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Re: Disunion reasons shift...
In Response To: Re: Disunion reasons shift... ()

George --

Thanks for asking! I won't try to belabor this point, but will provide more detail if requested.

Overall the revenues raised by different antebellum tariff bills may have helped industry and manufacturing in the North. That's only because industrial and manufacturing enterprises tended to be disproportionantly located on that side of the Mason-Dixon line. Southern industrialists like Daniel Pratt in Alabama, Joseph R. Anderson in Virginia and many others benefited from protective tariff bills.

It's certainly not difficult to understand that Southerners benefited from internal improvements, funded primarily by revenue from land sales and tariffs. Tobacco and cotton planters were keenly interested in reducing the cost of marketing their crops. They benefited from state and Federal grants to railroad companies planning to build new lines, plus harbor and river improvements by U.S. Army engineers like Robert E. Lee. Check the preliminary report for the 1860 census for the explosive growth of Southern railroad lines during the 1850s.

Those who insist that Southerners always opposed tariffs are simply not familiar with the political and economic environment of antebellum America. Here are two paragraphs on this topic from Michael F. Holt, , p. 167 --

Whigs proudly asserted that the Tariff of 1842 had invigorated the economy . Horace Greely trumpeted the tariff's virtues almost daily in his influential New York Tribune. But Greely was hardly alone in believing that the tariff provided the Whigs with an invincible issue. In January 1844, Georgia's Tombs jeered that the Democrats no longer dared talk about repealing it. Thus, he looked forward to "the sport I shall have out of them next summer on the stump about their unredeemed pledges to to repeal that 'odious Whig Tariff.'" Clay, who made a tour from new Orleans through Alabama, Georgia, and North Carolina in the winter and early spring of 1844, rejoiced that southern Whigs everywhere finally seemed united behind the protective tariff principle.

Nor did Clay exaggerate. Higher cotton prices,chortled North Carolina's David F. Caldwell, proved that a protective tariff for American industry "is decidedly beneficial to the Southen States, &c that the clamor on the subject is all humbug." The Virginia state Whig convention in 1844 pledged to campaign in defense of the Tariff of 1842, while Southern Whigs in the House of Representatives joined their northern colleagues to form a united front against tariff revision.

It would be well to consider how many Southern leaders during the secession crisis had been members of the Whig Party. Note also that Northern Democrats routinely opposed the tariff.

Do you see what I mean about North and South? Whigs tended to divide on the slavery issue, but closed ranks on other issues like the tariff. The same was often true of the Democrats.

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Southern Secession Movements
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Disunion reasons shift...
Re: Disunion reasons shift...
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