Posted on 05/01/2002 4:26:35 AM PDT by Non-Sequitur
One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States. This may seem strange, since wars throughout all of economic history have had important economic components, but it is true nevertheless. For example Richard Ferrier, a critic of my book, The Real Lincoln, recently insisted in a WorldNetDaily interview that in the Lincoln-Douglas debates “there is not a word about [Lincoln’s] economic agenda. Not a word!’
Absolutely correct. There are many words, not just one. Such as during the July 17, 1858, debate in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln said to Douglas, “You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.”
Lincoln here was voicing his career-long animosity toward the Democratic Party’s opposition to central banking. Ferrier’s rather hysterical claim that there was “not a word” about any economic agenda in the Lincoln-Douglas debates is simply untrue.
Indeed, a major component of the debates – Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery into the new territories – had a huge economic component. One of the reasons Lincoln and the Republican Party establishment gave for their opposition was, as he stated in his October 16, 1854, speech, that “the whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [new] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people. This they cannot be, to any considerable extent, if slavery shall be planted with them.”
Labor market protectionism was a basis for Lincoln’s opposition to the extension of slavery. A key strategy of the Republican Party was to buy votes from white laborers in the territories by promising to protect their jobs from competition with slave labor. This was not a very attractive position to hold, but it was indeed economically and politically motivated, despite Ferrier’s denials of any economic agenda appearing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Ferrier invokes the authority of James McPherson, who also said there was no talk of banks in the debates, but McPherson is clearly wrong in light of the above quotation. There was no great emphasis on monetary policy, but Lincoln did bring it up.
Ferrier also misstates my position in asserting that “neo-Rebels,” whatever that may mean, argue that “the tariff was the cause of the war” (emphasis added).” I do not say this; he is setting up a straw-man argument. What I say in the book is that the tariff issue was one among many issues in the war, and one that has been studiously ignored or downplayed by people like Ferrier.
He argues that the Morrill Tariff of 1861 was passed before Lincoln was inaugurated and uses that fact to make the case that Lincoln did not care about the tariff and that it had nothing to do with secession. He is being deceptive here, since I say the same thing in The Real Lincoln. I do not claim that Lincoln was in office when the U.S. Senate passed the tariff shortly before his inauguration. What I do say, though, is that as the leader of the Republican Party and its presidential candidate he must have had a hand in the political maneuvering that was involved in getting the tariff passed. I also quote Richard Bensel, author of the book, Yankee Leviathan (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), as saying that the Morrill Tariff was “the centerpiece of the Republican Party platform” of 1860. If it was not “the” centerpiece it was certainly “a”centerpiece, and Lincoln, as the party’s presidential nominee, was expected to enforce it when elected.
As the great historian of tariff history, Frank Taussig, wrote in Tariff History of the United States (p. 158), the Morrill Tariff “was passed, undoubtedly, with the intention of attracting to the Republican Party, at the approaching Presidential election, votes in Pennsylvania and other States that had protectionist leanings.”
Several southern states had already seceded, including South Carolina in December, when it was apparent that the tariff would probably pass the Senate and would be enforced by Lincoln, the career-long protectionist. Again, this is not to say that the tariff was the sole cause of the war, but it was certainly relevant.
Lincoln did play a more direct role with regard to the tariff in his First Inaugural Address, as I argue in The Real Lincoln. There he stated, “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion – no using force against, or among the people anywhere.”
I attempt to put this in historical context in my book. South Carolina nullified the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, forcing Andrew Jackson to back down and negotiate a lower tariff rate by 1833. That tariff originally had a 40 percent average rate. Southern statesmen continued to complain about tariffs, though, since according to Taussig, by 1860 the import-dependent South was paying some 80 percent of all tariffs. But by 1857, writes Taussig, the United States enjoyed the closest proximity to free trade that would exist in the nineteenth century, with an average tariff rate of around 15 percent.
Then in the 1859-1860 congressional session the House of Representatives passed the Morrill tariff, followed by the Senate in the next session, in early 1861, just before Lincoln’s inauguration. The average rate would soon be elevated to 47.06 percent, according to Taussig.
So, Southerners had been complaining bitterly about being plundered by the tariff, paying some 80 percent of it while, in their view, most of the money was being spent in the North. Then the Republican Party gains power and, before anyone expects a war, more than triples the average rate at a time when the tariff was the primary source of federal tax revenue; there was no income tax yet. Then Lincoln makes his First Inaugural Address and says it is his duty to “collect the duties and imposts” (among other things) and, as long as those much higher duties are collected, “there will be no invasion.”
My interpretation of these events is this: The tripling of the average tariff rate was the keystone of the Republican Party platform of 1860, as Richard Bensel argues. Once in power, Lincoln announced to the South, effectively: We are going to make tax slaves out of you by tripling the rate of taxation, and as long as you collect these taxes there will be no military invasion. He was not going to back down to the South Carolinian nullifiers, as Andrew Jackson did.
