Tariffs and secession: the Australian experience

Another example of where trade policy and comparative advantage contributed to a strong regional questioning of the right political home is Newfoundland’s decades long tug between the options of dominion, union with Canada, or even with the USA.

“The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.

The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.”

Statement of Secession, Adopted December 24, 1860, South Carolina

Lincoln was Inaugurated March 4th 1861, 3 months later, and the War started April 12th, 1861.

None of the States Statements of Secession mention tariffs, they all piss and moan about Slavery not being respected in the North.

Claiming the War was about tariffs is TIDOS, Treason in Defence of Slavery, and is a common defence of the Confederacy.

” Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

Thank you, Paul!
I have been following this thread since yesterday, waiting for someone to state the obvious. The necessary condition for justifying slavery is the proposition ” that the negro is not equal to the white man” , followed by the conclusion, ” that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”
The proposition seemed self evident to many in those times, it was the conclusion that separated men like Lincoln from his Southern relatives. But, however most libertarians may feel about that conclusion nowadays, Most that I’ve met seem to think the proposition still holds. They may be too circumspect to voice it but it is at the heart of all white racism. The recent Zimmerman trial was, to me, a perfect exhibit of this attitude. I don’t believe any of those women really valued Treyvon Martin as a human boy the way they would have had he been white. Hhowever academically decorated Randy Barnnet, I think, in his heart, he must share this belief. To me, there is no other way to explain how an intelligent man, could look for excuses for the confederate cause.

Since Jay quotes from the SC “Declaration of Immediate Causes,” the debate over that Declaration is quite illuminating. One delegate objected that the document failed to mention the Tariff. In response, a leading secessionist, Rep. Ellison Keitt, made these points: (1) the tariff in place at the time of the Convention was the Tariff of 1857. This tariff was a Democratic (i.e. low) tariff, drafted by a southern Democratic Senator, and received the votes of every southern Democrat in Congress, including the entire SC delegation. To make a tariff they supported the justification for secession would make secessionists look ridiculous. (2) Whigs were pro-tariff, and the remaining southern Whigs (there were quite a few) had to be won over to secession. This was particularly the case with Louisiana, whose sugar planters benefitted from tariff protection. (3) “Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it.”

TBS, there was a proposal for a much higher tariff, the Morrill Tariff, since the Tariff of 1857 had proven inadequate to finance the federal government. Indeed, the Morrill Tariff was enacted over the winter of 1861. However, it was enacted only after the mass resignation of southern congressmen, and would not have passed had they remained in office. Some who attempt the tariff-not-slavery argument attempt to use the Morrill Tariff as evidence, but clearly its passage was an effect, not a cause,/i>, of secession. This dog simply won’t hunt.

Is the assumption here that a secession (‘rebellion’) is the equivalent of fighting a war?

No. I suspect you are referring to the US Civil War, since the given example of WA did not lead to war (and WA never really declared that it had seceded). Please do not fall for the spin contained in the misnomer, “War of Northern Aggression”.

Laying siege to a Federal fort is the equivalent of fighting a war.

You make secession sound a simple matter – but it betrays/violates/invalidates many customs/compacts/contracts that existed as part of the union that went before it.

The way we legally define “divorce” does not include a unilateral decision that one is no longer married and that’s the end of it.

However, firing 3000 rounds at one’s spouse (or one’s spouse’s fort) might be a tactic designed to get that agreement.

OW, I just wanted to make a general point, because the events you keep talking about seem to be controversial and emotional. But since you keep bringing it up: are you saying that the American civil war was all about fort Sumter? If so, that must’ve been the silliest war of that scale ever, and the easiest to avoid.

@Mao: Just as nobody in Western Europe in 1914 set out to have four years of grinding trench warfare to settle the question of justice in the matter of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, nobody in North America set out to have its precursor* over the shelling of a coastal fort. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Each side expects the other to fold quickly; it turns out everyone hates to lose; things feed on themselves.

The southern militia and politicians who fired on Fort Sumter expected a humiliated North would immediately sue for peace. The Northern soldiers, and their commanders, who marched on Bull Run expected to put paid to the rebellion in a single battle. The southern soldiers who won that battle expected the North – its politicians and/or its citizens – to decide they’d bitten off more than they could chew. By this time, since war stokes the passions, both sides were in a fighting mood. And the North knew it could win (the Anaconda Plan), and the southern military elite was invested in Napoleonic notions of elan that hadn’t even worked out well for Napoleon in the end.

So for neither the first time nor the last, two sides set out to fight a quick war and fought a long one instead.

* In terms of military history, the trench warfare of 1864-65 was a huge Clue early 20th-Century Europe failed to pick up on.

Why is it wrong to trivialize this, the concept of splitting a political entity into two? It has been understood, since the age of enlightenment, as trivial enough: there are no nations ‘under God, indivisible’, not really. So yes, I trivialize.

As for the fort Sumter incident: you brought it up twice, and I was just curious why; what the significance of it is. But never mind: this is not important, and irrelevant to the general point.

Out of curiosity, were there any recent strong secessionist movements by the indigenous populations in Australia, and did the treatment of those populations ever lead to broad social upheaval in the same way as the treatment of African Americans did in the US?

@24 There are active secessionist movements, and attempted secessions, right now. There was a long history of armed resistance by Aboriginal nations (see: The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, the very fine 1978 film by Fred Schepisi based on the Booker nominated novel by Thomas Keneally).

I have always read, at least in the last few decades, that the real underlying cause of the Civil War was the huge increase in territory after the Mexican-American War.

