Posted on 02/26/2003 1:10:37 PM PST by GOPcapitalist
"There are, however, other important elements to be taken into the account. During the last fiscal year the exports of the United States, exclusive of specie, were $278,000,000. Of this amount, the free States furnished, exclusively, $5,281,000, the slave States $188,693,000, and the two sections jointly, also, $84,417,000. Of this latter sum of $84,000,000, the slave States probably furnished one third, but certainly one' fourth. A fourth added to the amount exclusively furnished by them, makes a total of $210,000,00 as the value of their exports to foreign countries. They also exported alarge amount to the free States. New England alone received about fifty millior dollars' worth of southern productions; and to the rest of i the free States were sent, doubtless, more. The entire'exports from the slaveholding States to the free States, and to foreign countries combined, must greatly have exceeded three hundred million dollars. As the South sells this much,it, of course, can afford to buy a like amount. If, therefore, it constituted a separate confederacy, its imports would exceed three hundred million dollars; a duty of twenty per cent. on this amount, which would be a lower rate than has generally been paid under our tariffs heretofore, would yield a revenue of $60,000,000. More than fifty million of this sum could well be spared for the defense of our section, and the support of larger armies and navies than the present Government has. Though it may seem strange to you that the South should in this way raise as large a revenue as the whole Union has ever done, and this, too, with a lower tariff, you must remember that most of the tariff taxes the South pays go, in fact, in the shape of protection to those northern manufacturers who thireaten us with negro insurrections and subjugation."
But if 80 to 90% of your cargo is headed to southern consumers, as is constantly claimed, then where does this make sense? Wouldn't it make more sense to go directly to the southern ports and tranship the tiny percentage of goods destined for the North from there? A lot of the ships are destined for there anyway to load cotton and such. Why drop off at New York and then head down the coast. Unless (gasp) there just wasn't that much demand for imported goods down south. You don't suppose that could be the reason, do you?
But if 80 to 90% of your cargo is headed to southern consumers, as is constantly claimed, then where does this make sense? Wouldn't it make more sense to go directly to the southern ports and tranship the tiny percentage of goods destined for the North from there? A lot of the ships are destined for there anyway to load cotton and such. Why drop off at New York and then head down the coast. Unless (gasp) there just wasn't that much demand for imported goods down south. You don't suppose that could be the reason, do you?
Yeah, the noise about slavery was definitely higher than it was on tariffs.
"[The chief obstacle to reconciliation] is the absoulute impossibility of revolutionizing Northern opinion in relation to slavery. Without a change of heart, radical and thorough, all guarantees which might be offered are not worth the paper on which they are inscribed. As long as slavery is looked upon by the North with abhorrance; as long as the south is regarded as a mere slave-breding and slave-driving community; as long as false and pernicious theories are cherish respecting the inherant equality and rights of every human being, ther can be no satisfactory political union between the two sections." New Orleans Bee, December 14, 1860 Quoted in "The Causes of the Civil War" Keneth M. Stampp, ed.
Walt
Perhaps, though such a conclusion assumes what those costs happen to be. Without knowing them though, it is impossible for you to say for sure.
And if you send those goods to Charleston to avoid the tariff in New York then what do you do with them?
Ship them around the continent internally. That means ship them by rail to North Carolina and so forth. Or ship them up the mississippi from New Orleans and so forth. It's a lot harder to collect tariffs on goods travelling over land than by sea at the port of entry.
How will Charleston be a way of accessing the North American continent?
Well, the last time I checked, Charleston was not located in Argentina, nor France, nor Nigeria, nor Japan. It was located on the coast of South Carolina, which is on the North American continent.
Seems to me that the stuff will just sit there and rot
Why would it have any reason to sit there? If buyers up north knew they could get goods without a tariff by going to Charleston, economic law dictates they would go to Charleston. If they knew they could get the same at New Orleans, they'd go to New Orleans.
Because if you're suggesting that those goods will be sent to Northern states then that makes no sense at all. Why ship goods to Charleston, pay the confederate tariff, tranship them to the North, and pay the Northern tariff as well plus all those additional shipping costs?
Because that would not be done. Unless Lincoln established inland customs houses all up the Mississippi and at every road and railway across the border from Virginia and Arkansas, goods could enter the south, paying only the low southern tariff, then be transfered up north by inland means without any further taxation. I suppose it would technically be "illegal" to do so, but without a mechanism to enforce the northern tariff, it simply won't be collected.
I've not made any estimates of the split of goods between North or South.
Wouldn't it make more sense to go directly to the southern ports and tranship the tiny percentage of goods destined for the North from there?
In other words, ship the Northern goods to the South, then turn around and ship them up the east coast part way back to Europe the way they came? It is a wonder you Yankees won the war.
