In his introduction to F.W. Taussig’s Tariff History of the United States, David Chalmers observes that debates about protective tariffs are often politically fraught. This is not surprising, given the overtly political goal of protective tariffs. Chalmers describes protectionist tariffs as designed,
…to shield particular products against competition…either to channel resources into productive areas that are felt to be nationally desirable or merely to aid particular domestic producers who have sufficient political power to use the tariff for their own gain. Whatever the initial reason for the protection, it is almost always easier to institute than to remove tariffs, which, once passed, build up special interests and political power behind them.
The purpose of this article is not to cover the full economic history of the tariff, for which readers may consult Taussig’s book, but to comment on the significance of the political disputes that arose between North and South in relation to the tariff question. The prevailing establishment consensus is that the dispute over tariffs was not “real” and was just fiction, a “myth” invented after the war to promote “lost cause narratives” and mask the “real” dispute which was, of course, about slavery and white supremacy. This establishment narrative can only be sustained by completely ignoring the political contestation around tariffs, which began, as Chalmers notes, as early as “the drafting of the American Constitution.”
At that time, “many Southerners were fearful that a strong central government might levy taxes on exports, which at that time were primarily composed of Southern agricultural staples.” The evolving political debates concerning the import tariffs in the decades preceding the war are now dismissed as a mere sideshow, by those determined to hold slavery as the only significant political issue. Neo-Marxist and postmodern theorists inform us that any suggestion that the South was concerned about tariffs is “a pernicious lie.” Anyone who dares to mention this “tariff fiction” draws the immediate ire of the cancel mob:
…articles like “Protective Tariffs: The Primary Cause of the Civil War,” which appeared in Forbes Magazine in June 2013. Although the article was quickly pulled from the Forbes website following a rapid response from historians on Twitter (#twitterstorians), this particular piece of tariff fiction still exists on the author’s website as well as in a local Virginia newspaper, the Daily Progress.
The tariff question was of great concern to the South and cannot be dismissed as post war mythology. As Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund Jr observe in their book Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War:
The South was basically an agrarian economy. This input-producing region’s major crops were tobacco, rice, and cotton, with much of the latter intended for export or for the textile mills of the North. Southerners had to earn their revenue to buy finished goods from the North and from abroad through the export of raw materials. Since tariffs on finished goods, such as textiles and luxuries, and on capital goods, such as machinery, raised the prices paid by Southerners, they believed correctly that the “terms of trade” were set against them by high protectionist tariffs. Thus, from the earliest days of the nation, the tariff issue was paramount to Southerners.
They add that, “These economic interests and the uncertainty that attended them throughout the antebellum period, we argue, were a major factor in the coming of the Civil War in 1860.” The concerns were not purely economic or financial, but also political.
Those who view the tariff dispute as “fiction” are flummoxed as to why the Southern States would vote in representative conventions to secede over taxes. They echo the befuddlement as to why the American Revolutionaries had earlier made such a huge fuss over what was, after all, a trivial tax on tea levied by the British Parliament. The colonists swore allegiance to George III and then revolted over a minor tax? Why would they do that? Was the tea tax grievance also a myth invented by white supremacist Founding Fathers to disguise the true nature of their “enslavers revolt”? To postmodernists, history is stranger than fiction:
So the colonists didn’t like [the tea tax]. They thought it would give the East India Company a monopoly. Colonial merchants with their smuggled tea would be ruined and the company would then tighten its grip on the marketplace, creating what they called a “monster,” as one colonist said... Now again, the colonists weren’t objecting to the financial burden of the tea tax, they were instead making a point about legitimacy. They were willing to pay taxes imposed by their own representatives, but they wouldn’t pay taxes imposed by Parliament where they lacked representation. So that was the main idea behind the protest.
To the followers of the New York Times 1619 project, the colonists did not genuinely care about representation, that was just a myth they invented to mask their desire to “protect slavery” because they were concerned that the British Empire might soon abolish slavery, just as they claim that the South seceded from fear that Lincoln did not really mean it when he said, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.”
These “everything was about slavery” theories are fanciful, and they are equally fanciful when applied to the tariff question. The Southern position must be viewed in the wider political context of concerns about the disproportionate effect of the tariff burden. Nor was this long-standing contention confined to the Morrill Tariff of 1861. Taussig observes that from the early 19th century, there were sectional differences between the States on this issue: “The stronghold of the protective movement was in the Middle and Western states of those days—in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky.” Conversely, according to Taussig,
…the South took its stand against the protective system with a promptness and decision characteristic of the political history of the slave states… they had grasped the fact that slavery made the growth of manufactures in the South impossible, that manufactured goods must be bought in Europe or in the North, and that, wherever bought, a protective tariff would tend to make them dearer.
