If anyone is smart enough to bring this particular post to this thread of @trice , I would appreciate it.
Sir, here you go...
...the below was originally posted by @unionblue here - https://civilwartalk.com/threads/tariffs.1205/page-55#post-1813708
From the book,
Reluctant Confederates, by Daniel W. Crofts, chapter 5, page 106, paragraph 2:
"First, upper South Unionists saw no economic advantage in joining an independent slave South. They rejected secessionist arguments that an identity of economic interests linked all slaveholding states. Many Unionists hoped that the economy of the upper South would increasingly develop along the pattern of adjoining northern states, with a diversified base of agriculture, industry, and trade. They insisted that the economic interests of the "grain growing states" of the upper South would be sacrificed in a "Cotton Confederacy" led by South Carolina.
"Slavery is the great ruling interest of the extreme Gulf States," one Unionist observed, but the states of the upper South had
"great interests besides slavery, which cannot be lightly abandoned."
Virginia Unionists insisted that the economic consequences of secession would be bleak. The two leading Unionists in the Virginia convention, John B. Baldwin and George W. Summers, warned repeatedly that Virginia's commercial and industrial interests were "bound up with the free states of the border." Baldwin noted that wheat, tobacco, livestock, and garden crops from eastern Virginia were sold in Baltimore and the cities of the Northeast. Summers explained that customers on both sides of the Ohio and upper Mississippi rivers bought the salt and coal produced in his home region, the Kanawha Valley. In the northwestern Virginia panhandle, wedged snugly along the Ohio River between the two free states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, secession appeared economically suicidal. The editor of the
Wheeling Intelligencer predicted that "it would kill us off as a city more completely than a big fire...We should sink day by day until we got to be a poor, miserable, penniless, decayed country town."
Virginia manfacturing interests had no wish to join a southern nation dominated by free traders,
who opposed any protective tariff for industry. One Unionist from Alexandria predicted that an independent South would seek close commercial ties with England and France, which would tend to keep the South an agricultural exporter, dependent on a supply of imported manufactured goods.
"What will become," he asked,
"of the promised manufacturing industry and enterprise of Virginia and the other border States of which we hear so much?" Virginia Unionists also suspected that deep South secessionists intended to
reopen the African slave trade, thereby depressing slave prices and benefiting the slave-importing states in the lower South at the expense of the slave-exporting states in the upper South. Virginia Unionists thus dismissed secessionist assertions about the bright economic future their state would enjoy in a cotton confederacy. They concluded instead that the economic interests of the upper and lower South were "irreconcilably antagonistic" and "in direct collision."
Parts of North Carolina and Tennessee had more significant economic ties with the deep South than did Virginia. In Memphis, Charlotte, and Wilmington, secessionists contended that any political seperation between the upper and lower South would prove an economic nightmare. But Unionists in North Carolina and Tennessee echoed many of the same economic themes used by their counterparts in Virginia. They complained that a southern nation based on South Carolina's
"Free Trade, and African Slave Trade Doctrines, would be ruinous to us." Many feared that secession would foreclose future industrial development and economic diversification. In Nashville and the adjacent Cumberland Valley region, the largest manufacturing center in Tennessee, secession had few friends. The owner of a Nashville foundry and machine shop complained to Andrew Johnson that
"this mad rush after dissolution" was undermining
"all commerce and manufacturs and enterprize." Having already laid off many of his hundred-man work force, Thomas M. Brennan implored Johnson
"for God sake try to save this Union." and prevent secessionists from completing
"the ruin that had been commenced."
Unionists also pointed out that secession directly theatened two major upper South internal improvement projects, the James River and Kanawha Canal and the Southern Pacific Railroad. Virginia's incomplete canal remained an unhappy symbol of how the state government had shortchanged western interests. Extended gradually west to two towns in the Valley by the early 1840s, the canal had never been completed across the thirty-mile gap between the headwaters of the James and the Kanawha, nor had the segment down the latter to the Ohio been built. In 1860, a French and Belgian consortium, Bellot des Meniers and Company, proposed to assume both the assets of the canal company and its obligation to extend the canal to the Ohio. Strongly endorsed by the governor in January 1861, the sale of the canal awaited legislative approval. Unionists complained that the uproar over secession threatened to sabotage the arrangement and "render the entire work utterly useless and valueless."
Secession also rudely interrupted a grandiose effort to build a southern transcontinental railroad from east Texas to southern California. Most of the chief promoters of the scheme were from Tennessee, which had just experienced a fast-paced decade of railroad construction that gave it rail links extending to the seaboard and up and down the Mississippi Valley. By 1860, managers of the Southern Pacific Rail Road Company were negotiating with the same European consortium that had bid to finish the Virginia canal. Only a twenty-seven mile segment of the railroad had been completed, enabling cotton planters in fertile Harrison County, Texas, to move their crops to the Red River west of Shreveport, Louisiana. But the state of Texas had pledged substantial assistance, and even more liberal aid from Congress was judged a realistic possibility. Compared to the canal project, which included two hundred miles of finished waterway that had been functioning for decades, the railroad would appear to have been more visionary and speculative. It was, however, more in tune with the economic trends of the era. The James River and Kanawha Canal would never be completed, whereas a southern transcontinental railroad eventually would.
But the Southern Pacific's 1861 promoters found to their dismay that the spread of secession blighted hopes for congressional aid and European investment. Congress lost interest in subsidizing the project when Texas seceded from the Union, which in turn discouraged the Europeans. Directors of the Southern Pacific, hoping to salvage something, threw themselves into the campaign to save the Union. They hoped that if the upper South remained in the Union, the deep South might be persuaded to return."
Again, more evidence that the tariff was not a reason for the South to leave the Union, as it appears that it was not mainly just a Southern issue, as shown with Virginia and its attitude about the tariff. In chapter six, page 140, another example that tariffs were more of a national than sectional/Northern interest:
"By the end of January, perceptive secessionists recognized the likelihood of a "defeat in Virginia and all the rest of the border States." An observer from Georgia reported that several economic issues had aided (Southern) Unionists. The "manufacturing interest of Virginia" suspected that a southern Confederacy would destroy
tariff barriers and "establish free trade." Worries that "navigation of the Mississippi will be obstructed
and that the slave trade will be reopened" had also weakened the secession cause in the upper South."
As for the transcontinental railroad, seems like the South had something going there for a while, didn't it?
Unionblue
HTHs,
USS ALASKA