What were the impacts of tariff policies on the rise of sectionalism before the Civil War?

Answer 1

The tariff is a tax levied by the government on items imported into the country. Before 1916 the was no income tax - it was unconstitutional and the Constitution had to be amended before an income tax could be imposed on the people. So most of the money the federal government received each year came from the tariff, and the rest from the selling of public lands.

Southerners tended to trade mostly with Europe, particularly England. In the US there were no north-south roads worth mentioning, and what roads there were consisted mostly of deep muddy ruts. Most goods were moved by water, but the rivers and canals all tended to flow west to east - good for getting the goods and crops out from the inland area of a state to its coast, not useful at all for north-south sectional trade. There was some coastal ship traffic up and down the seaboard and this was the main way goods moved between the north and the south. Railroads were just being laid in the two decades before the Civil War and were not yet built everywhere in the south.

So from the earliest colonial days the people in the south tended to trade with England. Large plantations had their own docks on adjoining rivers and ocean-going ships would tie up there, and be loaded with bales of cotton or massive barrels (hogsheads) of tobacco. Smaller farmers' crops were bought by middlemen in port cities and also consigned to England. The bigger operators, the plantation owners, tended to be wealthy, and therefore politically involved and influential. In England the southerners had trustworthy agents called "factors", who would see to the selling of the crops for the best price obtainable. The southerners would write to these factors and tell them what items they wanted - everything from farm implements and machinery, windowpane glass, fancy fabrics and clothes, wine, silverware, fine china - whatever they thought they might want. After selling the crops the factor would take the money and buy these items and ship them back to the south. Smaller farmers bought things from the middlemen/merchants in their port cities, who were also importing goods after selling the crops they sent abroad.

In the north the Industrial Revolution had begun, and many of these items were beginning to be produced in the US by northern manufacturers. But the English goods were generally much better and much cheaper. So the northern factory owners wanted a high tariff on imported goods, to make them more expensive than their own inferior goods, to try to force southerners to "buy American", even if what they bought was not as good, and hard to get, what with the transportation problems.

The southerners wanted a low tariff or no tariff at all. They worked and made money, so why should they pay all the taxes when they spent the money they earned? A tariff did not cost the northern factory owners anything, so all the cost of maintaining the federal government was placed on southerners with a tariff. This is literally true. White southerners made up about 1/6th of the population of the US, but southerners paid almost 2/3 of the money received by the federal government in the years before the Civil War.

When Andrew Jackson became president in 1829 the new congress sworn in at the same time jacked up the tariff rate to a new all-time high. In the south this was called the "Tariff of Abominations". Southerners were enraged at this blatant shifting of the entire cost of government onto them. South Carolina was so angry that the leaders of South Carolina announced that their policy was now nullification - meaning, South Carolina claimed for itself the right to "nullify" any federal law passed by the US congress with which South Carolina disagreed. The Constitution had little to say on the relative powers of states versus the federal government, and what the Constitution did say on the subject seemed to favor the states. But an early court decision by the US Supreme Court had held that the federal government was supreme. So South Carolina's policy provoked the "nullification crisis" and was a direct challenge to federal supremacy over the states. Andrew Jackson dealt with the Nullification Crisis by announcing that he would raise a large federal army, take his place at the head of it, march into South Carolina, and hang John C. Calhoun from the first tree. Everybody believed he would do exactly that, so the crisis ended, and congress eventually dropped the tariff rate a little bit, but not back to where it was before. So the southerners were still being gouged, to their way of thinking, and nobody forgot the hard feelings engendered on both sides.