States rights does not include the right of a state to violate the Constitution. The Constitution called for the return of fugitive slaves to their home state -- or technically speaking the return of people owing service in another state. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.
States rights refers to powers not delegated in the Constitution to the Federal government or items that were not specified in the Constitution. The return of fugitive slaves as specified in the Constitution was agreed to by the states ratifying the Constitution.
This bill [Morrill Tariff] did not precipitate secession. It was a result of secession.
It was a factor in secession though not nearly as much as slavery. The Republican-dominated House passed the Morrill Tariff in the Spring of 1860, and Lincoln was for the high protective tariff. The election of 1860 gave the North enough votes in the Senate to pass the Morrill Tariff even if all Southern Senators were present, at least according to the December 1860 post-election vote calculation of Senator Wigall of Texas. The tariff increase was a foregone conclusion.
You are correct that the Morrill Tariff never extracted money from the South. The South left before it could. The Morrill Tariff greatly depressed imports. Imports to the Port of New York (by far the largest port for imports) averaged about $20,000,000 a month in 1860. They started out at $26,000,000 in January 1861, but the last six months averaged about $10,000,000 a month. [Source: Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia for the Year 1865]
" ... The United States thus had a low-tariff policy that favored the South until the Civil War began in 1861." Wikipedia.
Favored the South? That is a misstatement. Thank you for citing the source. You have to be careful of Wikipedia, as I'm sure you know. If I might, let me provide you with a couple of other interpretations from the time.
Even at the relatively low rates in effect, the tariff did extract money from the South and transferred it to Northern manufacturers. As the Daily Chicago Times editorialized on December 10, 1860:
The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole . . . We have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually.
Or from another source, the book, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, by Thomas Prentice Kettell, New York, 1860:
The South manufactures nearly as much per head, of the white population, as does the West. Both these sections hold, however, a provincial position in relation to the East. As we have seen, heretofore, the first accumulations of capital in the country were at the East, from the earnings of navigation and the slave-trade. These were invested in "manufactures," "protected" by the tariffs imposed by the federal government. The operation of these tariffs was to tax consumers in the South and West, pro rata upon what manufactures they purchased of the East, and, by so doing, to increase Eastern capital at the expense of these two sections. The articles mostly protected, and of which the cost is enhanced to the consumers, in proportion to the duties, are manufactured in the East to the extent of $320,000,000, of which $200,000,000 are sold South and West. This gives an annual drain of $50,000,000 from the consumers of those sections, as a bonus or protection to the capital employed in manufacturing at the North.
I'm curious. Had secession won, the Confederacy would have had to pay for a separate government structure, and a military establishment probably much more expensive than that maintained by the Union before 1860. It would have to do this from about 1/4 the population of the 1860 Union.
Based on 1856 Treasury reports and 1850 census figures, Kettell estimates that the South consumed one third of the imports to the US. If that consumption continued unimpeded, the Confederacy would have obtained revenue from those imports plus any imports diverted from Northern ports with their higher tariff.
The South would have had to pay for a government that serviced fewer people and had less Western Border to protect. The Southerner who imported goods would have had to pay less in tariff by buying cheaper European goods imported directly to the South and less in effective tariff by switching from Northern goods whose price was propped up by the Morrill Tariff to European goods. Perhaps enough would be saved to pay for any increases in the per capita cost of government that you suggested.
The North would have had to lower the price of their goods in order to compete with Europe. This would have played havoc with the Northern economy and import revenue to the North would go down. Bear Sterns failure is a piker compared to this.
Not familiar with this one, but I'll take your word on it. It's only fair to point out that Texans raided into Mexico just about as much as Mexicans raided into Texas.
I'm not familiar with the Texas raids into Mexico. Could you provide me a source, please? I am aware that Texas Rangers under RIP Ford chased Mexican raiders led by Cortina into Mexico and defeated them there. My great great grandfather served under Ford during the war and fought Cortina.
