Editor’s note: This essay is part of Mississippi Today Ideas, a platform for thoughtful Mississippians to share fact-based ideas about our state’s past, present and future. You can read more about the section here.
“The minor events of history are valuable, though not always showy or picturesque.” — Mark Twain, 1891
“I always say ‘tariffs’ is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.” — Donald Trump, 2025
If I could slow time down just a kiss it would all come back, clear as that wink of a moon over freshly planted rows of cotton on Trout Valley Farm. Seems like only yesterday I was living out my calling, farming with my family in Tallahatchie County. The year before we had picked our best crop on record, and 2018 promised healthier markets for the fiber. Heading into spring I couldn’t wait to prep fields for planting.
As farmers we are fundamentally hopeful people. The mere act of putting a seed into the earth and hanging the well-being of an entire family on it is itself an act of radical hope. As I once heard my father say, “Every year I take all I have and all I hope to ever have and plow it into the ground.”
And so, we entered the 2018 planting season with even more cotton acres than 2017. We didn’t know then there was doom on the horizon, though no one in our universe had ever heard of Wuhan, China.
And yet, China loomed large in our daily discussions about the future. A trade war simmered throughout the Spring. It was like the child’s game “King of the Hill: Tariff Edition.” The contestants: President Trump and General Secretary Xi JinPing. Every time cotton and grain markets went on a run, a presidential tweet or an announcement from Beijing would send commodities tumbling, as Sisyphus after a traipse up the mountain.
By 2019 the markets were severely depressed for both. A tariff-induced depressed market, untimely drought, runaway production costs, and uncertainty due to the trade war forced us to close the doors on a 148-year-old, multi-generational, family-run farm. We became another victim of economic central planning and the hapless confluence of calamitous circumstances.
A soybean field at sunset at Trout Valley Farm. Credit: Courtesy photoIt caused my wife, our young daughter and me to upend our lives. The dream I worked for all my adult life and upon which my future depended, dead. At 40-years old, I had to recalibrate. My wife and I had to move from my community where we were both hopeful and active participants in its revitalization.
In 2019, there was a 20% increase in farm bankruptcies across America. And this despite government largesse in the form of an inflation-inducing 28-billion-dollar bailout. While bankruptcies ran rampant, we don’t even know the total number of farmers who simply stopped, as we did, rented their land and moved away. In the final accounting, we’ll likely find that depopulation and dispossession of our rural and agricultural class is what led to America’s demise.
While a farm is a dynamic and complex enterprise whereby any number and any combination of things can cause its failure, there is one thing that poses a greater immediate threat to any farm at any moment: Tariffs.
Agrarian people have always known this. Our history is replete with political and sectional strife over the federal government’s use of tariffs and the redistributionism that comes with it. This history needs a little sunshine as agricultural people have always pulled the short straw with protectionist tariffs.
The current iteration, as far as I can tell, is a negotiating tactic, yes. Revenue tariffs, it seems. But, President Trump has also been adamant that they are protectionist, intended to bring manufacturing jobs back, which, of course, is a laudable goal. It’s not clear that further impoverishing farm families, many of whom are already in financial straits, is the way to do it.
A recent Farm Journal poll showed that 54% of farmers don’t support tariffs as a negotiating strategy. The same poll found a bleak 92% of agriculture economists believe tariffs will hurt farmers in the long run. All the while the number of farmers has dwindled to a point where we are no longer a statistically significant parcel of the population.
Conflicts concerning tariffs along the urban/agricultural divide go back to the early years of the Republic. In 1816 Congress approved the first protective tariff, the Dallas Tariff at 20% to help pay off the debt from the War of 1812. They also wanted to level the playing field between English manufacturing and the nascent attempt at industrialism in the North. In 1824, the Sectional Tariff on imported goods went to 33% . In another four years the “Tariff of Abominations” placed a 38% tax on 92% of imported goods. Each of these found opposition across the South, as Southern farmers sold their crops and bought their goods on the international market. So, they had to pay more for goods and sell their crops for less, as we did in 2018.
South Carolina threatened secession. By 1832, South Carolina had the support of several states and declared these tariffs unconstitutional, thus unenforceable. President Andrew Jackson threatened the unthinkable: using the military to go to South Carolina and collect the duties at gun point. In 1833, President Jackson successfully urged Congress to pass the Force Act, to get the authority to do it. Henry Clay (architect of the American System agenda) and John C. Calhoun (Jackson’s vice president) avoided a disaster by reaching a compromise to incrementally reduce the tariffs, thereby stopping the Nullification Crisis from devolving into violence.
