The secession documents themselves don’t really mention tariffs. Some people have argued that the South couldn’t openly admit that tariffs were the real issue because they needed to impose tariffs to fund the Confederate government. In addition to the fact that this argument essentially boils down to arguing that “the absence of evidence is the evidence,” the actual context of the events refutes this logic.
In the first episode of the new season of Historical Controversies, which will focus on the sectional crises that led to
the Civil War, I gave a brief explanation of my problem with the “Tariff
Thesis” for the cause of southern secession. My arguments on the subject were
the primary subject of criticism for the episode, and I feel it may be worth
offering a more detailed explanation as to why I reject this popular
interpretation for the cause of secession.
It is worth
mentioning that although this article is only intended to address the tariff
thesis for southern secession, there is also a separate tariff thesis — the
“Tariff War Thesis” — which states that tariff revenues were the reason for
Lincoln’s desire to wage the war.
Although I reject
both tariff theses, Tariff War Thesis is, at least, more plausible. Although
many people combine both tariff theses into a single interpretation of
secession and the war, some historians only maintain one while rejecting the
other.
The Tariff and Southern Secession
The expositors of
the tariff thesis for southern secession point to the nullification crisis that
grew out of a protective tariff of 1828, known by the South as the “Tariff of
Abominations.”
As I discussed in the podcast, John C. Calhoun secretly wrote the South Carolina Exposition and
Protest, which argued that individual states have the right
to nullify federal laws that they deemed unconstitutional. In 1832, after a new
tariff bill was passed (which actually lowered duties, but was still criticized
for being protectionist), South Carolina passed a nullification act and started
mobilizing troops to defend against the threatened aggression by the Andrew
Jackson administration, which came in the form of a “Force Bill” passed by
Congress to empower the president to use the military against the nullifying
state.
The crisis was
averted after Henry Clay stepped up with a compromise tariff that offered to
lower duties gradually over a period of years (the new bill, interestingly,
never addressed the conflict between a “protectionist” and a “revenue” tariff,
the latter of which was considered to be constitutional by southerners).
In the early
1830s, it is fair to say that tariffs were a legitimate cause of controversy
between the North and the South (or, at least, South Carolina, which was the
only state that took real action in response to the tariff). But even in these
years, there is reason to question whether tariffs were the sole reason for the
dispute. John Calhoun himself, as revealed in a private letter to Virgil Maxy
written in 1830, said:
“I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion, rather
than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no
longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institutions of the Southern
States, and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have
given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriation
in opposite relation to the majority of the Union; against the danger of which,
if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the states, they must
in the end be forced to rebel or submit to have . . . their domestick
institutions exhausted by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves &
children reduced to wretchedness. Thus situatied [sic], the denial of the right of the state to interfere constitutionally in
the last resort, more alarms the thinking than all other causes.”
At least in
Calhoun’s view, it is clear that the institution of slavery — often
referred to euphemistically as the “peculiar institution” — was threatened
by northern anti-slavery schemes such as “Colonization.” Calhoun reveals quite
clearly that even during the tariff dispute, the fear of administrative
usurpations of the constitution would threaten the survival of slavery.
In fact, some of the arguments in favor of the tariff thesis for secession
have pointed out that slavery was dying out, so it is unlikely that this would
have motivated southern action. One article
on the subject says,
“Slavery was actually on the wane … [but] the issue of slavery provided
sentimental leverage [to rally public opinion for the Union war effort],
whereas oppressing the South with hurtful tariffs did not.”
The first problem with this argument is that the North never made slavery the issue upon which to rally public
opinion in support of the war. Quite the opposite was true, as Lincoln made
clear himself that the goal was to maintain the union, and that he had no
desire to end the institution of slavery. In fact, even though anti-slavery
sentiments had become more common among northerners, such views were still held
by a small enough percentage of the population that appeals against slavery
would never have been successful in gaining support for the war effort. This is
an argument that is designed to appeal to modern sentiments (and ignorance),
but depends on the complete denial of historic fact.
The second problem with this argument is that the dying out of slavery
was explicitly a motivation for southern action to protect the waning
institution. Leading up to the Civil War, southern “filibusters” were trying to
re-establish slavery in areas of the world in which it had already died, such
as Nicaragua, where southern slaveholders attempted to set up a new government
in which slavery was re-legalized. Southerners also advocated the annexation of
Cuba in order to add a new slave state to the union.
Most significant was the small-scale war that took place in Kansas during
the 1850s, known as “Bleeding Kansas,” in which pro-slavery “Border Ruffians”
from Missouri agitated for slavery through violence, which drove many
anti-slavery activists like John Brown to respond in kind, and voter fraud to
establish a pro-slavery government. The pro-slavery government of Kansas even
instituted a slave code that made it a criminal offense to speak out against the institution of slavery.
