We've already been over that red herring many times, Walt. The south liked the pre-Morrill tariff of 1857 because it was pro-free trade. It was one of the lowest rates in the world. They did not like the Morrill tariff though because it hiked the rate to over 45% and killed off their trade-based economy.
The Morrill Tariff could not have passed if the rebel senators had retained their seats.
That is simply false, Walt. Senator Wigfall calculated the voting strength of the south in the incoming senate on December 12, 1861. It had a pro-northern majority that was about to be increased. The best case scenario, holding that every single southern senator remained and voted in a block plus gained the support of all the swing vote senators, was a tie in which case the Republican VP would cast the deciding vote in favor of the north.
And a tariff is not a tax.
Put down that hookah and go tell that to any political scientist, economist, or lawmaker of your choice, Walt. Then tell me what they say to you when they finish laughing.
Buy American and you won't pay a penny.
Not if American costs $1 and import without the tariff costs 50 cents. In that case I end up paying 50 pennies.
That is simply false, Walt. Senator Wigfall calculated the voting strength of the south in the incoming senate on December 12, 1861
"One fact needs emphatic statement: of all the monistic explanations for the drift to war, that based upon supposed economic causes is the flimsiest. The theory was sharply rejected at the time by so astute an observer as Alexander H. Stephens. South Carolina, he wrote his brother on New Year's Day, 1861 was seceding from a tariff 'which is just what her own Senators and members of Congress made it.' As for the charges of consolidation and depsotism made by some Carolinians, he thought they arose from peevishness, rather than a calm analysis of facts. 'The truth is, the South, almost in mass, has voted, I think, for every measure of general legislation that has passed both houses and become law for the last ten years.' The South, far from groaning under tyranny, had controlled the government almost from its beginning, and Stephens believed that its only real grievance lay in the Northern refusal to return fugitive slaves and to stop the antislavery agitation. 'All other complaints are founded on threatened dangers which may never come, and which I feel very sure would be averted if the South would pursue a judicious and wise course.' Stephens was right. It was true that the whole tendency of federal legislation 1842 to 1860 was toward free trade; true that the tariff in force when secession began was largely Southern -made; true that it was the lowest tariff the country had known since 1816; true that it cost a nation of thirty million people but sixty million dollars in indirect revenue; true that without secession no new tariff law, obnoxious to the Democratic Party, could have been passed before 1863--if then.
"In the official explanations which one Southern State after another published for its secession, economic grievances are either omitted entirely or given minor posiitions. There were few such supposed grievances which the agricultural states of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota did not share with the South--and they never threatened to secede. Charles A. Beard finds the tap-root of the war in the resistance of the planter interest to Northern demands enlarging the old Hamilton-Webster policy. The South was adamant in standing for 'no high protective tariffs, no ship subsidies, no national banking and currency system; in short, none of the measures which business enteprise deemed essential to its progress.' But the Republican platform in 1856 was silent on the tariff; in 1860, it carried a milk-and-water statement on the subject which Western Republicans took, mild as it was, with a wry face; the incoming President was little interested in the tariff; and any harsh legislation was impossible. Ship subsidies were not an issue in the campaign of 1860. Neither were a national banking system and a national currency system. They were not mentioned in the Republican platform nor discussed by party debaters. The Pacific Railroad was advocated both by the Douglas Democrats and the Republicans; and it is noteworthy that Seward and Douglas were for buiulding both a Northern and a Southern line. In short, the diviisive economic issues are easily exaggerated. At the same time, the unifying economic factors were both numerous and powerful. North and South had economies which were largely complementary. It was no misfortune to the South that Massachusetts cotton mills wanted its staple, and that New York ironmasters like Hewitt were eager to sell rails dirt-cheap to Southern railway builders; and sober businessmen on both sides, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, were the men most anxious to keep the peace and hold the Union together."
Nevins, *The Ordeal of the Union* quoted on pp. 212-213 of Edwin C. Rozwenc (ed.), *The Causes of the American Civil War* (Boston: D. C. Heath 1961).
Walt