The Tariff Road to Un-Civil War: Questions and Answers

My G, G Grandfather - Tariff Must Be Reduced

The Tariff must be reduced; it was grinding the South to powder. The northern manufacturers were declaring dividends of 25 and 30 per cent per annum, while the poor farmer at the South could scarcely "make both ends meet." The Tariff must be reduced - it made the rich richer and the poor poorer.

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Part 5 of a Series

Mike Scruggs

Couldn’t the Morrill Tariff have been stopped in the Senate, if seven states had not already seceded?

Before answering, let me give a brief review of the economic situation in 1860. More than 95 percent of all Federal tax revenues came from tariffs on foreign imports. The Morrill Tariff immediately increased dutiable tax rates from under 20 percent to over 36 percent—a 67 percent increase—and provided for an increase in dutiable rates to 47 percent—more than doubling the 1860 rates—in three years. Only about 75 percent of import values were dutiable, so the effective overall rate went from 15 percent to about 26 percent the first year. The South accounted for nearly 80 percent of all exports with cotton alone being over 58 percent. Southern prosperity depended upon agricultural exports, especially cotton, and inexpensive manufactured imports from Britain. The South already paid over 83 percent of all tariff revenues, but close to 80 percent was spent on Northern budget items. Protective tariffs mean bigger profits for protected industries but hurt almost everyone else, raising their cost of living and doing business. Protective tariffs are particularly hard on exporters. Export sales volume and prices usually fall, and retaliatory tariffs by trade partners can cause ruinous damage to export economies. The Morrill Tariff and previous protective tariffs beginning in 1824 benefited Northern industry at the expense of the South.

Answer: The Morrill Tariff was submitted to the House Ways and Means Committee in late 1858, but it did not pass the House until May 10, 1860—by a vote of 105 to 64. The vote in the Senate did not occur until after the 1860 elections and passed by a vote of 25 to 14 on February 20, 1861. Seven Southern states had seceded by February 1, 1861, the last being Texas. Thus the Southern vote could have been brought up to 28. However, there were 34 states at that time, the last being Kansas, so the total of Senate seats was 68. The removal of 14 Southern Senate seats allowed the Morrill Tariff to pass easily, but had the Republican sponsors of the Senate bill needed more votes, they could have easily rounded them up. So the answer is—not really. Furthermore, Southern Congressional leaders had already seen “the handwriting on the wall.” No more potentially “pro-Southern” states would be admitted until 1907 to 1912, when Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona were admitted as the 46th, 47th, and 48th states.

Moreover, after a 37-year North-South conflict (1824-1861) over tariff and trade policies, Southerners had no confidence in Northern good will or faithfulness to the Constitution. As British political analyst John Spencer explained in 1862:

“The cotton States had indeed seceded previously; but why? Because, as we have seen, political power had passed into the hands of the North, and they anticipated from the change, an utter disregard of their interests, and a course of policy opposed to the spirit of the Constitution, and to their rights under it. Was it possible to offer to the world more prompt or convincing proof than this tariff affords, that their apprehensions were well founded.”

After the 1860 elections, there was little chance that the balance of power in the Senate would ever belong to the South again. Much of the tension over admission of “slave states” versus “free states” had little to do with the moral issues touching slavery. It was a political power game. As a conscious political minority, strict adherence to the Constitution and States Rights became indispensable to protecting Southern states from sectionalist Northern political and economic domination and exploitation. Spencer further explained:

“They now see that, under the irresistible growth of population in the North, political power has passed from its original tenure and is gone without hope of return. They feel the bitterness of the gnawing agitation long carried on by the Abolitionists, in plain violation of the spirit of the Constitution. They ask if it be expedient to remain under a bond which no longer suits the other parties to fulfill…In the opinion of the people of the South, it has been made to provide for the welfare of the North at their expense…Looking to its continuance, they see themselves consigned to a perpetual minority, in hopeless subserviency.”

Remember that five of eight Southern legislatures protested the 1824 protective tariff as unconstitutional and that the 1828 and 1832 protective tariffs caused the Nullification Crisis, which brought the nation within days of armed conflict between South Carolina and a Federal expeditionary force.

Nearly 40 years of heated political tension over sectionalist Federal tax and spending policies had worn away Southern trust in the Union. Now the Morrill Tariff renewed and inflamed that tension by a breath-taking increase in an already unjust tax burden on the South that would also severely damage its export economy. As Spencer put it:

“It would be difficult to contrive more ingenious machinery for dealing injustice, restricting commerce, perplexing merchants, creating disputes, inviting chicanery, or driving officers of the customs to despair.”

It is not likely that the Morrill Tariff could have been stopped in the Senate. It would have been only a temporary halt in any case. Besides, Southern leaders had already turned their eyes to the vast economic potential of low taxes and free trade.

But Southern independence and free trade would have been disastrous to a Northern economy based on protective tariffs and a Southern tax base. Northern business leaders and newspapers began to call for military intervention.

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The Tariff Road to Un-Civil War: Questions and Answers