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Oh,Lord.
"High protective tariffs were always the policy of the old Whig Party and had become the policy of the new Republican Party that replaced it. A recession beginning around 1857 gave the cause of protectionism an additional political boost in the Northern industrial state. Lincoln had been elected on a pledge to increase the economic prosperity of the country and his proposal involved tariffs. Soon after he took office, the Morrill Tariff was passed. The original Morrill Tariff law passed and was signed into law by lame duck President Buchanan the Pennsylvania protectionist, on 2 March 1861, just before the Sumter incident, and was cheered in parts of the Northeast, and particularly in Pennsylvania for economic protection. Half of the iron of the country was made in Pennsylvania. United States federal tariff revenues had fell disproportionately on the South, which paid for 87% of the total collected. While the tariff protected Northern industrial interests, it raised the cost of living and commerce in the South substantially. It also reduced the trade value of their agricultural exports to Europe. These combined to place a severe economic hardship on many Southern states. Even more galling was that 80% or more of these tax revenues were expended on Northern public works and industrial subsidies, thus further enriching the North at the expense of the South. While attempting to protect domestic industry from foreign imports, the unanticipated effect was to reduce the nation's exports and thereby help increase unemployment to the devastating figure of 25%. Lincoln had indicated that he would sign the Morrill Tariff bill should it not be passed before his inauguration on 4 March 1861. (Basler - Collected Works of Lincoln vol. 4, pg. 213).
Henry Morley:
"If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States? …Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived … The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union … So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils.… [T]he quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."
Well, what was stopping the South from building their own stuff, developing their own industry, and reducing their own dependance on imported manufactured goods? Couldn’t the cotton be milled and iron be smelted south of Mason Dixon? Seems a lot of their trade balance woes were because of an over-dependence on a mono-crop economy.
Between the 1831 nullification crisis and 1860, the Southern Dems were in control of Congress more than occasionally. Any tariffs were there with their consent.
Bull. Cotton growers got the same price for their goods whether it was going to the mills of England or the mills of New England. If US buyers had purchased every bale of cotton, the southern planters would have earned no more and no less. And the south, far from being impoverished, was raking in money hand over fist. What they weren't doing was investing any of that money in anything other than land and slaves. The south never developed shipping, or industry, or banking, or any of the other institutions that were the backbones of a sound economy. Or, as Louis Wigfall put it:
"We are an agricultural people, we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities -- we don't want them. We have no literature -- we don't need any yet. We have no press -- we are glad of it. We do not require a press because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine -- no navy -- we don't want them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. We want no manufactures: we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from the nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides."