If you loose a war the winning side teaches the history as they see fit. The reasons for the War between the States has been clouded by slavery for far to long. Greed of the northern industrialist was the main reason for the Civil War, slavery abolition was the smoke and mirrors.
The Morrill Tariff of 1860
The Morrill Tariff act passed the United States House of Representatives by a strictly sectional vote during the first session of the 36th Congress on May 10, 1860. Virtually all of the northern representatives supported it and southern representatives opposed it. The tariff had been written for peacetime with the purpose of protecting of industrial manufacturing, located mostly in the northeast, from foreign competitor products.
In its first year of operation, the Morrill Tariff increased the effective rate collected on dutiable imports by approximately 70%.
The Morrill Tariff was met with intense hostility in Great Britain, where the free trade movement dominated public opinion. The new tariff schedule heavily penalized British iron, clothing, and manufactured exports with new taxes and sparked public outcry from many British politicians. The expectation of high 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?"[7]
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, British public opinion was sympathetic to the Confederacy due to lingering agitation over the tariff. As one diplomatic historian has explained, the Morrill Tariff: [Johnson p 14]
"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 Palmerston to Adams, "but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff."
Many prominent British writers condemned the Morrill Tariff in the strongest terms. Economist William Stanley Jevons denounced it as a "retrograde" law. The well known novelist Charles Dickens used his magazine, All the Year Round, to attack the new tariff. On December 28, 1861 Dickens published a lengthy editorial, believed to be written by Henry Morley, in which he blamed the American Civil War on the Morrill Tariff:
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.
Communist philosopher Karl Marx was among the few writers in Britain who took a favourable view of the Morrill Tariff. 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 Morrill's bill, arguing instead that slavery had induced secession and that the tariff was just a pretext. Marx wrote, in October 1861:
The Morrill Tariff and the Secession Movement:
The Morrill tariff was adopted against the backdrop of the secession movement, and provided an issue for secessionist agitation in some southern states.
The Morrill Tariff received considerable attention in the conventions of Georgia and South Carolina. On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary...united in joint raid against the South." Anti-tariff sentiments also appeared in Georgia's Secession Declaration of January 29, 1861, written in part by Toombs.
Robert Barnwell Rhett similarly railed against the then-pending Morrill Tariff before the 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.
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.[13]
