It is well documented that both Henry Clay and Daniel Webster received kickbacks for their service to the agenda of the national bank. Both were in the back pocket of the Second Bank of the United States, and received kickbacks and other compensation from the corrupt bank director Nicholas Biddle. Andrew Jackson rightly saw it as a corrupting influence upon the body politic to be dispensed with.
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It should not come as surprise to many that Abraham Lincoln considered himself to be a heartfelt admirer of Henry Clay, and he made Clay his exemplar. During 1852, at his death, Abraham Lincoln eulogized Clay as “the beau ideal of a statesman” and the “great parent of Whig Principles.” Lincoln was conscious in making Clay as his political archetype, in noting: “During my whole political life, I loved and revered [Clay] as a teacher and leader.” When the Whig Party was fractured in the sectional strife, out of the ashes arose the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.Lincoln took up the mantle of the American System, and he supported some of the most onerous tariff increases in American history. The Morrill Tariff of 1861 was a protectionist tariff bill passed by the U.S. Congress in early 1861. The main purpose was the protection and encouragement of a cadre of northeastern manufacturing interests. Not surprisingly, 87% of the northern congressmen supported the bill and 87.5% of southern congressmen opposed it. As historian Frank Tausig observes, the schedule of the Morrill Tariff and its two successor bills were retained long after the end of the war. Whereas tariffs were around rates of 18–20% on average in the 1820s, the Morrill Tariff raised the average rates to 36.2%, and it was subsequently revised upward in 1864, and the average rate stood at 47.56%.
The Real Henry Clay: The Corrupt American Architect of Mercantilism and Protectionism
"a cadre of northeastern manufacturing interests" which we have now come to know as the "Globalist Elite." The Pullers of the GOPe strings.