By 1842 Northern industrial interests were back at it with the Black Tariff. This put rates back around the levels of the “Tariff of Abominations.” The South howled claiming revolution was the only solution for this issue. James Polk won the next election and started reducing the tariff. The Walker Tariff of 1846 lowered the average rate to 25%. This stimulated trade and led to higher government revenues. While other major sectional differences persisted, on the tariff front, at least, the sections seemed satisfied.
In 1857, however, with a healthy tariff of around 15%, it began to fall apart. There was a financial panic that year caused by several converging events. However, a leading economist – Henry Carey, a Republican and avowed protectionist– laid the whole thing at the feet of the lower tariffs.
Due to Carey’s prominence, Rep. Justin Smith Morrill (R., Vermont), a founder of the Republican Party, recruited him to help develop a new tariff. For two years, prior to 1860, Congress debated the Morrill Tariff. It didn’t pass until after Abraham Lincoln’s election once states had started to secede. James Buchanan signed it into law on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration.
As early as 1832, in the midst of the Nullification Crises, Lincoln said, “I am in favor of the internal improvement system and a high protective tariff,” before adding 28 years later in 1860, “My views have undergone no change… the tariff is to the government what a meal is to a family.” The Morrill tariff both informed and defined U.S. trade policy until the second incarnation of the income tax in 1913.
So, in terms of cultural differences in economic philosophy, what does this history verify except that farmers and stakeholders in an agricultural economy dependent on foreign trade have always vehemently advocated for free trade and against protectionist tariffs. And, that protectionist tariffs are a fundamental part of the Republican Party’s DNA. In fact, the Republican Party’s platform from 1860 featured the tariff as its 12th plank.
Mike Wagner, who owns Two Brooks Rice and farms grain in the Delta commiserated recently, “This tariff talk comes at the worst possible time for many of America’s farmers. There’s a perfect storm of conditions already [rising taxes, land/equipment/production costs] …China has not bought U.S. corn or soy since Jan. 16th.” After a pensive pause, he continued, “This happened most recently during the 45th presidency, and our export capacity never regained its footing…when agricultural markets are lost, the loss is permanent or gruelingly regained. A nation that can’t maintain the foundational part of its economy that farming is, and won’t support her growers, sacrifices her best defense.”
To better understand the impact of these particular tariffs, I spoke with Hank Reichle, president and CEO of Staplcotn, the oldest and largest cotton cooperative in the U.S. Echoing Mark Twain, he proffered, “By the way, history rhymes. Here we go again, like the Nullification Crisis, where agrarian South Carolina was concerned with tariffs restricting commerce, this time states concerned with the same are actually taking the President to court over the tariffs.
“Compared to President Trump’s first term, this trade war is a little different because it doesn’t involve only China. Tariffs are only good for farmers if they create a competitive marketing advantage.” Reiterating the danger to farmers, he explained, “Tariffs slow the global economic growth that fuels consumption and so decreases demand for commodities.”
But, Reichle doesn’t only predict despair and doom. Due to the reciprocal nature of the context President Trump created, we could see commodity markets rise as new markets open to U.S. farmers. According to Reichle, “…there are several countries that buy a significant amount of cotton on the export market who could easily increase purchases from the U.S. while decreasing them from the likes of Brazil and Australia…”
Tenuous as it is, I worry for all my friends still farming and welcome this bit of hope. This is a year wherein the lives of many farmers and their families’ futures hang in the balance. If we get to harvest without a solution, it will not bode well for any of us. For without farmers prayerfully, hopefully and profitably “plowing all they have into the ground” every year, American society and its position in the world will crumble.
Our greatest hope now is that our representatives in Washington remember their constituents and make deals (and tax cuts) that are in our best interest. Quickly.
Or, as Wagner put it, “Farming has always been a full contact sport…We need leadership. Not leadershit.”
Cal Trout holds bachelor’s degrees in history and English and a master’s degree in journalism. He currently owns and operates Trout Valley Quail Preserve and is a real estate agent. He also publishes and hosts the newsletter and podcast “Standing Point: Stories from Americans Afield,” which can be found at www.troutvalleyquail.com.
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