Anyone understanding basic economics, especially someone degreed in such, understands that protectionist tariffs on imports reduce the available money supply for purchases in kind, thereby repressing the exports of the importer. It's not rocket science.
... that the imports we had (esp. in the south) were different types of finished textiles than the U.S. produced.
The bulk of goods imported were not textile. The textile export revenues of the South were affected. Less revenue for foreign exporters to the US resulted in less money available to purchase Southern textile exports. It's simple economics.
In other words, we would have bought them whether the tariff was there or not at the same prices.
Wrong. The quality of goods also affect the desirability, aka demand. Despite the North churning out vast amounts of inferior products, the South continued to purchase superior European products to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
The more work that economic historians do on the tariff issue, the weaker and weaker it becomes as an issue for secession. The data is not on your side.
I guess that explains why the South protested over the amount of the tariffs almost since our founding? </sarcasm>
My how things have changed. </sarcasm> If this were true today it would blow the entire Wal-Mart business plan right out of the water.
2) In the major speeches, they were overwhelmingly focused on slavery, not the tariff.
3) No, it's not "wrong." The fact is, if you import bananas and you don't make bananas, you either get them or you don't. A small tax on bananas doesn't do a lot to change consumption if there are no subsitutes. What the new evidence on the tariff is showing is that the types of imports covered by the tariffs were subject to substitution---you could buy British textiles, or make your own, or whatever. But southerners were not locked into buying the products. They CHOSE to buy them, then grouse about it.
I do NOT favor a tariff, period, and certainly not one disporportionately aimed at a particular group. But it's sophistry and a smokescreen to try to blame the tariff for disunion and secession. It was all about slavery. They knew it, and you know it.
[4CJ] I guess that explains why the South protested over the amount of the tariffs almost since our founding? </sarcasm>
Two answers suggest themselves to me:
A) Are the economic historians working with good data and without an agenda? Remember that the Marxist historians at Columbia have been beavering away for years, trying to recenter the Civil War as a moral issue and as a didactic political drama of vanguard liberation, one of Marxist-Leninism's favorite (distorting) prisms. It would help their case if the tariff issue could be made to go away, and if slavery could be isolated as the solitary issue on the national bill of disagreements. Their politically-loaded mantra for years has been "it was all about slavery."
B) The data may or may not support a subtle argument that the tariff did not redound to the disadvantage of the South. However, the majority of Southerners thought that it did, and they thought so very firmly. As evidence, I would bring in (and cite if asked) the speeches of Robert Toombs and Alexander Stephens, the former a Democrat and the latter a Whig and a defender of the Whig program (Henry Clay's "American System"), debating secession and the iniquities of the tariff before the governor, legislature, and leading citizens of Georgia, as Georgia ruminated on the secession question after South Carolina, Toombs's home State, had already left the Union.
Stephens labored to make the argument LS does, but Toombs carried the day. Georgia, convinced she had nothing to look forward to but maltreatment and financial ruin from a Union run by Lincoln's sectionally-based political machine, seceded.