LOL. So it was a class warfare thing? How about it was good for Virginia tobacco farmers and cigar makers?
No. It was an age old technique that has been employed since the days of Rome and before. Luxury goods, especially inelastic ones (as in those that are addictive and will be purchased despite price increases), are good candidates for taxation. Cigars are a classic example of a taxable luxury good.
How about it was good for Virginia tobacco farmers and cigar makers?
If they wanted to help tobacco farmers, they would have put a high tariff up on all tobacco goods - not just cigars. And since Virginia is not exactly known for its cigar makers I truly doubt there were enough of them to either clamor for protection or to reap its percieved benefits.
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.
This is false and indicates either the author's mathematical ineptitude or a willful skewing of the CSA tariff's actual numbers. The CSA tariff schedule taxed 431 articles with a high of 25%. On average, that and other high level rates were outliers to the tariff's range. Only 12 articles fell in that top category and many of them were luxury goods. As economists Robert McGuire and Norman van Cott noted when analyzing the CSA trade position, the only good that arguably had clear protectionist elements to it was Louisiana sugar - but one of the 431 articles on the schedule. The remainder all fell well below 25% and not predominantly in the 15-20% range, but rather in the 10-15% range. That gave the CSA an average rate of about 13% - one of the lowest in the world.
Their breakdown of the tariff act history of the CSA is similarly skewed and statistically misrepresented: 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.
Once again their statistics are either mathematically inept or willfully misleading. The 1857 tariff, which was universally considered a free-trade tariff, imposed an average rate of 18-19% by the standard calculations - not 24% (see either the US Census Bureau or Taussig 1910).
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. 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.
Their statistics are once again misleading. Range stats are particularly useless when outliers are present because those outliers suggest a wider expanse than is actually present (for example, if a tariff on thirty goods taxed five of them at 2%, fifteen of them at 4%, five of them at 6%, four of them at 8% and one of them at 75% it would produce a tariff range of 2% through 75%, suggesting that tariffs were high. But in reality 29 of the 30 items would be taxed at under 10%, making the tariff on the whole a very low one). This was clearly the case with the CSA tariff where only 12 of 431 articles fell in the top range of 25%. The overwhelming majority of the remainder were in the 5 to 15% range and the tariff as a whole had an average rate of 13%, or about half that of its top rate.
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. 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.
That is not the case at all. The 15% rate, which was among the lowest in the world at the time, caused a panic up north when it was adopted as northerners feared that goods would be imported into the south at that low rate then smuggled across the border, undermining the Morrill act. When analyzing tariffs of the 19th century we often forget that they were also THE primary source of government revenue at the time. So a 15% import tax was not high by any standards of the day, and something in the 10-15% range was generally a minimum range for even a relatively low-expense government to operate, much less one involved in a war.
There is good reason to believe that a peacetime Confederate tariff might have been even higher.
There is little if anything to indicate this, and in fact existing evidence suggests that the exact opposite would be true. A central tenet of the confederate economic strategy (barring wartime interference) was to gain the trade market that the north was alienating from itself through protectionism. The confederates anticipated that, absent a war, the trade that was chased out of New York (it literally halved overnight upon the passage of the Morrill act) would go to Charleston instead due to the trade-friendly tariff rates that the CSA would enact. The south would thereby become a center of economic wealth while the north exiled itself from the very same thing through protectionism. This strategy was openly advocated by the leading secessionists (almost all of whom were free traders) and in the major southern publications such as DeBow's Review and the Charleston Mercury. To believe that they would have pursued the opposite of this policy despite all the advocacy of it throughout the secession crisis is a gratuitously claimed and wholly unsubstantiated absurdity.
I believe the heart of the problem with this article is that its authors are not economists but rather historians. There is nothing wrong per se with that but the argument that they are trying to make does require at least some degree of economic analysis to be valid. But in this case two historians are attempting to make that economic argument without a sufficient understanding of the field. They are out of their league and it shows.