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.
To the contrary and you are practicing marxian labor reductionism when you suggest as much.
Well, that's nonsense blue smoke and mirrors.
The rebels had machinery stolen from the federal government that could produce 300 rifles a day. But they only had skilled labor to produce 100 rifles a day. At this same time the federal government was producing 5,000 rifles a day in 44 different factories. The rebels had no ability to either repair or build railroad engines, spikes, rails or cars anywhere in the insurgent area. As Bruce Catton said:
"As the nation's need for an adequate transportation increased, the system would grow weaker and weaker, and there was no earthly help for it....these problems , indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely towards final defeat that one is faced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom they were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who who were familiar with valor, the classics and heroric atttitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it."
The south failed in its bid for revolution because it couldn't operate as a modern economy. They downplayed and denigrated free labor. That meant they couldn't guarantee their borders. Nothing else matters.
Walt
So it seems that your long winded and narrow minded argument is that Lincoln and the Republicans who controlled Congress went to war not to preserve the Union and abolish slavery but to avoid having a neighboring country with lower tariff rates, and your "evidence" of such consists of a speech in which a North Carolina Senator talks about the lack of any customs houses in New Orleans and his concern that Lincoln won't call Congress into special session so that they can have a public debate on what military tactics the Union should employ to suppress the Confederate insurrection. You would have us believe that a civil war was fought which increased annual federal spending from $63 million to $1.3 billion in order to collect $30-$50 million in import duties after depriving the people from whom the federal government was seeking that money of human "property" on which they placed a value of $3 billion.
Hey, if that's the story you want to wrap your narrow mind around, I hesitate to be the one to spoil your elaborate fantasies, but let me just remind you that a month before Senator Clingman made that speech, Confederate President Jefferson Davis had already announced:
"The time for compromise has passed. The South is determined to maintain her position [to secede to preserve the institution of slavery], and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel."
Protectionist tariffs are by definition barriers to trade.
I wasn't arguing semantics with you, I was disagreeing with your assertion that the Morrill tariff would kill trade. In fact, trade continued, and although it decreased, it maintained a level sufficient to keep import tariff revenue at a similar level to what it had previously been -- even though the Southern states were no longer paying tariffs to the U.S. Governnment.
The Morrill Tariff was not a "relatively small burden" by any reasonable standard. It's average rate reached about 47% midway through the war.
The Morrill tariff only raised the average import duties from 19% to 33%. A 14% import duty increase is certainly not a huge increase (particularly in comparison to the Confederates' concern about losing 100% of their $3 billion worth of human stock.) Later war measures raised the import tariffs to the 47% level. I'm not arguing that taxes in general -- no matter how small -- are minor burdens. Rtaher, my point was just that the Morrill tax increase was a minor burden in comparison to the threat that abolition posed to the basic underpinnings of the Southern economy and social system.
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.
The Democrats controlled the Senate until the Southern states seceded. They could have blocked the passage of higher taxes (though something had to be done about the budget deficits created under the Buchanan administration), and it's funny how they didn't mention anything about tariffs in their declarations of secession if that was a real concern to them.
To the contrary and you are practicing marxian labor reductionism when you suggest as much. Slavery was the labor attribute of their economy... 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.
You're the one "practicing marxian labor reduction" by ignoring the fact that slaves were essentially human capital who not only worked but produced more "capital" (i.e. offspring). On a typical Southern plantation the slaves had a greater value than the land and implements. Subtract the slaves and the South had very little going for it economically in the 1860's.
As for the rest of your comments, I won't attempt to give you a complete course in economics, but I suggest that you take several from good teachers with lots of patience. Be sure to include one in international trade.