And I'm amazed to see so many of you up on Saturday morning here to listen to a talk on Lincoln's terraform.
I brushed on this last night, very briefly, when I talked about what I called three American tax revolutions,
1776, 1861, and 1913, but I'm going to talk a lot more now about the 1861 tax revolution, as I call it.
And it didn't really begin in 1861, it began in 1824.
And what happened in 1824?
Well, as far as tariff history goes in the United States,
and of course, tariffs are taxes on imports, on imported goods.
In 1816, there was a tariff increase,
and even John C. Calhoun, who was a free trader
for the rest of his life,
wasn't supported a tariff increase in 1816.
And the reason was that earlier, the British had been confiscating American ships and when
Thomas Jefferson was president, Jefferson responded to the confiscation of American
ships and sailors by imposing a trade embargo.
The only thing he could think of doing, apparently, was to not allow for trade to happen because
the British were confiscating our ships.
And so James Madison enforced this when he became president as well.
And this was economically devastating to the New England shipping industry.
And so to compensate the New England shipping industry for the damage the government had
created with the embargo, they supported a moderate tariff in 1816.
And a lot of Calhoun's enemies have said, oh, he's a hypocrite.
He really wasn't a free trader.
Look at this.
He supported his tariff.
But they're unaware of the reason for his support of this early tariff.
It wasn't because he was a protectionist.
It was because he and the others felt responsible for all the economic damage to the New England
shipping industry that their earlier, the embargo had created and Calhoun had supported
the embargo.
But then in 1824, a genuine protectionist tariff was enacted and at this time Henry
Henry Clay was the leader of the protectionist movement as he would be for the rest of his life until he died in 1852.
And Clay, in fact, was the champion of a combination of economic policies that he labeled the American system,
which is a very clever labeling because the implication is if you oppose my policy proposals, you're un-American and unpatriotic.
You know, you're in favor of the un-American system if you're against me.
And the so-called American system had three components, protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare for road-building companies and canal-building companies, and a national bank.
That was it. And Abraham Lincoln, by the way, would later speak very eloquently about how Henry Clay was the fount of all his ideas with regard to politics.
Lincoln was a Whig, as was Clay, and Lincoln spent pretty much his 28-year on-and-off political career before becoming president, championing the American system, protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare, he was a highly paid railroad lawyer, by the way, for those of you who haven't really read up on it, and national banking, he was also a big defender of national banking. But in 1824, this all came into being, this battle that turned into a battle between the
protectionists mostly of the north and the free traders primarily of the south.
There were northern free traders, especially in New York City, and there were southern
protectionists who, you know, certain farmer, hemp farmers, for example, who wanted tariffs
on hemp.
But overall, the overwhelming majority of protectionists were from the northern states
because that's where manufacturing was getting its start and it was their manufactured goods
that were being protected from competition from abroad by these tariffs, and the overwhelming
opposition came from the South, which was agricultural, and they didn't see any benefit
really to this.
And so that's what happened.
And by 1828, the protectionists had the higher hand, and they raised tariffs to almost 50%.
In the south, called this tariff of 1828, the tariff of abominations, and there's a
book on it, a very good book on it by a man named Chauncey Boucher, B-O-U-C-H-E-R, and
the book is called The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, and what eventually happened
was South Carolina just announced to the federal government that they were not going to collect
the tariff at Charleston Harbor, and so there was a big confrontation.
And here's what Chauncey Boucher said about this, about this whole episode, the 1824 to
1828 protectionist episode. He said this, At the session of the South Carolina Legislature,
which convened in November of 1825, Judge William Smith introduced a set of anti-bank,
that is anti-national bank, central bank, anti-internal improvement, internal improvement
was a euphemism for corporate welfare, as we call it today, and anti-tariff resolutions.
They were adopted before this session, there had appeared in South Carolina scattered evidence
of the opposition to nationalism, but this episode may be said to mark the beginning
of the formidable anti-nationalist movement in the state, and not only in that state,
but in the South in general, and most of you are probably familiar with the early American
history of being a conflict between the Jeffersonians on the one hand, the states right Jeffersonians,
They were also the free trade Jeffersonians, the anti-bank Jeffersonians, and anti-internal
improvements Jeffersonians, and the Hamiltonians who were in favor of just the opposite, protectionist
tariffs, central banking, and taxpayer subsidies for corporations to build roads and canals
and things.
