It was NOT used to collect tariffs. But it did allow interdiction of any ship that would try to evade those taxes. It provided a de facto point of entry to Charleston harbor that could be used to stop any ship that did not pay the tariffs. Sumter effectively closed off all access to the port should it so desire. When there is a disagreement over paying those duties and the Federal government has made clear it’s going to keep on collecting them, it’s reasonable to conclude that the giant guns pointed at the strait are not just for decoration. Just like today, when I cross at the border, it’s not the guy with the gun collecting customs duties, but he’s the reason I pay (OK, I actually think it’s a moral duty, but if I had some sort of disagreement about the moral duty of customs, the guy with the gun is going to solve that disagreement in his favor.)
So, wait - the ships were supposed to pay the tariffs before coming into harbor? How would you know their intent to pay if they had not docked yet? The Federal plan to collect tariffs were to sink ships instead of, I dunno, enforcing the tariff when the ship was at harbor and the tariffs could be collected?
Given that South Carolina seemed to forget all about this when drafting their statement of secession, I think you need to re-evaluate your attachment to this position. I am more inclined to believe South Carolina on the subject.
Here is the text of their statement of secession. Please, please read it. It’s entirely about slavery. The whole thing. Not a word about tariffs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090201185344/http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Sweet, I’m glad we’re taking their word for it. In the debate, the entire first half of their declaration to the other southern states was on taxation, exactly as I said. Slaveholders had to bring the other people on board with taxation issues. Also as I said, they were afraid of the fort interdicting slave ships as well in the interstate trade.
As others have noted, South Carolina issued an official statement about the causes for their secession. And they didn’t mention taxes or tariffs.
They were trying to lead other southern states into seceding. If the tariff was such an important issue across the south, why did they neglect to mention it?
And I don’t know what slave ships you imagine were entering Charleston Harbor. The overseas slave trade had been abolished in 1807. The Confederates maintained this policy, even putting a prohibition on the overseas slave trade into their Constitution.
It was the interstate slave trade they were afraid of disrupting as I mentioned above. Slaves were still bought and sold at market, they just had to originate in the US. Charleston was the largest slave trading port in the south at the time.
Again though, I just provided documentation from the secession debates in South Carolina that specifically and at length discussed the tariff issues. I am not claiming for a moment that slavery was not important or had nothing to do with secession. It was THE dominant issue, but the tariff issue was still very large and used to convince the ‘capite censi’ as it were of the validity of secession. Sumter threatened both slavery and tariff-freedoms. I think it’s also important to keep in mind that in 1832, this is exactly what happened. Charleston nullified the tariffs and refused to collect them and Federal forces were sent to the harbor forts to interdict ships and force them to pay customs. This was not some unfounded fear.
Sumter in its weakened state couldn’t even defend itself from the rebels, much less shut down the port. And there never was a realistic prospect of that ever happening.
The tariff-and-trade thing is a revisionist red herring. It was slavery uber alles as the issue that led to secession.
Yes, and I provided the document that outlined what South Carolina concluded were the causes for secession.
So they discussed the tariff issue and then officially decided it wasn’t a cause.
We are talking about Sumter, not the primary reasons for secession. There is no debate from me regarding why the South was seceding. I think it’s simplistic to say it was only over slavery since secession had been a threat almost since the beginning of the union, but it’s very easy to see that it was by far the dominant issue in 1860.
The thing is that slavery was near and dear to the hearts of the wealthy classes, but not so much the underclasses who in many cases felt shut out of buying slaves. In order to sell the war to them, other issues were brought in to play, notably the tariffs. We know from the nullification crisis that this was not some sort of pigeon-holed issue and that nullifying those tariffs enjoyed wide, cross-class support in the south and especially in South Carolina. We also know that Jackson had planned to use the federal forts in the harbor as customs houses using ships to interdict shipping and forcing them to dock at Moultrie and Pinckney. There was no reason at the time to believe that Sumter wouldn’t be used in this manner if the Federal government made the decree. Hearing that a fleet of ships was showing up to resupply the fort would certainly not be something that assuaged those fears. You have to remember that during the nullification crisis, South Carolina had called up 25 thousand militia to seize the forts then and it was only through skillful diplomatic maneuvering that the Civil War didn’t start 27 years earlier.
