All the costs the owner of the goods CAN pass on are paid by the eventual consumers INDIRECTLY, yes. Tariffs however are not paid by consumers DIRECTLY. What happens in a competitive market is:
1. the importer's profit margins get squeezed
2. the importer is undercut by domestic producers and loses market share as a result and
3. domestic producers take the opportunity to raise their prices as much as they can while still undercutting the imports on price.
by 1860 the Southern states were paying in excess of 80 percent of all tariffs” The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War; by Thomas J. DiLorenzo, 2002, ISBN 0-7615-3641-8, page 135-126:
The following are what lawyers call "Statements Against Interest"...ie frank admissions by Northern newspapers at the time admitting that the Southern states are providing the overwhelming share of all exports/imports.
"The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing. The transportation of cotton and its fabrics employs more than all other trade. It is very clear the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go." The Manchester, New Hampshire Union Democrat Feb 19 1861
December 1860, before any secession, the Chicago Daily Times foretold the disaster that Southern free ports would bring to Northern commerce: "In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwide trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow." Chicago Daily Times Dec 1860
"It is not a war for Negro Liberty, but for national despotism. It is a tariff war, an aristocratic war, a pro-slavery war." Abolitionist George Basset May 1861 American Missionary Association
Even after the fact, Northerners were saying the same things:
"This question of tariffs and taxation, and not the negro question, keeps our country divided....the men of New York were called upon to keep out the Southern members because if they were admitted they would uphold [ie hold up or obstruct] our commercial greatness." Governor of New York Horatio Seymour on not readmitting Southern representatives to Congress 1866
Foreign sources noticed the same thing:
" If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States? …Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived … The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union. So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel." – Charles Dickens, as editor of All the Year Round, a British periodical in 1862
But hey, who ya gonna believe - Observers on all sides at the time as well as economists and tax experts who have studied the period....or a PC Revisionist with his little fantasies about how taxes and the economy really work?