The northern industrialists thought that the entire world was moving to an industrial economy. They thought that the South, by clinging to an agricultural economy, was stifling growth in the U.S. and was preventing the U.S. from becoming a world power, economically.
The tariff issue was part of this. As Martin Hyde said, the tariffs protected manufacturing. If they put these tariffs in place, then they were protected against foreign manufacturing and all they had to worry about was normal competition between local (meaning U.S. based) businesses on a level playing field. Instead, you had things like South Carolina deciding that the tariffs didn’t really apply to them, creating the whole tariff nullification issue.
If the South moved to an industrialist economy, then (so the northern industrialists thought) the entire country would at least work together with respect to government subsidies for new industries, tariffs, and similar issues, and while there would certainly be competition, they would all be more protected against foreign competition and would all grow in strength and economic power. Then they could grow and could become a major player in the world markets. As long as the South fought the industrial economy, fought tariffs and protective government strategies and policies, the industrialists believed that the U.S. couldn’t progress.
Are saying that the Industrialists thought the US shouldn’t have any agriculture business at all? Seems to me, they were just competing power blocs. Right now in Canada, the auto industry is unhappy with a trade deal made with S. Korea to remove tariffs, but the pork and beef farmers are happy. That doesn’t mean the auto industry thinks the farmers should all quit and start making cars.
And? What do you take issue with here? I’ve not, and to my knowledge, no one I was talking to about the tariff issue, have made the argument that tariffs caused the civil war. We were having a discussion about what caused economic conflict between Northern industrialists and Southern agriculturalists and that argument absolutely starts and finishes with tariffs.
I never said it was a Northern conspiracy, I simply said it was a protectionist policy that helped domestic manufacturers but hurt domestic importers and exporters like the Southern planter class. I don’t believe it was a conspiracy designed to hurt the South, but a policy pushed for and designed to help Northern factory owners and the South’s economy was just an unlucky victim.
Your argument about taxes is 100% irrelevant. In the 19th century tariffs ordinarily were quite high by modern standards, but that isn’t what the South was up in arms about because it was understood every country was going to have some level of tariff especially in the United States where it was the most important source of Federal revenue. Your post does reveal you are unaware of Federal excise taxes, which were an avenue available in the 19th century other than tariffs.
But if you read the history of the “Tariff of Abominations” and even read the congressional record, it was 100% designed to protect American manufacturing. It had nothing to do with revenue needs. The South wasn’t upset about the existence of any tariff, the lower, “base level” tariffs that had always been around were regarded much as we regard sales or income tax today…no one loves them but most mature people accept they are necessary. No, the South got up in arms over a dramatic increase (over 100% increase) in tariff rates which was solely done for protectionist purposes and was not done to fill in budget shortfall extant from the existing tariff rates.
FWIW if I was running the country I would’ve pushed for protectionist tariffs too. There really isn’t a good answer to the problem, especially since things that could alleviate the pain for the South would have been out of step with the role of the Federal government in the 19th century (today of course farm subsidies are a normal thing, but that would not have been seen as proper in the 19th century.) The 19th century was the age of industrialization, and the countries that industrialized the most and the fastest were destined to become some of the most powerful. The United States was several decades behind the British in industrialization, and we could not compete on even grounds. We needed protectionist tariffs to nurture and allow our manufacturing base to grow. We also needed things like industrial espionage–there’s several prominent cases of Brits immigrating to the United States who stole manufacturing designs and processes from British factories and helped implement them in American factories.
The Civil War was all about slavery in the sense that if there had been no slavery, there would have been no war. There were other points of conflict between North and South, but they all went back to slavery one way or another – e.g., the South was under-industrialized mainly because of its cultural investment in slavery. There were other factors, including climate*, but that’s the big one.
From The City in Mind, by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Atlanta:
Yes, but that wasn’t what we were actually discussing. The tariff issue was a beef between economic interests in the South and North where the economic well being of both could not be advanced without hurting the other. Even without slavery it’s unlikely the South would have industrialized to the degree of the North. Even in the 21st century after generations of anti-union efforts and pro-business policies designed to attract manufacturing the South is only now rivaling the north in terms of factory employment and output. The North wasn’t suited for the large scale agriculture the way the South was, and it’s unlikely that even if there had never been American slaves (imagine we just indentured blacks or something because of some shift in opinion way back in the colonial era that lead to a legal ban on slavery) that the South would not have developed as a significant agricultural region. Even today regions of the United States that have the appropriate fertility to profitably conduct farming pretty much farm the hell out of the land.