The move toward secession was not a quick thing. Beginning with the nullification crisis, the south had long used propaganda and education to unite the working underclasses. There was a constant drumbeat following the crisis about the Federal government behaving unjustly toward the south and the tariffs of the nullification crisis were a large part of the propaganda effort. So you have this propaganda of the government using Federal forts to ‘oppress’ South Carolinians and then the Federal government apparently looking to reinforce those forts. It’s not a surprise that South Carolinians viewed this as an aggressive action. Now, I certainly don’t think that Lincoln meant it as such, but I do think that he was largely ignorant of the situation in the South and honestly, not a particularly strong diplomat or political creature.
I think the bottom line is that the wealthy citizens of the deep south wanted out of the union and had wanted out for a long time. Slavery was a really big reason why. The northern south though was not as keen on it. There’s a real chance that they could have been convinced to stay and it was diplomatic bungling that pushed them into the Confederacy. There was no hope for South Carolina. There was going to be a crisis there regardless of what happened. Richmond, Raleigh and Nashville though could have been enticed to stay if not for the bungling of Fort Sumter.
Also, the idea that Fort Sumter would not be able to defend itself or shut down the port is belied by the fact that after it was taken, it was defended for the entire length of the war from near constant bombardment and didn’t fall until the entire city of Charleston fell first. The fear was not that the 90 people in the fort at the start of the bombardment would be able to interdict shipping, but rather the reinforcements that were coming from the Northern fleet WOULD be able to do so and that was not an unreasonable fear. Fort Sumter was not an easy target to destroy and truthfully if the North had been able to resupply it, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t have survived the war in Union hands.
They decided it was an issue when they were trying to convince other states to join them. They did not put it in their response to Washington, but did put it in their request to the Confederacy. Both were official documents regarding their reasons for secession. You don’t get to ignore one because it doesn’t fit your narrative. I already have conceded the main point of contention at this point was slavery. That doesn’t mean that nothing else was relevant and the only thing upon which they based all decisions was that single issue. The tariffs were very much relevant and very much in their heads at the time and certainly being used to convince others of the rightness of their course.
Where are you getting this stuff about “a fleet”? The U.S. attempted to resupply Fort Sumter in January 1861 using a single ship that was turned back by Rebel guns. The North was doing all it could to avoid anything that could be perceived as a provocation, but the South was intent on war.
You seem to be really hung up on tariffs - but it’s not believable (or documented in history) that the average non-slave holding Southerner was excited about that issue. What overwhelmingly mattered was racial fears and hatred.
"Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Curfews governed the movement of slaves at night, and vigilante committees patrolled the roads, dispensing summary justice to wayward slaves and whites suspected of harboring abolitionist views. Laws were passed against the dissemination of abolitionist literature, and the South increasingly resembled a police state.”
Churches in the South told their flocks that it was God’s command to subjugate blacks. And political leaders amplified those sentiments and promoted fears of a black uprising.
“Typical of the commissioner letters is that written by Stephen Hale, an Alabama commissioner, to the Governor of Kentucky, in December 1860. Lincoln’s election, he observed, was “nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the south, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans…
What Southerner, Hale asked, “can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality?” Abolition would surely mean that “the two races would be continually pressing together,” and “amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable.”…
In sum, the commissioners described one apocalyptic vision after another – emancipation, race war, miscegenation. The collapse of white supremacy would be so cataclysmic that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause, they argued. Secession was necessary to preserve the purity and survival of the white race.”
Note that the above link is to an address written by a Southern historian (with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy), grappling with the reasons why ordinary non-slave owning Southerners supported secession.
Oddly enough, he does not mention tariffs. 