Why? Goods destined for Northern consumers would have to be delivered to a North eventually and the tariff would be collected then.
That must be why they called up 75,000 troops with the goal of forcing the North into the Confederacy.
Whatever the goals of the Confederacy was, it is a fact that they started the war by firing on Sumter and that they seceded to protect their slave property.
“Why? Goods destined for Northern consumers would have to be delivered to a North eventually and the tariff would be collected then. “
European shippers would choose lower tariff southern ports when possible. Previously tariffs were equal so there was no reason to make a choice based on price. European goods would also be less expensive for the South when tariffs were lower. Northern made goods would be less competitive. The lower tariff would have an impact, just as tax havens do today.
“Whatever the goals of the Confederacy was, it is a fact that they started the war by firing on Sumter and that they seceded to protect their slave property.”
Of course such property had been legal since before the Revolution, with George Washington being one of the larger practitioners in Colonial days.
As we know in hindsight Southerners were correct in their suspicion that the North had decided to abrogate the idea of human property by force- any Constitutional remedy was moving too slowly. That plan was hardly a secret, a campaign of vilification and hatemongering had been waged on the ‘slaveocracy’ for decades in the run-up to the war, a situation well documented in Fleming’s recent “A Disease in the Public Mind”.
By 1859 that vilification campaign flowered with John Brown’s murderous plan for a Haiti-style slave rebellion, financed by wealthy Northern abolitionists. There was no longer any doubt that Northerners were waging a guerrilla war against the South, with John Brown being widely praised as something akin to a Messiah.
The election of 1860 confirmed that the country had divided. Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote and not one electoral vote south of the Mason-Dixon line. This was the most extreme example of sectional division in American political history.