Morrill Tariff

• 1. Introduction

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  The Morrill Tariff was blamed for the American Civil War by one of the most famous novelists writing in English. On the 28th of December 1861, Charles Dickens published a long article in his magazine, All the Year Round. It argued that a dry piece of United States trade law, not slavery, had split the North from the South. The article, believed to have been written by Henry Morley, called the conflict 'solely a fiscal quarrel.'

  Behind Dickens's claim sat a real law, not just a rhetorical target. It was an import tax bill signed in the closing days of a president's term. It had been drafted by a Vermont congressman with an economist's guidance, and pushed through a divided Congress only after a wave of senators resigned their seats. How did a tariff bill get entangled with a war fought over slavery? Why did it provoke outrage in London? Why did southern secessionists claim it as a grievance even while a Democratic president signed it on his way out the door? And why, more than a century later, do historians still disagree about what the tariff actually caused?

• 2. Origins In A Divided Congress

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  Henry Clay, the Whig Party's longtime leader, had pushed for high protective tariffs for years. In 1842, that strategy became law. In 1846, the Democratic Party took power back and passed the Walker Tariff, cutting rates substantially. Democrats cut rates even further in the Tariff of 1857. That law had been developed in response to a federal budget surplus in the mid-1850s, and it was highly favorable to the South.

  By 1856 the Whig Party had collapsed. That year, the new Republican Party ran its first national ticket and picked up the cause of high tariffs. Former Whigs from the border states and the Upper South stayed on in Congress as 'Opposition,' 'Unionist,' or 'American' Know Nothing members. Many of them supported higher tariffs as well.

  The Panic of 1857 triggered calls to revise the tariff along protectionist lines. The economist Henry C. Carey blamed the panic on the new, lower tariff, and protectionist newspapers spread his argument widely.

  Efforts to raise tariffs began in earnest in the 35th Congress, which met from 1857 to 1859. It produced two competing proposals in the House of Representatives. Ways and Means Chairman John S. Phelps, a Missouri Democrat, wrote his party's plan. It kept most of the low 1857 rates with only minor revisions.

  Committee members Justin Smith Morrill and Henry Winter Davis, a Maryland 'American,' wrote the Republican counterproposal. It replaced the existing ad valorem tariff schedule with specific duties. Rates rose sharply on goods from politically popular 'protected' industries such as iron and textiles. Morrill represented Vermont, and Carey, the same economist who had blamed the panic on the old tariff, helped him draft the bill's details.

  The economic historian Frank Taussig argued that in many cases, the switch to specific duties was used to disguise how much rates had actually increased. Supporters of specific rates countered that they were necessary. European exporters, they said, routinely gave American customers fake invoices showing artificially low prices. Specific duties made that trick pointless. Still, the House took no action on either bill during the 35th Congress.

  That inaction carried the fight into a new Congress. There, a New Jersey speaker's election and a committee chairman named Sherman would decide whether Morrill's bill ever reached a vote.

• 3. A Bill Freed By Secession

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  When the 36th Congress convened in 1859, a dispute over who would be elected Speaker of the House stalled all business until 1860. Republican William Pennington of New Jersey finally won the speakership that year. He then appointed a pro-tariff Republican majority to the Ways and Means Committee, chaired by John Sherman of Ohio. The committee soon passed the Morrill bill out for a floor vote.

  On the 10th of May 1860, near the end of the first session, the bill passed the House floor by a vote of 105-64. Republicans, all from northern states, backed it 89-2, joined by seven northern Democrats from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Five of those seven were 'anti-Lecompton Democrats' who had broken with their party over the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas. Fourteen other northern Democrats voted no.

  In the Border States, four Kentucky 'Opposition' Representatives voted yes, joined by the bill's co-sponsor Winter Davis of Maryland, a 'Unionist,' and a Delaware Democrat. Eight Border State Democrats and a Missouri member of the American Party voted no. In the South, 35 Democrats and three Oppositionists voted against the bill, while one Tennessee Oppositionist voted for it. The overall sectional split came to 96-15 in the North, 7-9 in the Border States, and 1-39 in the South. Fifty-five members abstained, including 13 Republicans, 12 northern Democrats, 13 southern Democrats, and eight southern Oppositionists and Americans.

