Oh, do you're saying that the government levied a tax on itself by placing a tariff on war materials? I've read the original Morrill Tariff bill and I must have missed that part. How high was the tariff of cannons, rifles, gunpowder, and the like?
You have something in mind? Spit it out.
Sure. I think that is further evidence that rather than providing the bulk of tariff revenue, the southern states actually imported very little and probably provided a disproportionately small percentage of total federal receipts, and that claims that the southern rebellion was primarily about tariffs is a smokescreen put up by those who can't admit that it was primarily about slavery. How's that?
That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources, which supply our treasury, will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe.There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.
-- New York Post, Mar. 2, 1861
And The New York Times summed up the call to arms this way:
With the loss of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many hundred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers...Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty-free. The process is perfectly simple... The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North...We now see clearly whither we are tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question---one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated powers of the State or Federal government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad.....We were divided and confused till our pockets were touched." [Emphasis supplied.]
---New York Times March 30, 1861
So, how about this one, Non-Sequitur? It was about the Benjamins. It was about tariffs, and the tariffs were about business. It was all about business.
The Times editorialist threw in that little adjective, "moral", as an afterthought -- the statement was too raw, otherwise. Business came first. I would argue that business came first, second, and third -- with The New York Times, everyone in New York, and everyone in the North who participated in the real decision-making -- the decision to go to war to conquer the South, and make her behave. These editorials that trumpet this call to war (not merely secession, like the document you introduced) don't mention slavery once.
With federal legislation -- legislation favoring the New England shipbuilding industry, that forbade American coastal trade to be carried in foreign bottoms, that subsidized American ships by imposing penalties on exporters who shipped in foreign-flagged vessels, and other legislation like the Warehousing Act, which postponed import duties on goods stored in (New York's abundant) warehouses until they were sold -- the Yankee merchants captured the entire export trade of the South and the West for their own ports and profited mightily off that trade.
That was the real deal, your real cause of the Civil War. It was the tariffs, and sectionally advantageous federal legislation, and the businesses they favored.