Editing Morrill Tariff (section)

==Reception abroad==
The Morrill Tariff was met with intense hostility in Britain, where free trade dominated public opinion. Southern diplomats and agents sought to use British ire towards the Morrill Tariff to garner sympathy, with the aim of obtaining British recognition for the Confederacy.<ref>Marc-William Palen, "[http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_the_civil_war_era/v003/3.1.palen.html The Civil War's Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy's Free Trade Diplomacy]," ''Journal of the Civil War Era'' 3: 1 (March 2013): 35–61</ref> The new tariff schedule heavily penalized British iron, clothing, and manufactured exports by making them more costly and sparked public outcry from many British politicians. The expectation of high tax rates probably caused British shippers to hasten their deliveries before the new rates took effect in the early summer of 1861.

When complaints were heard from London, Congress counterattacked. The Senate Finance Committee chairman snapped, "What right has a foreign country to make any question about what we choose to do?"<ref>Richardson p. 114</ref>

When the [[American Civil War]] broke out in 1861, British public opinion was sympathetic to the Confederacy, in part because of lingering agitation over the tariff. As one diplomatic historian has explained, the Morrill Tariff:<ref>Johnson p. 14</ref>

<blockquote>not unnaturally gave great displeasure to England. It greatly lessened the profits of the American markets to English manufacturers and merchants, to a degree which caused serious mercantile distress in that country. Moreover, the British nation was then in the first flush of enthusiasm over free trade, and, under the lead of extremists like Cobden and Gladstone, was inclined to regard a protective tariff as essentially and intrinsically immoral, scarcely less so than larceny or murder. Indeed, the tariff was seriously regarded as comparable in offensiveness with slavery itself, and Englishmen were inclined to condemn the North for the one as much as the South for the other. "We do not like slavery," said [[Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston|Palmerston]] to Adams, "but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff."</blockquote>

Many prominent British writers condemned the Morrill Tariff in the strongest terms. The economist [[William Stanley Jevons]] denounced it as a "retrograde" law. The famous novelist [[Charles Dickens]] used his magazine, ''[[All the Year Round]],'' to attack the new tariff. On December 28, 1861, Dickens published a lengthy article, believed to be written by [[Henry Morley]],<ref>Unlike the situation with ''[[Household Words]]'', no ledger survives giving the authorship of each article in ''All the Year Round'' but Dickens scholar Ella Ann Oppenlander has attempted to provide a list in a work that is not easily procured, ''Dickens's All the Year Round: Descriptive Index and Contributor List'' (1984). The article that the above quote is from is widely regarded by scholars as a follow-up to an article from a week earlier, ''American Disunion''. Graham Storey in ''The [[Letters of Charles Dickens]]'' attributes both articles to staff writer Henry Morley, based on a letter by Dickens stating that "you say nothing of the book on the American Union in Morley's hands. I hope and trust his article will be ready for the next No. made up. There will not be the least objection to having American papers in it." He afterwards wrote, "It is scarcely possible to make less of Mr. Spence's book, than Morley has done." Dickens micromanaged the magazine and so none dispute that Dickens must have generally endorsed the ideas in the articles.
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which blamed the [[American Civil War]] on the Morrill Tariff:

<blockquote>If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States?... Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived.... The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union.... So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils.... [T]he quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.</blockquote>

Others, such as [[John Stuart Mill]], denied tariffs had anything to do with the conflict:

<blockquote>...what are the Southern chiefs fighting about? Their apologists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery. They say nothing of the kind. They tell the world, and they told their own citizens when they wanted their votes, that the object of the fight was slavery. Many years ago, when General Jackson was President, South Carolina did nearly rebel (she never was near separating) about a tariff; but no other State abetted her, and a strong adverse demonstration from Virginia brought the matter to a close. Yet the tariff of that day was rigidly protective. Compared with that, the one in force at the time of the secession was a free-trade tariff: This latter was the result of several successive modifications in the direction of freedom; and its principle was not protection for protection, but as much of it only as might incidentally result from duties imposed for revenue. Even the Morrill tariff (which never could have been passed but for the Southern secession) is stated by the high authority of Mr. H. C. Carey to be considerably more liberal than the reformed French tariff under Mr. Cobden's treaty; insomuch that he, a Protectionist, would be glad to exchange his own protective tariff for Louis Napoleon's free-trade one. But why discuss, on probable evidence, notorious facts? The world knows what the question between the North and South has been for many years, and still is. Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of. Slavery was battled for and against, on the floor of Congress and in the plains of Kansas; on the slavery question exclusively was the party constituted which now rules the United States: on slavery Fremont was rejected, on slavery Lincoln was elected; the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed slavery as the one cause of separation.</blockquote><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5123/5123-h/5123-h.htm|title=The Contest in America, by John Stuart Mill}}</ref>

The [[communist]] philosopher [[Karl Marx]] also saw slavery as the major cause of the war.  Marx wrote extensively in the British press and served as a London correspondent for several North American newspapers including [[Horace Greeley]]'s ''[[New York Tribune]].''  Marx reacted to those who blamed the war on the Morrill Tariff and argued instead that slavery had induced secession and that the tariff was just a pretext.  In October 1861, he wrote:

<blockquote>Naturally, in America everyone knew that from 1846 to 1861 a free trade system prevailed, and that Representative Morrill carried his protectionist tariff through [[Congress of the United States|Congress]] only in 1861, after the rebellion had already broken out. Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place.<ref>[http://www.aotc.net/Marxen.htm Biographies<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref></blockquote>

Seven  of the 11 Confederate states had already seceded before the signing of the Morrill Tariff, making it all the more dubious that tariffs caused the Civil War. <ref>https://www.thoughtco.com/order-of-secession-during-civil-war-104535</ref>