  The bill then went to the Senate, where Democrats controlled the chamber. They bottled it up in the Finance Committee, chaired by Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia. That delay pushed any Senate vote to the second session, beginning in December 1860. The tariff would now be a live issue in that year's presidential election.

  The Republican platform of 1860 placed a high tariff as the twelfth of its seventeen planks, even though the party had not yet taken office. The party sent advocates like Morrill and Sherman to campaign on the issue in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, where the tariff was popular. Both Democratic candidates, John C. Breckinridge and Stephen Douglas, opposed high tariffs and protectionism generally. Lincoln's record as a protectionist helped him win support in Pennsylvania and neighboring New Jersey, historian Reinhard H. Luthin has documented. So did his public support for Morrill's bill. Lincoln carried Pennsylvania handily that November, part of his sweep of the North.

  On the 14th of February 1861, President-elect Lincoln addressed an audience in Pittsburgh. He said he would make a new tariff his priority if the bill failed to pass before his inauguration on the 4th of March.

  The second session of the 36th Congress opened in December 1860. At first, it seemed Hunter would keep the bill tabled until his term ended in March. Then, in December 1860 and January 1861, seven southern states seceded, and their low-tariff senators withdrew from Congress. Republicans took control of the Senate in February, and Hunter lost his grip on the Finance Committee.

  The Treasury was meanwhile in crisis, holding less than $500,000 on hand against millions of dollars in unpaid bills. One historian later summarized the moment this way. 'The impetus for revising the tariff arose as an attempt to augment revenue, stave off "ruin," and address the accumulating debt.'

  The Morrill bill reached the Senate floor on the 20th of February and passed 25 to 14, almost entirely along party lines. Twenty-four Republicans supported it, joined by Democrat William Bigler of Pennsylvania. Ten Southern Democrats, two Northern Democrats, and two Far West Democrats voted no. Twelve senators abstained, among them three Northern Democrats, one California Democrat, five Southern Democrats, two Republicans, and a Maryland Unionist.

  Minor amendments involving the tariffs on tea and coffee sent the bill to a conference committee with the House. The two chambers quickly resolved them. The Senate approved the final bill by unanimous consent on the 2nd of March. President Buchanan, though a Democrat, favored the bill because of his home state Pennsylvania's interests. He signed it into law as one of his last acts in office.

  The new law would not take effect for another month. That gave merchants on both sides of the Atlantic a narrow window to adjust.

• 4. What Morrill Wanted

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  According to historian Heather Cox Richardson, Morrill set out to spread tariff protection well beyond the usual manufacturing interests of the Northeast. For the first time, protection extended to nearly every major farm product: sugar, wool, flaxseed, hides, beef, pork, corn, grain, and hemp. It also covered minerals such as coal, lead, copper, and zinc. The duty on sugar was meant to appease southerners who opposed tariffs. Wool and flaxseed were growing industries in the West. The new mineral duties matched what the young northwestern states were beginning to produce. The Eastern fishing industry got its own duty, on dried, pickled, and salted fish.

  Morrill explained his approach with a flourish when he introduced the bill: 'In adjusting the details of a tariff, I would treat agriculture, manufactures, mining, and commerce, as I would our whole people, as members of one family, all entitled to equal favor, and no one to be made the beast of burden to carry the packs of others.'

  The economist Frank Taussig later wrote that Morrill and the bill's other supporters described their goal as simply restoring the tariff rates of 1846. But Taussig suspected another motive. Steep new duties on iron and wool were aimed, he believed, at winning Pennsylvania and the western states for the Republican Party.

  Carey pressed the political stakes directly on Lincoln in a letter dated the 2nd of January 1861: 'the success of your administration is wholly dependent upon the passage of the Morrill bill at the present session.' Carey went on to warn that without it, 'there will be much suffering among the people, much dissatisfaction with their duties, much borrowing on the part of the Government, and very much trouble among the Republican Party when the people shall come to vote two years hence.' He closed with a stark either-or: 'There is but one way to make the Party a permanent one, and that is, by the prompt repudiation to the free trade system.'

