Lincoln's Tariff War

Lew Rockwell ^ | 5/13/02 | Thomas Dilorenzo

[stainlessbanner]

This is not a slam on you, but it helps to post the correct title. I searched for "Lincoln's Tariff War" and came up with nothing! Looks like the poster changed the title to be called Lying and Lincoln.

[Restorer]

You miss my point. What you are referring to is a balance of payments issue, not a revenue issue. Unless the consumers of imported goods in the northern, mid-south and border states had suddenly stopped consuming. Or you have some evidence that indicates a vastly disproportionate amount of tariffed goods were consumed in the Deep South.

[elmer fudd]

In the end Lincoln had justice dealt to him.

[weikel]

Your right for once the neoconfederates and their historical distortions piss me off too.

[mykej]

Mississippi, A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union:

"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. "

Looks like the rebels disagree with you. They say it was slavery, not tarrifs.

[WhowasGustavusFox]

Trade with Europe was in goods and specie, not balance of trade credit.

Imports were being financed with the sale of Southern exports, and without Southern goods to underwrite the process, and Southern consumers to pay for the import tariffs, the government of the US either had to find a new source of revenue or attack Charleston.

[weikel]

So Lincoln planned to solve his financial crisis by fighting a costly war which would put the country deeply in debt... real logical(sarcasm).

[Restorer]

So rather than develop a different way of handling the books, the US government entered on a war that cost it at least $6 billion dollars to retain (using your figures) $40 million per year in revenue? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?

I haven't been able to come up with the figures, but I assume the amount the federal government raised and spent in 1861 is available somewhere. I also assume it is hundreds of millions of dollars. If they could raise this amount for war purposes somehow, wouldn't you think it would have been much easier to raise $40 million in similar ways and avoid the war entirely?

Unless factors other than financial considerations were far more important in leading Northern men to be willing to fight to save the Union.

To turn your scenario around, if financial considerations were the primary contributor to secession, the South was willing to fight a devastating war over at most $40 million a year in taxes. Not very smart, considering that in the aftermath of the war around $4 billion in capital vanished when the slaves were freed.

[shuckmaster]

I was taught in school that the major bone of contention leading to the war was that ships from France & England were off-loading furniture & goods at ports in the South and then on-loading cotton & other agriculturals with IOU's instead of cash being exchanged.
The Southerners were thus avoiding taxes, tariffs, sending raw materials east instead of north (thus driving up the price yankees had to bid), and at the same time, diminishing the market for northern industrial goods in the South. Northern industrialists resented that & contrived to destroy the South using any & every dirty trick available right up to a fraticidal war.
Keep in mind that lincoln didn't found his party, he was selected by the party to do the dirty work for northeastern yankees who were determined to destroy the South's economy.

It's almost comical to see the lincoln apologists scream & holler at the notion that economy was the cause of the war. There was no other reason!

[4CJ]

Actually, it was the slaveocracy that made it obvious that secession was about money, their perception of a threat to the $4 billion of capital invested in human flesh. The irony, of course, is that their actions precipitated the destruction of this capital.

Until the 13th Amendment was ratified after the war, slavery was legal in the US, and every Northern state agreed that it was legal when they ratified the Constitution. The North had sold the vast majority of their slaves to the South, pocketing the cash. A few abolutionists adopted slavery as a moral issue (both northern and southern), while the vast majority of northerners advocated separatist policies (aka "Free-soilers"). SCOTUS had issued a 7-2 ruling that slaves could be carried into the territories. Northerners refused to return escaping slaves - a part of the Constitution that they had agreed to. The yankees were the ones that broke the agreement.

[4CJ]

Due to the recession in the North of 1857-58, and the excessive infrastructure spending by Congress, the Federal Debt had swelled to unprecedented levels.

You're one of the few I've seen post anything about the economic conditions of the depression/recession, which hit the Northern economy hard, and left the Southern economy virtually untouched.

Who protests raising tax rates? Taxpayers or Freeloaders?
Who advocates higher taxes? Taxpayers or Freeloaders?
Who protests welfare payments? Taxpayers or freeloaders?

