There were several old FR folks that did not understand the tariff system, but they eventually came around to processing the facts and developing an intelligent understanding of the unfair use of federal power that was used to promote Northern sections over Southern culture.
Let me present something that you might like:
The Morrill Tariff Issue
“[A] wise and frugal government... shall restrain men from injuring one
another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of
industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread
it has earned.” -—Thomas Jefferson
In the three decades between 1830 and 1860, non-protectionist tariffs were in place for a grand total of 14 years, or less than half of that period. The period began under the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, which was restored to lower but still protectionist 1824 rates in 1832 and then to lower yet still protectionist rates in the 1833 compromise.
Heavy protectionism was reinstated with the Black Tariff in the early 1840’s. The 1846 Walker Tariff was the first true reduction and the first true non-protectionist tariff schedule that the U.S. had enacted since the War of 1812. It lasted 11 years until 1857 when it was reduced even further. That reduction lasted three years until the Morrill Tariff passed in May of 1860 and March of 1861.
3/1861 The Northern British Review, Edinburgh,
“The ‘Tariff’ question, again, enters largely (more largely than is commonly supposed) into the irritated and aggrieved feelings of the Southerners. And it cannot be denied that in this matter they have both a serious injury and an unconstitutional injustice to resent.
“... All Northern products are now protected: and the Morrill Tariff is a very masterpiece of folly and injustice. No wonder then that the citizens of the seceding States should feel for half a century they have sacrificed to enhance the powers and profits of the North; and should conclude, after much futile remonstrance, that only in secession could they hope to find redress.”
3/1861 By 1860 the protectionists had a solid majority in the House of Representatives. This majority was also strictly sectional. The northerners voted in near unanimity for the Morrill tariff while the southerners opposed it in equally unified form. The northerners outnumbered the southerners in the House, meaning it passed with a large majority.
The senate was a slightly different situation in 1860 but its tide had shifted by 1861.
Even if one assumes that every single seceded state's senators had (a) remained and (b) voted against the Morrill act, they still would not have been able to muster enough votes to defeat the thing.
In the absolute best case voting scenario that could have occurred under the senate that took office in 1861, the best that the southerners could manage would be a tie vote, in which case VP Hanibal Hamlin would cast a tiebreaker in favor of the north and the tariff would pass. The southerners recognized this fact almost immediately after the 1860 elections and publicly stated so.
It's certainly true that some Northerners, especially iron founders in Pennsylvania and Ohio, were very strongly pro tariff. So were Southern sugar and hemp growers. While it is always true that some protectionists existed in the south, the tide of southern opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of the free trade position. Every single major trade vote in Congress from the era testifies to this fact by displaying virtual unanimity among the southerners in opposition to tariffs.
Senator Robert Hunter of Virginia was on the senate floor in 1861 fighting the passage of the Morrill Tariff. He admitted its passage was inevitable ever since Pennsylvania and the Republican Party united on the issue. He told his colleagues;
“I believe it has been generally understood that the adhesion of the State of Pennsylvania to the Republican party was upon the condition of the passage of this Morrill-tariff bill. Still, I owe it, perhaps, to those whose opinions I represented on this committee, and to my constituents, to expose, if I can, the shallow pretexts on which it is sought to adopt this measure, and strip it of those disguises in the shape of specific duties, under which its enormous taxation is hidden.”
3/2/1861 The Morrill Tariff was signed into law by outgoing President Buchanan.
Before the seats vacated in 1861 by the Southern congressmen were cold, the economic order of the United States was dramatically changed. The tariff took off on an upward trajectory that was far above any tariff in history
This tariff raised the taxation rate from an average of approximately 15% to 37.5% with a greatly expanded list of covered items. This effectively tripled the taxation rate on imported goods. The law allowed a second additional rate averaging 47% for iron.
This was a major change in taxation. Having evolved from the low taxation rates of the early 1800’s, voters in certain sections of the country were in favor of higher tariffs to protect their manufacturing industries. Southerners, whose income came from agriculture, of course demanded low tariffs. They preferred buying European products, which were better and cheaper than those made in the United States.
Westerners, whose income also came from agriculture at first opposed high tariffs. But they came to accept the “American System” proposed by Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky. In 1824, Congress had boosted most tariffs as a result of Clay’s proposals.
Many people, especially Southerners protested the rising tariffs in 1828. Subsequent negotiations in the US Congress caused the tariffs to rise and fall intermittently during the 1840’s and 1850’s. Since the agricultural South needed more imported goods than the industrial North, the tariff highly affected the South while benefiting the manufacturing interests in the North. Most of the discretionary Federal spending was on Northern projects and infrastructure that did not encourage industrial development in the South.
When Morrill’s tax plan was introduced into debate in Congress in 1860, the Southerners felt betrayed when the West and North joined in support of the high tariffs.
Earlier in the year, the New Haven Daily Register said,
“There was never a more ill-timed, injudicious and destructive measure proposed, than the Morrill tariff bill, because while Congress is raising the duties for the Northern ports, the Southern Constitutional Convention is doing away with all import duties for the Southern ports, leaving more than three-fifths of the seafront of the Atlantic States…beyond the reach of our tariff…Southern ports would then invite the free trade of the world.”
The editor advised that the South be left alone, and the Morrill tariff be repealed.
The Republican Party and Lincoln’s major focus was on raising taxes, in particular raising and enforcing the tariff. His convention victory was particularly made possible by support from the Pennsylvania delegation.
Pennsylvania had long been the home and the political focus of the nation’s iron and steel industry which, ever since its inception during the War of 1812, had been chronically inefficient, and had therefore constantly been bartering its votes for high tariffs and, later, import quotas.
Virtually the first act of the Lincoln administration was in passing the Morrill protective tariff act, doubling existing tariff rates, and creating the highest tariff rates in American history
3/2/1861 The New York Evening Post stated:
“That either the revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the port must be closed to importations from abroad, is generally admitted. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed; the sources, which supply our treasury, will be dried up; we shall have no money to carry on the government; the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe.
"There will be nothing to furnish means of subsistence to the army; nothing to keep our navy afloat; nothing to pay the salaries of public officers; the present order of things must come to a dead stop.”
And so the southern senators bravely ran away. No filibuster. No vote against. Bravely, bravely ran away.
If that was the real grievance, they should have had no problem with getting a constitutional amendment passed to prevent or restrict the tariff.
But the south rebelled before the change to the Tariff was passed. Their access to the territories with their slave property was about to be cut off. They would not be able to rape their concubines on their NY shopping trips. Well, sir, something more drastic than a constitutional amendment was needed!
The tariff is their complaint that they would have to do something like show up and vote against it. Not convincing to the rest of us.
Of course the Lincoln administration did not pass the Morill tariff act. That was signed into law by Buchanan, a friend of the South, though from Pennsylvania.