A Vast and Fiendish Plot:. Clint Johnson
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On November 19, 1860, U.S. senator Robert Toombs from Georgia made a speech where he incorrectly lumped together all Northerners as being in favor of the Morrill Tariff, charging that the “free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists. The result of this coalition was…the robber and the incendiary struck hands, and are united in joint raid against the South.”
Robert Barnwell Rhett, a Charleston newspaper editor who had been pushing for the South to secede for years and to form a “Confederacy of slave holding states” made a speech to South Carolinians where he charged: “For the last forty years, the taxes laid by Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue—to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the production of their mines and manufacturers.”
New York City’s merchants shared the South’s anger at what the bill would do to New York’s import and export business. With Southern trade already off by 50 percent with New York due to the Southern recession, the city’s merchants feared the Morrill Tariff could send New York into the same recession early in 1861.
The Journal of Commerce laid out in print what most of the merchants were thinking, “The merchants are waking up to the fact that a tariff bill is hanging over them and likely to prove disastrous to their trade.”
“The passage of the Bill in its present shape will bring ruin and disaster upon a very large class of merchants,” wrote an importer in the Herald.
Already too late with their protests since the bill had overwhelming support among the legislators in New England and the western states (today’s Midwest), New York’s merchants vainly explained to anyone who would listen that the Morrill bill would be bad for New York. It would double the cost of some goods coming into the port, which meant customers would stop buying imported goods from New York merchants. It would be complicated and time-consuming to enforce, as separate items in an entire shipment would be taxed at varying rates. Just sorting through what tariff rates applied to which goods would take days to accomplish, which meant ships would be backed up in the harbor waiting to unload on the city’s wharves.
The New York City Chamber of Commerce predicted that “the commerce of the City of New York would shrink into one-tenth of its present compass…. This measure is known to be obnoxious to the Southern States. To pass it when a part of them are not represented in Congress could scarcely fail to widen the existing breach and present a new and serious obstacle to reconciliation.”
After Lincoln was elected, the entire delegation of Southern senators (with the exception of Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee) and representatives walked out of Congress early in 1861. With a Senate made up entirely of Northerners, the Morrill Tariff sailed through with no opposition. Ironically, the bill was signed into law, not by Republican Lincoln who had made signing it a campaign promise, but by outgoing Democrat James Buchanan, whose Pennsylvania congressional delegation had been strong supporters.
As important as the problem of the impending Morrill Tariff was for New York City’s merchants, it paled beside the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.
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