The Effects of Tariffs on the South

The Effects of Tariffs on the South

Thomas Allen, editor

In The United States Unmasked: A Search into the Causes of the Rise and Progress of These States, and an Exposure Of Their Present Material and Moral Condition (London, Ontario: J. H. Vivian, 1878), pages 33–35, G. Manigault explains the effects of tariffs on the South.

Has the reader ever considered what is the origin and true nature of that offence which is called smuggling? Stealing, and robbery, and the destruction of your neighbour’s property, and a multitude of other acts, are crimes in their very nature, and were criminal before any human law undertook to punish them. But there is in nature no such offence as smuggling. An important ingredient in your natural liberty is the right to carry the proceeds of your industry, or any part of your portable property, to the best market you can find for it; and, when you have exchanged it for other commodities, you have naturally an equal right to carry your new acquisitions home with you. They are as much yours as that was, which you gave for them. These are the natural and justifiable acts out of which governments have manufactured the offence of smuggling. They create the crime by legislation; they provide for its punishment by further legislation. 

The United States affords a striking example of these abuses. The people of the Northern States, having a majority of the votes in Congress, they had, when united among themselves, the control of the government, and sought to use it to their exclusive profit. In raising a revenue for the government, they, by the ingenious arrangements of their tariff acts, threw the burden of taxation on the South. In expending that revenue they bestowed a benefit on the North. They lowered the value of Southern produce by impairing the foreigner’s means of paying for it; and they raised the price of Northern manufactures by shutting out the competition of foreign goods. They used the whole machinery of government as if it had been designed for impoverishing the South and enriching the North. 

This method of plundering the South met with earnest protest and strenuous opposition from that quarter; and the tariffs for revenue and protection underwent many fluctuations. The fact is, that there is an essential incompatibility between the two objects of revenue and protection. Just so far as a duty protects home manufacturers, it fails to yield any revenue; for it keeps out foreign goods: and just so far as a duty yields a revenue from foreign goods imported, it fails to afford protection to the home manufacturer. There were many people at the North, to whom the raising of a large revenue by the government was of vital interest, for they profited by its expenditures. They were opposed to duties so high as to cut off revenue from the government, while affording protection to the manufacturer, by shutting out the goods of his foreign competitor. The representatives of the Southern States, by combining with this class of plunderers, were more than once enabled to foil the measures of that worse class of plunderers, who advocated protective duties so high as to shut out foreign goods.

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