Buying little is not the same as buying nothing, and those who buy little with the very little they have to spend are hurt the most by tariff-induced high prices.
It's by no means certain that they would have been net beneficiaries of protection, but it's highly possible that they would have.
Only in the most limited sense of a select few cases who had the benefit of affiliation with a select protected industry. Further, if those few did gain it would be at the much greater expense of everyone else, because that is simply what protectionist tariffs do. Making a few poor people richer by screwing the rest of the poor people with tariffs isn't exactly what I call advancement. Sorry x, but the laws of economics say you're just plain wrong on this one.
While it's true that protection inhibits trade between developed countries and decreases prosperity, it's also clear that earlier in history protection helped first Britain, then the US and Germany, and later Japan to develop industries and achieve greater national prosperity.
No. They only think it helped them because they never knew the alternative. Britain rose economically in the time of mercantilism, and the US protectionists tried to mimic it in many regards with Lincolnian neo-mercantilism. But that is not to be unexpected as there is nothing to say that economies cannot grow and grow strong with tariffs in place. Could they have been even stronger and grown even faster is another issue entirely, and free trade says they could. The economics of trade and tariffs are a matter of mathematical verification, and trade models mathematically verify that protectionism is an economy inhibiting fallacy.
But it's undeniable that protection did work for these countries in one period of their history.
Not really. A country can still advance with protectionism in place, especially when the rest of the world is just as screwed up if not more so in its trade barrier policy. But that doesn't mean protectionism was the source of that country's wealth, and economic trade models show that it's anything but the case.
It's by no means certain that Southern opposition to US national tariffs was indicative of a more general, principled support for free trade.
Sure it is as the south had advocated a free trade policy for decades. They did so because regionally they were hurt the most by protectionism and because the U.S. trade economy, which was almost entirely southern in exports, stood to gain across the board with free trade.
Free trade versus protection was a great staple of 19th century political debate. While there's much to be said for free trade, I don't think an abstract mathematical answer can answer the question in all cases. Specifically, in 19th Century America there was the concern about escaping a colonial situation in which America provided raw goods to Britain and imported British finished products. There was a desire to escape the situation of subordinate, resource providing economies that the Caribbean islands had fallen into.
In time, it's likely that free trade might have made it possible to overcome the colonial situtation. But it wasn't clear that 19th century Americans would have that time, or that free trade was the wave of the future. For some countries, development would wait until protected "free trade zones" like the EU were created. For others, economic development never really took off. In any event, I don't think one can give one and only one answer for all times, peoples and situations. Even if one could, blaming people for not following as yet unproven theories that they didn't know and couldn't understand looks like a low way of proceeding, particularly if one excuses far worse moral failings.
A dynamic, free labor, free market economy contributed to ending slavery and segregation. The agrarian, colonial economy promoted by many Southern free traders would not have done so. Looking at the situation with the eyes of a mid-nineteenth century American, there was something to be said for protection, industrial development, federalism, and free labor, that couldn't be said of the free trade, agrarian, state's rights, slave side of the question. Today the situtation is different and the options are bundled differently, but at the time, protectionists had nothing to be ashamed of.
It's comical the way that libertarians and anarcho-capitalists look for forebears among those, like Taylor and Calhoun, who despised everything about their world view and way of life, and neglect those like Hamilton, Clay and Lincoln, who helped to create capitalist America.