And so the conflict between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians manifested itself for
decades in the context of these economic disputes.
It wasn't just a philosophical dispute.
This is how the philosophical dispute manifested itself in real policy.
And these resolutions condemned what they called usurpations.
And they said this, the tariff was denounced as a system of robbery and plunder, destructive
to the southern states.
And then by 1828, as I said, the South Carolina legislature passed a nullification law that
essentially said we are not going to enforce this tariff, this 50% tariff.
And what did that say?
It said that the Tariff Acts of 1828 is unauthorized by the Constitution of the United States and
and violates the true meaning and intent thereof, and therefore are null, void and no law, nor binding upon this state its officers or citizens.
And so back in those days you had a state taking what was at the time known as the Jeffersonian dictum of nullification.
Jefferson was the author of this idea of nullification through something called the Kentucky Resolve of 1798.
And this was a response to the Alien and Sedition Acts.
And when President John Adams was in office, and they passed the Alien and Sedition Act,
the Sedition Act in particular, made it illegal essentially to criticize the government.
And the Sedition Act was enacted into law in such a way that it would become no longer
be law on the day John Adams left office.
So it was never to apply to the Federalists like John Adams, it was only to apply to
at Jefferson's party, and the only people who were ever prosecuted under the Sedition
Act were members of Jefferson's party. There were no Federalists that were ever prosecuted.
And this included newspaper people, politicians, and so forth. So Jefferson responded with
this Kentucky Resolve of 1798 that essentially said that we, the people of the states, have
have every much a right to decide on issues of constitutionality as any other branch of government, as the Congress, or the Supreme Court, or the executive branch, and so we don't think this law, the Sedition Act, is constitutional, and we don't plan on obeying it.
So what South Carolina did in 1828 was taken strictly out of the Jeffersonian book with
regard to nullification.
And this is an interesting, it's hard to imagine that the citizens of the state would do something
like this today.
But what this nullification law authorized importers, remember this is a 50% tax on imports,
it authorized importers themselves to recover any goods that had been impounded by federal
of Tariff Collectors, sheriffs were instructed to seize the private property of the tariff
collectors. So if you're a tariff collector, I think it sees your property, everything
you personally own, and award that property to the importers until the seized imported
goods were recovered by the importers. That's an incentive for you. Any duties that were
paid were to be reimbursed with interest to the importers. Anyone arrested for failure
Failure to pay the tariff was to be immediately liberated from jail, no property titles were
recognized for property sold in order to pay the tariff, tariff collectors and all their
assistants were subject to fines and imprisonment for any attempt to resist the nullification
law. This is how to treat federal bureaucrats, in my view. And no public jail in the state
could be used to imprison anyone for failure to pay the tariff. And here's the finally,
And my favorite part of the law, a fund of $200,000 was made available to the governor of South Carolina to purchase guns if necessary to enforce the nullification law to the state militia.
So they were serious about not collecting this tax.
So that was back in the days when the citizens did not just sit back and be taxed like slaves like we all do now.
They had a method for opposing what they thought were unconstitutional usurpations of power by the federal government
and it was called nullification.
This forced Andrew Jackson, President Andrew Jackson, to back down,
the famous Indian fighter back down to the South Carolina legislature, basically.
And there was a compromise lower tariff.
And in the handout that I put on all the tables here, there's a chart, a great chart there,
there, and it shows the average tariff rate from 1810 to 1870, and you can see the tariff
of abominations there in 1828, the high point where the average rate actually dipped above
60% there for a while, but then after this confrontation in 1832 over the tariff of abominations,
the free traders pretty much had their way, and the average tariff rate went on a downward
spiral up until 1861, where it was below 20%, it was close to 15% actually, by 1857, 1858.
And then, and I'll talk later about how, you know, it's shot up after that, during the
Lincoln administration, and it ends there in 1865 or so.
But what happened from then on, you could probably draw almost a straight line from
the last data point there to 1913, when Woodrow Wilson was office, and sort of hovered around
Around 50% of the average tariff rate, 40 to 50% until 1913.
So this tariff confrontation was one of the biggest confrontations between the state and the federal government in the history of America, certainly up to that point, and the free traders won.
But by 1857, the old Whigs, which by then were Republicans, there was no longer a Whig Party, were still influential and were gaining influence with the new Republican Party.
And there was a very deep recession in 1857, and as a result of that, the argument was made that, well, there's a recession, and what happens during the recession?
Our standard of living goes down, people lose their jobs, we have less income to buy goods and services,
Because many of us are unemployed, what's the answer to that according to the Republicans in 1857?
Raise prices. Make things more expensive. How to do that? Raise the tariff.
And so they saw the recession of 1857 as an excuse to wage a campaign to raise the tariff once again
after, you know, for several decades of losing the political battle, and they did succeed in increasing the tariff.
It was called the Morrill Tariff, M-O-R-R-I-L, named after Justin Morrill of Vermont, a member of Congress,
and this was passed by, excuse me, by the House of Representatives during the 1859-1860 session,
Before Abraham Lincoln was even nominated, by the way, and passed the House, and then passed the Senate just a couple of days before he took office.
And there are two economists named Robert McGuire and Norman Van Cot at Ball State University in Indiana,
who wrote a very interesting little article on the tariff and the Civil War in a journal called Economic Inquiry,
which is one of the top economic journals in the economics profession.
And here's what they say, they say, during this time a drum beat for protection among various northeasterners, industries and labor groups commenced in late 1857 and of course raising the tariffs had been a paramount objective of the Republican Party and they took a look at the votes on the moral tariff by region and what they found was that 87% of the northern congressmen voted for the moral tariff but only 12% of southern congressmen
Congressman. And of the states that seceded, of the 11 states that seceded, just one out
of 40 congressmen voted in favor of the moral tariff. So there was a very clear split between
North and South on the issue of protectionist tariffs. And for a very good reason, I touched
upon this last night. It has to do with simply the fact that most of the manufacturing was
Most of the manufacturing was in the north, and that was what was being protected by the tariff.
And if you protect northern manufacturers from competition from abroad, they're able to charge higher prices.
And so the south, which was an agricultural economy, and purchased most of its manufactured goods, farm tools and everything else, woolen blankets and so forth,
They saw it as all the burden is on us, that we're paying everything and there's nothing being protected down here.
And then when they tried to pass on their prices, the tariff in the form of higher prices in European markets, they couldn't do it.
And the South sold about 75% of all its produce on European markets.
They found them to be very, very competitive and they couldn't pass on the higher tariff cost of living to the European markets.
Markets. And the southerners recognized this. Calhoun said this in September 1st, 1828 in a letter. He was a genius in economics. Calhoun understood international economics, I think, better than most modern economists today do. And he said this, a protectionist tariffs gives to one section, the north, the power of recharging the duty. That is, if you're a person in the north and you're a merchant and you
You have to pay more for shoes, because there's tariff on shoes.
You have a little more latitude to charge more for what you're selling, okay?
Then he says, while to the other section, the South, is a pure unmitigated burden, because
the South was engaged in cultivating the great staples of the country for our foreign market
in a market where we can receive no protection and where we cannot receive one cent more
or to indemnify us for the heavy duties we have to pay as consumers.
And so Calhoun recognized this in 1828.
This is also recognized in all the modern economic textbooks that export dependent regions
always pay a disproportionate burden of a tariff.
Here's one textbook that I quote from in an article of mine by Brown and Hogan Dorn,
If any students in the audience here, of what happens with the tariffs is consumers include
the price increases in their wage and salary demands. Everybody tries to pass the tax to
someone else. The only group that is powerless to pass the costs on further are the exporters
who have to sell at world prices and swallow these costs. In essence, a tax on imports
becomes a tax on exports. So if you're an export-dependent region, you essentially have
have a tax specifically on you, as opposed to regions of the country that aren't so export dependent.
Milton and Rose Friedman recognize this in their famous book, Free to Choose.
Here's what they say, if tariffs are imposed on, say, textiles, that will add to output and employment in the domestic textile industry.
