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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (33312)	3/27/1999 12:19:00 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

In regard to the idea of tariff policy as the cause of the Civil War, I just have a hard time believing this. One problem is that I can't believe that imports of manufactured goods into the south were very substantial. The south was less thickly populated and had fewer large cities than the north and most of the South's population was composed of either slaves or poor whites, so there couldn't have been enough people with any buying power to form a significant consumer market for manufactured goods. Southern agriculture was unmechanized. The major investments and expenses of the planter class, which did have buying power, was for land, slaves, and livestock. There was little industry and few railroads in the south, so there was bound to have been little industrial demand for manufactured goods. I have to conclude that imports of manufactured goods into the south prior to the Civil War had to have been pretty insignificant. So how important could have tariffs on manufactured goods have been? Further, I believe that southern propagandists for secession generally gave preservation of the unique southern way of life (a code phrase for slavery and white supremacy) as the major justification. Additionally, I seem to recall reading somewhere that the Confederacy imposed tariffs of their own as high or higher than those previously in place in the Union - not to protect industry but to raise tax revenue. An alternate offering: During the first five or six decades of the United States, federal political power - as measured by number of Senators, Supreme Court Justices, and patronage employees - was amazingly evenly divided between the northern free states and the southern slave states. As the population and number of free northern and western states grew rapidly due to territorial expansion and immigration, the South's ruling political class could read the handwriting on the wall and foresee their coming relative decline in political power. The answer - secede and be the big frogs in a littler pond. Better to be the ruling political class of an entire new independent country than the rulers of a minority region of a large country with little influence over the nation as a whole. JMO, Bruce