This was being done while the Confederate Constitution was outlawing protectionist tariffs altogether, which would have caused most of the trade of the world to be diverted from high-tariff Northern ports to lower-tariff Southern ones. Some Northern newspapers affiliated with the Republican Party were openly calling for the bombardment of Southern ports (before Fort Sumter). “Let the South adopt the free-trade system,” the Daily Chicago Times editorialized on December 10, 1860, and the North’s “commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it now is.” The Newark Daily Advertiser editorialized on April 2, 1861, that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” which “must operate to the serious disadvantage of the North.” The paper called South Carolina the “chief instigator” of these free-trade doctrines, and called for the “closing of the ports” in the South by military force. Ferrier’s casual dismissal of the role of the tariff in the war as only being of interest to “neo-Rebels” is ahistorical.
Ferrier continues to insist that economics (besides the economics of slavery) had nothing to do with Lincoln’s election and the South’s reaction to it, but the preeminent Lincoln scholar, Pulitzer Prize winning Lincoln biographer David Donald, would probably disagree. In his book, Lincoln Reconsidered (p. 106)., Donald quotes U.S. Senator John Sherman, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman and a major Republican Party figure in the U.S. Senate during the war, as explaining why Lincoln was elected: “Those who elected Mr. Lincoln,”said Senator Sherman, “expect him . . . to secure to free labor its just right to the Territories of the United States; to protect . . . by wise revenue laws, the labor of our people; to secure the public lands to actual settlers . . . ; to develop the internal resources of the country by opening new means of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific.”
David Donald claims to interpret this remark “from the politician’s idiom” into plain English by saying that Lincoln and the Republicans “intended to enact a high protective tariff that mothered monopoly, to pass a homestead law that invited speculators to loot the public domain, and to subsidize a transcontinental railroad that afforded infinite opportunities for jobbery.”
Donald left one thing out – the first sentence, in which the first goal of the Republican Party, according to Senator Sherman, was labor market protectionism. “To secure to free labor its just right to the Territories” meant to keep slavery out, not for moral but for purely economic and political reasons.
In conclusion, one of the most prominent Republicans of Lincoln’s time, and perhaps the most prominent Lincoln biographer of our time, are of the opinion that economics was at the heart of Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency. In Sherman’s interpretation, the basic stratagy of the party was to buy votes and campaign contributions from 1) protectionist manufacturers; 2) mining and timber companies who would get cheap federal land; 3) Subsidy-seeking railroad corporations and associated industries; and 4) white laborers who did not want competition for jobs from either freed blacks or slaves.
One is inclined to assume that the reason why people like Ferrier so hysterically deny that Lincoln had any economic motivations, despite having spent a 25-year political career promoting the Whig Party’s economic agenda, is that they are deathly afraid that the public will begin to develop an interest in the real Lincoln, as opposed to the fantasy Lincoln that has been created by the cartel of Lincoln scholars.
One thing that can never be admitted in polite academic company is the notion that economics had anything to do with the American War between the States.
A straw man the author puts forth to criticize a critic.
“You remember we once had a national bank . . . the Supreme Court decided that the bank was unconstitutional. The whole Democratic party revolted against that decision. General Jackson himself asserted that he, as president, would not be bound to hold a national bank to be constitutional, even though the court had decided to do so. He fell in precisely with the view of Mr. Jefferson, and acted upon it under official oath, in vetoing a charter for a national bank.”
A very interesting comment on an early conflict (1820's) between the executive and judicial branches. Required reading for those who think "loose interpretation" of the Constitution is a recent Leftist perversion.
One hardly knows where to begin.
Perhaps reading the whole of Donald's chapter 6, "The Radicals and Lincoln," in Lincoln Reconsidered would help. Donald is, in the section DiLorenzo cites, presenting a school of historians with whom he disagrees, at least in part. See esp. pp 109, 110 and 245 in the Bibliographical Essay.
Donald does not think any one of the "Radicals" [his term for Sumner, Sherman, Wade, Greeley, etc.,] speaks for Lincoln, the Party, or the Administration, and when he translates Sherman's remarks, cited in the article, he is imitating the voice of T. Harry Williams, J. G. Randall, and the like.
But setting aside DiLorenzo's always crude reading of texts, there is no doubt that the tarrif and other economic matters figured in the election of 1860, and even in the secession movement.
As with all historical matters, one has to use judgment and see the whole. And the best way to do that, in the present case, is to look at the words of the leaders of the secession cause in the states, both in 1860-1, and in the period in which the crisis developed, roughly 1846-60. That evidence points, overwhelmingly, to slavery. Slavery in the territories, Dres Scott, the fugitve slave law, fear of slave insurrection, defense of slavery as a positive good, and so forth.