Good for them. However, foreign producers who no longer can sell their textiles in the United States earn fewer dollars.
They will have less to spend in the United States.
Exports will go down to balance decreased imports.
Employment will go up in the textile industry, but down in the export industries.
And the shift of employment to less productive uses will reduce total output overall.
And this is exactly what was happening because textiles were booming in New England at the time
and they were being protected. That was good. They were expanding. More employment, more jobs there.
But at the expense of the export industries, because our foreign trading partners did not have as much money that they could use to buy American goods.
And the big majority of American goods they were buying was coming from the South.
And like I said, Southerners had recognized this for decades.
That's what the tariff of abominations controversy was all about.
One more example of this phenomenon to drill this into your heads, that export dependent regions are discriminated against with tariffs.
I'll read one more quote from a book by Frank Choterov called The Income Tax, which I mentioned last night.
And in one passage he's talking about how the Midwestern farmers in the late 1880s were opposed to tariffs.
He says this, the plight of these farmers in the Midwest was made worse by the protective
tariff policy of the government.
The best they could get for their products was the competitive world price.
While the manufacturers they bought from the East were loaded down with duties, next to
their demand for more money, the populace clamored for lower tariffs.
So whether it was southern farmers in 1860 or Midwestern farmers in 1880, they all understood
that they were disproportionately burdened by tariffs and so how does this lead into Lincoln's
tariff war? Well, as you see in the chart that I handed out here, there was a dramatic increase
in the average tariff rate in 1861, beginning in 1861 on the chart and Lincoln was a lifelong
protectionist in terms of his political career among other things and it turns out that he really
And he owed his nomination by the Republican Party to the protectionists in Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania had the second largest number of delegates and electoral votes at the time
next to New York. New Jersey was also a big protectionist state at the time. And there
was an article that I dug up in the American Historical Review from 1944 by a historian
by the name Reinhard Luthen called Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff that really outlines
how Lincoln got the nomination and he owed it all to his record as a protectionist.
And for example, what he did was, it was well known that Pennsylvania was probably the key
to securing the Republican nomination in 1860.
And so, some of Lincoln's friends and supporters in Illinois, especially Joseph Meadow who
who was the editor of the Chicago Press and Tribune, which is one of the most influential
papers in the country at the time, recognized that their man was the perfect candidate to
win Pennsylvania and therefore win the nomination.
And so he editorialized this, he said, Lincoln was an old clay wig, that is a Henry Clay
wig, he's right on the tariff and he's exactly right on all other issues, is there any man
who could suit Pennsylvania better?
And Lincoln himself went to work soliciting the support of the Pennsylvania political
establishment by communicating through a distant relative of his, a Dr. Edward Wallace of Pennsylvania.
He was actually a distant relative.
And he wrote him a letter.
He said, my dear sir, your brother, Dr. William Wallace, who was also a big shot in the Republican
Party in Pennsylvania, showed me a letter of yours in which you kindly mentioned my
In my name, inquire for my tariff view and suggest the propriety of my writing a letter upon the subject.
I was an old Henry Clay tariff wig. In the old times, I made more speeches on that subject than on any other subject.
I have not changed my views since.
And so Lincoln was establishing his bona fides as a protectionist.
And it worked. They believed him.
And another thing that he did, it's kind of interesting, the Lincoln scholars, who I refer to usually as the Lincoln cult,
if you read my articles on lewrockwell.com, they point to the fact that Lincoln did not make a lot of speeches on the tariff at the time,
you know, right before, in fact, he didn't make any speech on anything, as a matter of fact, from the time he was nominated,
to the time he was president, he said nothing, the time he was inaugurated.
If he wrote somebody a letter, he would actually ask them to not tell anyone that you received
a letter from me because they might ask you what was in it, that I mentioned policy or
anything like that.
And it's true, he didn't say much publicly about the tariff, but privately he did a lot
of things.
There are letters in the collected papers of Abraham Lincoln that reveal what happened
here, what went on here.
And the delicate political problem that Lincoln faced in Pennsylvania is he wanted to win
in the Pennsylvania support by bragging of what a protectionist he was, but then he would
risk losing support in the Midwest among all the farmers. The farmers were dead set against
high tariffs. And so the trick was to tell the Pennsylvanians, I'm a protectionist without
the Midwesterners knowing about him. And so what he did, and I got this information, it
was called by a friend of mine from the Lincoln papers and what he did was he got an emissary
to take his old speeches, his old speeches, the originals, to Pennsylvania and show them
to Simon Cameron and Thaddeus Stevens and all the big shots in Pennsylvania politics documenting
that for decades he had been an ardent protectionist, and they did that.
They carried these, the Lincoln scholars call these the tariff scraps.
So anything that disagrees with their version of history, it's all scrap.
So they call these the tariff scraps, but these were Lincoln's speeches on tariffs.
And so he took 11 of his pro-tariff speeches and apparently worked, and Simon Cameron informed
from Lincoln that these speeches were, quote, entirely satisfactory for his purposes and
he returned them to Lincoln in the mail.
And so he did that to get the nomination and he got the nomination, he got the nomination.
And this article I was, I alluded to from the American Historical Review talks about
about how when the tariff plank was voted in at the Republican convention,
Professor Luthen says the Pennsylvania and New Jersey delegations were terrific in their applause over the tariff resolution
and their hilarity was contagious, finally pervading the whole vast auditorium.
You can imagine, here's the Republican party, they pass the tariff plank and pandemonium breaks out.
And then when Lincoln went home to Springfield, Illinois,
Lutheran writes that at the entrance of the town there was, quote,
an immense wagon bearing a gigantic sign reading,
protection for home industry. So that's what met Abraham Lincoln
when he went home to Springfield, Illinois after getting the nomination, protection for home industry.
So from that I would conclude that protectionism was a reasonably important issue
in the eyes of Abraham Lincoln at the time he took office.
So that's what I mean when I said he really owed everything politically to the protectionists, especially in Pennsylvania.
Okay, so what does this mean? Well, he takes office, and by the way, I think it's important to understand that both Lincoln and the United States Congress declared to the world the cause of the war in 1861.
Lincoln reiterated his opinion of the cause of the war in a letter to Horace Greeley, the newspaper editor, in 1862.
In the letter, he said, I could paraphrase it, that my ultimate purpose is to save the Union, and if I could do that without freeing a single slave, I would do that.
He said, if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others in bondage, I would do that too, but my paramount objective is saving the Union.
and the Congress issued a resolution saying that as well and also I think you should know if you never learned this in school that in Lincoln's first inaugural address he pledged his support for a constitutional amendment that had just passed the United States Senate two days earlier and had already passed the House of Representatives that would have forbidden the federal government from ever interfering in southern slavery and you can read the first inaugural address online anywhere if you want to and so the day he was inaugurated
He was fully supportive of Southern slavery, he said it was constitutional, and he said in that speech he had no objection to making it express and irrevocable, that is, Southern slavery, putting it in black and white in the Constitution with his amendment, because his paramount objective, as he said, was saving the Union or destroying the secession movement. Same thing.
In my book, I argue that the Union was destroyed, actually, because it was a voluntary Union.
We did hold ratification elections by state, and it was a voluntary thing, but it was no
longer voluntary after 1865, so that rhetoric is sort of off base, too.
But the question is, where did this idea come from, that the Union is so sacrosanct, so
So sacrosanct that it would justify 620,000 deaths which occurred in the war back when
the population was 30 million. That would be the equivalent of roughly 6 million deaths
today in four years or well over a hundred times the number of Americans who died in
Vietnam. You know, where did this idea come from? Why? Why is the Union so sacrosanct
When Virginia, for example, when Virginia ratified the Constitution, they explicitly
reserved the right to resume the powers that they had delegated to the federal government
in some future date if the federal government became oppressive of their liberties. Rhode
Island and New York said the same thing. It was assumed by everyone. It was a voluntary
union. So my argument is that the reason why Lincoln was so infatuated with the union is
is that if the South left, it would take all this tax revenue with it, the tariff.
The tariff accounted for 95% of all federal revenues.
And if the Southern states seceded, well, that would have been the destruction of Abraham
Lincoln's political career, for sure, and it certainly would have destroyed the Republican
party that had gone the way of the Whigs.