Well, yes, in the sense that (as you say) that made it much more likely that there would be a war about slavery. Without slavery, expansion wouldn’t have led to a civil war.

Do you know was the white immigration policy driven primarily by racism or to prevent wages being undercut? If there was centralised wage-fixing I assume that wages being undercut wouldnt have been as much of an issue?

Thanks Peter

Out of curiosity: imagine an alternative USA, 1860ish, in which slavery is not an issue. Suppose (frantic handwaving) there is no significant Abolitionist movement, or no slavery in the South, or equal slavery everywhere (do I have to stress I would regard the first and last as immensely undesirable?)

Then suppose that, because of intolerable tariffs, the South wish to secede.

Would the correct view be: No slavery involved, let them go peacefully?

Or would it be: no, we have a Union, eternally indivisible, better a war with hundreds of thousands of dead and much of the country devastated, rather than the Union be violated?

gavinf @26, I’ve only seen your comment now, thanks for the recommendations I’ll check them out

We ran Stephen’s experiment in reverse in Australia. The main point of difficulty in federation was the tariff issue – industrial Victoria favoured a high tariff, more agricultural NSW and Queensland a low one. Yet, after several tries, federate we did. And Queenslanders are reputed to be nearly as mad as Southerners.

But my question was: suppose no agreement were possible?

There would have been no CSA, Louisanna as a State and economic Class for example, profitted by the Whig Tariff Compromise, while South Carolina did not. The tariff system split States beyond simple lines of Slavery/Industry. Maine for example.

Overtime like any internal economic redistribution and economic development system, compromises would be gamed to the point where most would accept the compromises.

“Iron and Steel at 4.5% and Cotton for Free” is a hard ideal to rally the troops around.

Stephen @ 41

The constitutional problem posed by the doctrine of States’ Rights and a supposed unilateral right of State secession arose in logical, (but, of course, not substantive) independence from the controversy over slavery.

Advocates of a States’ Rights interpretation of the American constitution (small-c), held the individual States each had an unilateral right to secede on their own motion, without the consent of other States or the corporate bodies of the Federal government. The act of secession, it was asserted, automagically disestablished the Federal government of the United States in the territory of the seceding State.

In the event, this theory ran aground on the lack of institutional mechanism. There’s no provision in the Constitution for unilateral State secession, and the administrative structure laid out by the Constitution, makes the States and the U.S. federal government, operationally separate creatures, with their own authorities, officials, public property and fiscal regimes. The States’ Rights theory held that a State could secede by its own motion, disestablishing the Federal government by mere notice of that motion. In the event, getting the Federal government to take notice proved to be problematic, as logically it must. It was on this point that Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy made resort to a contest of arms, to compel the U.S.A. to recognize the C.S.A. as a sovereign state.

Stephen asks whether the North might not have consented to secession, if sought on some less inflammatory ground than the cause of defending slavery as an institution. But, that is the wrong question: the right question would be: can we imagine the South asking the consent of the Federal government for a separation of their region from the rest, if the impetus were from some lesser issue? Can we imagine the Southern representatives remaining in place in the Federal government to form the nucleus of a party or faction favoring separation, and seeking allies from other regions, interested in negotiating an agreed separation?

In the event, by some tellings at least, the Confederates almost got their automagic result. Popular feeling and betrayals by local officials and military officers “going South” at the critical moment, left few Federal installations south of the Mason-Dixon line in Federal hands, by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861. But, one of those facilities was Fort Sumter, in the heart of secession, and we know how the Confederate bombardment galvanized the conflict into war. But, why did Jefferson Davis choose a dramatic bombardment, when he knew full well that the garrison was about to surrender for lack of provisions?

It is too easy to ask only why the Union would persist, and refuse to let the southern Confederacy go in peace. One must also ask, why did the Confederacy insist on trying to compel by force of arms, the acquiescence of the Union to separation? Why not ask consent to separation? Surely, some of the northern and western grievances would be well-satisfied by separation. The Fugitive Slave Act would be a dead letter, in relation to a foreign country; shorn of the agrarian plantation economy of the South, the Union could pursue the Industrial Revolution unhindered. And, with Southern representatives still in office in Washington, vigorous action by a Lincoln Administration to suppress the Confederacy would have been impossible.

The mentality that stood behind the political calculus of compulsion, as a means to independent nationhood, played havoc with the Confederate efforts to formulate a workable grand strategy, on the field of battle, in foreign policy and diplomacy, even in espionage. The Confederates tried to compel Britain and France to intervene, by withholding cotton, which only aided the Northern blockade for the year before that blockade could be put into practical effect. Later in the war, Jefferson Davis tried to subvert the peace party at the North into violent insurrections — apparently unaware of the nature of a “peace” party. Robert E. Lee sought, in his own words, a “Cannae” — a grand and dramatic battlefield victory, with no obvious connection to the goal of gaining Union consent to separation. Near the end, Lincoln and others feared that the Confederates might sue for peace, and bring the war to an untimely end, leaving slavery still alive as a legal institution.

It may be that the southern aspiration to become an independent nation simply could not survive without the patriotic fervor of war. A routine and peaceful politics of negotiation and coalition building would smother it in the crib. We cannot run that experiment. We can observe, though, the event, and in the event, the withdrawal of the Confederates unleashed an extraordinarily vigorous state, able to marshal its vast resources systematically and effectively in the long-run, against a belligerent, which started strong, but could not find a workable grand strategy for negotiating its life in the world.