Alexander Dallas

Alexander James Dallas (1759-1817) was born in Kingston, Jamaica on June 21, 1759. He was of Scottish and Irish ancestry. With Jamaica lacking adequate educational facilities, the Dallas family decided to move to Edinburgh, and then to London, to put the young Alexander through schooling. Dallas was planning to become a lawyer, but upon the death of his father at the age of ten, his family could no longer afford to fund his legal training. He would eventually return to Jamaica in 1780, and through family connections, he would be admitted to the bar. Dallas would remain in Jamaica for three years, before deciding to seek out a new life in the United States. With a letter of introduction from William Bingham and Robert Morris, who he became acquainted with in Jamaica, Dallas sailed to the United States in 1783. He would settle in Philadelphia and would be admitted into the Pennsylvania bar in 1785. Dallas also established a career in journalism during this time. He would briefly gain employment with the Pennsylvania Evening Herald in 1787, and would then become the editor of Mathew Carey’s Columbian Magazine later that year.

In January of 1791, Dallas would be appointed Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and not long after he would become involved in the Democratic-Republican Party, where he positioned himself in the more conservative and nationalist wing of the Party. He would then pen the work, Features of Mr. Jay’s Treaty in 1795, which castigated Federalists for normalizing trade relations with Britian. Annexed to this work was his essay View of the Commerce in the United States, which emphasized the economic implications of the Treaty. In 1801, Dallas would then be appointed as the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Dallas would remain there until 1814, when President Madison appointed him to replaced Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury. During his tenure, Dallas produced several major treasury reports, including his Report on Public Credit, his Report on Treasury Notes, and his Report on the National Bank.

Dallas’s main protectionist work, however, was his Report on the General Tariff, which was communicated to Congress on February 12, 1816. In this Report, Dallas notes that while the establishment of domestic manufactures was deemed important ever since Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures, the government never implemented policies to bring about this end. Dallas observed, however, that “American manufactures” had “been introduced during the restrictive system and the war,” referring to the US non-importation acts enacted during the Napoleonic Wars. These peculiar circumstances “afforded a sufficient inducement for [the] investment of capital, and [the] application of labor” to manufacturing, but, Dallas noted, that this “inducement, in its necessary extent, must fail when the day of competition returns.” Dallas’s primary concern was not so much the encouragement of infant industries but preventing the loss of already established industries. Indeed, “the present policy of the Government,” explains Dallas, “is directed to protect, and not to create manufactures.” Dallas therefore proposes high rates of protection for mature industries, moderate rates for infant industries, and revenue rates for industries which are unestablished or unsuited to the United States. In November of 1816, Dallas would retire from public office, and would return to his law practice in Philadelphia. Within just weeks of returning to Philadelphia, Dallas would die on January 16, 1817, following bouts of a mysterious and reoccurring pain.