And my take on the whole thing is that's why all of a sudden the Union became so sacrosanct.
And in my book I quote a book of, a very thick book called Northern Editorials on Secession
that showed that the majority of newspapers in the North thought that the Union was voluntary
and the right in the South had a right to secede peacefully and of course that opinion
changed after Fort Sumter.
But listen to what Lincoln said about tariffs in his first inaugural address, one passage
where he says, the power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government.
That's not about tariffs, that's property. Here's the tariff part.
And to collect the duties and imposts, now listen to this, but beyond what may be necessary for these objects,
there will be no invasion, no using force against or among the people anywhere.
So, now think about that. The president is inaugurated and he's saying, put it into context, the tariff tax had just been doubled, more than doubled, from about 15% to 32%.
The South, for 30 years, have been complaining, we're being plundered by this tariff because we're exporters.
The Republicans get rammed through the moral tariff that would double their tax rate, double.
Lincoln says, collect this tax and there will be no invasion.
To me that means don't collect the tax and there will be an invasion.
So he literally threatened death and destruction over tax collection.
It's right in there in the first inaugural address in black and white.
Now Andrew Jackson backed down.
Almost the exact same thing happened under Andrew Jackson with the terror of abominations.
South Carolina nullified it and Virginia by the way joined in with South Carolina
and supported South Carolina on this and but Andrew Jackson backed down but Abraham Lincoln
wasn't backing down on the issue of slavery he was he said in the same speech he's willing to
to support a constitutional amendment that would forbid him or any other American president from
ever interfering with slavery but on the issue of tax collection pay up or die is essentially what
This is what he said, and the northern newspapers before the war, you have to understand also what was happening is the Confederate government outlawed protectionist tariffs all together.
And so here you have the north with a 50% tariff that they were on the road toward and the south with a minimal revenue tariff.
Here's what the Confederate Constitution actually said about tariffs.
It's almost exactly like the U.S. Constitution with some minor changes.
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 1 of the Confederate Constitution said,
Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, imposts, and excise taxes for revenue necessary to pay the debts,
provide for the common defense, and carry on the government of the Confederate states.
But no bounties shall be granted from the Treasury, nor shall any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry, no protectionism, and all duties, imposes and exercises shall be uniformed throughout the Confederate States.
So it's very similar to the U.S. Constitution, but they explicitly said tariffs are not to be used for protectionism, only a revenue tariff to raise money for the government.
There were northern newspapers around the outbreak of the war who were really fretting about this.
They were very concerned about what would happen if the South moved in the direction of free trade
and the North moved in the direction of more protectionism.
Here's what the Daily Chicago Times said on December 10th, 1860.
The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country.
Last year, she furnished 72% of all the exports. We, in Chicago, the North, have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from 30 to 50% and enables us to consume large quantities of southern cotton and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe.
This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor of millions annually, and they were saying, alright, good deal, we like this.
And then they went on to say, let the South adopt the free trade system and the North's commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it now is.
Our labor could not compete with the labor of Europe. A large portion of our shipping interest would pass into the hands of the South, leading to very general bankruptcy and ruin.
So they were fearful of the move to free trade.
And another newspaper, the New York Evening Post on March 12th, 1861, advocated that the Navy, the United States Navy, quote,
abolish all ports of entry into the South. Now this was before Fort Sumter. Fort Sumter was April 12th, 1861.
This is March 12th, 1861, where Republican Party-associated newspapers in the North were advocating the bombardment
The Newark, New Jersey Daily Advertiser said this on April 2nd, 1861
In the end, that the chief instigator of the present troubles, South Carolina, have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of free trade and must be stopped by the closing of the ports by military force.
And that's the Newark, New Jersey Daily Advertiser.
There were other northern newspapers that the New Haven Daily Register said the same thing.
And they said, at the end, they advocated, well, let's avoid all this by just lowering our tariff.
Rather than bombing the southern ports, why don't we just lower our tariff and avoid this economic calamity?
But of course that didn't happen. No one paid attention to them. It didn't happen.
Fort Sumter takes place where, by the way, no one was hurt or killed.
I think one horse made his end, one horse was killed in Fort Sumter.
