… is from historian Marc-William Palen’s January 10, 2018, interview with the Toynbee Prize Foundation:
When I initially started doing research and tracing the origins of this debate after I found FDR’s Secretary of State Cordell Hull being referred to as the ‘Tennessee Cobden.’ I was quite surprised and wondered when these references about British free trade entered American political discourse. I came to realize that to trace the origins of Cobdenism in the United States, I needed to focus not on the middle of the twentieth century, when histories of US trade liberalization usually start, but on the 1830s and 1840s. It is there that you see radical American intellectuals clearly starting to embrace Cobden’s ideas.
As a result, something I really did not expect to do was to study the ways in which free trade would be used in the context of emancipation. That is, I hadn’t at first considered asking what happened to abolitionists after the US Civil War, and one of the things I discovered was that many of the most radical abolitionist leaders became the leaders of the burgeoning American free trade movement. They embraced Cobden’s philosophy connecting free trade, non-intervention, world peace and anti-imperialism. They believed that the more integrated the world markets, the less likely war. For them, free trade thus became the next step in emancipating humankind. American free traders were fascinated by what they perceived as the entwined successes of Britain’s antislavery and free trade movements. The American Cobdenite free trade movement was therefore in part a legacy of the transatlantic antislavery movement, which was both a cause of and a crystalizing factor for their Anglophilia. That’s also why you find this fascinating use of antislavery rhetoric in the Gilded Age tariff debate.
DBx: Pictured above is Cordell Hull.
