Did Tariffs Really Cause The American Civil War?

In the first episode of the new season of Historical Controversies, which will focus on the sectional crises that led to the Civil War, I gave a brief explanation of my problem with the “Tariff Thesis” for the cause of southern secession. My arguments on the subject were the primary subject of criticism for the episode, and I feel it may be worth offering a more detailed explanation as to why I reject this popular interpretation for the cause of secession.

It is worth mentioning that although this article is only intended to address the tariff thesis for southern secession, there is also a separate tariff thesis — the “Tariff War Thesis” — which states that tariff revenues were the reason for Lincoln’s desire to wage the war. Although I reject both tariff theses, Tariff War Thesis is, at least, more plausible. Although many people combine both tariff theses into a single interpretation of secession and the war, some historians only maintain one while rejecting the other.

The Tariff and Southern Secession

The expositors of the tariff thesis for southern secession point to the nullification crisis that grew out of a protective tariff of 1828, known by the South as the “Tariff of Abominations.” As I discussed in the podcast, John C. Calhoun secretly wrote the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, which argued that individual states have the right to nullify federal laws that they deemed unconstitutional. In 1832, after a new tariff bill was passed (which actually lowered duties, but was still criticized for being protectionist), South Carolina passed a nullification act and started mobilizing troops to defend against the threatened aggression by the Andrew Jackson administration, which came in the form of a “Force Bill” passed by Congress to empower the president to use the military against the nullifying state.

The crisis was averted after Henry Clay stepped up with a compromise tariff that offered to lower duties gradually over a period of years (the new bill, interestingly, never addressed the conflict between a “protectionist” and a “revenue” tariff, the latter of which was considered to be constitutional by southerners).

In the early 1830s, it is fair to say that tariffs were a legitimate cause of controversy between the North and the South (or, at least, South Carolina, which was the only state that took real action in response to the tariff). But even in these years, there is reason to question whether tariffs were the sole reason for the dispute. John Calhoun himself, as revealed in a private letter to Virgil Maxy written in 1830, said:

I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institutions of the Southern States, and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriation in opposite relation to the majority of the Union; against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the states, they must in the end be forced to rebel or submit to have . . . their domestick institutions exhausted by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves & children reduced to wretchedness. Thus situatied [sic], the denial of the right of the state to interfere constitutionally in the last resort, more alarms the thinking than all other causes.