The Morrill Tariff had been bottled up in the Senate by Southern states and would not have passed except for secession. Blaming secession on the Morrill Tariff confuses cause and effect.
Go read the articles of secession by the Southern states. They do not refer to tariffs but repeatedly refer to the protection of slavery as the reason for secession.
With some justification, slaveholders feared that abolitionist agitations would inspire slaves to flee North or to revolt. Slavery required Southern whites to support a strong apparatus of enforcement, control, and repression lest the large slave population turn on them.
That is unrealistic. The Southern states were barely able to hold back such measures, but they realized that inevitably it was futile.
Go read the articles of secession by the Southern states. They do not refer to tariffs but repeatedly refer to the protection of slavery as the reason for secession.
3 or 4 do. But they also include economic arguments, and most of the states didn't even issue such documents.
It has become a propaganda trick to claim that the 3 or 4 (depending on how you count it) that specifically mention slavery as a reason for secession, speak for all 11 states, most of which don't cite it as justification.
"Read the documents" these people put out, as if they would just come out and tell the North "We are taking our money back out of your pockets!"
Most people don't want to attract attention to the fact they would be putting a serious hurt on people by stopping the money flow. Better to misdirect them with some "Look Squirrel!!!"
With some justification, slaveholders feared that abolitionist agitations would inspire slaves to flee North or to revolt.
They really were worried about slave revolts. John Brown probably did a lot to convince people secession was necessary.
Here I disagree. It would have passed. All they needed to do was pick off one or two senators. That's done all the time. Remember when Obama exempted an entire state from Obamacare to get it passed? The certainty of the Morrill Tariffs passage is what drove the original 7 seceding states out.
Go read the articles of secession by the Southern states. They do not refer to tariffs but repeatedly refer to the protection of slavery as the reason for secession.
Sigh. I don't know how many times we have to go through this. Of the 4 states that issued declarations of causes only Mississippi talked about slavery alone. Texas talked about a range of issues from malicious failure to provide border security to unequal economic legislation to deliberately trying to provoke a slave insurrection to violating the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. Georgia went on at considerable length about the economic causes. South Carolina attached the address of Robert Barnwell Rhett and sent it out along with its declaration of causes. Rhett's address went on at great length about the economic causes.
The thing is no matter how much Southerners hated the tariffs and unequal federal outlays for corporate subsidies and infrastructure projects, they were not unconstitutional. There was no way they could say they were. They were unfair as can be, but they were not unconstitutional. What was actually unconstitutional was the Northern states refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. On this point the seceding states really could say the Northern states violated the compact between them.
With some justification, slaveholders feared that abolitionist agitations would inspire slaves to flee North or to revolt.
Northerners certainly did not want Blacks living amongst them - witness the Black Codes. I doubt there was much fear of some mass flight of slaves to the North. They did cite Northern fanatics trying to cause slave revolts AND the refusal of the Northern states to either prosecute or extradite people who supported and financed terrorist attacks like John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry.