The Litmus Test for American Conservatism (The paloeconservative view of Abe Lincoln.)

Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as their agent, hedging it in by a doctrine of enumerated powers. Since the compact between the states was voluntary, secession was considered an option by public leaders in every section of the Union during the antebellum period. Given this tradition — deeply rooted in the Declaration of Independence — a great statesman in 1860 would have negotiated a settlement with the disaffected states, even if it meant the withdrawal of some from the Union. But Lincoln refused even to accept Confederate commissioners, much less negotiate with them. Most of the Union could have been kept together. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas voted to remain in the Union even after the Confederacy was formed; they reversed themselves only when Lincoln decided on a war of coercion. A great statesman does not seduce his people into a needless war; he keeps them out of it.

When the Soviet Union dissolved by peaceful secession, it was only 70 years old — the same age as the United States when it dissolved in 1860. Did Gorbachev fail as a statesman because he negotiated a peaceful dissolution of the U.S.S.R.? Likewise, if all states west of the Mississippi were to secede tomorrow, would we praise, as a great statesman, a president who refused to negotiate and launched total war against the civilian population merely to preserve the Union? The number of Southerners who died as a result of Lincoln’s invasion was greater than the total of all Americans killed by Hitler and Tojo. By the end of the war, nearly one half of the white male population of military age was either dead or mutilated. No country in World War II suffered casualties of that magnitude.

Not only would Lincoln not receive Confederate commissioners, he refused, for three crucial months, to call Congress. Alone, he illegally raised money, illegally raised troops, and started the war. To crush Northern opposition, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus for the duration of the war and rounded up some 20,000 political prisoners. (Mussolini arrested some 12,000 but convicted only 1,624.) When the chief justice of the Supreme Court declared the suspension blatantly unconstitutional and ordered the prisoners released, Lincoln ordered his arrest. This American Caesar shut down over 300 newspapers, arrested editors, and smashed presses. He broke up state legislatures; arrested Democratic candidates who urged an armistice; and used the military to elect Republicans (including himself, in 1864, by a margin of around 38,000 popular votes). He illegally created a “state” in West Virginia and imported a large army of foreign mercenaries. B.H. Liddell Hart traces the origin of modern total war to Lincoln’s decision to direct war against the civilian population. Sherman acknowledged that, by the rules of war taught at West Point, he was guilty of war crimes punishable by death. But who was to enforce those rules?

These actions are justified by nationalist historians as the energetic and extraordinary efforts of a great helmsman rising to the painful duty of preserving an indivisible Union. But Lincoln had inherited no such Union from the Framers. Rather, like Bismarck, he created one with a policy of blood and iron. What we call the “Civil War” was in fact America’s French Revolution, and Lincoln was the first Jacobin president. He claimed legitimacy for his actions with a “conservative” rhetoric, rooted in an historically false theory of the Constitution which held that the states had never been sovereign. The Union created the states, he said, not the states the Union. In time, this corrupt and corrupting doctrine would suck nearly every reserved power of the states into the central government. Lincoln seared into the American mind an ideological style of politics which, through a sort of alchemy, transmuted a federative “union” of states into a French revolutionary “nation” launched on an unending global mission of achieving equality. Lincoln’s corrupt constitutionalism and his ideological style of politics have, over time, led to the hollowing out of traditional American society and the obscene concentration of power in the central government that the Constitution was explicitly designed to prevent.

A genuinely American conservatism, then, must adopt the project of preserving and restoring the decentralized federative polity of the Framers rooted in state and local sovereignty. The central government has no constitutional authority to do most of what it does today. The first question posed by an authentic American conservative politics is not whether a policy is good or bad, but what agency (the states or the central government — if either) has the authority to enact it. This is the principle of subsidiarity: that as much as possible should be done by the smallest political unit.

The Democratic and Republican parties are Lincolnian parties. Neither honestly questions the limits of federal authority to do this or that. In 1861, the central government broke free from what Jefferson called “the chains of the Constitution,” and we have, consequently, inherited a fractured historical memory. There are now two Americanisms: pre-Lincolnian and post-Lincolnian. The latter is Jacobinism by other means. Only the former can lay claim to being the primordial American conservatism.

David W. Livingston is a professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (University of Chicago Press).

For all practical purposes, the southern governments were dominated by free traders. Protectionists were a small minority.

LOL. That's why the first act of the Confederate congress was to pass a 15 - 25% protectionist tariff.

You are a trip into fantasy land GOP -- a True Beliver who will stick with your Confederate Lost Cause mythology regardless of any and all evidence. But for any lurkers here who are somehow being mislead by your revisionism, here's some stuff from the actual record. The Civil War was about preserving slavery, and to paraphrase Lincoln, they would preserve slavery with a tariff, or without a tariff.

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Virginia and Confederate Tariffs

When the secession crisis of 1860-61 forced supporters of southern independence to articulate their vision of an Confederate economy, calls for a southern tariff became even more popular. Especially in Virginia, the complicated politics of secession created political incentives that encouraged pro-independence politicians to focus on a Confederate tariff. Even after Lincoln’s election and the secession of the cotton states, many Virginians remained doubtful about the desirability of southern independence. Unionist sentiment was especially strong in the western portion of the state, which had relatively few slaves and strong economic ties to the North. Many of the Unionists, moreover, were former Whigs from prosperous commercial centers. Ever distrustful of radical change, Whigs feared the economic consequences of secession, especially if the new Confederacy embraced free trade doctrines. “What will become of the promised manufacturing industry and enterprise of Virginia and the other border states of which we hear so much?” asked one Alexandria Unionist.30 To persuade a Unionist majority, secessionists at the Virginia state convention in 1861 often focused on the economics of tariffs and trade.
Virginia secessionists had many eager allies in their effort to promote a Confederate tariff. Many cotton state secessionists desirous of luring the border states into the Confederacy, envisioned a regional division of labor with the upper South replacing New England as the manufacturing center of the newly configured nation. Cotton state emissaries entrusted with the task of persuading border state delegates to join the new Confederacy based their appeals on the promise of future industrial grandeur. Embedded in these appeals was the conviction that the Union had been a barrier to the development of manufacturing in the upper South. Secession would allow these states to pursue their industrial aspirations free from the fetters of ruinous competition with northern industry, which had been artificially raised by unjust federal tariff policy in the first place. While such a prospect was especially attractive to Virginians, secession commissioners offered similar appeals elsewhere in the upper South. The Georgia commissioner to North Carolina, for example, assured the convention that “All your material interests must be promoted by your speedy union with us in the new government. The princely treasures which have hitherto been lavished with a generous hand upon ungrateful New England, will be poured into your lap.”
The key to securing such “princely treasures” was a moderate revenue tariff that would have a significant protective element. William Benning of Georgia—one of three emissaries from the cotton states to address the Virginia secession convention—offered Virginians a twenty percent revenue tariff that would allow the Old Dominion to monopolize the lucrative southern market. “Why will not she [Virginia] take the place now held by New England and New York, and furnish to the South these goods?” he asked. Benning painted an alluring picture of prosperity and progress that would benefit all Virginians. Virginia’s manufacturing industry would flourish; northern mechanics and capitalists would move to Virginia and stimulate the growth of villages, towns and cities; property values would rise, as farmers and planters would have a profitable home market for their produce. Richmond itself would “take the place of New York” and become “the centre of the Earth.”
Virginian secessionists echoed Benning’s optimistic assessment of a Confederate tariff. The hum of machinery and the buzz of progress—not pastoral descriptions of a southern agrarian landscape—became the favorite images of Virginia secessionists. John Goode, Jr. of Bedford County, for example, predicted that “our noble water-falls would whistle with machinery, and the spindles of the North would be transferred to the Potomac, the Rappahannock, and the James; and Norfolk, with her magnificent harbor, would become the grandest commercial emporium of the world.”33 Even when sounding a more cautionary note, Virginia secessionists could hardly contain their enthusiasm for a new industrial order. “It would not be in the interest of Virginia to become a great manufacturing State at once,” James Bruce of Halifax County noted. Yet a few moments later, he boldly pronounced that “when we are divided [from the North], and become a great commercial and manufacturing people, then we shall fulfill the destinies of Virginia.”34
The coming industrial glory of Virginia, secessionists argued, would be quite compatible with the Old Dominion’s slave society. The relationship between slavery and industry was an important one, especially in Richmond, where the massive Tredegar Iron Works in 1847 had replaced striking white workers with slaves.35 Would such conflict become endemic as Virginia industrialized behind a Confederate tariff? George Randolph, a Richmond lawyer, reassured members of the convention that slaves would naturally be confined to operations such as agriculture and mining, while white laborers would monopolize “the higher processes of mining, manufacturers, navigation, and the mechanic arts.” White mechanics and artisans, he argued, had far more to fear from the competition of cheap northern labor than the competition of slaves. “The true competitors of our laboring whites,” he declared, “are the gigantic manufacturing corporations of the North which flood our market with everything that white labor can produce.”36 Randolph made clear that only a Confederate tariff could protect Virginia’s white mechanics from these “gigantic manufacturing corporations.”
Far from undermining slavery, a Confederate tariff would help southern slaveholders keep their “peculiar institution” safe from northern attack. James Barbour of Culpepper County argued that encouraging white labor by way of a Confederate tariff was akin to developing the state’s “imperial resources.” Planters and other property holders who would bear the cost of a Confederate tariff, he argued, should do so happily. “While resolutely protecting slave labor, let us also give the fullest encouragement to the labor of the mechanic and the merchant and the artisan . . . When we build up commerce, manufactures, and trades, the accumulated wealth and population will be a source of strength and safety which will be cheaply purchased.” For southerners concerned with the potential threat that the hated “Black Republicans” posed for slavery, the image of a growing and economically vigorous Confederacy was especially appealing.
(snip)
Virginia secessionists delivered what they promised. Reflecting the firm southern consensus on the revenue tariff, the Confederacy enacted tariff schedules within the 20 to 15 percent range. On February 9 (four days before the Virginia Secession Convention opened), the provisional Confederate Congress passed a tariff—almost identical to the U. S. Tariff of 1857—that imposed an ad valorem duty of 24 percent on most manufactured goods. Nine days later, the Confederate Congress amended this act to expand the free list of goods to include most food products as well as arms, ammunition, and gunpowder. On March 15—when the Virginia convention was still meeting—the Confederacy lowered the duty on pig iron and other iron products to 15 percent.54 In May of 1861, after Virginia had joined the Confederacy, the Confederate Congress implemented a new tariff schedule with duties ranging from 25 percent to 5 percent. For the manufactured goods that that the Confederacy was most likely to import—iron products, textiles, boots and shoes, furniture, and wagons—the ad valorem duty was pegged at 15 percent.55
Although significantly lower than the U. S. Tariff of 1857 and the Morrill Tariff of 1861, the Confederate tariff nevertheless fell far short of Unionist predictions of free trade. There is good reason to believe that a peacetime Confederate tariff might have been even higher. Facing the imminent prospect of war, the Confederacy had little time to nurse infant industries to maturity. To encourage the rapid importation of goods needed to win the war, the Confederacy lowered its duties for foodstuffs, iron plating, railroad equipment, and arms of all types. Significantly, refined sugar and manufactured tobacco—products not related to the war effort and produced in great quantities in the Confederacy—had duties of 20 and 25 percent, respectively.56 That type of protection might well have been more common if northerners had let the Confederacy part in peace.
Regardless of the level of the tariff, there is little doubt that the Confederacy was prepared to collect duties on northern goods. Circulars issued by the Treasury department established revenue officers not only in Atlantic ports, but also in Norfolk (on the Mississippi River) and on various railroads that connected the Confederacy with the North. The circulars created formidable bureaucratic regulations to collect the tariff, with those importing goods via railways facing particularly onerous requirements. The railroad conductor had to submit triplicate copies of a manifest at the nearest government revenue station, and then wait for the revenue guard to inspect the train to insure that “the goods described therein are placed in separate cars from which mails or passengers are conveyed.” The revenue agent then placed Confederate revenue locks on the freight cars, which could only be opened at specified Confederate revenue depots. Once at the revenue depot, the merchandise in question was then moved to “a warehouse of deposit.” After executing a bond guaranteeing the payment of duties, the importer was finally granted a “permit for inland transportation” so that the goods could finally reach their destination. The treasury department even authorized Confederate revenue officers to inspect passenger baggage for dutiable goods.
The Confederacy, of course, never had a chance to collect a tariff, but if the seceding states had been allowed to leave without war, the economic impact of the Confederate tariff would have been significant. According to economist Thomas F. Huertas, the South imported $200 million worth of northern goods in 1860 (See Table 1).58 With an independent Confederacy, northern goods would have been transformed into dutiable foreign trade. Under Confederate tariff schedules passed in May 1861, imported manufacturing goods from the North and Europe would have yielded the Confederate treasury almost $34 million dollars. The $34 million figure is undoubtedly an upper-bound estimate—consumers may have decided to buy fewer manufactured goods in the face of higher prices, and smugglers might have avoided some of the duties. Yet even if the Confederate government only collected $25 million in tariff revenue, free southerners would have paid $4.46 per capita in duties. In comparison, the entire United States in 1860 (both North and South) collected duties worth $53 million, or $1.94 per free resident.59
These revenue figures, of course, tell us little about the potential costs and benefits of the Confederate tariff regime to southerners in general and Virginians in particular. At least in the short term, Confederate Virginians would undoubtedly have purchased more European goods and domestic manufacturers at the expense of northern imports, but we are not in position to calculate the magnitude of such changes. Some economists, though, have speculated a Confederate tariff might have “promoted southern industrialization and raised southern income.”60 A Confederate tariff, they have hypothesized, would have diverted resources into manufacturing and out of cotton production, thus raising the price of cotton and the price of slaves. Virginia secessionists might have gotten the best of both worlds: a new manufacturing empire and higher slave prices to boot.
One could paint a far bleaker economic future, though, for Virginia and the rest of the Confederacy. Confederate independence would have hemmed Virginians into the rather small southern market. Whereas northern manufacturers operating behind a protective tariff could count on a national market of some 27 million free consumers in 1860, Virginia manufacturers in the Confederacy could only rely on a market of only 5.6 million free residents, which were spread out over a wide area. Confederate independence, moreover, would lock southern manufactures out of the potentially rich markets of the Northeast and Midwest, since they would have to pay the high U. S. tariffs. A highly constrained market might have had potentially devastating results for the Confederacy, especially in the long run. Recent research has stressed the crucial importance of market size in giving firms in the antebellum period the incentive to innovate and increase productivity.61 Lacking such incentives, the Confederate manufacturing sector might well have been composed of small, relatively inefficient firms that needed increasingly higher degrees of tariff protection to remain viable. The Confederate revenue tariff could have proved yet another failure for southerners anxiously trying to modernize their economy. Whatever future the Confederacy faced without war, the experiences of the Union blockade intensified support for an even more protective tariff. When one correspondent to the Southern Literary Messenger called for a peacetime economy of free trade to actively discourage the growth of manufacturing, a rejoinder from “C. R. C.” appeared a few issues later. Calling for a “protective tariff” that would eliminate northern competition in the South, C. R. C.’s 1863 essay went far beyond the 1861 secessionists. A protective tariff would allow the Confederacy to extinguish its large debt and, more importantly, establish the industrial power necessary for national independence. Keeping the experience of the war firmly in mind, he argued that “The South should be densely populated, and with manufactories in every region, and with double lines of rail roads in all directions; a future blockade would bring but little of the suffering and heartless speculations in provisions and clothing.” Adopt a policy of free trade, he predicted, and the “future blockade would find the South little better prepared for self-defense than at present.”62
C. R. C.’s arguments highlight an important point that historians have often overlooked. Civil War historians have often viewed the Confederacy as a reaction against northern modernization and industrialization.63 Our evidence suggests that claim is largely true—Virginia secessionists were increasingly fearful of the growing economic power of the North. Virginia secessionists, however, envisioned the Confederacy not as a refuge from the modern world of industry and commerce, but as a vehicle for promoting the economic modernization of their region. Of course, war and the resulting Union blockade gave the Confederacy far more autarky than it bargained for. But in the heady days before wrecked railroads, destroyed plantations, and pressing shortages, Virginia secessionists imagining their economic future wrote and spoke in a Hamiltonian idiom of industrial expansion, economic independence, and national greatness. Historians should therefore not be surprised that Confederate Virginians eagerly embraced the tariff—the principle instrument of economic nationalism in the nineteenth century—as they debated the prospect of separate nationhood.
Source: Imagining “A Great Manufacturing Empire:” Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff Jay Carlander (UCSB) and John Majewski (UCSB)1

b YOu neglect the fact that the Morrill Tariff was in fact only the tariff act of 1847 That is incorrect.

Absolutely not. You are clearly Whisky Papa-ing.

Some supporters of the act initially CLAIMED they were reinstating tariffs to their late 1840's level but they were in fact selling a bill of goods. By the time it reached the senate even the bill's proponents were starting to admit that it was in fact a protectionist tariff. It hiked average rates to around 35% and then to 47% the next year.

A cheap and shallow misdirection to say the least. All tariffs had high points, particularly on books, which the south disdained and often burned on import.

and that the only reason it had been altered into producing deficits by the southern cotton crowd was as part of their conspiracy to trash the Union.

That too is false. The tariff in place by 1860 had been enacted in 1857 shortly before the recession of that year. The unanticipated end to the Crimean war during that year set international markets including food staples into turmoil causing the Panic of 1857 and with it deficits. Over the next three years the federal government failed to reign in its spending and instead, led by the republicans, accelerated it through line items. Thus by 1860 they were facing a budget crisis and by 1861 after Lincoln's election, a credit crisis.

Another piece of foolish and insipid revisionism. The Congress before Lincoln was dominated by the South, as almost all Congress's prior to that time were. Any tariff the North ever put in place was quickly dismantled by the south. Tax opinions were never split cleanly on North/South lines.

As Alexander Stephens pointed out, there was simply no reason for the South to complain of the tariffs.

Stephens was in error and made that speech at a time when he was leading the fight against secession in Georgia. At the time he had been out of congress for over a year and was not a witness to the events of the Morrill tariff like his colleague Robert Toombs. Toombs accurately and early on identified the Morrill act as a protectionist measure and exposed that fact to public light.

All tariffs are protectionist, and the first industry speicific one was put in place by John C. Calhoun. The idea that southern legislators did not value them most highly is totally disingenuous and mere beer hall prattle.

She only contributed 14% of the Federal income, and reaped well over half of the financial benefit.

That too is false. Tariffs, especially protectionist ones, impose economic costs that go well beyond simple revenue collection totals. In fact the overwhelming MAJORITY of costs for your average protectionist tariff are non-revenue ones reflected in (a) the loss of the consumer surplus, (b) dead weight losses abroad, (c) the dropoff in an international market, and (d) the economic pass through of revenue costs onto others than their physical payee. The entire nation's consumers stood to lose from items (a) and (b). The south stood to lose especially so though by incurring not only (a) and (b). They also incurred two items that the rest of the nation would not experience in a significant degree: (c) since their economy made up over 75% of the entire nation's trade exports and (d) since agricultural exporters are price takers who must sell at the world price and therefore cannot pass through tariff costs onto their buyers like everybody else.

WHat piss poor drivel. LOL. Cotton was a mere drop in the bucket of GNP. You make it sound as though the US economy only operating on British pounds, and only when cotton was sold. How utterly ridiculous. YOu are obviously just trolling for the thrill of it and not at all interesting in any serious history.

An increased tariff would only have increased her annual income.

False. Just like any other tax, tariffs function on a Laffer curve relationship (which in the case of tariffs also incidentally corresponds to their use for either revenue or protection purposes). The Morrill act effectively pushed tariff rates past the curve's apex and onto the declining revenue edge. While this could indeed increase revenue collection, it also extracts a greater non-revenue cost from the economy than the previous level, thus resulting in a net economic loss.

80% of the tariff was on consumables, and at rates equivalent ot modern sales taxes. Pushing the notion that sales taxes in the US are currently the root of all of our economic woes with that rationale would surely flunk anyone studying economics at any school except one of those Tennessee 'buy your own' diploma barns.

most of them were so dirt poor they couldn't have afforded to pay the miniscule tariffs, even if they wanted or needed to, which they did not.

That is not the issue at all. Even the poorest of southern farmers were agriculture producers. As such they were also participants in the southern economy, which was overwhelmingly an export economy. Tariffs are known as trade BARRIERS for a reason - namely they kill off trade (and incidentally that is exactly what happened in the northern states right after the morrill tariff passed - within just a few months trade into the port of New York almost HALVED). When trade stops a trade-based economy dies, and when that economy dies all of its participants from the massive plantation operator to the smallest of small farmers suffers.

What a joke. You ignore the whole impact on the system of the war. Utterly facetious and deceptive strawmanship. Like I said, you have no interest in the history, only in the trolling, which is a total waste of bandwidth. Now you need to explain how it is the 'disastrous' Moriill Tariffs ruined the Northern war effort and collapsed it's economy. I can't wait to hear that joke!

In fact though, the North didn't need to pass the Morrill tariff if the war had not come and the southern states were let go. The 1860 tariffs could have easily been cut into half and still produced large surplusses for the north, where the tariffs were hardly felt at all by any one with an average income.

False. The south's departure took with it a full 75% of the entire nation's export economy. Without exports, you have only credit with which to acquire imports from abroad. Credit alone is insufficient to take on that task wholly and when it is in pieces (as was the case in late 1860) the absence of any substantial exports with which to trade is nothing short of a disaster. Trade in effect stops and when trade stops, imports also stop. When imports stop, revenues collected from those imports stops and the government goes broke.

Utter nonsense. The south's departure took away the failed economy of the south in a year when the cotton glut was so great that it couldn't even be given away. Talk about lies. You really take the cake with that one.

Absolutely not. You are clearly Whisky Papa-ing.

Whisky Papa-ing? Let's see...YOU made an unsubstantiated claim that Morrill simply reinstated non-protectionist 1840's tariffs. That is a Wlat tactic in itself. By contrast, I responded with the fact that senate debates on the act virtually forced its proponents to admit its protectionist goals (BTW, no less a source than Henry Carey called the Morrill act the most important protectionist effort in decades) and with the fact that its average rates, 35 and then 47%, were clearly protectionist at levels well beyond the pre-1857 tariff. So it would seem to me that you are the one "Whisky Papa-ing" here.

A cheap and shallow misdirection to say the least. All tariffs had high points, particularly on books, which the south disdained and often burned on import.

No misdirection at all. I am simply noting the average rate as calculated by economists and recorded by the US government. That figure is the standard economic measure of a given tariff's strength just as rate schedules for income tax today are its standard measures. If you don't like that take it up with the government's statisticians and economists.

Another piece of foolish and insipid revisionism.

And from you, another Wlat-ism. Simply calling something "revisionism" without substantiation is insufficient to demonstrate that charge. What I stated is historical fact and I stand by that fact ready to defend it. Challenge it if you desire, but calling it names and dismissing it upon your own gratuitous assertions will not suffice on this forum. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

The Congress before Lincoln was dominated by the South, as almost all Congress's prior to that time were.

Oh really? The US House before Lincoln's election had a northern majority and a speaker from New Jersey. The 1857 House had a northern majority and a speaker from Massachusetts. The Senate before Lincoln was elected had a northern/western state majority and a president pro tempore from Indiana. The one in 1857 had the same majority but it did have a southern president pro tempore from Texas. During that same period the previous two presidents had also been northerners, one from New Hampshire and the next from Pennsylvania. The chairman of W&M was also from Pennsylvania and so forth. So no - the south did not dominate EITHER house of congress in the period you claim.

Any tariff the North ever put in place was quickly dismantled by the south. Tax opinions were never split cleanly on North/South lines.

They certainly were as of May 10, 1860. On that day the House voted on the Morrill bill. Every southerner save one voted no. Every northerner save about 5 or 6 voted yes. It was indisputably the most sectionally split major vote on north/south lines in that entire session of congress.

All tariffs are protectionist

Actually no they are not. All tariffs do have at least a slight protectionist capacity, though certain tariffs overshadow this capacity with their revenue capacity. As any credentialed and sane economist will tell you, revenue tariffs and protectionist tariffs are two distinct types of policy. They are typically distinguished by whether they fall on the lower side or upper side of the revenue apex.

and the first industry speicific one was put in place by John C. Calhoun.

Calhoun favored protectionist tariffs briefly as a young legislator in the 1810's. A decade later he had learned the error of his ways and spent the rest of his life as one of their strongest opponents.