  Besides setting the new duty rates, the bill also altered and restricted the Warehousing Act of 1846.

  Representative John Sherman later described the bill's balancing act: it aimed, he wrote, to provide 'ample revenue for the support of the government' while also giving 'proper protection to home industries.' Sherman noted that the Civil War upended that balance almost immediately. Imports fell even as revenue needs multiplied tenfold. Congress responded by taxing nearly everything imported, and by adding new taxes on domestic goods such as spirits, tobacco, and beer. That revenue funded the army and navy, interest on the war debt, and pensions for disabled veterans and for war widows and orphans.

  The bill had been drafted and passed the House before anyone expected a civil war. It only reached the Senate after seven states had already seceded. At least one historian has argued that, on those grounds, the Morrill Tariff should not even be counted as Civil War legislation. That distinction would soon be tested by the war's mounting bills.

• 5. Paying For The War

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  In its first year, the Morrill Tariff raised the effective rate collected on dutiable imports by about 70%. American tariffs in 1860 had been among the lowest in the world, and low by nineteenth century standards generally. The average rate from 1857 to 1860 ran around 17% overall, or 21% on dutiable goods alone. The new law pushed those averages to about 26% overall, or 36% on dutiable goods. Further increases by 1865 brought the comparable rates to 38% and 48%. Even so, those rates stayed well below the years between 1825 and 1830, when duties had sometimes topped 50%.

  Morrill would go on to sponsor two more tariff bills during the war, each higher than the last. Both were meant to meet the Union's revenue needs. The war effort alone needed some $3 billion to arm and supply the Union's forces, over $400 million for 1862 alone. Tariffs were still the government's chief source of revenue. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, despite being a longtime free-trader himself, worked with Morrill later in 1861. Together they drafted a second tariff bill, the Second Morrill Tariff, or Revenue Act of 1861, which raised rates another 10%. Carey again assisted Morrill in drafting it, and the protectionists who supported the earlier bill backed this one too.

  Despite the rate increases, tariffs played only a modest role in financing the war. They mattered far less than the $2.8 billion raised through bond sales and the printing of greenbacks. Customs revenue from tariffs totaled $345 million between 1861 and 1865, about 43% of all federal tax revenue. Total military spending over those same years reached $3,065 million.

  The tariff schedule set in 1861, along with its two higher successors, opened a stretch of continuous American protectionism. That policy held until the Revenue Act of 1913, known as the Underwood Tariff. Its schedule remained in place for decades after the Civil War had ended.

  That new bite on imported goods did not stay a domestic matter for long, either. It reached across the Atlantic and hit Britain, the country the United States traded with most.

• 6. Outrage In Britain

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  Free trade dominated public opinion in Britain, and the Morrill Tariff met open hostility there. Southern diplomats and agents tried to use that anger to win British recognition for the Confederacy. The new tariff schedule made British iron, clothing, and other manufactured exports significantly more costly, and it drew public outcry from British politicians. Expecting the higher rates, British shippers likely rushed their deliveries to beat the deadline before the new rates took effect in early summer 1861.

  When complaints reached Washington from London, Congress answered sharply. The Senate Finance Committee chairman snapped, 'What right has a foreign country to make any question about what we choose to do?'

  British public opinion leaned toward the Confederacy once the Civil War began in 1861, an inclination fed partly by lingering anger over the tariff. One diplomatic historian later wrote that the tariff 'not unnaturally gave great displeasure to England.' It hurt the profits of English manufacturers and merchants badly enough, he wrote, to cause 'serious mercantile distress' there. The same historian noted that Britain was then in the first enthusiasm of free trade, led by figures like Cobden and Gladstone. The nation was inclined to treat protectionism as 'scarcely less' immoral than 'larceny or murder.' Some even judged it comparable in offensiveness to slavery itself. Lord Palmerston put it more plainly to the American minister, Adams: 'We do not like slavery, but we want cotton, and we dislike very much your Morrill tariff.'

  The economist William Stanley Jevons denounced the law as a 'retrograde' measure. He was one of several prominent British writers who condemned the tariff in the strongest terms.

