It was enacted indeed two months in advance of the law creating a Treasury Department, and providing for a Secretary thereof.

The need of money was indeed so urgent that provision was made for raising it by duties on imports before the appointment of a single officer of the Cabinet was authorized.

Even a Secretary of State, whose first duty it was to announce the organization of the government to foreign nations, was not nominated for a full month after the Act imposing duties had been passed.
THE TARIFF ENACTED BY FIRST CONGRESS.
All the issues involved in the new Act were elaborately and intelligently debated.

The first Congress contained a large proportion of the men who had just before been engaged in framing the Federal Constitution, and who were therefore fresh from the councils which had carefully considered and accurately measured the force of every provision of that great charter of government.
It is therefore a fact of lasting importance that the first tariff law enacted under the Federal Government set forth its object in the most succinct and explicit language.

It opened, after the excellent fashion of that day, with a stately preamble beginning with the emphatic "whereas," and declaring that "it is necessary for the support of government, for the discharge of the debts of the United States, _and for the encouragement and protection of manufactures_, that duties be laid on imported goods, wares, and merchandise." Among the men who agreed to that declaration were some of the most eminent in our history.