To hear the yankees talk, they demanded that they pay higher taxes, and the confederates protested about receiving too many benefits. And fought a war of subjugation to force us to accept their generousity. < /sarcasm >

[muleboy]

God bless the United States of America which righteously destroyed the illicit nation of contemptable illegal states supported in ignorance and greed by illiterate fools.

And replaced it with one "legal" state supported in ignorance and greed by illiterate fools?

[ravinson]

... the 1861 Morrill tariff, which Lincoln was expected to enforce, was the event that triggered Lincoln’s invasion, which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

"The only event", Mr. DiLorenzo? Or just one of the millions of events that led up to the specific decisions that were made by each side at Fort Sumter? Kind of like "had Lincoln not pulled his hat on a little too tightly that day, he may have waited for the Confederates to stroll through the White House doors before odering an "invasion" of the Confederacy.

In 1860, Pennsylvania was the acknowledged key to success in the presidential election.

The key? Acknowledged by whom? Lincoln would have won the 1860 election (he received 180/303 electoral votes) even if Pennsylvania (27 electoral votes) had voted for Mickey Mouse or anyone else. And the election in PA wasn't even close (56%-38%), so it wasn't exactly a "battleground" state in any respect in 1860. (Source.)

The Pennsylvania and New Jersey delegations were terrific in their applause over the tariff resolution...

New Jersey went to Stephen Douglas, so neither Pennsylvania nor New Jersey was any kind of a "key" to Lincoln's election.

The bill immediately raised the average tariff rate from about 15 percent (according to Frank Taussig in Tariff History of the United States) to 37.5 percent, but with a greatly expanded list of covered items. The tax burden would about triple.

Tariff Revenue (as a share of total imports) was higher during the War of 1812 that it was during the Civil War, and tariff rates and revenue dropped precipitously after the Civil War (even though the Lincoln Republicans were by then in control of every port in the U.S. -- north and south). (Source.)

At the time, Taussig says, the import-dependent South was paying as much as 80 percent of the tariff, while complaining bitterly that most of the revenues were being spent in the North.

The Southern states were complaining so "bitterly" about tariffs that they decided to hardly mention tariffs at all in their declarations of secession -- instead complaining almost exclusively about "hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and interference with "the greatest material interest of the world [slavery]...

...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.

In other words, Lincoln wasn't anxious to go to war, but would insist on holding the Southern states to their Constitutional obligations (and wouldn't let them continue to get away with anything in perpetuity -- the way Democratic presidents had).

"We are going to make tax slaves out of you," Lincoln was effectively saying...

I don't know at what rate a mere import tax becomes the equivalent of the burden imposed by "slavery", but in 1860 the U.S. Government's entire revenues from all taxes amounted to only $63 million, whereas the Confederate slaveholders placed a $3 billion value on slavery. Federal revenue during the Civil War never even reached 15% of Gross National Product, and it dropped back down to under 5% immediately after the war and continued dropping throughout the remainder of the 19th Century. (Source.)

With slavery, Lincoln was conciliatory.

The South Carolinians begged to differ on that:

"A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction." From the South Carolina Declaration of Secession,.

[CWRWinger]

RE: Post #29

The truth of this matter is getting through. Speaking with a dye-in-the-wool yankee, an educated accomplished professional, a few days ago, I was stunned to hear him say he now believes the 'civil war' was not about slavery. This is from a man who will never wave a Confederate Flag, doesn't visit FR, and never heard of Aw Shucks. He has come to this conclusion through his own study of these events.

[4CJ]

Just Southerners? Yankees sailed to Africa to pick up their human cargos, Yankees allowed thousands to die during the "Middle" cossing, Yankees sold slaves, and Yankees practiced slavery.

[4CJ]

Sigh. cossing=crossing

[Non-Sequitur]

Five weeks later, on April 12, Fort Sumter, a tariff collection point in Charleston Harbor.

Fort Sumter was a fort, a military institution. It was not used as a tariff collection point prior to the time Major Anderson moved his command there and it wasn't used as such afterwards. The Customs House was (and still is) on East Bay Street. Just another DiLorenzo whopper.

[Non-Sequitur]

Lincoln made it obvious in his inaugural speech that it not about slavery or union, it was about money.

And the south made it obvious in their declarations of the causes of secession that it (was) not about money or the union, it was about slavery.