Reciprocal Tariffs

Joshism

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In the discussion about tariffs as a supposed cause of the war, the emphasis is usually on the imported goods that would purchased be used in the South.

But shouldn't the real tariff issue be reciprocal tariffs? If the US raises tariffs on European goods, Europeans would typically respond by raising tariffs on US exports.

What was the export on which the South relied? Cotton, of course. So tariffs hurt the Southern economy by making Southern cotton less financially lucrative. King Cotton and slavery were intertwined in the antebellum South. An threat to one was a threat to both.

Thus in the end saying the war was about tariffs is to say the war was about slavery. Tariffs threatened slavery, much as the states' rights under threat was the right for a state to maintain slavery.

I believe the modern term is dog whistle.
 

jgoodguy

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In the discussion about tariffs as a supposed cause of the war, the emphasis is usually on the imported goods that would purchased be used in the South.

But shouldn't the real tariff issue be reciprocal tariffs? If the US raises tariffs on European goods, Europeans would typically respond by raising tariffs on US exports.

What was the export on which the South relied? Cotton, of course. So tariffs hurt the Southern economy by making Southern cotton less financially lucrative. King Cotton and slavery were intertwined in the antebellum South. An threat to one was a threat to both.

Thus in the end saying the war was about tariffs is to say the war was about slavery. Tariffs threatened slavery, much as the states' rights under threat was the right for a state to maintain slavery.

I believe the modern term is dog whistle.
Don't forget that a Yankee importer might eat some or all of the tariff increase to keep his customers. Likewise a British exporter might lower his prices to stay competitive. Finally, the South did not import that much.
 

Mike12

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The other cotton option was Indian British Empire, British Raj. Slavery undercut the Indians' cotton in the British Empire, is that the suggestion? Just curious. The south tried an embargo to get attention, Britain went back to India. So you've just 'dog whistled', that, every State territory, concession, nation, country, tribe-land, is to demarcate a totally different entity from the others? That States wrote that Constitution together? That Hawaii is a place, Alabama, Virginia was a place before Union etc... Also Dog Whistled yes i Did say that, documentaries show Imports to be effected to the South is fine china plates, british victorian made furniture imported.
 

Leftyhunter

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In the discussion about tariffs as a supposed cause of the war, the emphasis is usually on the imported goods that would purchased be used in the South.

But shouldn't the real tariff issue be reciprocal tariffs? If the US raises tariffs on European goods, Europeans would typically respond by raising tariffs on US exports.

What was the export on which the South relied? Cotton, of course. So tariffs hurt the Southern economy by making Southern cotton less financially lucrative. King Cotton and slavery were intertwined in the antebellum South. An threat to one was a threat to both.

Thus in the end saying the war was about tariffs is to say the war was about slavery. Tariffs threatened slavery, much as the states' rights under threat was the right for a state to maintain slavery.

I believe the modern term is dog whistle.
I am not aware on any European nation having any tarriff's at all on cotton. US cotton was simply the best quality at least in that era.
US tarriff's were at a historical low so not a major issue at the time.
Leftyhunter
 

5fish

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There was an on and off issue over tariffs in the first 50 years of the 19th century but by 1857 the south won the argument before the war...

https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h974.html

Tariff of 1857 - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_1857

No debate tariffs were lowered in 1857 to low levels since 1816... this tariff argument just does not hold water...

The Tariff of 1857 was a major tax reduction in the United States that amended the Walker Tariff of 1846 by lowering rates to between 15% and 24%.[1][2]

Morrill tariff was in 1861... after secession began...

When the Panic of 1857 struck later that year, protectionists, led by economist Henry C. Carey, blamed the downturn on the new tariff.[3] The Tariff of 1857's cuts lasted only a few years, as the highly protectionist Morrill Tariff was signed into law in March 1861.[4]

Note...

In 1857, the average rate was reduced to the neighborhood of 20 percent. The trend toward lower tariffs had begun most recently in the Walker Tariff of 1846, but would be abruptly halted by wartime tariff measures.

Notre...

Downward tariff revision to almost free trade status; North opposed; (Buchanan administration).

Note... it was the North not the South that was upset...

The Tariff of 1857 was warmly greeted in the South and roundly derided in the North. The tariff was one of a number of major issues that was dangerously increasing the tension between the two regions.

Note... because the southerns left the congress, this happened... but 1861

The Morrill Tariff of 1861 was an increased import tariff in the United States, adopted on March 2, 1861, during the administration of President James Buchanan, a Democrat. It was the twelfth of seventeen planks in the platform of the incoming Republican Party, which had not yet been inaugurated, and it appealed to industrialists and factory workers as a way to foster rapid industrial growth.[1]

It was named for its sponsor, Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont, who drafted it with the advice of Pennsylvania economist Henry Charles Carey. The passage of the tariff was possible because many tariff-averse Southerners had resigned from Congress after their states declared their secession. The Morrill Tariff raised rates to encourage domestic industry and to foster high wages for industrial workers.[2]
 

5fish

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The myth started during the war...


Nor was the tariff myth’s transatlantic conception immaculate. As I’ve previously noted, it was crafted by canny Southern agents in the hopes of confounding British public opinion so as to obtain British recognition of the Confederacy:

Pro-Southern business interests and journalists fed the myth that the war was over trade, not slavery – the better to win over people who might be appalled at siding with slave owners against the forces of abolition. On March 12, 1861, just 10 days after the Morrill Tariff had become law, The London Times gave editorial voice to the tariff lie. The newspaper pronounced that “Protection was quite as much a cause of the disruption of the Union as Slavery,” and remarked upon how the Morrill Tariff had “much changed the tone of public feeling” in favor of “the Secessionists.”
The pro-North magazine Fraser’s made the more accurate observation that the new Northern tariff had handily given the Confederacy “an ex post facto justification” for secession, but British newspapers would continue to give voice to the Morrill myth for many months to come.
Why was England so susceptible to this fiction? For one thing, the Union did not immediately declare itself on a crusade for abolition at the war’s outset. Instead, Northern politicians cited vague notions of “union” – which could easily sound like an effort to put a noble gloss on a crass commercial dispute.
It also helped that commerce was anything but crass in Britain. On the question of free trade, the British “are unanimous and fanatical,” as the abolitionist and laissez-faire advocate Richard Cobden pointed out in December 1861. The Morrill Tariff was pejoratively nicknamed the “Immoral” tariff by British wags. It was easy for them to see the South as a kindred oppressed spirit.[3]
As a result, over the course of the first two years of the Civil War, the tariff myth grew in proportion and in popularity across the Atlantic, propagated by pro-South sympathizers and by the Confederate State Department.

snip... The help...


It would take the concerted efforts of abolitionists like John Stuart Mill, alongside Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, to debunk the Civil War tariff myth in Britain:

The Union soon obtained some much needed trans-Atlantic help from none other than the English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. By the beginning of 1862, the tariff myth had gained enough public traction to earn Mill’s intellectual ire, and he proved quite effective at voicing his opinion concerning slavery’s centrality to the conflict. He sought to refute this “theory in England, believed by some, half believed by many more … that, on the side of the North, the question is not one of slavery at all.”
Assuming this to be true, Mill asked, then “what are the Southern chiefs fighting about? Their apologists in England say that it is about tariffs, and similar trumpery.” Yet, Mill noted, the Southerners themselves “say nothing of the kind. They tell the world … that the object of the fight was slavery. … Slavery alone was thought of, alone talked of … the South separated on slavery, and proclaimed slavery as the one cause of separation.”
Mill concluded with a prediction that the Civil War would soon placate the abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. That, as the war progressed, “the contest would become distinctly an anti-slavery one,” and the tariff fable finally forgotten.
Mill’s prescient antislavery vision eventually begin to take hold in Britain, but only after Abraham Lincoln himself got involved in the trans-Atlantic fight for British hearts and minds when he put forth his Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863.
By February, Cobden happily observed how Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had aroused “our old anti-slavery feeling … and it has been gathering strength ever since.” […] And so, two years after the Morrill Tariff’s March 1861 passage, Northern antislavery advocates had finally exploded the transatlantic tariff myth.[4]
As we know the myth keeps coming back again and again...
 

Mike12

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One set of peoples fought a war to an end ,of having a nation for their children, it was the war of independence, American Independence, so they weren't the same as everybody in the world. And we got a government in an offensive silencing stance about simple Facts. Not a politician on the planet in this country just calling "dog whistle" and "Bull Shit" on the causes that are supposed to be your own. Whats at the end of what you're doing? Sometimes I'd be confused if you don't have fancy words to tell me I don't have a Nation and the others are welcome to it.

You're all over the place, even Civil War talk so focused. Union knows... what is it?
 

5fish

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One set of peoples fought a war to an end ,of having a nation for their children, it was the war of independence, American Independence,
These people you speak of fought for the independence to enslave another human being to steal his labor to profit themselves. . You want to defend these horded people and their horded reason for independence... It was a war for Slaveholder's Independence...
 

Mike12

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These people you speak of fought for the independence to enslave another human being to steal his labor to profit themselves. . You want to defend these horded people and their horded reason for independence... It was a war for Slaveholder's Independence...
They stated it was the same independence of 1776. These are two very different topics. Be a welcoming, egalitarian country. Does the government promote Puritan Pilgrims walking around? This is some non-Nation, neutral ground, and Star Wars Cantina. It somehow proves Hitler is wrong to call Jews the No-Nationalist. The Generals said. It doesn't. Who would recognize there's a descent, language, culture, and history native to the colonies, like Lee Myung Bak of Korea would. They put down every Country, Lonestar steak, every cowboy, every American Native Restaurant, every everything, existence. I want a turkey restaurant, culture-themed.

What's the irony here? Woodrow Wilson's family's from Pocahontas and Virginia, and has a Russian-Jew and Romanian Jew couple the Alma Gluck's do all the southern favorites?
 
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Mike12

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I'm not trying to suggest it's a good argument, but rather that tariffs - like states rights - circles back to slavery.
I'm not trying to bore anybody either. I've had 5 threads on 5 forums. But look! French Louisiana that's the "Dixieland Band" birthplace , that's Louis (Loo-ee not Lewis) Armstrong and the Louisiana Saints. That's Cajun, that's a State Heritage. There's under 20% slavery West Virginia, Tennessee. Virginia birthed all our Presidents, George Washington. These States signed a compact , Constitutional Union providd only by their own signature, with inarguable right at secession says defeated generals waist-deep in the blood and widows. Make this famous throughout the world.
The South saw no revolution, no government upheaval or domestic upheaval occurred, no change to officers in government, the Vice President Breckenridge left with them who heard the speech, no aggression remained feeling toward the states, assured end of all wrongs stated, attempted diplomacy, they could all come join us. Slaves is mentioned that's what mobs of ochlocracy, the demagogues of idol worship, and the tyrants of displacement look to raid.
 

jgoodguy

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I'm not trying to suggest it's a good argument, but rather that tariffs - like states rights - circles back to slavery.
One can argue that it was a contributing factor in the lead-up to secession. Reality and what men believe are often at odds. In the passion following Lincoln's election, it was not much of a factor. Worth discussion without knee-jerk reactions. It is along the lines of the notion that the North suppressed Southern Industry. There was a lot of heat and light with little significance.
 

nicholls

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did 80% of the tariffs fall on goods consumed in the South, and why were 70% of the revenues spent in the North? Why were New England fishermen subsidized, and why were tariffs higher on goods that came over in ships that had not been built in New England? Why was there a tax on salt and a "drawback" (basically an exception) on salt used to preserve fish?
 

nicholls

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I thought One of the causes of the Civil War was that the South was being bled dry for projects in the North regarding tariffs?
 

5fish

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I thought One of the causes of the Civil War was that the South was being bled dry for projects in the North regarding tariffs?
To his is false for one what projects? The next somewhere on this forum I have shown tariffs were at there lowest level since 1816... Here a link that tariffs are nothing but a false excuse for the war... tariffs are not mention in any articles of Seccession...

 

5fish

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I thought One of the causes of the Civil War was that the South was being bled dry for projects in the North regarding tariffs?
Here is another...

.

snip...

The Walker Tariff was a set of tariff rates adopted by the United States in 1846. Enacted by the Democrats, it made substantial cuts in the high rates of the "Black Tariff" of 1842, enacted by the Whigs. It was based on a report by Secretary of the Treasury Robert J. Walker. The Walker Tariff reduced tariff rates from 32% to 25%. Coinciding with Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws, it led to an increase in trade and was one of the lowest tariffs in American history.

snip...

The bill made moderate reductions in many tariff rates. As Walker had predicted, trade increased substantially, and net revenue collected also increased, from $30 million annually under the Black Tariff in 1845 to almost $45 million annually by 1850. It also improved relations with Britain that had soured over the Oregon boundary dispute.

It was passed along with a series of financial reforms proposed by Walker including the Warehousing Act of 1846. The 1846 tariff rates initiated a fourteen-year period of relative free trade by nineteenth century standards lasting until the high Morrill Tariff of 1861.

The Walker Tariff remained in effect until the Tariff of 1857, which used it as a base and reduced rates further.

The 1861 Morril Tariff raised the effective rate collected on dutiable imports by approximately 70%. Customs revenue from tariffs totaled $345 million from 1861 through 1865.
 

5fish

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Here is a summary on the thought of tariffs...


So the simple answer to common questions about the Morrill Tariff is, no, it was not the "real cause" of the Civil War.
 
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