Editing Morrill Tariff (section)

===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>