Editing Morrill Tariff (section)

==Secession==
===Relation to tariff===
While slavery dominated the secession debate in the south,<ref>Dew p. 12. For example, Dew notes that in South Carolina the Declaration of Causes adopted by the secession convention "focused primarily on the Northern embrace of antislavery principles and the evil designs of the newly triumphant Republican Party" and Georgia's convention was "equally outspoken on the subject of slavery."</ref> the Morrill tariff provided an issue for secessionist agitation in some southern states. The law's critics compared it to the 1828 [[Tariff of Abominations]], which sparked the [[Nullification Crisis]], but its average rate was significantly lower.

[[Robert Barnwell Rhett]] railed against the pending Morrill Tariff before the 1860 South Carolina convention. Rhett included a lengthy attack on tariffs in the ''Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States'', which the convention adopted on December 25, 1860, to accompany its secession ordinance:

<blockquote>And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue— to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.<ref>[http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=433 Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States by Convention of South Carolina<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref></blockquote>

The Morrill Tariff played less prominently elsewhere in the South. In some portions of Virginia, secessionists promised a new protective tariff to assist the state's fledgling industries.<ref>Carlander and Majewski, 2003</ref>

In the North, enforcement of the tariff contributed to support for the Union cause by industrialists and merchant interests. The abolitionist [[Orestes Brownson]] derisively remarked that "the Morrill Tariff moved them more than the fall of Sumter."<ref>"Emancipation and Colonization," ''Brownson's Quarterly Review'', April 1862</ref> In one such example, the ''[[New York Times]]'', which had opposed Morrill's bill on free trade grounds, editorialized that the tariff imbalance would bring commercial ruin to the North and urged its suspension until the secession crisis passed: "We have imposed high duties on our commerce at the very moment the seceding states are inviting commerce to their ports by low duties."<ref>"[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1861/03/26/80263349.pdf The Tariff and Secession]", ''The New York Times'', March 26, 1861</ref> As secession became more evident and the fledgling Confederacy adopted a much lower tariff, the paper urged military action to enforce the Morrill Tariff in the South.<ref>"[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1861/03/30/78655375.pdf The Great Question]", ''The New York Times'', March 30, 1861</ref>

===Historiography===
Historians, [[James L. Huston|James Huston]] notes, have been baffled by the role of high tariffs in general and have offered multiple conflicting interpretations over the years. (Low tariffs, all historians agree, were noncontroversial and needed to fund the federal government.) One school of thought says the Republicans were the willing tools of would-be monopolists. A second school says the Republicans truly believed that tariffs would promote nationalism and prosperity for everyone along with balanced growth in every region, as opposed to growth only in the cotton South. A third school emphasizes the undeniable importance of the tariff in cementing party loyalty, especially in industrial states. Another approach emphasizes that factory workers were eager for high tariffs to protect their high wages from European competition.<ref>James L. Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism: The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrines," ''Journal of American History,'' June 1983, Vol. 70 Issue 1, pp 35–57</ref>

[[Charles A. Beard]] argued in the 1920s that very long-term economic issues were critical, with the pro-tariff industrial Northeast forming a coalition with the anti-tariff agrarian Midwest against the plantation South.

According to Luthin in the 1940s, "Historians are not unanimous as to the relative importance which Southern fear and hatred of a high tariff had in causing the secession of the slave states."<ref>Luthin, p. 626</ref> However, none of the statesmen seeking a compromise in 1860–61 to avert the war ever suggested the tariff might be either the key to a solution or a cause of the secession.<ref>Robert G. Gunderson, ''Old Gentlemen's Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861'' (1981)</ref>

In the 1950s, historians began to move away from the Beard thesis of [[economic causality]]. In its place, historians, led by [[Richard Hofstadter]], began to emphasize the social causes of the war as centered on the issue of slavery.

The Beard thesis has enjoyed a recent revival among economists, pro-Confederate historians, and neo-Beardian scholars. A 2002 study by economists Robert McGuire and T. Norman Van Cott concluded:

<blockquote>A de facto constitutional mandate that tariffs lie on the lower end of the [[Laffer Curve|Laffer]] relationship means that the Confederacy went beyond simply observing that a given tax revenue is obtainable with a "high" and "low" tax rate, a&nbsp;la [[Alexander Hamilton]] and others. Indeed, the constitutional action suggests that the tariff issue may in fact have been even more important in the North–South tensions that led to the Civil War than many economists and historians currently believe.</blockquote>

Rather than contributing to secession, Marc-William Palen notes how the tariff was passed through Congress only by the secession of Southern states. Thus, secession itself allowed for the bill's passage, rather than the other way around.<ref>Marc-William Palen, "[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/the-great-civil-war-lie/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 The Great Civil War Lie]," ''New York Times'', June 5, 2013</ref>

[[Allan Nevins]] and [[James M. McPherson]] downplay the significance of the tariff; argue that it was peripheral to the issue of [[slavery]]; and note that slavery dominated the secessionist declarations, speeches, and pamphlets. Nevins also points to the argument of [[Alexander Stephens]], who disputed Toombs's claims about the severity of the Morrill Tariff. Though initially opposed to secession, Stephens would later cite slavery as the "[[Cornerstone Speech|cornerstone]]" for his support of secession.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76 |title=Teaching American History library |access-date=2005-09-14 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071117085333/http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=76 |archive-date=2007-11-17 |url-status=dead}}</ref>