I take what GOP says with a grain of salt. Why don't you try and sway me? You are correct that the southern economy was dependent on exports. Millions of bales of cotton and other goods flowed out of New Orleans and Mobile and Savannah and Charleston destined for European shores. Yet if you look at the tariff revenues for those same ports almost nothing from Europe was flowing in. Why were those ships showing up empty to be loaded if such a vast amount of imports were destined for southern consumers? It's a simple question and should be handled with a simple answer. How can you say that the tariff was abusive when such a small percentage was shouldered by southern consumers?
How could one say the income tax is abusive when their portion is miniscule(sp?) in comparison with that of Bill Gates?
You are peddling labor union style nonsense, Non-Seq. As you have been informed many many many times, trade economics simply don't work that way. Here's what economist Tom DiLorenzo had to say about your argument:
"A more subtle explanation for how protectionism harms Americans comes from an understanding of what international trade economists call the "pass-through effect" of a tariff. As explained by Wilson Brown and Jan Hogendorn in their text, International Economics (p. 119), as tariffs cause prices to rise,
"Importers pass on [most of] their costs to buyers, and industrial buyers pass those costs on in the form of higher prices. . . . Consumers, hit directly or indirectly, include the inflationary price increases in their wage and salary demands. Everybody tries to pass the tax to someone else. The only group that is powerless to pass the costs on further are the exporters, who have to sell at world prices, and swallow those costs. In essence, a tax on imports becomes a tax on exports (emphasis added)."
A tax on imports harms American exporters the most of all.... Southerners clearly understood that they were being made into tax slaves by the North, and by Lincoln, who announced in a February 15 1861 speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that "The tariff is to the government what a meal is to the family." John C. Calhoun had long been a crusader for free trade and his ideas, drawn from Adam Smith and the great classical economists, were widely accepted in the South (see my article, "Calhoun’s Cause: Free Trade," on Mises.org). As he explained 1828, as part of his protest of the "Tariff of Abominations":
"Almost every man to the North, let his employment be what it may, manufacturer, labourer, farmer, capitalist, land holder, &c. &C. hopes to receive more from the Tariff by the increased price of his labour, or his property than what he pays in duties as a consumer. The very object is a protection to what is called the home industry. But what is our case. Our industry tho’ at home, by our own hands and on our own soil, is engaged in cultivating the great staples of the country for a foreign market, in a market where we can receive no protection, and where we cannot receive one cent more to indemnify us for the heavy duties we have to pay as consumers" (in Clyde Wilson, ed., The Essential Calhoun, p. 190)
Thus, because of the "pass-through effect" of tariffs it doesn’t really matter where the tariff is collected – New York, Boston, Charleston, or New Orleans – in determining the incidence of the tariff. It is the economic effects of the tariff that are important, not the collection point. (Some critics of The Real Lincoln have incorrectly argued that since there was more shipping coming in and out of Northern ports than Southern ones in 1861, the export-dependent South was not being exploited by the tariff. Such arguments ignore economics altogether and rely instead on a trivial and irrelevant statistic."