I’ve long said the Civil War of the 1860’s was not about slavery. At its core, that war was about the North pillaging the wealth of the Southern states. Profits were being secured by having the southern states nearly completely fund the federal government, and those same states were forced by tariffs into captive consumers of union manufactured goods. Protectionism at its most brutal.
The entire war was a way to steal the wealth of less populous states while cloaking the theft in the veneer of freeing the slaves.
The Tariff of 1828, which included very high duties on raw materials, raised the average tariff on imported goods to 45 percent. The Mid-Atlantic states were the biggest supporters of the new tariff. Southerners, who imported all of their industrial products, strongly opposed this tariff.
The tariff was nominally created to repay the debts incurred after the War of 1812. This wasn’t actually the case. By 1832 the national debt was paid and there was no reason for this tariff. What actually happened was that the tariff created a favorable situation for the North, who benefited greatly from such high taxes at the expense of the South. Since the Southern states didn’t produce manufactured goods, they were forced to buy those goods from either Europe or the Northern states. Since the South also needed to sell their agricultural goods in Europe, this created a situation where the Southern states were paying roughly 75% of all American taxes.
The Southern states just didn’t want to pay the tariffs, and began refusing to do so. (This idea of “State nullification” of Federal laws that states didn’t feel were constitutional was first advanced by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.) The states, led by South Carolina, declared the tariff null and void, and simply refused to pay.
So in 1833, the “Force Bill” was passed, allowing the president to use whatever force he deemed necessary, including the military, to collect taxes owed by the Southern states. Along came Lincoln, who campaigned on a platform of putting the tariffs back in place so that his sponsors could again enjoy the profits that the protectionist scheme caused.
Then it came to pass that in 1861, a new tax was passed, the Morrill Tariff. This tariff was the highest tax in American history to that point, and taxed imports at over 45%, with imported iron products taxed at 50%. This forced the South to buy northern iron products from the North at whatever prices the North wanted to charge. Victorious Republicans cheered the heavy taxes that benefitted the Northern industrialists who had backed Lincoln’s campaign.
The South announced that it no longer wanted to be a part of a union where they would be robbed in order to make northern businessmen wealthy. They seceded. The north still enforced the tariffs using military force.
Draw your own parallels as you realize the Union states were nothing more than thieves who were using the power of the Federal government and an Army as a means of stealing the wealth of others. No different from the DSA party movement of today.
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