. tariff schedule by executive order.
As those passages suggest, the White House’s retelling of its history seems reversed in key respects. Rather than aiming to unleash a Hamiltonian tariff republic, the American colonies explicitly rebelled against British constraints on their ability to trade with the wider world.
About two years before he penned the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson drew up a list of grievances for Virginia’s delegates to the First Continental Congress. His “Summary View of the Rights of British America” sought a peaceful remedy to growing tensions with London, stopping short of full independence. Although Jefferson did not attend the Congress himself, his eloquent pamphlet helped establish him as the voice capable of articulating the colonists’ complaints. That is why he was chosen to draft the Declaration in 1776.
When the two documents are compared, the origin of the Declaration’s trade clause becomes immediately evident. A pivotal passage from Jefferson’s earlier document asserts the colonies’ interest in “the exercise of a free trade with all parts of the world, possessed by the American colonists, as of natural right, and which no law of their own had taken away or abridged.”
To mount his case, Jefferson examined the legal history of Britain’s relationship with its American colonies. He drew on a 1651 agreement between Virginia’s House of Burgesses and the English commonwealth, which held that “the people of Virginia have free trade as the people of England do enjoy to all places and with all nations” and that “Virginia shall be free from all taxes, customs & impositions whatsoever,” absent the colonists’ consent. Parliament attempted to reshape this relationship—initially through the Navigation Acts that required shipments to move through England and on English vessels, and later through the well-known revenue taxes on sugar, tea, and printed goods.
These measures culminated in Parliament’s assertive claim to legislate for the colonies “in all cases whatsoever” via the Declaratory Act of 1766, followed by a later display of that power in 1774 when the Crown shut Boston’s port and suspended Massachusetts’ charter and government. Some of the Revolution’s most provocative triggers thus centered on Britain’s taxation of and interference with American trade.
Similar threads run through earlier protests prior to the Declaration. As early as 1763, James Otis condemned “the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land, or houses, or ships, on real or personal, fixed or floating property” as “absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the Colonists.” Otis’s framing mattered because he saw taxes on trade as the wellspring from which all other unilateral assertions of the Crown’s taxing power sprang. Samuel Adams would crystallize these arguments into a clarion call: “For, if our trade may be taxed, why not our lands? Why not the produce of our lands, and every thing we possess or make use of? This, we apprehend, annihilates our charter right to govern and tax ourselves.”
The linkage between trade restrictions and the crown’s militarization of the colonies, along with the curtailment of long-held civil liberties, also emerges. In 1761, Otis filed suit against the crown’s use of “writs of assistance” to conduct warrantless searches in Boston. These measures also sprang from trade concerns, as Otis’s clients—a group of 63 merchants—opposed the writs as an unlimited tool for enforcing tariffs. John Adams, who watched Otis argue the case as a young attorney, would later recall that it was “then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years…he grew up to manhood, and declared himself free.”
The prominence of trade in the Revolution’s origins helps address a long-standing paradox about the colonies’ motives. Although the Revolution is famous as a tax revolt, Americans paid relatively modest taxes compared with those in England itself. The total amount was described as “paltry,” and most of Parliament’s new revenue measures were “moderate and often short-lived,” as economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey notes. Yet they sparked a political upheaval against the imposition of a new and distant authority.
The issue wasn’t the rate of taxation; it was Parliament’s claim to tax power over trade, and thus over everything else. To the lawyer Jefferson, the crown’s regulation of trade was a “nullity”—the “true ground on which we declare these acts void is, that the British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us.” Or as an elderly Captain Levi Preston, a veteran of the Battle of Concord, reportedly told a young interviewer in 1843, “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to.”
The significance of tariffs in the Founders’ economic thinking did not vanish after they objected to the manner of implementation. Several leading Founders were voracious readers of political economy. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin assisted his friend George Whatley in preparing a pamphlet arguing for free trade. Anticipating Adam Smith’s more famous The Wealth of Nations, Franklin’s notes on the manuscript observed that “No Nation was ever ruin’d by Trade; even, seemingly, the most disadvantageous.” Several years after the Declaration, John Jay answered a query from the Spanish government by pledging that the young nation would pursue free trade. He explained that American sentiment favored “Every Man being then at Liberty by the Law to cultivate the Earth as he pleased, to raise what he pleased, to manufacture as he pleased, and to sell the Produce of his Labor to whom he pleased, and for the best Prices without any Duties or Impositions whatsoever.”
Yet a tariff system did surface in the early republic, providing some credence to Trump’s narrative. The 1787 Constitution authorized “imposts,” or import taxes, largely as a revenue mechanism. They were mostly revenue-focused, though. Even Hamilton, the most protectionist among the primary Founders, limited his tariff proposals to relatively modest, revenue-raising rates in his famed 1791 Report on Manufactures. Rather than breaking with the supposed British doctrine of free trade, most Americans still viewed their former nation as a leading advocate of protectionism. George Washington criticized Britain for its own “unwise” and self-defeating “restriction of our trade, and her heavy imposts on the staple commodities of this Country” after the wartime peace resumed.
It is true that the United States moved toward greater protectionism in the 19th century, sometimes aligning with Clay’s American System. Although Trump seeks to anchor this tradition in the Revolution, that linkage is inaccurate.
Clay first unveiled his tariff plan in 1824, a generation after most of the Founders had died. After Madison received a copy, he wrote to the Kentucky congressman to express his doubts: “Candor obliges me to add that I cannot concur in the extent to which the pending Bill carries the Tariff, nor in some of the reasonings by which it is advocated.”
Nearby Monticello, an 82-year-old Jefferson read Clay’s bill with even deeper misgivings. The American System, in his view, claimed a federal “power to do whatever they may think, or pretend, would promote the general welfare, which construction would make that, of itself, a complete government, without limitation of powers.” He concluded that Virginia would likely have to tolerate such a measure if it passed, choosing the unthinkable alternative of disunion. Yet the author of the Declaration of Independence had one final political act. He drafted a resolution denouncing the American System’s “usurpations…against which, in point of right, we do protest as null and void, and never to be quoted as precedents of right.”
“Null and void.” It was the same language Jefferson had used a half-century earlier to condemn Parliament for trampling Americans’ right to trade freely with the world.