Additionally the entrenched wealthy classes in the North tended to have gotten rich through activities like shipping or other ventures and not by farming/land ownership, so when industrialization got started the North’s wealthy class had gotten wealthy in capital which is essential for getting a factory running. The South’s wealthy class was wealthy in real assets (primarily land and slaves), which can’t be nearly as easily converted to capital. Even again, if not for slavery if we just had British style tenant farming or whatever the South’s wealthy would have been rich in land and equipment etc, but not capital and would have faced a problem similar to that of the British aristocracy in the 19th and early 20th century (in that they were land rich but cash poor.)
Slavery was the cause of the Civil War, but it’s not the only conflict that existed between North and South.
Exactly so, in every country there are conflicts between the interests of different constituents. In normal times these conflicts get resolved by muddling through and compromise or maybe one side loses big.
As you say, tariffs can be adjusted up or down to balance the interests of various parties. Slavery couldn’t be, in the eyes of the slaveowning class. They correctly understood that a nation could not survive half slave and half free, and were determined to expand slavery, because if slavery was restricted to a few states the free states would dominate the national government and eventually strangle slavery. This was intolerable because it directly threatened their fortunes and way of life.
And this is what pro-Southern apologists never seem to understand. It wasn’t that the North was about to abolish slavery, violating “states rights”. It was that the increasing power of free states meant that slavery could no longer be expanded into the western territories. They needed a pro-slavery national government, one that enforced a slave owner’s right to his property even in a free state.
No, I’m not saying that at all. People need to eat and there were agricultural businesses in the North as well. The industrialists wanted the U.S. to do what other countries were doing at the time, which was pushing agricultural business to the back burner while focusing more on industrialism, which is what they were doing in the North.
If the South had started building factories, and had a mix of agriculture and industrialism, then they would have been more open to things like tariffs that protected industry and allowed the industrial businesses to grow. Instead, the South remained completely focused on agriculture and after 1840 or so kept enough votes in Washington to effectively block most tariffs and other government policies that would have benefited industrialism. This frustrated and angered the industrialists, who felt that the South was preventing the entire U.S. from becoming a major economic player world-wide.
Of course, focusing on industry would have taken money and power away from the plantation owners, so they weren’t ever going to go along with the industrialist’s plans.
A point can be made that the northern industrialists didn’t care to protect the southern cotton and tobacco industries. These would have suffered if the industrialists had their way.
I don’t know that that is true given the Nullification Crisis, but certainly the actual Civil War was not started over tariff disagreements. The disagreement and vitriol over tariffs were at their peak in the 1830s, by the 1850s and early 1860s they were mostly a non issue (they had been reduced for one and Southern exports were doing decently well at that point), and slavery had become a violently prominent issue. This is evidenced by Bleeding Kansas, John Brown’s raid, the extreme disagreements/differing reactions to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision in North v South, the arguments over slave/free territories etc. The tariff crisis nearly did tear the country apart but on a smaller scale and it had died down.
Slavery actually did, in real fact, tear the country apart.
Just look at the Southern States’ various documents of secession. They don’t mention tariffs, but they do mention the vital importance of slavery and white supremacy.
You say this but it still makes no economic sense. The whole point of a protectionist tariff is to protect existing companies from competition. So why would those same companies want to encourage the creation of new companies? The same motivation that led northern industrialists to support the tariff would have led them to oppose southern industrialization.
That was one fear the south expressed over a Lincoln administration. Under the patronage system of the era, the Republicans would have the power to appoint postmasters. These Republican postmasters would, as you noted, presumably not follow the established practice of refusing to deliver “subversive” literature in southern states.
No one was going to start a war over the slavery issue alone. The South seceded. The North started the war, remember? Lincoln warned in his inaugural address he would only invade to enforce the tariff. He most likely did this to appease his Northern industrialist backers who were all about tariffs, not so big on emancipation, and never would have started a war for it.
Meh, the South was the side that justly lost the Civil War as it was fighting to maintain an evil system of human slavery, but I think it’s a pretty debatable point about who started “the war.”
There is nothing clearly stated in U.S. law that prohibited secession. Thus the question of whether Ft. Sumter was a Federal possession or an illegal occupation by a foreign power on sovereign soil of South Carolina is, to me, a technical one which could go either way. The President at the time secession happened actually believed it was probably legal, as did several constitutional thinkers of the day. It was a genuinely unsettled question that was finally settled–but not by legal arguments.
