Andrew Stewart

Andrew Stewart (1791-1872), affectionately known as “Tariff Andy”, was born on June 11, 1792, near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. He received his education from the public school system, and from a young age, he would work as a farmhand and as a teacher at a local country school. He remained in these roles until the age of eighteen, when he undertook the study of the law. He would be admitted into the bar in 1815 and would establish a practice in Uniontown. In the same year, he was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where he would remain until 1818. He would then be appointed as US District Attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania later that year and would remain there until 1820. It was in 1820 that Stewart’s career in federal politics began. He would be first elected to the House of Representatives as a Democratic-Republican and would then successfully recontest the 1823 election as a Democrat. He would then abandon the Democratic Party in 1828 for the National Republicans due to the tariff question, and would openly oppose the election of Andrew Jackson.

He would later join the Whig Party and would serve in the House of Representatives between 1843 and 1849. He would not seek renomination for Congress in 1849, choosing instead to contest the Vice President spot in the 1848 Whig primary, but lost out to Millard Fillmore. When the Whigs won the 1848 presidential election, Steward was asked to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, but was compelled to decline the offer due to illness. As a Whig Congressmen, Stewart was an earnest follower and contemporary of Henry Clay. During his time in Congress, Stewart would serve as Chairman of the Committee on the Tariff, as well as on the Committee on Internal Improvements, both of which constituted the two planks of Clay’s American System. Stewart would contribute to the American Protectionist doctrine through his numerous congressional speeches on the topic. Later, in 1872, these speeches would be compiled and published in a volume entitled The American System: Speeches on the Tariff Question and on Internal Improvements, a work which ran over 400 pages in length. After the collapse of the Whigs, Stewart would join the Republican Party, but would remain out of politics for some time, choosing instead to devote his time to private business, mostly in construction and real-estate. He would run for Congress, however, in 1870, but was unsuccessful. At the age of eighty two, Andrew Stewart died at his residence in Uniontown on July 16, 1872.