No Walt. Contrary to your marxist lie, the Morrill Act passed the House in May 1860 and had the backing of the new president, all before any state seceded.
The Morrill tariff couldn't hve passed had the rebellious states kept their seats.
You are wrong again, Walt. The only remaining barrier to the act on the onset of secession in December 1860 was the Senate. The Senate was evenly split on a sectional basis. Had every southerner retained his seat and voted against it in a unanimaty similar to their delegation in the House, that would make it a tie vote. The VP then breaks the tie in favor of the bill and it passes.
You are wrong again, Walt.
"What makes emphasis on the tariff as a cause for secession particularly absurd is that the votes to pass the Morrill Tariff did not exist in Congress until *after* the secessionist Senators and Representatives resigned.
More generally, an emphasis on economic (in the narrow sense) issues as an explanation for secession is thoroughly misguided for the reasons given by Allen Nevins more than a half century ago in *The Ordeal of the Union*:
"One fact needs emphatic statement: of all the monistic explanations for the drift to war, that based upon supposed economic causes is the flimsiest. The theory was sharply rejected at the time by so astute an observer as Alexander H. Stephens. South Carolina, he wrote his brother on New Year's Day, 1861 was seceding from a tariff 'which is just what her own Senators and members of Congress made it.' As for the charges of consolidation and despotism made by some Carolinians, he thought they arose from peevishness, rather than a calm analysis of facts. 'The truth is, the South, almost in mass, has voted, I think, for every measure of general legislation that has passed both houses and become law for the last ten years.' The South, far from groaning under tyranny, had controlled the government almost from its beginning, and Stephens believed that its only real grievance lay in the Northern refusal to return fugitive slaves and to stop the antislavery agitation.
'All other complaints are founded on threatened dangers which may never come, and which I feel very sure would be averted if the South would pursue a judicious and wise course.' Stephens was right. It was true that the whole tendency of federal legislation 1842 to 1860 was toward free trade; true that the tariff in force when secession began was largely Southern- made; true that it was the lowest tariff the country had known since 1816; true that it cost a nation of thirty million people but sixty million dollars in indirect revenue; true that without secession no new tariff law, obnoxious to the Democratic Party, could have been passed before 1863--if then.
"In the official explanations which one Southern State after another published for its secession, economic grievances are either omitted entirely or given minor positions. There were few such supposed grievances which the agricultural states of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota did not share with the South--and they never threatened to secede. Charles A. Beard finds the tap-root of the war in the resistance of the planter interest to Northern demands enlarging the old Hamilton-Webster policy. The South was adamant in standing for 'no high protective tariffs, no ship subsidies, no national banking and currency system; in short, none of the measures which business enterprise deemed essential to its progress.' But the Republican platform in 1856 was silent on the tariff; in 1860, it carried a milk-and-water statement on the subject which Western Republicans took, mild as it was, with a wry face; the incoming President was little interested in the tariff; and any harsh legislation was impossible. Ship subsidies were not an issue in the campaign of 1860. Neither were a national banking system and a national currency system. They were not mentioned in the Republican platform nor discussed by party debaters. The Pacific Railroad was advocated both by the Douglas Democrats and the Republicans; and it is noteworthy that Seward and Douglas were for building both a Northern and a Southern line. In short, the divisive economic issues are easily exaggerated. At the same time, the unifying economic factors were both numerous and powerful. North and South had economies which were largely complementary. It was no misfortune to the South that Massachusetts cotton mills wanted its staple, and that New York ironmasters like Hewitt were eager to sell rails dirt-cheap to Southern railway builders; and sober businessmen on both sides, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, were the men most anxious to keep the peace and hold the Union together."
--Nevins, *The Ordeal of the Union* quoted on pp. 212-213 of Edwin C. Rozwenc (ed.), *The Causes of the American Civil War* (Boston: D. C. Heath 1961).
In view of these facts, and in view of the fact that Southern pamphlets on the secession issue *invariably* emphasized the alleged danger to slavery represented by Lincoln and said comparatively little about economics (anyone who doubts this is invited to read Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., *Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861* [University of North Carolina Press 1996])--why have so many people emphasized issues like the tariff? I would say there are three reasons:
(1) It was a much more respectable justification for Southerners after the war than "we seceded because we believed--rightly or wrongly--that Lincoln's election would be a menace to slavery." (For the same reason the tariff "explanation" of secession was often used by Confederate representatives in Great Britain *during* the war.)
(2) The view of the South as the victim of Northern exploitation seemed to fit what happened *after* the war, when Northern capitalism reigned supreme and the South was very poor. It seemed logical to many people that this was what the South had seceded to resist and the North had fought to bring about. What tended to be forgotten is that in 1860 the South was wealthier than most nations in the world; that in per capita income of its *white* population it was about equal to the North; that it was making considerable progress in industrialization; and that Northern capitalists and bankers, so far from being determined to crush the South, were generally the most pro-Southern element in the Northern population. It was largely secession and the ensuing war which brought about the economic results Southerners later claimed they seceded to prevent.
(3) Finally, the economic explanation of the war fit in well with vulgarized Marxism--something which influenced a considerable number of non-Marxists from the Progressive Era onward."
-- From the moderated ACW nesgroup
Walt