Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
Neil, as Devil's advocate you know how much money was in the institution of Slavery... that's what Dicken's was talking about. Nothing passed in the Senate w/out the South voting for it and there was more than enough representation of the Slave States to kill any bill they didn't like. The tariff issue... if a lie is told often enough it garners a measure of truth.
__________________ Few take the trouble to understand or to view the American scene with perspective. And we Americans love to find ourselves guilty of something. However, it is never I who am guilty, but those other Americans, the past or present government or the other political party. Americans almost never find other countries guilty. It is always ourselves or our fancied influence in other countries. Louis L'amour
"Time and time again, the Morril Tariff is held up as the cause of the war, that the North was 'gunning' for the South solely for the money generated by the tariff."
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The Morrill Tariff could not have been passed had the southern senators not been withdrawn due to secession. So it can't possibly have been the cause of secession.
Newspaper articles are pointed out by those who put forth this theory wherein Northern interests are afraid of losing their cash cow, the South.
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Claims about the tariff have been overblown. For one thing, the total revenue from the tariff was less than was claimed. For another thing, the vast majority of tariff revenues were collected in Northern ports. While goods could be transshipped south from those ports, it's simply not credible to believe that over 70% of those goods were shipped south. The North and the West had a larger percentage of the population than the South did, and individually they were every bit as much a consumer as the average southerner.
Dickens has been quoted as saying the 'real' cause of the Civil War was over money and for no other good reason.
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What would Charles Dickens know about the American Civil War? All he knew was what he read in the London newspapers.
It has even been proposed to me that the issue of slavery was merely a 'front' an easier cause to rally support for secession, than over the real reason of the tariff.
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The Declarations of Causes written by four of the seceding states didn't claim they were seceding because of tariffs. Their secession had already happened, so they had no reason to lie to anyone. The debates in Congress show no threats to secede over a tariff, but numerous threats of secession related to slavery. Charles Adams was the one who put forward the idea that the secessionists were lying about their reasons for seceding. That's just not credible. He expects us to believe they never once threatened to secede because of tariffs, threatened to secede over slavery numerous times, yet they didn't mean their threats concerning slavery and really meant to secede over tariffs, which they hadn't threatened to secede over before?
Slavery is at least a mere side issue, while the economic warfare of the North and Lincoln wanting to keep Ft. Sumter as a collection for the tariff the real reason for the war.
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Fort Sumter was not a tariff collection point. That's one of the many, many errors Adams makes in his book.
You of course have heard the quotes that Lincoln gave saying that he must collect the tariff at the beginning of his administration. How can this all be dismissed?"
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This refers to the interview with John Baldwin.
In February of 1866, Baldwin said, " 'Well,' said he, 'what about the revenue? What would I do about the collection of duties?' Said I, 'Sir, how much do you expect to collect in a year?' Said he, 'Fifty or sixty millions.' 'Why, sir,' said I, 'four times sixty is two hundred and forty. Say $250,000,000 would be the revenue of your term of the presidency; what is that but a drop in the bucket compared with the cost of such a war as we are threatened with? Let it all go, if necessary; but I do not believe that it will be necessary, because I believe that you can settle it on the basis I suggest.' "
Even if we were to take Baldwin at his word, Lincoln was not a stupid man and he would know that any tariff revenue he'd be able to get would indeed be only a drop in the bucket compared to what he would spend on a war.
After the interview with Baldwin, Lincoln spoke at length about it with John Minor Botts. Botts' reporting of what Lincoln said, especially concerning the offer of evacuating Fort Sumter in return for Virginia staying in the Union, does not mesh with Baldwin's account. Baldwin claims no such offer, but we know from C.S. Morehead of Kentucky and from John Hay's diary that Lincoln made that very offer prior to his inauguration and from Botts that he made the offer at least one other time afterward, this time to a group including Francis Pierpont, Rep. John S. Millson, and Garrett Davis of Kentucky. Richard N. Current, in <u>Lincoln and the First Shot,</u> provides more evidence that Lincoln did indeed make the offer to Baldwin, but Baldwin didn't recognize what Lincoln was talking about. So there is reason to doubt Baldwin's account.
Additionally, Lincoln never tried to assert federal authority to collect revenue in Charleston from the time he took office all through the Sumter crisis. If it were so important to him, why didn't he do anything about it? Fort Sumter had no revenue collection.
