06/07/2023
Morill Tariff of 1860 and its impact on starting the Civil War: Pushed by the North and opposed by the South.
The vote was on May 10, 1860; the bill passed by a vote of 105 to 64. The vote was largely sectional. The sectional breakdown was 96–15 in the north, 7–9 in the Border, and 1–39 in the south.... Seven months later, as the bill was in the Senate, South Carolina seceded. Within two months, six other states had joined.
The Tariff was on the importing of finished goods from Europe. England was buying cotton from the South and selling finished goods such as farm equipment and clothing back to America. The Tariff gave the North the ability to raise their prices at the expense of the South.
The Morrill Tariff was adopted on March 2, 1861, by President James Buchanan, two days before Lincoln took office. It appealed to industrialists and factory workers as a way to foster rapid industrial growth.[1] The country at the time had a $500,000.00 debt.
It was named for its sponsor, Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont. The Morrill Tariff raised rates to encourage industry and to foster high wages for industrial workers.[2] It replaced the low Tariff of 1857, which was written to benefit the South. Two additional tariffs sponsored by Morrill, each one higher, were passed during Abraham Lincoln's administration to raise urgently needed revenue during the Civil War.
The Morrill tariff inaugurated a period of continuous trade protection in the United States, a policy that remained until the adoption of the Revenue Act of 1913 (the Underwood tariff).
Charles Dickens wrote in his magazine, "All the Year Round", to attack the new tariff. On December 28, 1861 Dickens published a lengthy article, which blamed the American Civil War on the Morrill Tariff:
"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... "
In December 1860, Former US Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina (Dem,) similarly railed against the then-pending Morrill Tariff before the South Carolina convention to decided to secede:
"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."