Kansas was the
stage for this controversy because it shared a border with Missouri, and slave
owners were afraid that a free Kansas would provide a new haven for their
fugitive slaves (which ultimately was the case, as anti-slavery guerillas like
John Brown and James Montgomery engaged in raids to help free Missouri slaves).
So it might be
correct to say that slavery was on its way out, but the dying institution was
one of the reasons the South wanted to secede; southerners were trying to hold
on to their peculiar institution.
But most
importantly, when trying to argue that the southern secession was motivated by
tariffs is the complete lack of evidence on the matter, and the volumes of
evidence to support the slavery thesis. The secession documents themselves
provide the most straightforward evidence. Although the second wave of
secession was motivated largely by Lincoln’s mobilization of troops to wage war
on the South, as I mentioned in the episode, the first wave of secession was
quite clearly motivated by slavery.
The secession documents themselves don’t really mention tariffs. Some
people have argued that the South couldn’t openly admit that tariffs were the
real issue because they needed to impose tariffs to fund the Confederate
government. In addition to the fact that this argument essentially boils down
to arguing that “the absence of evidence is the evidence,” the actual context of the events refutes this
logic.
South Carolina was the first southern state to officially secede. At the
time of secession, South Carolina was hoping other states would join them, but there was certainly
no guarantee of it. A “Confederate government” was an idea, but not a ratified
reality. Furthermore, South Carolina was the primary agitator against tariffs
in the 1830s, so the idea that they were afraid to use tariffs as the explicit
reason for their secession is countered by the very episode promoters of the
tariff thesis point to: the nullification crisis.
But South Carolina, along with the rest of the states in the initial wave
of secession, had no worries about confessing the role of slavery in their
decision. With zero mention of the tariff in its secession document, South Carolina made slavery the primary subject of
their pronouncement. The most telling paragraph, in fact, is the one in which
South Carolina justifies secession because of “an increasing hostility on the
part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, [which] has
led to a disregard of their obligations [to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act of
1850].” The document then lists a number of northern states who “have enacted
laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them”
(emphasis added). Not only was South Carolina objecting to northern opposition
to the Fugitive Slave Act, but it was hypocritically hostile to the use of
nullification – a doctrine proposed by Calhoun himself for South Carolina to
use against the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 – in opposition to the Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850.
Additionally, at
the secession convention, South Carolina fire-eater Laurence Keitt explicitly
addressed the tariff question to the members of the assembly:
“But the Tariff is
not the question which brought the people up to their present attitude. We are
to give a summary of our causes to the world, but mainly to the other Southern
States, whose co-action we wish, and we must not make a fight on the Tariff
question. …
African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial,
social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars
against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and
you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism. . . . The anti-slavery
party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a
consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right,
and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.”
Keitt was appealing
to a group of men of whom, roughly ninety percent owned slaves.
Other secession documents are equally clear about southern motivation to
secede. In the opening of the Mississippi secession document, the legislature declares that “Our position is
thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” The document then goes
on to enumerate all the attacks on slavery that the South had suffered since
“before the adoption of the Constitution” itself.
None of the
secession documents mention tariffs. In the first wave of secession, slavery
was the primary theme, and states’ rights were a secondary (and contradictory,
considering the states who listed nullification of the Fugitive Slave Act among
the northern offenses) justification.
It is important to stress, of course, that the Union apologists who argue
that the Civil War was waged over slavery are distorting the history as
well. Secession was one thing, and the war
to end it was another, as Ryan McMaken
succinctly reminded us in a recent article. The fallacy that the war was fought
over slavery is based on the inappropriate application of algebraic logic to
historical analysis: according to the transitive property of algebra, if
secession was driven by slavery and the war was driven by secession, then the
war must have been driven by slavery.
But this kind of mathematical logic cannot logically apply to history,
which as Mises reminds us in The Ultimate Foundations of Economic Science, is one of the two sciences of human action (page
41). Human action is driven by ideas. Action is purposeful. Action employs
means to obtain desired ends. The study of history attempts to establish what
these ends were during different historic episodes, and what means humans
employed historically to achieve these ends. To determine this, Mises explains,
historians must look at the historical evidence (unlike the other science of
human action, praxeology, which is an a priori deductive science).
The evidence is
clear. For the South, the ends aimed at was the preservation of slavery, and
the means they employed to realize these ends was secession. The historical
evidence makes this interpretation entirely evident. For the North, the ends
aimed at was the preservation of the Union, and the means they resorted to in
order to achieve this end was war.
***Source: