If that is the case, why did they care so much about the tariff? Enough that it was a major motive for secession?
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