What did Lincoln say about tariffs?

A fair question, and one I addressed at some length during my travels to Pennsylvania in early 1861. My view was always that the tariff is, as I put it in those remarks, “a question of national housekeeping. It is to the government what replenishing the meal-tub is to the family” Revenue must be raised somehow, and if not by direct taxation, then by duties on imports — and that necessity, I observed, makes the tariff question “as durable as the government itself” Where the real controversy begins is not over whether to raise revenue, but over whether duties ought to be adjusted to favor home production. One side argues such adjustment oppresses one class for the benefit of another. The other contends that, in the long run, all classes are benefited. I had sympathy for the latter view, particularly on grounds of labor. My reasoning ran thus: if equal labor produces a bar of iron in England and another in Pennsylvania, it makes no sense to ship the English bar across the ocean when the Pennsylvania bar lies ready at hand. The carrying cost is, as I put it, a dead loss of labor. I leaned toward the Chicago platform's plank on the subject, which called for duties adjusted to secure to working men liberal wages, to agriculture remunerating prices, and to the nation commercial prosperity — though I confessed I had not a thoroughly matured judgment on the details.