What is it about that quote that leads you to believe that "tariffs" played any significant role in secession or the Civil War?
You have just demonstrated your comprehension of market concepts falls short of even your reading ability. Tariffs are not paid by one intermediary in the economy then forgotten about. They are passed on to the consumer by way of the prices.
Not necessarily. The importer who pays the duties may not be able to sell his imported goods at all (or may be forced to discount them) if domestic goods are available at a lower price, and in fact that was the main reason (albeit not a sound one economically) for Congressional passage of the high import duties.
If a barrier to trade exists in the north (i.e. a high tariff) but not in the south, the goods will go to the place where they can achieve entry, meaning the south.
You're begging the question by asserting that the "tariff" was a "barrier" to trade (as opposed to merely a relatively small burden on imports).
the Morrill bill virtually killed off trade with Europe after it was enacted.
That isn't true, but discouraging imports was certainly the intent of the bill. It was an unwise protectionist measure, but it played no substantial role in secession or the Civil War.
The grievance was with the Morrill act, which practically destroyed international trade with Europe. The southern economy was almost entirely export-based, and when trade halts so do exports.
That's total nonsense. The secessionists' grievance (by their own emphatic admissions) was the threat posed to slavery by Lincoln and the Republicans. Most of the Southern states seceded before the Morrill tariff was passed, and the rest seceded as a result of Lincoln's refusal to permit the Confederates to steal federal property (i.e. Fort Sumter). What destroyed the South's economy was basing it almost entirely on slavery.
Moreover, there was no tax on exports, so even a high import duty would not stop Southern cotton from being exported to Europe (just as Japan's high import duties never stopped Americans from buying Toyotas and other Japanese goods).
The "Morrill tariff" raised import duties from an average of 19% to 33% (source), so even using Senator Clingman's highest estimate, that would only raise the South's annual import tax burden from $30 million to $51 million, still far far less than the value they placed on slavery. They claimed that the slaves they held in bondage were worth $3 billion to them (which in today's dollars would amount to about $100,000 per family). The social value they put on keeping negroes at the bottom rung of society apparently far exceeded that, since the Confederate citizenry were willing to give up hundreds of thousands of their sons to try to hold onto their "peculiar institution".
By 1860, cotton ruled the South, which annually exported two-thirds of the world supply of the "white gold." Cotton ruled the West and Midwest because each year these sections sold 30 million worth of food supplies to Southern cotton producers. Cotton ruled the Northeast because the domestic textile industry there produced $100 million worth of cloth each year. In addition, the North sold to the cotton-growing South more than $150 million worth of manufactured goods every year, and Northern ships transported cotton and cotton products worldwide.
So, if the price of Northern manufactured goods were increased by the Morrill tariff, the South would pay roughly 30 to 50 million dollars more for protected manufactured goods purchased from the North (assuming sales volume didn't go down because of increased cost and that all of the previous tariff went into the previous price of Northern manufactured goods). All this without an increase in the income the South was getting from cotton exports.
Northern people would pay more for their manufactured goods too, but that was money out of one Northern pocket and into the pocket of the Northern manufacturer. On balance, the North came out even, while the South paid.
I wasn't suggesting that shipping goods from Europe to the South was more efficient routing through the Northeast because they could there be placed on railroads or wagons. Stopping in NYC allowed imports to be sorted there and placed (based on orders from jobbers/retailers) on more efficient intracontinental ships headed to various Southern ports. Meanwhile, the intercontinental ships could resupply at NYC or Boston and take an export load back to Europe.
Strange comment. Rome lasted far longer than 700 years, even if we exclude the long time the city has survived after the fall of the Roman Empire: monarchy (approximately) 200 years, republic 500 years, empire 500 years. But the Roman Republic lasted from the fall of the monarchy (c. 507 BC) to whenever we date the end of the Republic (between 49 BC, when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and 19 BC, when Augustus became consul for life), far less than 700 years.
The average cotton farmer in the south was in debt to his "factor" for money to buy land and slaves. The factor in turn represented the farmer to the cotton brokers who in turn represented northern and european investment houses.
One of the underlying premises of the "tariffs were the reason the south seceded" folk (other than to ease their guilt about slavery) is that the Confederates were the true capitalists, not the protectionist North.
Clingman himself began his career as a Whig from a mountain district. So he was at least in theory not ill-disposed towards the party of higher tariffs early on in his career. In 1845 he lost an election because he was perceived as being insufficiently pro-slavery. As is very common in politics, he apparently resolved not to give his opponents cause to make that reproach against him, and became very proslavery and well disposed towards secession. In 1852 he left the declining Whig party and was eventually rewarded by the Democrats with a Senate seat.