Cheers,
Richard F.
We are going to make tax slaves out of you by tripling the rate of taxation, and as long as you collect these taxes there will be no military invasion. He was not going to back down to the South Carolinian nullifiers, as Andrew Jackson did.
This DiLorenzo guy is such a hoot! Where in the world does he get this stuff? Old Hickory told the Charleston idiots he would personally lead the Army and crush them. (see Jackson's message to the People of South Carolina) The fire-eating morons in Charleston backed down. Andrew Jackson never "backed down" from any man or any thing.
It will suffice to say here, in conclusion of this subject, that the passage of the Force Bill, and the energetic preparations of the President, deterred the nullifiers. The President had declared in his proclamation that as chief magistrate of the country he could not, if he would, avoid performing his duty; that the laws must be executed; that all opposition to their execution must be repelled, and by force, if necessary. That Jackson meant all that he said no one for a moment questioned, and South Carolina hastened to "nullify" her hostile action, though still loudly advocating her favorite doctrine of "State rights."The tariff difficulty, which had led to this controversy, was for the time quieted by another "compromise bill," offered by Henry Clay. This provided for the gradual reduction of duties till 1843, when they were to reach a general level of twenty per cent. This bill was accepted by Calhoun and his friends as a practical concession to their doctrines, and as enabling them to retire with some dignity from the discreditable attitude into which they had forced their State.
For DiLorenzo to say that Jackson "backed down" is ..... well.... typical of DiLorenzo.
Like one moron was telling me the other day about the slaves in the North AFTER the war. lol.
Of course, he also believed that the skirmish at Sabin Pass was the equivalent of Thermopylae.
Wlat must still be in bed with his teddy bear and pacifier.
"In all this I can see but the doom of slavery. The North do not want, nor will they want, to interfere with the institution. But they will refuse for all time to give it protection unless the South shall return soon to their allegiance." - April 19, 1861, in a letter to his father-in-law, Frederick Dent.
"My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go." - November 27, 1861, in a letter to his father.
"I never was an abolitionist, not even what could be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly and it became patent in my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not therefore be willing to see any settlement until the question is forever settled." - August 30, 1863, in a letter to Elihu Washburne.
"As soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed. We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle... there had to be an end to slavery." -In a conversation with Bismarck, 1878.
"The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United States will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true." - U.S. Grant, in his Memoirs, 1885.
Must have changed his mind, huh?
Do you have a source for that quote? Oh... I forgot. Neo-confederates are allowed to just make things up. Neither accuracy nor honest is a requirement for membership in the DiLorenzo brigade.
If anyone is interested in what U.S. Grant really thought about slavery, not the words that the revisionist anti-American neo-confederates put into his mouth, they can click HERE
The predicament in which both the Government and the commerce of the country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws, is now thoroughly understood the world over....If the manufacturer at Manchester [England] can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage...If the importations of the counrty are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own port by millions of tons, to be transported abroad by the same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the lost of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many huindred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers...Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty-free. The process is perfectly simple... The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North...We now see clearly whither we are tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question---one of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated powers of the State or Federal government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad.....We were divided and confused till our pockets were touched. ---New York Times March 30, 1861
The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing....It is very clear that the South gains by this process, and we lose. No---we MUST NOT "let the South go." ----Union Democrat , Manchester, NH, February 19, 1861
That either revenue from duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad....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.....Allow rail road iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten per cent, which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not an ounce more would be imported at New York; the railroads would be supplied from the southern ports. ---New York Evening Post March 12, 1861, recorded in Northern Editorials on Secession, Howard C. Perkins, ed., 1965, pp. 598-599.
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge. --Cicero
"In Dick Dowling At Sabine Pass, he wrote of an incident in the Civil War when a handful of Confederate artillerymen led by Dowling turned back an armada of twenty-one Union warships?a battle sometimes referred to as the Thermopylae of the Civil War." - Fred Tarpley, Professor Emeritus of English Texas A&M University
"The Thermopylae in Texas is the Sabine Pass" - John McCormack, Professor of History Villanova University
"You may ask the schoolboy in the lowest form, who commanded at the Pass of Thermopylae. He can tell you. But my friends there are few in this audience who, if I ask them, could tell me who commanded at Sabine Pass. And yet, that battle of Sabine Pass was more remarkable than the battle of Thermopylae, and when it has orators and poets to celebrate it, will be so esteemed by mankind." - Jefferson Davis, President of the CSA
Respond if you like. I will gladly dig up more quotes for you and taunt you with them.
"The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has ever seen. It is suicide, murder...You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountain to ocean; legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death; It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal." -- Robert Toombs to Jefferson Davis.
(Maybe one of the Ape Linkum scholars can tell us if this newspaper was later closed down by the Ape.)
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