Other issues overshadowed the tariff, which was really considered to be settled, and a President and Congress were chosen without any distinct knowledge on the part of their constituents as to what their action might be upon this question.

The popular mind had been engrossed with the annexation of Texas and with the dawn of the free-soil excitement; hence protection and free-trade were in many States scarcely debated from lack of interest, and, in the States where interest prevailed, both parties took substantially the same side.
A deception had however been practiced in the manufacturing States of the North, and when the administration of Mr.Polk was installed, the friends of protection were startled by the appointment of a determined opponent of the tariff of 1842, as Secretary of the Treasury.

Robert J.Walker was a senator from Mississippi when the Act was passed, and was bitterly opposed to it.

He was a man of great originality, somewhat speculative in his views, and willing to experiment on questions of revenue to the point of rashness.
He was not a believer in the doctrine of protection, was persuaded that protective duties bore unjustly and severely upon the planting section with which he was identified; and he came to his office determined to overthrow the tariff Act, which he had been unable to defeat in the Senate.

Mr.Walker was excessively ambitious to make his term in the Treasury an era in the history of the country.
He had a difficult task before him,--one from which a conservative man would have shrunk.