Greeley was slow to understand what an independant South with a low tarrif would do to the Northern economy with their high tarrif.
Low tariffs?
Tariffs were higher in the so-called CSA. What a bunch of laughably incompetent bums.
From a newsgroup:
"In point of fact, the long-standing Federal sugar import tariff imposed to protect Louisiana sugar growers was extensively debated at the Montgomery Convention and, in spite the highly-touted Confederate devotion to free trade principles, was retained in the Confederacy through out the ACW.
Additionally, the Confederacy placed tariffs on exports, including a duty on exported cotton. I repeat here for emphasis --- tariffs on Southern cotton exports were prohibited by the US Constitution. So much for high secessionist principles concerning tariffs! They talked the talk, but didn't walk the walk, as goes the modern formula for hypocrisy.
It is humorous to note that the prewar Federal iron import tariff, so despised by Secessionist firebrands, was continued by the Confederacy after some of the realities of fiscal and industrial policy set in. On 16 February 1861 the Provisional Confederate Congress blithely passed a bill providing for free import of railway iron. A month later, however, fiscal realities set in and an ad valorem import tax was imposed on such goods at the rate of 15% --- a rate confirmed in the Confederate Tariff Act of 21 May 1861.
For further details, see Robert C. Black's THE RAILROADS OF THE CONFEDERACY (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of NC Press, 1998)."
You can't make the excuse for the so-called congress acting for the so-called CSA that they were forced by the exigencies of war to impose import tariffs in February, 1861.
They expected to win in a walk --- Yankees can't fight, don't you know.
Walt
Care to post the stats on that one, Walt? The first confederate tariff act was to adopt the existing pre-Morrill US tariff schedule, a pro-free trade schedule under which the average rate was 19%. The US average rate in the first year after Morrill kicked in was 36.69%, and the year after that the yankees hiked it to 47.56%.
Comparatively the pre-Morrill schedule was in place in the south until the Confederate Congress adopted its own tariff in May 1861. The average rate on the May 1861 act was 13.3% with the highest rate, charged on 12 out of 431 ad valorem articles, was 25%.
To suggest that this 15% tariff in May 1861 ammounted to anti-free trade protectionism is idiocy, Walt. The tariff's low rate indicates very clearly that it was for revenue purposes and therefore not designed to curtail free trade. That 15% rate was in fact lower than any average tariff rate in the U.S. between 1850 and 1860 - a period known to be friendly to free trade. It was also one third of the yankee average tariff rate that kicked in for 1863.