The response by the Lincoln administration was a full-scale invasion of all the southern states
after Fort Sumter, and a naval blockade was announced two weeks after Fort Sumter.
And again, this is one of the things that anybody can read on the internet,
Lincoln's announcement regarding the reason for the naval blockade of the southern states and he
gave one reason, just one reason is in there. What do you think, who would like to guess what the one
reason is? Tariff collection. He explicitly said with the seceding states, I am unable to fulfill
my, I'm paraphrasing, my duties as president in collecting the taxes and so that was the reason
and the reason for the naval blockade, which of course was an act of war and for the war, and he said that.
So that's basically the gist of my argument for how Lincoln turned a tariff war into a shooting war
and how the tariff dispute that began in 1824 was a major cause for this war.
And the final thing I'd like to mention here is that after my book came out,
There's more and more people that I'm running across, scholars and others, that are agreeing with me, writing books about this.
And one of them, honest to God, I'm not making this up, is an editorial writer from the New York Times.
His name is Stephen Weisman. He wrote a book called The Great Tax Wars, Lincoln to Wilson.
And of course it covers this tax war, the tariff tax war.
Tax War, and here's what he, and this is a fairly new book, it's been out just a couple
years, I think, if a couple years, he's talking about the secession of the southern states
and so Stephen Weissman says this, South Carolina went first, the state's grievances had been
long-standing and not simply focused on slavery, its major complaints went to the heart of
the nation's finances, tariffs. A generation earlier, South Carolina had provoked a state's
and the United States' rights crisis over its doctrine that states could nullify or override the national tariff system, which I just mentioned.
The nullification fight in 1832 was actually a tax revolt.
It pitted the state's spokesman, Vice President John C. Calhoun, against President Andrew Jackson.
Because tariffs rewarded manufacturers but punished farmers with higher prices on everything they needed,
Clothing, Farm Equipment, and even essential food products like salt and meat.
Calhoun argued that the tariff system was discriminatory and unconstitutional.
Calhoun's anti-tariff battle was a rebellion against a system seen throughout the South
as protecting the producers of the North.
And so I could hardly believe I was reading this from a New York Times editorial writer.
And then Weissman, unlike a lot of the Lincoln scholars, he's actually read what Jefferson Davis
had to say in his first inaugural address about the reasons for the secession and here's what he says.
He basically says Jefferson Davis gave the tariff, the tariff dispute was the reason
for the secession of the southern states and here's a quote.
There can be no cause to doubt, this is Jefferson Davis's first inaugural,
There can be no cause to doubt that the courage and patriotism of the people of the Confederate
states will be found equal to any measure of defense which may be required for their security.
Devoted to agricultural pursuits, their chief interest is the export of a commodity required
in every manufacturing country, cotton.
Our policy is peace and the freest trade our necessities will permit.
It is like our interest and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would
by that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the
interchange of commodities and the word slavery does not appear in Jefferson
Davis's first inaugural address and weisman comments more on this he says
he says Davis was quote a vigorous exponent of the view that the war was at
its core and not a fight to preserve slavery but a struggle to overthrow and
and an exploitative economic system headquartered in the North,
the American system, in other words.
And he also says there was a great deal of evidence
to support Davis's view, this is Weissman writing,
of the South as the nation's stepchild, he called it.
And he says, quote, the South had to import
at least two thirds of its clothing
and manufactured goods from outside the region,
and Southerners paid an artificially high prices
because of the high tariffs.
The South even had to import food. The North's economy was based on a kind of state capitalism of trade barriers, government-sponsored railroads, and public investment in canals, roads and other infrastructures, paid for in large part with Southern taxes.
Southern resentment of the tariff system propelled the Democratic Party to define itself as the main challenger to this corrupt mercantilist system.
Okay and so this was the American system and another person that the final thing
I'll mention here that wrote a book this year that also supports the view that the
tariff is a much more important cause of of this whole battle than most
historians say is Professor Michael Holt from right here at the University of
Virginia and and Professor Holt is probably the preeminent expert in
in America Among American Historians on the Antebellum Period.
He's a Princeton graduate, he's been here for many years.
