I'm not an economist, so I'm not able to poke the appropriate holes in this argument. I suspect, however, that it is ridiculously simplistic.
I would also like to point out that southern apologists can hardly be considered more reliable to prove a point than Wikipedia. Also, the very quote you use shows that the Northwest was affected as much by the tariff as was the South. All non-manufacturers were equally affected, throughout the Union. A New England farmer paid the same "tax" to his New England manufacturer neighbor as a South Carolina planter.
I took three economics courses as an undergrad, but I'm no economist either. As an engineer though I am used to doing material balances around chemical plants or other parts of a system. Let's do that for domestically manufactured items items.
Draw boxes around the 1860s North (say Pennsylvania or Ohio and points east), the West (today's Midwest and West), and the South back in 1860 before the Morrill Tariff. Prop up manufacturing prices with a nationwide tariff so that manufactured items from the North box can compete with European manufactured items. I know the tariffs before the war were not supposed to be particularly protective, but there are protective effects with any tariff. I'll modify the actual numbers some below for purposes of this discussion.
The North sells 100 million dollars worth of items each to the South and West and 150 million are sold in the North. Suppose that 20 percent of the price of those goods was due to the tariff (roughly matches the percentage of import price that was collected as tariff). Forty million of that 200 million dollars sold to the South and West could be attributed to the increase in the price of those goods because the price was propped up by tariff.
The West and the South would each be paying about 20 million dollars to the Northern manufacturer that was due solely to the tariff. That money would go to support Northern manufacturers and provide jobs for Northern skilled workers. It would have been transferred out of the West and South because of the tariff.
Yes, the farmer in the North would also have to pay higher prices on domestic goods because of the tariff. Some 30 million dollars in our example. But regionally that money would stay in the North benefiting the Northern economy. If Northern politicians were in the pockets of manufacturers then, surprise, they might vote to benefit their big money contributors.
Is there some other effect I'm forgetting? My figures above are not meant to be exact.
I found it interesting that six of the 14 Senate votes of February 20, 1861, against the Morrill Tariff came from the West. The other eight votes against came from the South (if you include one vote from Maryland). No votes against it came from the North.
One way of interpreting that vote was that Southern and Western senators voted against the sectional aggrandizement that the Morrill Tariff represented. Their regions were already having to pay increased prices for domestic goods because of the old tariff on imported goods. The Morrill Tariff meant that the portion of the price of domestic goods that they would have to pay due to tariff would increase by about 50%. The South and West would have to pay 30 million dollars each to the Northern manufacturer rather than the 20 million they had been paying before.
Sectional aggrandizement and partial legislation favoring the North were listed as causes for secession in at least the Texas and Georgia cause documents.
One of these factors may have been protective and other tariffs. I'm sure you will also agree that it is human nature to blame your problems on factors caused by others rather than on your own failures as an individual or society. So when southerners thought of their problems they certainly had an incentive to blame it on the North.
Nevertheless, if a federal (or confederate) government were to be maintained, funds would have to be raised. Most of the apologists for the South seem to assume that tariffs could be dumped and the government run on air. Tariffs on imports are easily collected and require minimal intrusion on the lives of those who eventually pay the tax.
Since southerners objected to the tariff, I assume they had other proposed mechanisms for raising money. Perhaps a direct tax imposed on each slave, the single largest category of property in the South? LOL
It is quite obvious that the South had dominated the copuntry up through 1850 by allying itself with the agrarian northwest against the industrializing northeast.
They they went too far. The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision caused the considerable majority of folks in the northwest to ally themselves with the northeast against the south. The northwest viewed freedom as even more important. IMO the south viewed maintaining the absence of freedom as equally important.
Sectional aggrandizement and partial legislation favoring the North were listed as causes for secession in at least the Texas and Georgia cause documents.
Agreed. However, I believe all or almost all of the state documents listed threats to the institution of slavery as their primary reason.
Using your numbers above, the South apparently viewed paying $20M/year in "tribute" to the North as a greater problem than even a potential threat to accumulated capital worth well over $2,000M.