The Confederate Constitution: What your elementary school didn’t teach you

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The Confederate Constitution: What your elementary school didn’t teach you

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Posted: Sunday, June 30, 2013 9:57 am
David John Marotta and Megan Russell
At the start of 1861, several Southern states seceded to form their own union under the Constitution of the Confederate States. The Confederate Constitution was just a modified version of the original U.S. Constitution, but the edits were significant.
The South seceded largely over economic issues. Heavy-hitting tariffs on manufactured goods protected Northern industries while making Southern costs skyrocket. Meanwhile, 90 percent of the Union’s revenue came from those tariffs and then was spent to help the North.

Slavery certainly was a factor in the Civil War. But it was partly the economic pressures on the South that made slavery an issue.
Other countries were compensating slave owners, using government revenue to ease the transition away from slavery. In the United States, however, the North was tightening the economic screws. It exploited the South with tariffs and spent the revenue on its own largess.
Two days before Lincoln’s inauguration in March 1861, Northern congressmen passed the Morrill Tariff. It steeply raised tariffs on politically popular Northern manufactured goods.
Previous tariffs had been a percentage of the purchase price. The practice of providing a phony invoice for a lower amount alleviated much of the tariff’s harm. The Morrill Tariff removed this possibility. It required a specific duty per quantity of the imported item regardless of the purchase price.
With the South peacefully seceded, it was impossible to count on its cooperation. But Lincoln was expected to enforce the Morrill Tariff. A group of Virginian commissioners were deputized to determine if Lincoln would use force and suggested he abandon Fort Sumter.
Lincoln responded, “If I do that, what would become of my revenue? I might as well shut up housekeeping [a euphemism for federal spending] at once!” With 90 percent of his revenue coming from tariffs collected in the South, the Southern secession meant the union’s budget would take a cut.
He went on to say, “But what am I to do in the meantime with those men at Montgomery?” — meaning the Confederate constitutional convention. “Am I to let them go on... [a]nd open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry, with their ten-percent tariff? What, then, would become of my tariff?” Just a month before the start of the hostilities of the Civil War, Lincoln had tariff revenue on his mind.
Meanwhile, the Confederate states correctly judged the need for additional checks on the federal government’s power to tax some while benefiting others. The Confederacy is often portrayed as the villain in popular media. But the Confederate edits to the Constitution would have helped prevent a lot of the federal mischief we’ve experienced.
The Confederate states added a prohibition on tariffs protecting specific industries and required all such taxes to be uniform throughout the country. Such a law removed the special-interest lobbying and patronage that elected Lincoln. It was based on the more general principle that if the power doesn’t exist to discriminate among specific industries, there is no incentive to buy the right to wield that power for your own industry’s benefit.
They also removed the general welfare justification for collecting taxes; only providing for the common defense remained.

For the rest: http://www.dailyprogress.com/opinio...cle_0caceeaa-e18d-11e2-b6d6-001a4bcf6878.html
 
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