During the past thirty years most historians claim that slavery was
the dominant cause of the Civil War. They increasingly insist that the
South’s opposition to protective tariffs was a minimal factor, even
though such tariffs were specifically outlawed in the Confederate
constitution. Historian Marc-William Palen, for example, writes:
One of the most egregious of the so-called Lost Cause narratives
suggests that it was not slavery, but a protective tariff that sparked
the Civil War.
On 2 March 1861, the Morrill Tariff was signed into law by outgoing
Democratic President James Buchanan. . . A pernicious lie quickly formed
around the tariff’s passage, a lie suggesting that somehow this tariff
had caused the US Civil War. By ignoring slavery’s central role in
precipitating secession and Civil War, this tariff myth has survived in
the United States for more than a century and a half – and needs to be
debunked once and for all.
To begin, Palen fails to note that antebellum tariffs accounted for
about ninety percent of federal revenues, even though most of his
comrades readily conceded the point. Thus, tariff policy was as
important to antebellum Americans as federal tax policy is to us today.
Beyond that, Palen falls into three traps that often entangle his fellow woke historians.
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