Just thought I would pass on an interesting quote I found concerning the Nullification Crisis of 1831. Although I contend it supports my idea that the tariff, during that time and just before the Civil War had nothing to do with the actual reasons why it left the Union, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
After the tariff controversy that brought him to the forefront as the leading spokesman for Southern interests, South Carolina's Senator John Calhoun considered slavery the most important issue to the South. Calhoun confided to an associate early in the Nullification Crisis, "I consider the tariff act as the occasion rather than the <u>real cause</u> of the present unhappy state of things."
"The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institution of the Southern States and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given her industry, has placed them...in opposite relation to the majority of the Union..."
So again, where did tariffs fit into all of this?
YMOS,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
A bit of history concerning the tariff. Who stated the following concerning the tariff?
"It (the encouragement of manufactures) produced a system strictly American, as much so as agriculture, in which it had the decided advantage of commerce and navigation. The country will from this derive much advantage. Again it is calculated to bind together more closely our wide-spread Republic. It will greatly increase our mutual dependence and intercourse, and will, as a necessary consequence, excite an increased attention to internal improvements--a subject every way so intimately connected with the ultimate attainment of national strength and the perfection of our political institutions."
YMOS,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
At the close of the War of 1812, the traders of Great Britain determined, even at a temporary loss to themselves, to glut the US market with their goods and thus break down forever, as they hoped, this country's infant manufactures. Their purpose and object were boldly announced in the House of Commons by Mr. Brougham, when he said, "Is it worth while to incur a loss upon the first importation, in order by the glut to stifle in the cradle those rising manufactures in the United States which the War had forced into existence contrary to the natural course of things."
Against this threatened ruin, our manufacturers all over the United States --the sugar planters of Louisiana among them--clamored for Protection, and Congress at once responded with the Tariff Act of 1816.
YMOS,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
I found this earlier thread on the tariff issue and thought it should be brought up to the front also. A lot of good posts, web sites, debates and opinions from when we were all young and very new on this board.
Enjoy,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
You guys who are convined of the tarrrifs insignificance may need to look at the information a little closer.The Morril tarrif was passed a year prior to secession in the House of Representatives.So first of all it wasn't a war measure.Of the eleven seceded states only one(from Tennessee) out of 40 voted infavor of the tarrif.Yes 39 out of 40 voted against it from states that would secede a year later.Please explain to me how it is even remotely possible looking at the voting results to believe that the tarrif didn't screw the South and wasn't an issue.
__________________ "The sword is mighty, but principles laugh at swords. Overwhelming force may crush truth to earth but, crushed or not the truth is still the truth." Regards, Ashley
The Morril tarrif was passed a year prior to secession in the House of Representatives.So first of all it wasn't a war measure.
You are right! It wasn't a war measure, and you'll notice no one has claimed it was. The later tariff acts and amendments that raised the tariff rates to the infamous levels noted by Adams, DiLorenzo, et. al., WERE war measures, instituted to raise revenue for the war effort. But these later revenue measures were not the 1861 Morrill tariff, as most pro-confederate sources will try to fool you into believing.
Quote:
Of the eleven seceded states only one(from Tennessee) out of 40 voted infavor of the tarrif.
Its one thing to object politically to a tariff (or any other subject). Its quite another to initiate disunion over it. As the majority of southern imports were produced in the North and West, and these imports, being domestic, were consumed duty-free, it makes little economic sense to make these sources foreign. The US cotton and woolen manufactures, flour, butter, leather goods, etc, that before had no duty attached would now suffer a CS duty. How would that possibly have benefitted Southerners? Southern products like sugar, tobacco, hemp, etc, would now have a US tariff to overcome. If you opine that Union exporters to the South would have to lower their prices in order to compete in the CS market, duty-added, then you have to consider that European producers had been doing the same all along. If that's the case, then the foreign exporters actually were paying part of the burden of this external tax - possibly explaining why amid the objections, no one demanded a repeal of the tariff and replacement with direct, internal taxes.
Who do you hear more griping about today - US Customs or the IRS?
You guys who are convined of the tarrrifs insignificance may need to look at the information a little closer.The Morril tarrif was passed a year prior to secession in the House of Representatives.So first of all it wasn't a war measure.Of the eleven seceded states only one(from Tennessee) out of 40 voted infavor of the tarrif.Yes 39 out of 40 voted against it from states that would secede a year later.Please explain to me how it is even remotely possible looking at the voting results to believe that the tarrif didn't screw the South and wasn't an issue.
Because it didn't "screw" the south to use your words. The majority of the tariff was paid outside the south. It wasn't an issue because the only way it passed the Senate was because the 7 deep south states seceded, taking their senators out of the voting.
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