Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, (March, 1861):
"Allow me briefly to allude to some of these improvements (of the new Confederate Constitution over the old Union Constitution). The question of building up class interests, or fostering one branch of industry to the prejudice of another under the exercise of the revenue power, which gave us so much trouble under the old constitution, is put at rest forever under the new."
“We allow the imposition of no duty with a view of giving advantage to one class of persons, in any trade or business, over those of another.
“This old thorn of the tariff, which was the cause of so much irritation in the old body politic,is removed forever from the new.
The next evil that my friend complained of, was the Tariff. Well, let us look at that for a moment. About the time I commenced noticing public matters, this question was agitating the country almost as fearfully as the Slave question now is. In 1832, when I was in college, South Carolina was ready to nullify or secede from the Union on this account. And what have we seen? The tariff no longer distracts the public councils. Reason has triumphed. The present tariff was voted for by Massachusetts and South Carolina. The lion and the lamb lay down together-- every man in the Senate and House from Massachusetts and South Carolina, I think, voted for it, as did my honorable friend himself. And if it be true, to use the figure of speech of my honorable friend, that every man in the North, that works in iron and brass and wood, has his muscle strengthened by the protection of the government, that stimulant was given by his vote, and I believe every other Southern man. So we ought not to complain of that...Yes, and Massachusetts, with unanimity, voted with the South to lessen them, and they were made just as low as Southern men asked them to be, and those are the rates they are now at. -- Alexander Stephens to the Georgia legislature, December 1860.
Mr. Stephens didn't think much of tariffs as an issue then. What did he know that you and this yutz, Bill Hunt, apparently don't know? And another thing. If tariffs were such a bone of contention, if they were so onerous that it was worth entering into a rebellion to get away from them, then why did the confederate congress, as one of its first actions, impose tariffs as high or higher than those imposed by the federal government? That would be like the founding fathers installing John Adams a king a month after the Declaration of Independence.
Why yes, of course, I *do* see where the two are on the same moral plane... </sarcasm off>