Did Tariffs Really Cause the Civil War? The Morrill Act at 150

Did protective tariffs really bring about the Civil War? It's an argument that enthusiasts of the era are bound to encounter at some point, and also among the most contentious and least understood of the many debates surrounding the instigating causes of secession 150 years ago this month. The tariff thesis is contentious because it is often interpreted as an attempt to displace the primacy of slavery as the underlying instigator of events in Civil War causality. In this simplified form, the argument may be easily disposed of by referring to South Carolina's Declaration of Immediate Causes, which attributed their action to "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery." Yet as we will see, the tariff issue cannot be completely discounted from the discussion of Civil War causality...To state that tariffs were not an issue in 1860 is itself "flatly wrong," as my recent article in the Journal of the Early Republic illustrates. Nor was the Tariff of 1857 the source of southern angst, but rather the Morrill Tariff of 1861, which had been the subject of an intense political feud in Congress for some two years prior and an issue in the presidential election of 1860...So where did the tariff issue stand on the eve of the Civil War? Like so many other facets of American politics at the time, it stood in the middle of a complex and heated political fight that fell largely on North-South sectional lines...more