Not a sales tax, a tariff. The 1861 Morrill Tariff act applied to imports to the entire United States, not just Southern States.
Which would have put an undue burden on the South as an agrarian society.
We can argue semantics about the Morrill Tariff until the end of time, but we know three facts that are not in dispute.
1. Secession was a right of the individual states. Were it not, the US Constitution would have not have been ratified. If not the case, why did outgoing President Buchanan take no action after the first Southern states seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration?
2. Confederate Leadership was not tried for treason after the war, see Chase’s quote for the reasons why. Would anyone argue that the leaders of the Revolution would have been treated in the same manner?
3. Had the war truly been about slavery, why no Emancipation Proclamation until 1863?
In the end, had the Southern Confederacy ponied up the money that Washington was expecting from Morrill, there wouldn’t have been a war.
In theory. In practice, the Northern states only contributed 28% of the export products, and therefore only 28% of the returning imports could be bought from revenue produced by northern exports.
The South was producing ~73% of the exports that were paying for the imports, and at 1/4th of the population of the North, the financial burden of the Tariff was substantially higher on their population than it was on the Northern population.