Posted on 10/29/2001 11:26:49 AM PST by aomagrat
If that is the case, why did they care so much about the tariff? Enough that it was a major motive for secession?
I will rely upon those that were there. A newspaper in 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. Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States; but 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 upon 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 Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the country will suffer from the increased importations resulting from low duties.
But in case you need some facts to help you along, enjoy:
If the Confederacy wanted an army the size of the Union, in 1860 it would have cost $16 million. If they wanted a navy to match the Union, in 1860 it would have cost another $11 million. Operation of a government less than 25% the size of the Union, $4 million.
Grand total of $31 million.
Value of total Southern exports in 1859 was $208 million, bringing in a like valued import amount at an 8% tariff, and what do you have? Left over $16 million? About $3 a person of personal taxes? Check my math.
They would just charge those yankee traders a port tax.
"That either revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importation from abroad... If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next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....Allow railroad iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten percent, which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not one ounce more would be imported at New York; the railways would be supplied from the southern ports."
Value of total Southern exports in 1859 was $208 million, bringing in a like valued import amount at an 8% tariff, and what do you have?
You have the end of your claims to a free trade zone, among other things.
It is false to say that tariffs were even a minor irritant, or cause of the war.
Consider:
"The total revenues of the Federal government in 1860 amounted to a mere $56,054,000. The population of the whole US in 1860 was 33,443,321. Thus, Federal taxation per capita was less than $2 per person. Even if the 9,103,332 people in the soon-to-secede Southern states paid all of the Federal taxation in 1860 (which they did not), their per capita cost would still have been less than $7 for the entire year. From these inconsequential sums, another secessionist myth has been created and sustained for 140 years.
Be that as it may, the record shows that tariffs were an irritant, however irrational, to Southern interests up to 1846. In that year, accordingly, Federal tariffs were generally lifted in response to Southern pressures and in favor of free trade. From 1846 until early 1861, what was essentially a free trade regime existed in the whole of the USA. It was only after (and because) rebellion broke out that the US Congress passed the hated Morrill tariffs.
It is instructive to note again that the tariffs that the South protested before the ACW were actually taxes on goods and services imported into the South. In the real world, these imports included significant proportions of luxury goods such as fine British furniture and whiskey, French fashions and perfumes and Cuban rums and cigars. Most of these things were available from the North, and Northern interests wanted to protect their markets in both North and South by adding costs to their foreign competition. Likewise, the South also wanted to protect its markets in the North on products produced in the South but not the North. Accordingly, well before the ACW, southern legislators in the US Congress sought and received substantial tariffs on imports impinging on the domestic markets of Southern agricultural products. For example, the prewar sugar growers of the deep South and the hemp growers of the upper South got protective Federal tariffs on imported products from their foreign competition.
In point of fact, the long-standing Federal sugar import tariff imposed to protect Louisiana sugar growers was extensively debated at the Montgomery Convention and, in spite the highly-touted Confederate devotion to free trade principles, was retained in the Confederacy through out the ACW. Additionally, the Confederacy placed tariffs on exports, including a duty on exported cotton. I repeat here for emphasis --- tariffs on Southern cotton exports were prohibited by the US Constitution. So much for high secessionist principles concerning tariffs! They talked the talk, but didn't walk the walk, as goes the modern formula for hypocrisy.
It is humorous to note that the prewar Federal iron import tariff, so despised by Secessionist firebrands, was continued by the Confederacy after some of the realities of fiscal and industrial policy set in. On 16 February 1861 the Provisional Confederate Congress blithely passed a bill providing for free import of railway iron. A month later, however, fiscal realities set in and an ad valorem import tax was imposed on such goods at the rate of 15%
--- a rate confirmed in the Confederate Tariff Act of 21 May 1861. For further details, see Robert C. Black's THE RAILROADS OF THE CONFEDERACY (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of NC Press, 1998)."
-from the AOL ACW forum.
Walt
I'm glad to see there is no longer any confusion on the cause of the war.
Walt
I still don't think you read very carefully. Go back and look at what the article was saying.
It says:
Be that as it may, the record shows that tariffs were an irritant, however irrational, to Southern interests up to 1846. In that year, accordingly, Federal tariffs were generally lifted in response to Southern pressures and in favor of free trade. From 1846 until early 1861, what was essentially a free trade regime existed in the whole of the USA. It was only after (and because) rebellion broke out that the US Congress passed the hated Morrill tariffs.
Here is the truth:
1860 Tariff revenue=$53,188,000.
1855 Tariff revenue=$53,026,000.
So, From 1846 until early 1861, what was essentially a free trade regime existed in the whole of the USA is essentially a lie.
In fact, your famous quote of the Lifeline of the Confederacy document, if you add the figures, shows that tariff revenues in 1857 were $63,876,000.
So, your post is either ignorance or someone is lying to you.
Assuming you still believe your source, if you visit section U 207-212 you can find that the percentage of imports that duty was paid on in 1841 was 50%. By 1845 that had increased to 90%. By 1850 it was 91%.
Your source is really wacky.
Well you decided on a war economy. That would be entirely based on credit. The data I gave you was for a peace time economy. Second, apparently you don't do any reading, or you would have seen the tariff rate that was legislated.
By the way, if" Federal tariffs were generally lifted in response to Southern pressures and in favor of free trade" where did the $56 million come from?
Non-Sequitur = Non-Sense
The tairiff rate was legislated? Well, duh. Same as up North. The confederate congress could have set it as high as they wanted to. But since you hold out the free trade zone stuff they would have had to find their money elsewhere.
As I said in my post 301 above, the south was in a position where it , of necessity, exported to Europe and England. Of necessity it in turn imported goods from them. (Not all luxury goods either. In spite of some cloth and clothing manufacture in the Northeast, in the period prior to 1861 cloth and clothing were a significant component of U.S. imports.) This made them sitting ducks for the Northern dominated governments tariff policies, used against the South as a revenue raising means, not as a protection measure. See the newspaper editorial in my post 305, the source for that contains more in the same vein.
Unfortunately, the sources that I have at hand are light on details such as tariff rates and amounts of revenue produced by these tariffs on southern imports. I will try to get some of these details, and, perhaps, get back to you.
"It is false to say that tariffs were even a minor irritant, or cause of the war."
That statement is false. As for your earlier statement that there is no right of secession in the constitution, (which you immediately, unwittingly, declare a fiction) that may be true. However, the existence of the right doesn't depend on its being in the constitution. The constitution does not and cannot grant rights, they pre-exist it and can only be asserted in the constitution, as in the bill if rights.
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