From the Austin, Texas, State Gazette of November 12, 1859:
We are informed by friends from the Rio Grande, that at last dates, Cortenas [sic] was on this side of the Rio Grande, with a force variously estimated from two to six hundred; that he had complete control of all the country except the city of Brownsville, and this was guarded day and night by the citizens.
His parties are scouring the country, robbing and destroying property and farms and residences of the American population. That he has destroyed Nealsville, and had stolen 150 beeves from different owners – That the life of an American citizen is unsafe outside of Brownsville, and not very safe in it. That the American families had fled for protection to Matamoras in Mexico; and that the company of Mexican troops was still in Fort Brown giving a protectorate to Texas. They are subsisted by the citizens of Brownsville, whose Committee of Safety raised the means by private subscription.
BTW, I thought conservatives were supposed to be opposed to Supreme Court rulings where the justices impose their own values on the rest of society. The Scott decision was the first and still the most egregious of these. It was wrong constitutionally, morally and historically.
Slavery was the law of the land back then, and it was legal. Slaves were considered property. They were even considered real estate in Kentucky. The Dred Scott ruling was based on property rights rather than human rights.
Posters often refer to "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence at this point. If you are inclined to do so, please remember the rest of the Declaration where it says of the king, "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us ..." The insurrections referred to the freeing of blacks (and indentured servants) who would escape and serve the king against the American colonists. Look up Lord Dunmore's Proclamation sometime. In other words, the Declaration said all men are equal but leave our slaves alone.
I think Taney's reasoning was wrong in the Scott ruling. Blacks fought for our side in the Revolution (but more fought for the British). If Taney wasn't willing to accord them full citizenship on a human rights basis, he should have recognized that blacks who fought for us earned their right to be treated as first class citizens.
And by the way, Taney freed his slaves in the 1820s.
"While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came."
Many of that time interpreted Lincoln's First Inaugural speech as meaning nothing but war. I've posted a thread about newspaper editorials on this speech and how polarized the country had become. See: Lincoln's first inaugural.
Sorry for being so long winded in this reply, but you raised points that needed a response. Thank you.
States rights does not include the right of a state to violate the Constitution.
Nope. But certain actions taken by the federeal government to enforce a constitutional provision could be a violation of states' rights. The clause you quote contains no prescribed enforcement mechanism other than presumably for State 1 to sue State 2 in federal court.
The election of 1860 gave the North enough votes in the Senate to pass the Morrill Tariff even if all Southern Senators were present, at least according to the December 1860 post-election vote calculation of Senator Wigall of Texas.
No doubt there were enough northern senators to pass the law, if all northern senators voted for it, which seems unlikely since it was a Republican issue. Since only 31 of the 68 senators were Republican, they would have been in a minority and unable to pass the bill without Democrat party support, which would have no doubt watered down any terms significantly. This is leaving filibustering and other parliamentary maneuvers out of the equation. Bottom line - the Morrill tariff has been used as a southern excuse for secession ever since secession failed. It was hardly used at all in this way at the time, as with rare exceptions the southerners themselves cited threats to the institution of slavery as their reason for seceding.
The operation of these tariffs was to tax consumers in the South and West, pro rata upon what manufactures they purchased of the East, and, by so doing, to increase Eastern capital at the expense of these two sections.
I'm not an economist, so I'm not able to poke the appropriate holes in this argument. I suspect, however, that it is ridiculously simplistic.
I would also like to point out that southern apologists can hardly be considered more reliable to prove a point than Wikipedia. Also, the very quote you use shows that the Northwest was affected as much by the tariff as was the South. All non-manufacturers were equally affected, throughout the Union. A New England farmer paid the same "tax" to his New England manufacturer neighbor as a South Carolina planter.
If tariffs were not used to raise money, some other system of taxation would have had to be used. What did southerners of the time propose as a more equitable system of taxation?
Protective tariffs were first promoted by Henry Clay (a southerner and slaveowner) during and after the War of 1812. The Union was severely embarassed during this war by the fact that so many manufactures had been imported from the enemy, hampering the war effort. I find it highly amusing that most of the pro-south apologists of today think protective tariffs were an abomination in 1860, when US manufactures were less competitive, but somehow are just the ticket today.