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I'm not sure what your point is. Lincoln ran on a high tariff platform. When he won, the South feared that tariffs would be hiked. I don't know about the 75% number, but there was no income tax back then, so it is entirely possible. My overall point here is that when people say that slavery was not the reason for the Civil War, they state at best a half truth. Slavery was not a direct trigger for the War, but was the underlying cause for why the ecomomic interests of the industrial North and the agrarian South diverged so much. In that sense, the Civil War was all about slavery, both before Fort Sumter and after the Emancipation Proclamation. As for your second response, free black labor would have commanded a market price. In contrast, slave labor is inherently far beneath market. Whites who feared labor competition with blacks had far more to fear from slavery than from emancipation. Finally, there is a difference between a civil war (no capitals), which refers generically to any internecine conflict, and the Civil War, which refers to the War Between the States. Without slavery, there may have been a trigger for some other civil war, but we would have been spared the Civil War.

The imposition of high tariff rates by the Federal government would not have been perceived by the South as ruinous.

Explain please. At the time the north invaded the south, the south was funding some 75% of the federal treasury which was being spent in the north as "industrial development." You don't call that ruinous?

Complete nonsense. Lies.

Almost 95% of the tariff revenues were collected in northern ports. More revenue was collected in Philadelphia in 1859 than in all southern ports put together. And tariff revenue was 99% of federal income.

Common sense will also tell you that 1/4 of the people were not providing 3/4 of the revenue.

But lies are the currency of the "southern heritage".

Consider:

1) "One of the major reasons the south pulled out of the union was because of unfair tarriffs placed on them by the north."

Well, the Feds never placed tariffs on Southern exports, as is commonly asserted in Secessionist myth. Tariffs on Southern imports caused the friction. Could these have damaged the South to the extent that secession and civil war were justified? South Carolina, Texas and Jeff Davis' own State of Mississippi failed to mention tariffs once in the official and closely-reasoned declarations of the causes of secession they published in association with their Acts of Secession. Georgia's declaration of the causes of secession did mention the tariff irritant in passing --- but briefly and only in the context of an ancient wrong that had ultimately been righted by political compromise acceptable to the South. Similarly, the speeches of Secessionist leaders made in late 1860 and early 1861 show almost total concentration on slavery issues, with little or no substantive discussion of current tariff issues. In any case, before the ACW, the rate of Federal taxation was tiny by today's standards. The total revenues of the Federal government in 1860 amounted to a mere $56,054,000, and that included tariff revenue, proceeds from the sale of public lands, whiskey taxes and miscellaneous receipts. The population of the whole US in 1860 was 33,443,321. Thus, total Federal taxation per year was less than $2 per person. Even if the 9,103,332 people in the soon-to-secede Southern states paid all of the Federal taxation in 1860 (which they did not), their per capita cost would still have been less than $7 for the entire year. From these inconsequential sums, another Secessionist myth has been created and sustained for 140 years --- but people do not go to war over pocket change.

2) "Any goods ship …… out of the south from the north were subject to these tarriffs."

As noted above, this is another persistent neo-Secessionist myth. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 5 of the US Constitution states unequivocally that "No tax or duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State." Accordingly, not a single shipment of cotton or any other goods out of Southern ports after the US Constitution was adopted was ever put under tariff UNTIL THE CONFEDERACY DID SO BY AUTHORITY OF AN AMENDED CONSTITUTIONAL PROVISION ALLOWING THE CONFEDERATE CONGRESS TO LEVY TARIFFS ON EXPORTS. In short, only the Confederacy ever charged tariffs on Southern cotton.

3) "Slavery was but one small paving stone one the road that lead to the Civil War."

Seven states from the Deep South started the war. The four of the seven that published declarations of the causes of their secession spent the majority of their ink on frictions over slavery. None even mentioned the phrase "states' rights". South Carolina, Texas and Jeff Davis' own State of Mississippi failed entirely to mention tariffs. Georgia's declaration mentioned the tariff irritant in passing --- but briefly and only in the context of an ancient wrong that had ultimately been righted by political compromise acceptable to the South. Similarly, the speeches of Secessionist leaders made in late 1860 and early 1861 show almost total concentration on slavery issues, with little or no substantive discussion of current tariff issues. Accordingly, it is clear that non-slavery issues have been vastly overemphasized by post-war writers attempting to minimize the pro-slavery motivations of Secessionists at the outbreak of war."

-- from the AOL ACW forum.

It's all lies from you, PP Mama.

Walt

At the time the north invaded the south, the south was funding some 75% of the federal treasury which was being spent in the north as "industrial development." You don't call that ruinous?

Was the term "economic development" used in the 1860's? Probably not.

You forgot this, didn't you?

"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.

[Mr. Toombs: That tariff lessened the duties.]

[Mr. Stephens:[ 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. If reason and argument, with experience, produced such changes in the sentiments of Massachusetts from 1832 to 1857, on the subject of the tariff, may not like changes be effected there by the same means, reason and argument, and appeals to patriotism on the present vexed question? And who can say that by 1875 or 1890, Massachusetts may not vote with South Carolina and Georgia upon all those questions that now distract the country and threaten its peace and existence? I believe in the power and efficiency of truth, in the omnipotence of truth, and its ultimate triumph when properly wielded. (Applause.)"

-- Alexander Stephens, November, 1860

Your interpretation is devoid of reference to the historical record.

Your interpretation is fantasy.

Walt