No, I've understood all along, but object to your focusing on outlier high rates when the overall average rate was 15%.
Indeed, in the same paragraph where you mention the Union's top tariff rates, you also generously allow the Confederates an average tariff rate of 15%.
In fact, on Day One of the Confederacy those two rates were exactly the same, but you chose to focus on the highest Union rates while mentioning only the average of Confederates.
Clearly, rusty, you are a master of propagandists, able to convey lies while telling just the facts!
My hats off to your skill, sir, but you never fool me.
rustbucket: "FYI, on February 16, 1861, the provisional Confederate Congress adopted the same tariff rates as the 1857 US tariff.
Then on February 18, 1861, they exempted a number of items from that tariff."
Items exempted were food and weapons, which means the majority of the old 1857 rates remained in effect.
New lower tariffs did not take effect until September 1861 by which time nearly all such commerce had ended.
Bottom line: Confederate tariffs were not the great earth-shaking change which might drive otherwise sober Northerners into a frenzy of war-fever against the South.
So the focus of Northern attention during early months of 1861 was not Confederate tariffs, it was elsewhere, beginning with Fort Sumter.
FYI, here is an interesting analysis of Morrill from the then Republican-friendly New York Times:
"Indeed, some feared that the Tariff was so high on most articles that foreign goods would almost entirely cease to seek our markets, and that our own people would spend such vast sums of money, in erecting and providing factories here, that at some future day a crash would come when circumstances should have rendered it necessary to relax the prohibition, as they termed it, of the importation of foreign goods.
"That ruin would, at a future time stare our great manufacturers in the face, and a crisis throw out of employment thousands and thousands of operatives at a time when other employment could not be found.
Such was the picture some of the opponents of the Tariff act of last March painted for the contemplation of themselves and those that would listen to them.
"But these predictions and forebodings had not the effect to prevent the passage of the act.
But not sooner was it passed, and the rates it prescribes levied on the goods arriving here, than the war-clouds which had been gradually growing larger and larger, and blacker and blacker, burst, with a tempest of iron rain, over the land.
The bombardment of Fort Sumter roused the Northerners to a sense of their danger, and, as one man, they sprang to their feet, and vowed that such treatment should not pass unpunished.
"A new direction was given, not only to the thoughts of the people, but to the channels of trade.
Those who had opposed the passage of a Tariff bill, which should raise the duties on imported merchandise, joined with those who had originated it and had urged its passage, and both parties soon concluded that the rates of duty, of which they had complained as too high and as prohibitory, should be still further increased, for, said they, we must keep our money in the country; we must now encourage our own people; we must not squander our substance in purchasing light wines, fine silks, and foreign fruits, when our Government is in danger; we must husband our resources and only seek abroad those articles of necessity for the war which we cannot procure or manufacture in our own land.
And thus thinking our Congressmen framed a new bill in August last..."
I cited a Northern paper that pointed out that high tariffs on manufactured items in the 1857 tariff were benefitting Northern manufacturers and Northern laborers. The South did not have that much of a manufacturing industry that would benefit from those high tariffs. Because of that, the South ended up essentially paying some of those high tariff rates cited by the Chicago paper to Northern manufacturers who were selling their items to Southerners at tariff-inflated prices. Or did the Northern manufacturers only boost the prices by 15% on their manufactured items protected by even higher tariffs? No? I thought not.
And you say I shouldn't mention all that or that I am telling lies when I do?
The fastest thing the Confederacy could do with respect to getting tariff revenue to support their new government was to use the existing 1857 tariff which was already in place in Southern ports. After putting that in place quickly, they kept working on a tariff that would reduce tariff rates. They achieved that in only three months, changing the tariff rates on hundreds of imported items including manufactured goods. They succeeded in negotiating a reduced sugar tariff with Louisiana with its many sugar plantations. The Confederacy completed that May version of their tariff before the North really made the blockade effective.
Bottom line: Confederate tariffs were not the great earth-shaking change which might drive otherwise sober Northerners into a frenzy of war-fever against the South.
That's your opinion, and you are welcome to it. Serious minded Northerners were quite aware of the problem the two different tariffs posed for the Northern economy. Northerners had shot themselves in the foot with the Morrill Tariff. A crafty Northern politician plotted to instigate war as a way of overcoming the two tariff problem.
So the focus of Northern attention during early months of 1861 was not Confederate tariffs, it was elsewhere, beginning with Fort Sumter.
Shoot! All those businesses failing in NYC, all those papers saying the Northern economy was going to be ruined by the two tariffs, Northern merchants upset. Papers advocating that Southern ports be blockaded, the Morrill tariff should be repealed, Lincoln should convene the Congress, the South should be allowed to go in peace. All that never dominated the news? Apparently I missed that it was all about Fort Sumter in the papers.
Dadgum it, I'll have to throw away all my copies of old newspaper articles that conflict with today's politically correct Northern version of history that you've just related. I'll have to chuck those newspaper articles down the Memory Hole.