My goodness, two newspaper editorials and the case is closed. No need for statistics or documentation. Never mind the fact that far from drying up, tariff revenue expanded greatly. And the fact that the Post was a Democrat paper probably doesn't enter into it either. And if you get right down to it, much of it doesn't make a lick of sense. If New Orleans is in an independent confederacy, a foreign nation, then how can goods come into New Orleans and be distributed nationwide duty free? At some point they travel from the confederacy to the U.S. and at that point then doesn't it make sense that the U.S. duty would be levied? So confederacy or no confederacy, the tariff would be collected regardless of whether the goods come in at New York or at New Madrid, Mo. The Benjamins would still come rolling in.
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.
You make less and less sense as you go along. Millions of bales of cotton were exported from southern ports each year leading up to the rebellion, somewhere over 90% of the total. The largest cotton exporting Northern port was New York with the 1/7th the total imports of New Orleans alone. So all those ships arriving and leaving full of cotton. But they were apparently arriving empty since upwards of 94% of all tariffs were collected in Northern ports. So if the south imported such an enormous amount of goods from overseas, as you would have us believe, then why didn't they come directly to the southern ports? Why the roundabout way? Why drop off in New York, pay tariff, and then ship it south? And drop that "Warehousing Act" crap. The act was designed to allow goods destined for customers elsewhere to be warehoused under bond without paying duties. In otherwords, a New York merchant could by goods in London, get them in New York, and then ship them to a customer in Cuba or where ever without having to worry about customers. What other use for the law was there? You talk about merchants storing stuff in New York for later sale. Well how stupid is that? Why import something to begin with if you don't have a customer for it? Why put your money up to buy it, go through the expense of shipping it, then pay for storing it, and then look for a buyer? Just how dumb do you think they were?
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.
Which is, of course, why every compromise proposal floated in the Senate concerned tariffs and tariffs alone. Why Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, Robert Hindmann all proposed Constitutional Amendments on tariffs. Why Robert Crittenden headed the Committee of Thirteen to discuss tariffs. Why all the Declarations of the Causes of Secession mention tariffs and the Southern Tariff-Paying states to the exception of all else. Oops. Wait a second! Every one of those proposals, regardless of author, concerned slavery and nothing else. Every declaration mention slavery most of all, and describe the south as slave-owning states. And when the south started the war at Sumter they started it over slavery, and not tariffs.
You're pretty quick on the trigger yourself, cowboy.
No need for statistics or documentation.
That always seemed to be your attitude when nolu chan brought the bacon, or rustbucket, or Pea Ridge, or stainless. I was just trying to be considerate of my interlocutor. Or are we playing Wlat's favorite game, "I win"?
Never mind the fact that far from drying up, tariff revenue expanded greatly.
You keep saying that. I guess your fellow-posters who disagreed with you don't count?
They're better-equipped than I to argue tariff stats, so I'll let them, while noting again that original source material, which you referred to in your reply to Domain Master, refers repeatedly to tariffs and business considerations in the debate about secession. Alexander Stephens, whom you referenced, opposed secession in his reply to Robert Toombs in the Georgia secession debate, and I happen to think he was "righter" than Toombs; but your referencing his remarks shows that you know very well that Southerners spent a good deal of time debating the proposition that the Union was a one-way street, or proposed to become a one-way street, in which the North would take advantage of the South economically.
Mind you, it needn't have been actually true, and modern economic analyses and sensitivity tests of the effects of tariffs on Southern States' gdp's might show that the Southerners' apprehensions were ill-founded, but the point here, is that they thought they were correct, and that they acted on those beliefs.
And not just on the slavery question -- your and the Red historians' politically-motivated, Clintonoid "contextualizing" gainsay utterly notwithstanding.
I grant you Greeley's paper was Democrat, but the Post's editorial line fell right in with that of The New York Times. How "Democrat" is that -- calling for war on the South?
But if you insist, here's another paper, much more Republican-sounding, the Manchester Union Democrat:
The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing....It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No---we MUST NOT "let the South go." [Emphasis in original]
-- Union Democrat, Manchester, N.H., February 19, 1861.
If the Union Democrat is to be believed in the slightest, that "the South gains by this process," then by the operation of logic, what I posted above, and what Robert Toombs told the Georgians, was correct: the North was indeed cleaning up on the South, by the operation of the tariff as it existed, never mind the impending Morrill Tariff that was to be passed the following year.
It was about the Benjamins, your blowhard snarliness to the contrary notwithstanding.
That's a very good point. It shows up the fact that the editorialist wasn't really concerned about tariff revenue from the imports as much as he was sales of tariff-subsidized Yankee manufactures in the South and the West. Because that is where the gouge was biting -- and by the operation of arithmetic, in the South more than in the West, because the center of population was still well east of the Mississippi.
It was about sales of Yankee manufactures, and the protection Yankee shippers and brokers enjoyed in capturing a significant share of the value of Southern cotton production via middlemen's turnstile rents.
So confederacy or no confederacy, the tariff would be collected regardless of whether the goods come in at New York or at New Madrid, Mo. The Benjamins would still come rolling in.
Not to Northern manufacturers, they wouldn't -- they would lose a significant formerly-domestic market -- and not on imports by the South for her agricultural economy. Which was the real point.
You've just been discussing the effect of the war on actual tariff revenue streams, and you seem to be locked in an obscurantist -- but still meaningful -- argument about definitions and categories.
Just wanted to correct this misimpression:
There was no "rebellion". That was just political rhetoric. Time to put it away, now. Or otherwise, you can't complain about stand any more.
No. That was the reason.
What other use for the law was there?
Steering imports (in violation of the Constitution) to favored ports -- the ones with lots of warehouses. You talk about merchants storing stuff in New York for later sale. Well how stupid is that?
Stupid like a fox, if you're a New York politician and you want to clone the distribution-center role London had taken on with near-identical laws that the Warehousing Act was modelled on. Because it funnels massive amounts of trade through your local entrepot, that's why. A Jaycee's dream.
Why import something to begin with if you don't have a customer for it? Why put your money up to buy it, go through the expense of shipping it, then pay for storing it, and then look for a buyer? Just how dumb do you think they were?
It's called, stocking merchandise. Wal-Mart and Radio Shack do it all the time. Only New York's warehouse system allowed the merchants to stash there stuff in New York and defer the duties. That's called leveraging your investment -- it's a comparative advantage. Nugatory at free-trade "tariff" rates, it becomes an enormous economic fact of life if you're talking about tariff rates like those of 1828 or contemplating something like a Morrill Tariff.
Other people understand the economics of this better than I, so I'll let them make the argument, and stand aside.
And when the south started the war at Sumter they started it over slavery, and not tariffs.
No, they didn't. They started it over independence, and having a future.