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WHAT DID THEY FIGHT OVER?
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South Carolina threatened to secede over the tariff in 1832. The tariff was reduced, with more reductions promised to follow. This continued to be a source of friction between north and south. The tariff provided 90% of the revenue for the national government. A high tariff on manufactured items protected industry from foreign competition. But the south, without industry, imported these items anyway and paid a disproportionate share of the taxes. The tariff also invited foreign retaliation which would have hurt exports. The south exported more than the north, and grew more cotton than the rest of the world combined. The south favored free trade but northern industry wanted more and higher tariffs which became part of the 1860 Republican Party platform. In May 1860 the House of Representatives approved the Morrill Tariff with the representatives of the eleven confederate states voting 39-1 against it. It was stalled in the Senate until secession left the north strong enough to pass it.
Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States
Convention of South Carolina, 25 December 1860, includes these words:
"For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue� to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures. ... The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three�fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others, connected with the operation of the General Government, has made the cities of the South provincial."
The Confederate Constitution prohibited protective tariffs but was mostly a copy of the U. S. Constitution. Jefferson Davis stated in his inaugural address "Our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit." On 2 March 1861, the same day the amendment protecting slavery was passed, the U.S. Senate passed the tariff. The south wanted slavery and free trade; the north effectively answered "you can have slavery but not free trade." When advised against sending the ships to Fort Sumter by General Winfield Scott and most of the cabinet, Lincoln responded "And open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry with their ten percent tariff. What, then would become of my tariff?"
The Boston Transcript editorial of 18 March 1861:
It does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive that trade is perhaps the controlling motive operating to prevent the return of the seceding states to the Union which they have abandoned. Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton states; but the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports. The merchants of New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York, Boston, and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their mercantile greatness, by a revenue system verging on free trade. If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby.
The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederate States that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interests of the country will suffer from the increased importation resulting from low duties.
After the war, the south's rate of growth lagged the rest of the country's until the demise of protectionist trade duties in the twentieth century. A brief respite from tariffs in the 1880's also coincided with a rate of growth matching the rest of the country's.
The abolitionist
Lysander Spooner
wrote in
"
No Treason
No. VI" (1870)
"Notwithstanding all this, that we had learned, and known, and professed, for nearly a century, these lenders of blood money had, for a long series of years previous to the war, been the willing accomplices of the slave-holders in perverting the government from the purposes of liberty and justice, to the greatest of crimes. They had been such accomplices for a purely pecuniary consideration, to wit, a control of the markets in the South; in other words, the privilege of holding the slave-holders themselves in industrial and commercial subjection to the manufacturers and merchants of the North (who afterwards furnished the money for the war). And these Northern merchants and manufacturers, these lenders of blood-money, were willing to continue to be the accomplices of the slave-holders in the future, for the same pecuniary considerations. But the slave-holders, either doubting the fidelity of their Northern allies, or feeling themselves strong enough to keep their slaves in subjection without Northern assistance, would no longer pay the price which these Northern men demanded. And it was to enforce this price in the future --- that is, to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South --- that these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, in order to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These --- and not any love of liberty or justice --- were the motives on which the money for the war was lent by the North. In short, the North said to the slave-holders: If you will not pay us our price (give us control of your markets) for our assistance against your slaves, we will secure the same price (keep control of your markets) by helping your slaves against you, and using them as our tools for main-taining dominion over you; for the control of your markets we will have, whether the tools we use for that purpose be black or white, and be the cost, in blood and money, what it may."
"The effect of a provision to pass commercial laws by a simple majority would be to deliver the south bound hand and foot to the eastern states."- George Mason
"Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils....The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."- Charles Dickens, December 1861
"You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions."- Texas Congressman Reagan, January 1861
"The contest is really for empire on the side of the North and for independence on that of the South...."- London Times, November 1861
"The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism."- Charleston Mercury (newspaper), November 1860
"They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people's pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests....These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union."- New Orleans Daily Crescent, January 1861
"The mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports....by a revenue system verging on free trade...."- the Boston Transcript, March 1861
"The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty."- Karl Marx, 1861
From the March 2, 1861 edition of The New York Evening Post: "That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe. There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop. "What, then, is left for our government? Shall we let the seceding states repeal the revenue laws for the whole Union in this manner? Or will the government choose to consider all foreign commerce destined for those ports where we have no custom-houses and no collectors as contraband, and stop it, when offering to enter the collection districts from which our authorities have been expelled?"
In October 1862, Boston's North American Review wrote: "Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, 'to fire the Southern Heart' and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation."
Further, two days before the November 1860 election, the Charleston Mercury wrote: "The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism."