On that point the South was right. Protective tariffs did indeed tend to make manufactured goods dearer and thus disproportionately affected the agricultural section of the economy. There was a related constitutional dispute—the fear being that a tax burden falling disproportionately on some states, while being spent disproportionately to benefit others, would effectively make some states vassals of others. Against that background, in the lead up to the war, tariffs were gradually reduced at the behest of the Democrats by the Act of 1846 and 1857.
Taussig notes that there was general agreement on the 1857 Act which reduced tariffs for the last time before they were once again raised by the Morrill Tariff. In 1857, “It was agreed on all hands that a reduction of the revenue was imperatively called for, and, except from Pennsylvania, there was no opposition to the reduction of duties made in it.”
When the Morrill Tariff of 1861 was introduced, Taussig explains that “it was passed, undoubtedly, with the intention of attracting to the Republican party, at the approaching Presidential election, votes in Pennsylvania and other States that had protectionist leanings.”
One may agree or disagree with the political position of the South, but it is clear that the tariff question was of great concern at the time. There is a tendency, which is a form of “presentism,” to suppose that if one does not agree with a position held in the past, one’s own disagreement is evidence that nobody in the past could genuinely have held that position. To postmodernists, history is only “true” if it aligns with their own theories. In this form of “history by theory,” the facts are whatever “twitterstorians” think ought to be the facts. The importance attached by Southerners to the tariff question goes a long way in explaining the hostilities that eventually led to the secession of South Carolina. As Tom DiLorenzo shows in The Real Lincoln, there was a real fear in the North that free trade in the South would be detrimental to Northern financial interests. DiLorenzo explains,
To put all this into historical context, it is important to recall that Southerners had been adamantly protesting protectionist tariffs since 1824. Southerners ended up paying the lion’s share of all federal taxes (more than 90 percent of federal tax revenue came from tariffs at that time), since they relied so heavily on foreign trade, while most federal spending was occurring in the North… most of the nonagricultural goods that Southerners purchased came from either Europe or the North. A tariff, which is a tax on imports, raised the price of virtually everything Southerners purchased.
This is corroborated by Taussig’s observation that tariff laws, such as the Tariff Act of 1832, were unpopular in the South (“the average rate on dutiable articles was about 33 per cent” which was up from a historic low of 5 per cent). Taussig also observes that, under the Compromise Tariff Act of 1833, the rate of tariffs was to be gradually reduced—at the behest of the South. The intended purpose of this gradual approach, reducing the tariff incrementally, was to avoid unduly antagonizing the North. Taussig observes that at around this time, “Calhoun had represented the extreme Southern demand that duties should be reduced to a horizontal level of 15 or 20 per cent.”
He regards this as “extreme” because, in his view, the demand for lower tariffs was based on an overly narrow understanding of how tariffs affect the economy, leading some analysts to accord undue significance to tariffs. It is certainly true that the economic effects of tariffs were debated by economists at the time, as Taussig explains. For example, he observes that “the cotton manufacture was in the main independent of protection, and not likely to be much affected, favorably or unfavorably, by changes in duties.”
In relation to the political dispute surrounding the Tariff Act of 1842, Taussig observes that it was “passed by the Whigs as a party measure, and its history is closely connected with the political complications of the time.” He explains that the political dispute concerned “the distribution among the States of the proceeds” of the tariff, and notes that, “Attention was turned mainly to the political quarrel and to the political effect of the bill in general.” Taussig observes,
There is much truth in Calhoun’s remark that the act of 1842 was passed, not so much in compliance with the wishes of the manufacturers, as because the politicians wanted an issue.
He also notes that Calhoun was concerned about “the influence of the ‘moneyed men’ who wanted the Treasury to be filled.” Calhoun feared that, in addition to the protectionist manufacturers behind the tariff, the “moneyed men” supporting the tariff were financially and politically self-aggrandizing and not geared towards promoting the economic wellbeing of the country.
It is clear from Taussig’s discussion of the tariff history of the United States that the political concerns of the South were not merely “invented” after the war to advance a lost cause mythology. The Southern states followed through on their long-held opposition to protectionist tariffs by abolishing them in Article I, Section 8, clause 1 of the Confederate Constitution of 1861.