The idea that southern legislators did not value them most highly is totally disingenuous and mere beer hall prattle.

And that is yet another of your wholly unsubstantiated claims. Their error is further exposed by simply looking to the major tariff votes between roughly 1827 and 1861. The south became increasingly unified in its opposition to protectionism throughout that era and by 1860 was voting against them in virtual unanimaty. Only one southern senator and one southern congressman voted for the Morrill bill. The rest all vehemently opposed it.

WHat piss poor drivel.

Only on your part. It is further becoming evident that you have not the slightest clue about what you write, nor even the most basic understanding of trade economics. In light of that fact I will happily offer you a word of friendly advice before you end up subjecting yourself to the complete and utter demolition of others who have followed your course on this issue (a fact that many around here can attest to if you so desire to ask). Take a moment off and read a basic trade economics text. Freepmail me if you desire and I can even recommend some. Otherwise you cannot hope to correctly discuss the issue of tariffs any more than an uneducated grade schooler can hope to perform brain surgery upon being handed a scalpel. The choice of whether you want to learn or simply embarrass yourself is wholly yours to make. Just note that in the immortal words of John Paul Jones, I have not yet begun to fight.

LOL. Cotton was a mere drop in the bucket of GNP.

If you have data to that effect it is your burden to display it. I will endeavor to verify your claim later when I am at a place where I may look it up. In the meantime I will simply note that in 1860 cotton exports provided somewhere around 65% of the entire nation's trade exports - more than any other commodity from any region and enough to boost the southern trade contribution in excess of 75% when crops such as tobacco were also included.

You make it sound as though the US economy only operating on British pounds, and only when cotton was sold. How utterly ridiculous.

Huh?!? I don't believe I ever said a word in my previous post about British pounds or anything remotely related. I did however note the fact that the United States trade economy in 1860 was almost entirely due to southern exports and that is a simple fact of history whether you like it or not.

80% of the tariff was on consumables, and at rates equivalent ot modern sales taxes.

It is once again evident that you are way out of your league. Sales taxes and tariffs do not work the same way economically, and especially protective tariffs. Sales taxes are generally imposed at low levels on inelastic goods where they will have only minor deterent effects upon purchase of those said goods (in laymen's terms, they are imposed upon retail consumption items). Protective tariffs are installed not to reap the benefits of inelasticity but rather to shift consumer purchasing behavior from a cheaper import to a more expensive domestic substitute. As for rates being comparable, unless you know a state that charges a 40% sales tax on steel products that is simply not so.

What a joke. You ignore the whole impact on the system of the war. Utterly facetious and deceptive strawmanship.

Do you seriously believe the mindless and inane ramblings of what you post? Or do you simply take some sort of irrational and bizarre benefit out of dropping meaningless insults without the substance to back them? Once again, everything I say I also stand by as historical and economic fact. And once again, everything you have posted in attempted "response" to them constitutes little more than wholly unsubstantiated and gratuitously asserted nonsense.

Now you need to explain how it is the 'disastrous' Moriill Tariffs ruined the Northern war effort and collapsed it's economy.

They didn't ruin the northern war effort but they did severely harm the northern economy and make the war both longer and harder to fight. The Morrill tariff almost instantaneously wiped out foreign trade in the north. The largest northern port was New York City and prior to the tariff it handled more than half of the north's trade. With the Morrill act the 1860 trade totals for NYC virtually halved overnight and remained below their 1860 totals until the end of the war.

Utter nonsense.

Son, do yourself a favor and take a class on trade economics. You are essentially pushing towards the position that trade does not require reciprocal payment. After all, those goods just magically appear on the docks, right? And those foreign countries fling their money in our direction out of the kindness of their hearts, right?

The fact of the matter is that trade is and has always been a two way street. You give something of value and you get something of value in return. If you put up a barrier to either part of the exchange it all comes to a crashing halt. That is what the Morrill act was intended to do and that is exactly what the United States trade statistics for 1861-65 indicate that the Morrill act did do.

The south's departure took away the failed economy of the south in a year when the cotton glut was so great that it couldn't even be given away.

Once again that so-called "glut" of cotton was reaching all time price highs and accounted for 65% of the entire nation's exports in 1860. Igore that fact at your own peril.

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