Tariffs were the greatest (approaching 95% at times) source of federal revenue until the Federal income tax began after 1913. For well over a century the federal government was largely financed by tariffs averaging about 20% on foreign imports.
Thomas Jefferson: “experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort: [we should] purchasing nothing foreign where an equivalent of domestic fabric can be obtained, without regard to difference of price”
Henry Clay: “When gentlemen have succeeded in their design of an immediate or gradual destruction of the American System, what is their substitute? Free trade! Free trade!...
... The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child, in its nurse's arms, for the moon, or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven...
It never has existed; it never will exist. Trade implies, at least two parties. To be free, it should be fair, equal and reciprocal.”
Abraham Lincoln: “Give us a protective tariff and we will have the greatest nation on earth." Lincoln warned that "the abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government… must produce want and ruin among our people."
Teddy Roosevelt: “The country has acquiesced in the wisdom of the protective-tariff principle. It is exceedingly undesirable that this system should be destroyed or that there should be violent and radical changes therein...
Our past experience shows that great prosperity in this country has always come under a protective tariff.”
IMO: Look no further than China to see the the benefits of industrial growth under a system of protectionism.
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