Among his books are The Fate of Their Country is his latest, The Rise and Fall of the American
Whig Party, The Political Crisis of the 1850s, and The Civil War and Reconstruction.
And what he writes about in this latest book of his is he focuses on, you know, the debate
Food over slavery at the time was not about southern slavery. The Republicans and Lincoln
only opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories, but they pledged their
support for a constitutional amendment to support southern slavery. In fact, when that
vote was taken in the Senate, two days before Lincoln's inauguration on this constitutional
amendment, most of the southern senators were gone. These were all northern senators that
voted in favor of this constitutional amendment to ban the federal government from ever interfering in slavery, southern slavery.
Why the extension of slavery? Why was that important?
Well, one theory that historians talk about is the theory that if you eliminate slavery in the new territories,
then it will eventually wither on the vine everywhere else.
And I've never understood how that exactly was supposed to happen.
And Professor Holt says this, modern economic historians have demonstrated that this assumption was false, but that was never likely to happen.
But Lincoln himself gave two reasons for the opposition to the extension of slavery, and as did other members of his party.
One, they wanted to preserve the new territories for the white race. They explicitly said that.
and particularly they wanted to promise jobs for white workers
that would not be interfered with by competition
from either slaves or free blacks.
That's why they had laws in many of the new territories
and states like Illinois.
Illinois by the example had a constitutional amendment
that made it illegal for black people to enter the state,
to migrate into the state.
Abraham Lincoln defended that.
Why are they doing this?
The second reason, the more important one,
was the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution, which existed at the time,
artificially increased the congressional representation of the Democratic Party,
because it said that for every five slaves, you could count them as three people
for purposes of determining how many members of Congress there would be by state.
So the argument that Lincoln made was if slavery goes into the new territories,
that will further increase the representation of the Democratic Party.
We can't have that.
I'll support an amendment that will ban forever the ability of the government to do anything about southern slavery,
but the extension of slavery will disadvantage my party, therefore I'm against it.
That was his position. That was the position of all the big shot Republicans at the time.
And what Holt says about this is this,
many northern whites also wanted to keep slaves out of the West in order to keep blacks out.
North was a pervasively racist society where free blacks suffered social, economic, and political discrimination.
Bigots, they sought to bar African-American slaves from the West.
Congressman David Wilmot himself proudly and repeatedly called his major the Wilmot Proviso.
He called it the White Man's Proviso.
So it's not just my theorizing here.
Professor Holden has much more stature than I do on this whole topic.
So politics was why the extension of slavery became an issue, not morality, not humanitarianism.
And what was the end of this politics?
Why politics?
Why was this a big political issue to the Republicans?
Well, I'll quote Holt one more time.
He quotes Ohio Congressman Joshua Giddings as explaining why the opposition to the extension
of slavery.
Here's what Giddings said, to give the South the preponderance of political power would
would be itself a surrender of our tariff, our internal improvements, our distribution of proceeds of public lands.
It is the most abominable proposition with which a free people were ever insulted.
So if you stop protectionism, it's the most abominable proposition you could ever imagine in a free country,
is what Joshua Giddings was saying.
And so one final conclusion here from Professor Holt of what he says about this whole episode
is, he says, short-sighted politicians of all parties use the emotionally charged and
largely chimerical, and the word chimerical, I looked it up so it had a precise definition
of it, means wildly fanciful and unrealistic, according to Webster's, the largely chimerical
issue of slavery's extension westward to pursue the election of their candidates and settle
political scores all the while inextricably dragging the nation down toward disunion.
So I'm glad to see that he agrees with me that this was one big tax fight, one big tax
revolt that was put down by killing 300,000 tax revolters, 300,000 southern citizens of
and the bonding of the cities and all the rest, and so it's not a very enlightening thing to end with,
but that was won, the state's rights check on the powers of the central government were abolished,
central banking was initiated with the National Currency Acts, and the tariff, they got their tariff,
they got their 50% tariff in the Republican Party that lasted until 1913, and it dipped for a few years after that,
and we're right back up to 60% with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930.
And maybe that's about all the time I'll take for now.
Thanks for not pelting me with cabbages or anything like that.
If there are any leap in supporting out there.
Thank you very much.