Clingman's contributions to DeBow's Review (Coolies, Cuba and Emancipation, and North Carolina, Her Wealth, Resources and History reveal him to be a brutal biological racist and an imperialist. Clingman thought nothing of being published in the same volume with proslavery theorists like Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh. It's natural that he would support tariff policies that would promote a slaveholding empire, and oppose those that hurt slaveholding interests, but he was certainly not an innocent freetrader devoid of interest in slavery expansion and racialism and provoked to rebellion by the Morrill Tariff.
But they seceded because Lincoln took steps to reclaim federal forts and other property in the states that had previosuly seceded, not because of the Morrill tax (which had been proposed by James Buchanan and supported by many Democrats).
As the editorials I posted pointed out, passing the Morrill tax played right into the hands of the secessionists and worked against the North in the border states.
More nonsense. Lincoln was very cautious about upsetting the border states and by doing so he was able to keep them all in the Union. In drafting his first inaugural address, he replaced a threat to reclaim forts and other federal property with an intent to enforce import duties in the South, since he and his advisors knew that the latter would not be nearly as objectionable to the border states as the former.
More likely, the large investment houses were located in the Northeast because they had the best ports for trans-Atlantic shipping.
One of the underlying premises of the "tariffs were the reason the south seceded" folk (other than to ease their guilt about slavery) is that the Confederates were the true capitalists, not the protectionist North.
I've never heard them say so. The modern day Confederate glorifiers seem to be hell bent on trying to paint Northern capitalists as ruthless and self-serving while trying to paint Southerners as radical free marketers who just happened to have a "peculiar institution" -- while ignoring the fact that their "peculiar institution" (a) involved stealing the labor of 4,000,000 negroes and (b) was the underpinning of their entire economy and society.
In drafting his first inaugural address, he [Lincoln] replaced a threat to reclaim forts and other federal property with an intent to enforce import duties in the South
What is this, Lincoln vs. Lincoln? Lincoln took steps to reclaim federal forts that wise Lincoln had earlier dropped a threat to do? Talk about two-faced politicians. I guess this is consistent with the Lincoln Administration promising to evacuate Fort Sumter but not doing it. No wonder the Southern Commissioners charged the Lincoln Administration with gross perfidy over Fort Sumter on April 11, 1861, the day before firing on the fort began.
The South, who truly believed they had the constitutional right to secede, could probably argue that actions by Lincoln to reclaim forts located within their states and enforce US duties at their ports were acts of war.
You really aren't helping your case in the area of comprehension. Look at the quote again:
"My apprehension, as I have already expressed it, is that the Administration intend...as soon as they can collect the force to have a war to begin; and then call Congress suddenly together, and say, "The honor of the country is concerned; the flag is insulted. You must come up and vote men and money." That is, I suppose, to be its policy; not to call Congress together just now. There are two reasons, perhaps, for that. In the first place, it would be like a note of alarm down south; and, in the next place, if you call Congress together, and deliberately submit it to them whether they will go to war with the confederate States or not, I do not believe they would agree to do it. Of course, I do not know what is the temper of gentlemen on the other side; but, though they will have a large majority in the next Congress, I take it for granted from what little I have heard, that it will be difficult to get a bill through Congress for the war before the war begins; but it is a different thing after fighting begins at the forts."
Now, look at what that part quote was referring to, meaning the statement that preceded it:
"I think, if you have no custom-house between Louisiana and the Upper Mississippi, merchants up there will come down and buy their goods at New Orleans. If they learn that at New York they can buy goods under a tariff of fifty or seventy-five per cent., and that they can biy them at New Orleans under a tariff of only one third that, they will go down to New Orleans; and the result will be that we shall get very little revenue under the existing system. We may bandy witticisms; we may show our adroitness in debate; but this is a question which we have to look at practically. One of two things must be done: either you must prevent imports into those States, which I do not think you can do; and I do not suppose there is a Senator on this floor who believes that, under the existing laws, the President has authority to do it; or you must call Congress together, and invest him with some authority. If you do not do that, you must establish a line of custom houses on the border."
In other words, Clingman said the southern tariff undermined the yankee one, therefore the yankees were going to war. See it now? Or are you still as oblivious as ever...
Not necessarily. The importer who pays the duties may not be able to sell his imported goods at all (or may be forced to discount them) if domestic goods are available at a lower price, and in fact that was the main reason (albeit not a sound one economically) for Congressional passage of the high import duties.
If it occurs that that becomes the case, the recipient of the imported goods will cease acquiring them due to the losses they cause him to incur by their uncompetitiveness with protected domestic prices. When that happens, trade stops.
You're begging the question by asserting that the "tariff" was a "barrier" to trade .
