Tariffs

Neil,
It is obvious to me you have been busy. Cool links.......

It is also obvious to me you are looking at this a bit backwards. You seem to think the south decided to secede and that was the “Cause” yet it was the other way around. Simply put the various financial abuses the south were attacked with were bad enough, the ones apparent in the future were worse. (Remember the site I provided showing the south did NOT have control of congress after 56. http://www.msu.edu/~jenki107/jenknok.PDF) After 60 it was foregone conclusion worse abuses were on the way. On every front.

So they were looking for contractual violations the north had repeatedly committed as legitimate excuse to leave. Technicalities as it were. They could not legally secede without doing that. Whether you believe secession was legal or not, they did and they tried to do it legally.

They could not secede for Tariffs alone. Not legally. They used the one most glaring violation of the Union’s contract that the North repeatedly willingly violated. Guess what. If the north had not violated it, if the north had not made it clear they were going to bleed the south more dry, the south would have had neither the motive but more importantly the legal grounds to secede. So who CAUSED what eh?

YMOS
tommy

[unionblue]

Tommy,

No, sorry, I don't read it as backwards the reason, THE cause, as it were. Slavery was the reason the South left the Union, not the tariff.

As for the idea that secession was 'legal' and these men had to justify it in some way, thats like backing up to the whole issue in my mind. The men of the time said it was NOT about the tariff, they disputed it themselves when coming up for the main reason for their leaving and came up with slavery. I will agree that the Fugitive Slave Act figured in to some of the reasoning, but again the issue there was slavery AGAIN.

As for the site you have provided, I have checked it out before. Again, the South was outnumbered in the House of Representatives, but not in the Senate. Nor was she outnumbered on the bench of the Supreme Court. The South, if it had desired to, could have had any legislation concerning its interest, tied up in legal knots leaving Lincoln in the cold.

And you are right, I view the entire idea of secession being based on 'legal' technicalities as high comedy. The idea that the South could not base secession on tariffs alone ought to say something about just how little an issue that was at that time.

And please, it has already been shown on another thread, the Part I of this one I think, that out of the 326? cases concerning the Fugitive Slave Act, 300 slaves were returned. Smoke and mirrors and another so-called 'legal' issue to secede over. Legal means my eye!

Until that time,
Unionblue

[unionblue]

Friends,

Another interesting web site entitled, "Causes of the War Seminar" where you can view a few things said about the tariff from a thread almost like this one.

http://www.gdg.org/dtcause.html

Will keep checking for more sites about the tariff or tariffs.

Unionblue

Neil,
You have to better than that one. When the moderator is the one trashing the tariff as an issue it show a severe lack of objectivity. Where I come from moderators moderate they do not participate in a debate. Especially damaging in light he is neither a historian nor even an economics guy...he is a math prof. Fun to read though, I sure wish I could have argued with them.

YMOS
tommy

(Message edited by aphillbilly on July 22, 2003)

[johan_steele]

I, like Neil, don't see the tariff issue as anything but smoke a mirrors. For a very long time I didn't believe Slavery had anything to do with the War. I still don't believe it was in anyway in the forefront of the CSA Soldiers mind. That was primarily "States Rights" though I wonder how many of those men understood everything that meant. If you think I'm wrong ask any HS student what is within the Third Amendment... I'll be shocked if they know.

What I have come to believe is that Slavery was in the forefront to the leaders of the CSA. Yes, tariffs were an issue but I think it was merely more ammunition for the secession crowd. But I think it was more along the lines of what our illustrious Democrats are doing today. "No matter what is done it's not being done by one of us and therefore is not right." Or perhaps more of "Now who the hell is that guy to tell us Slavery is wrong and how dare he tell us what to do?" The Civil War was inevitable from the start of the 1850's. Slavery was the dividing issue. It was an issue that Northerners, innocent or not, could point at as morally wrong.

Could the War have been avoided by more level headed men? Maybe, probably only delayed at best. Politicians are politicians. Always have been, always will be. Who was right & who was wrong? It doesn't matter, the victor writes the history and there is no doubt who won.

The reasons? Thea and Aphillbilly have beat the board to death with blaming the North and those ****ed Yanks for starting the war, Connie Boone did her level best to paint the South as evil (whether she was willing to admit it or not). All things said and done Politicians started the War, soldiers finished it. American heroes, both North and South, men who lived from one day to the next. Some were good men, some not. But they were all Americans and after the War ended there was a reconcilliation of sorts. The kind of reconcilliation of the like the world had not seen before. Was it fair, easy or even all that peachy? No, but every man women and child of the South was not put to the sword, not even one in ten or one in a thousand. There was no mass starvation, a lot of rebuilding had to be done and it was done. The South isn't a bad place, you have to look very carefullly to see the visable scars. The emotional scars are still there in places and there are some who hang on to the belief that the South shall rise again and do it all over.

