Virginia secessionists delivered what they promised. Reflecting the firm southern consensus on the revenue tariff, the Confederacy enacted tariff schedules within the 20 to 15 percent range.
This is false and indicates either the author's mathematical ineptitude or a willful skewing of the CSA tariff's actual numbers. The CSA tariff schedule taxed 431 articles with a high of 25%. On average, that and other high level rates were outliers to the tariff's range. Only 12 articles fell in that top category and many of them were luxury goods. As economists Robert McGuire and Norman van Cott noted when analyzing the CSA trade position, the only good that arguably had clear protectionist elements to it was Louisiana sugar - but one of the 431 articles on the schedule. The remainder all fell well below 25% and not predominantly in the 15-20% range, but rather in the 10-15% range. That gave the CSA an average rate of about 13% - one of the lowest in the world.
Their breakdown of the tariff act history of the CSA is similarly skewed and statistically misrepresented: On February 9 (four days before the Virginia Secession Convention opened), the provisional Confederate Congress passed a tariff—almost identical to the U. S. Tariff of 1857—that imposed an ad valorem duty of 24 percent on most manufactured goods.
Once again their statistics are either mathematically inept or willfully misleading. The 1857 tariff, which was universally considered a free-trade tariff, imposed an average rate of 18-19% by the standard calculations - not 24% (see either the US Census Bureau or Taussig 1910).
Nine days later, the Confederate Congress amended this act to expand the free list of goods to include most food products as well as arms, ammunition, and gunpowder. On March 15—when the Virginia convention was still meeting—the Confederacy lowered the duty on pig iron and other iron products to 15 percent. In May of 1861, after Virginia had joined the Confederacy, the Confederate Congress implemented a new tariff schedule with duties ranging from 25 percent to 5 percent.
Their statistics are once again misleading. Range stats are particularly useless when outliers are present because those outliers suggest a wider expanse than is actually present (for example, if a tariff on thirty goods taxed five of them at 2%, fifteen of them at 4%, five of them at 6%, four of them at 8% and one of them at 75% it would produce a tariff range of 2% through 75%, suggesting that tariffs were high. But in reality 29 of the 30 items would be taxed at under 10%, making the tariff on the whole a very low one). This was clearly the case with the CSA tariff where only 12 of 431 articles fell in the top range of 25%. The overwhelming majority of the remainder were in the 5 to 15% range and the tariff as a whole had an average rate of 13%, or about half that of its top rate.
For the manufactured goods that that the Confederacy was most likely to import—iron products, textiles, boots and shoes, furniture, and wagons—the ad valorem duty was pegged at 15 percent. Although significantly lower than the U. S. Tariff of 1857 and the Morrill Tariff of 1861, the Confederate tariff nevertheless fell far short of Unionist predictions of free trade.
That is not the case at all. The 15% rate, which was among the lowest in the world at the time, caused a panic up north when it was adopted as northerners feared that goods would be imported into the south at that low rate then smuggled across the border, undermining the Morrill act. When analyzing tariffs of the 19th century we often forget that they were also THE primary source of government revenue at the time. So a 15% import tax was not high by any standards of the day, and something in the 10-15% range was generally a minimum range for even a relatively low-expense government to operate, much less one involved in a war.
There is good reason to believe that a peacetime Confederate tariff might have been even higher.
There is little if anything to indicate this, and in fact existing evidence suggests that the exact opposite would be true. A central tenet of the confederate economic strategy (barring wartime interference) was to gain the trade market that the north was alienating from itself through protectionism. The confederates anticipated that, absent a war, the trade that was chased out of New York (it literally halved overnight upon the passage of the Morrill act) would go to Charleston instead due to the trade-friendly tariff rates that the CSA would enact. The south would thereby become a center of economic wealth while the north exiled itself from the very same thing through protectionism. This strategy was openly advocated by the leading secessionists (almost all of whom were free traders) and in the major southern publications such as DeBow's Review and the Charleston Mercury. To believe that they would have pursued the opposite of this policy despite all the advocacy of it throughout the secession crisis is a gratuitously claimed and wholly unsubstantiated absurdity.
I believe the heart of the problem with this article is that its authors are not economists but rather historians. There is nothing wrong per se with that but the argument that they are trying to make does require at least some degree of economic analysis to be valid. But in this case two historians are attempting to make that economic argument without a sufficient understanding of the field. They are out of their league and it shows.
The circulars created formidable bureaucratic regulations to collect the tariff, with those importing goods via railways facing particularly onerous requirements.
So exactly what were those "onerous" requirements? Well, for one a railroad operator had to present not one but (gasp!) three lists of what his cargo contained at the revenue post! I mean, after all - how dare they require freight shippers to supply their cargo lists at the customs post upon entering a country! Why they should be able to simply march on in, hand a small bag of coins that they themselves have concluded to be sufficient for the duties, and continue on their merry way. Cause we certainly can't burden them with that "onerous" requirement of actually having to provide paper copies of their shipping cargo!
But wait - it got worse. The cargo had to be in a separate hold from the passengers! After all, how dare they not let the train operaters throw them in all together! And how dare we tell airlines today that they must put their cargo in a separate hold from the passengers up above. Why, by golly, there's room for a crate of chickens under every seat plus three pineapples and a box of coal in every overhead bin!
And if that were not outrage enough, get a load of what those evil confederate bureaucrats with their onerous regulations did next. They stuck a lock on the cargo container and (oh horror!) put it in a warehouse! After all, why would any shipper want to pay his tariff fee with anything other than cash on hand? Why on earth would he want to warehouse the stuff thereby giving him time to sell his merchandise and then pay the tariff as it was taken out of the warehouse and its lock removed? I mean, doesn't every merchant travel around the country with a large coffee can of gold under his mattress just ready to pay tariffs?
And then they even made the poor overburdoned importers obtain a bond pledging they would pay the duties when they removed their goods from that evil onerous warehousing system that let them import their goods closer to the margin and with greater economic benefit without having to carry large ammounts of advance cash on their person!
But get this - the poor merchants were not the only ones who had to face the "onerous" regulators. The customs agents dared to impose themselves upon ordinary passengers by conducting inspections of bags for smuggled goods! One can only imagine the pains those passengers must have suffered. After all, can you even fathom the horros that would be imposed upon travellers if, say for example, they had to declare their bag's contents to be free of dutiable goods and, if reasonable suspicion indicated it was necessary, submit it for inspection to the airport customs agent on every single international flight into the United States? Who knows - in all the horrors of that policy those poor overburdened travellers would even have to fill out a form! Such a system would be an outrage, I dare say! And if the United States Congress ever tried imposed that burdensome and onerous weight on the backs of international travellers why, why I'd get my senator to filibust...oh wait. We already do have that system in place. Nevermind...