Not at all. Protectionist tariffs are by definition barriers to trade. If you don't like that term, take it up with the economics books.
(as opposed to merely a relatively small burden on imports)
The Morrill Tariff was not a "relatively small burden" by any reasonable standard. It's average rate reached about 47% midway through the war.
That isn't true, but discouraging imports was certainly the intent of the bill.
It is indeed true. American trade with Europe dwindled to virtually nothing in 1862. Newspapers on both sides of the atlantic reported it when the trade stats came out for the year, and the Morrill bill was directly pinpointed as the cause.
It was an unwise protectionist measure, but it played no substantial role in secession or the Civil War.
Speeches such as Clingman's above indicate otherwise. There were many of this sort. For example, Senator Robert Hunter of Virginia had this to say on it when the bill was up for consideration in the senate:
"But pass this bill [the Morrill Act], and you send a blight over that land [of Virginia]; the tide of emigration will commence - I fear to flow outward - once more, and we shall begin to decline and retrograde instead of advancing, as I had fondly hoped we should do. And what I say of my own State I may justly say of the other southern States. But, sir, I do not press that view of the subject. I know that here [in Congress] we are too weak to resist or to defend ourselves; those who sympathize with our wrongs are too weak to help us; those who are strong enough to help us do not sympathize with our wrongs, or whatever we may suffer under it. No, sir this bill will pass. And let it pass into the statute-book; let it pass into history, that we may know how it is that the South has been dealt with when New England and Pennsylvania held the power to deal with her interests."
That's total nonsense.
Call it whatever you like, but it will not make the issue go away. The fact is the tariff issue was there. They made speeches about it, drafted resolutions about it, and denounced it in their newspapers. Lying about it and pretending not to see it when it is being discussed as the central point of a speech will never change those facts.
The secessionists' grievance (by their own emphatic admissions) was the threat posed to slavery by Lincoln and the Republicans.
Slavery was a grievance, but not the sole grievance.
Most of the Southern states seceded before the Morrill tariff was passed
It passed the House in May 1860 and gained a supportive voice as the heir to the White House that November, all before a single one of them seceded. The only thing left was the Senate, and, by their own calculations of December 12th, 1860, the southerners knew they did not have the votes to stop it there.
What destroyed the South's economy was basing it almost entirely on slavery.
To the contrary and you are practicing marxian labor reductionism when you suggest as much. Slavery was the labor attribute of their economy, and a morally repulsive one I might add. But, contrary to what Marx would have you believe, labor is not the entirity of any economy and it is idiocy to suggest so. Rather, the southern economy was characterized and determined by its dominating functions: agriculture and exports. Those functions arose because the south had geographic comparative advantages that allowed them to grow certain crops.
Moreover, there was no tax on exports, so even a high import duty would not stop Southern cotton from being exported to Europe
Nonsense. Trade is, by its very nature, circular. The south would not simply give Europe cotton out of the goodness of their hearts. They expected payment in return, just as any seller expects payment from a buyer in exchange for a good. This may be either payment in a monetary form, which in turn serves as credit to buy other imports. Or it may be in exchange for the imports themselves. If an enormous protective tariff exists impeding the import factor of that trade to the point that it virtually stops (as happened around 1862 due to the Morrill bill), so does trade itself. just as Japan's high import duties never stopped Americans from buying Toyotas and other Japanese goods).
Your measure is fallacious as it makes no measure of cost in opportunity. Further, the situations are simply not comparable due to the nature of the tariffs and the credit aspect of today's economy that is incomparable to 1861.
The "Morrill tariff" raised import duties from an average of 19% to 33% (source )
Your source does not, itself, provide a source. The figures that I have as the official government estimates are more precise. Before Morrill, the average rate was 18.84%. It jumped to 36.2% with Morrill, then creeped up to 47.56% after two years when even more protectionist adjustments were made to Morrill. By comparison, the confederate tariff adopted in May 1861 had an average rate of just over 13%.
so even using Senator Clingman's highest estimate, that would only raise the South's annual import tax burden from $30 million to $51 million
Your economic ignorance is showing again. Tariff costs are not felt in their revenue alone, but in their impact on price. A tariff hike redistributes a portion of the consumer surplus into the producer surplus and in deadweight losses in addition to the tax revenues of the government. still far far less than the value they placed on slavery. They claimed that the slaves they held in bondage were worth $3 billion to them
Arbitrarily choosing that figure as the standard of value by which all else in the economy is measured is itself an exercise in the absurd. To give you an example of how absurd it is, the entire international commerce of the United States economy for any given year of that period did not match that figure. But that does not mean that the entire U.S. commercial economy was of negligable importance to anything and therefore may be dismissed from consideration. To do so would be in itself absurd.
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