Pure and simply the one dividing line I can see between the Union and Confederate soldier was Slavery... but it wasn't a dividing line between the men who fought the war. Most of them could have cared less about it. They were more concerned with day to day survival. The general concensus seemed to be that the war could have been ended at any time by the men fighting it but BOTH cabinets would be swinging from trees the next morning. Maybe that would have been the better answer, but the end result would have been the same... Slavery dead in North America.

[unionblue]

Friends,

Found a very interesting site having to do with tariffs.

The Tariff History of the United States, Part I, by F.W. Taussig, Henry Lee Professor of Economics in Harvard University 1910.

This is a 271 page document in PDF format, placed on-line this year. This is a BIGGIE, taking the reader from the start of this country's tariff acts, all the way through 1909.

Page 100 entitled, Part II. Tariff Legislation, 1861-1909, Chapter 1, The War Tariff, makes very interesting reading. If you got the time to plow through this thing, you can learn a lot about the tariff, how it operated, what was 'taxed' and for how much and just how important the tariff was (or how important it WAS NOT) in leading up to the Civil War.

http://www.mises.org/etexts/taussig.pdf

Another site of interest if the following entitled, 'The Tariff/Nullification Crisis' at:

http://aam.wcu.edu/deville/null.html

Let me know what you think.

Unionblue

(Message edited by Unionblue on August 07, 2003)

[unionblue]

Friends,

Another interesting tidbit about tariffs in the years before the Civil War. From the book, "The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861", by David M. Potter.

In Chapter 2, Portents of a Sectional Rift, the groundwork is laid for the first beginnings of North / South splits due to southern Democrats sabotaging the nomination of Van Buren, and then allowing the belief that once Texas was annexed as a slave state, they would permit the admission of Oregon as a free state, maintaining the balance of power between the North and the South. Polk led the party to believe that he supported the plan and got party support and votes in all of the states on this issue.

Instead, once Texas had been admitted as a slave state, southern Democrats, with support from President Polk, tried to keep Oregon out of the picture, giving the South the edge in the Senate. On page 26, paragraph 2, the story continues:

"The third apple of discord was the tariff. Here again, Polk's excessively adroit campaign methods made trouble for his administration. During the campaign he had written an ambiguous letter to John K. Kane of Philadelphia in which he did not quite say that he favored a protective tariff, but did express approval of "protection to all the great interests of the whole Union...including manufactures." With this document in hand, Pennsylvania Democratic leaders had been able to convince the voters, and perhaps even themselves, that Polk would not reduce duties, and they had carried the state for him against Clay.

But when he appointed Robert J. Walker, a man of free-trade convictions, as his secretary of the treasury, and when Walker produced an administration-sponsored measure that was one of the few real tariff reductions in American history, northern Democrats again felt betrayed. In July 1846, Walker's bill passed the House by a vote of 114 to 95 with seventeen northern Democrats joining the Whigs who voted solidly against it. In the Senate, it passed by a single vote, 28 to 27, with three northern Democrats in opposition and one Whig, under the duress of instructions from his state legislature, in support. Northern opponents were quick to note that the measure could not have passed without the votes of the two new senators from Texas."

Interesting what a man will say or do to get elected President and then what he does when he gets into office, isn't it?

Unionblue

[rbenne]

"The Panic of 1857 yielded a major depression in the United States and later in many other parts of the globe. One result of the worldwide economic difficulties was a general stagnation in trade."

I would think this is a very major point. The depression of 1857 was only 3 years past at the outbreak of the war. After a major economic downturn one is rather sensitive about issues that may have caused that downturn. (at least issues in their minds that caused it)

[unionblue]

Mr. Benne,

Or may I have the privilege of calling you Ray? Am I to understand then, that you consider the tariff of 1857 a cause of the Civil War or that it was merely a campaign issue of 1858?

Sincerely,
Unionblue
PS Welcome to the board.

[rbenne]

Neil;

Please feel free to call me Ray;

I was refering to a causation of war although I am sure it was also a campaign issue.

Not THE cause of course as I fully believe their were many causes. Even to the point of it being a continuation of the English civil war in many respects (Southern cavalier versus northern roundhead)