  Seven of the eleven Confederate states had already seceded before Buchanan ever signed the Morrill Tariff into law. That timeline gave some writers grounds to dispute any claim that a tariff, rather than slavery, had caused the war.

• 7. Tariff Or Slavery

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  Robert Barnwell Rhett railed against the pending Morrill Tariff before South Carolina's secession convention in 1860. He wrote a lengthy attack on tariffs into the Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States. The convention adopted that address on the 25th of December 1860, to accompany its secession ordinance. The address complained that southern states, outnumbered in Congress, had been taxed by the North 'exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit.' It argued that for forty years, Congress had set tariffs to serve northern interests.

  The Morrill Tariff mattered less elsewhere in the South. In parts of Virginia, though, secessionists promised a new protective tariff would help the state's young industries. In the North, enforcement of the tariff bolstered support for the Union cause among industrialists and merchants. The abolitionist Orestes Brownson remarked, dryly, that 'the Morrill Tariff moved them more than the fall of Sumter.'

  The New York Times had opposed Morrill's bill on free-trade grounds. It warned that the tariff gap between North and South would bring the North commercial ruin: 'We have imposed high duties on our commerce at the very moment the seceding states are inviting commerce to their ports by low duties.' Once the Confederacy adopted a much lower tariff of its own, the paper reversed course. It urged military action to enforce the Morrill Tariff in the South.

  Critics compared the new law to the 1828 Tariff of Abominations, which had sparked the Nullification Crisis. Even so, the Morrill Tariff's average rate was significantly lower than that earlier law's.

  The philosopher John Stuart Mill dismissed any claim that tariffs explained the conflict. Confederate leaders, he pointed out, had told their own citizens when seeking their votes that the fight was about slavery, not 'tariffs, and similar trumpery.' Mill went further. He noted that even the protectionist Carey considered the Morrill tariff more liberal than the reformed French tariff under Cobden's treaty.

  Karl Marx, writing as a London correspondent for American newspapers including Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, argued that slavery, not the tariff, had driven secession. In October 1861 he put it directly: 'Secession, therefore, did not take place because the Morrill tariff had gone through Congress, but, at most, the Morrill tariff went through Congress because secession had taken place.'

  None of the statesmen who tried to broker a compromise in the winter of 1860 and 1861 ever pointed to the tariff as a cause. None called it a cure either.

• 8. Still Arguing

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  The historian James Huston has observed that scholars remain divided over what high tariffs meant for the era. They have offered conflicting interpretations for generations. All of them agree that low tariffs were never controversial and were simply needed to fund the federal government. Past that point of agreement, one school of thought casts the Republicans as willing tools of would-be monopolists. A second holds that Republicans genuinely believed tariffs would spread prosperity and balanced growth to every region, not just the cotton South. A third stresses how the tariff helped tie industrial-state voters to the Republican Party. A further view emphasizes that factory workers wanted high tariffs to shield their wages from European competition.

  Charles A. Beard argued in the 1920s that long-term economic divisions mattered most. He pointed to a coalition between the pro-tariff industrial Northeast and the anti-tariff agrarian Midwest, arrayed against the plantation South. Writing in the 1940s, the historian Reinhard Luthin observed that 'historians are not unanimous as to the relative importance which Southern fear and hatred of a high tariff had in causing the secession of the slave states.'

  In the 1950s, historians began moving away from Beard's economic explanation. Richard Hofstadter led a shift toward emphasizing the social causes of the war, centered on slavery.

  Beard's thesis has found new life among some economists, pro-Confederate historians, and neo-Beardian scholars. A 2002 study by economists Robert McGuire and T. Norman Van Cott reached a striking conclusion. The tariff issue, they argued, may have mattered more to North-South tensions than most economists and historians currently believe.

  The historian Marc-William Palen has pointed out the opposite direction of causation. The tariff passed through Congress only because Southern states had already seceded, not the other way around.

  Allan Nevins and James M. McPherson, by contrast, treat the tariff as peripheral, noting that slavery dominated the declarations, speeches, and pamphlets secessionists actually produced. Nevins highlights how Alexander Stephens once disputed Toombs's claims about the tariff's severity. Stephens had initially opposed secession, yet he later called slavery the 'cornerstone' of his support for it.