Part 2

The war was about taxation--the usual cause of revolution. A century ago it was taxation without representation; a generation ago it was unequal, discriminating, sectional, and class taxation. Out of this still grows the political strife whose quadrennial flood rises higher and higher at each election: income taxes successfully resisted by the rich; rate, fare, and tariff taxes unsuccessfully resisted by the poor--these are the fruitful causes of war--fought with ballots first, and finally, if no remedy can be found, with bullets.

The truth must be told even if it diminishes the glory of those who "saved the Union"--and made money by it. The blood of the last generation was not shed in vain, if we, with the advantages we enjoy, learn and teach the lessons which all posterity will demand of us--both for the sake of those who perished and of those who may perish if we suffer them to believe a lie. Forewarned is forearmed.

Under our Federal revenue laws, those who have produced the export crops (in quantities sufficient to invite the exploits of political manufacturing and trade combinations) have long paid far more than their share of the expenses of government. They were not allowed to buy in the open market, where they sold their crops, but in the restricted "home market," at prices not fixed by open competition. But the said combinations bought these crops in a free market and sold their own products in a protected market. So they got more benefit than the government: first, in being relieved from Federal taxes, which the producers of the export crops paid; second, in incidental, then in avowed, protection; third, in the system of internal improvements which they were obliged to invent to dispose of the surplus revenues raised as an incident to giving them "protection"; and these "improvements" usually improved one section and impoverished the other.

So, early in the game, we find one _class_, the political combinations of manufacturers, growing rich, and another class, the ill-combined agriculturalists, growing correspondingly poor. Prior to 1860, even more than now, relatively, cotton was the great export crop of America, and was also the principal money crop of a section; so the tax suffered on account of it was sectional. Being also manufactured in a section, the benefits enjoyed on account of it were sectional. So we have the _sections_, as well as the classes, antagonistic, and made so by the operation of a Federal revenue law--one section growing richer and the other growing correspondingly poorer in the sight of all men.

Political parties aligned according to "geographical discriminations" (against which Washington warned but did not provide), arose and cursed each other, from 1816--the date of the first distinctively protective tariff (which, as increased in 1828 and 1830, provoked South Carolina's first acts of secession)--to 1861, the date of the Morrill tariff, with sixty per cent. protection in it, which, passed March 2d, and flaunted in the face of the seven already seceded States, rendered reconciliation impossible. The Confederate Constitution declaring in its very first article against even incidental protection, conveyed no hint to the wilfully blind revenue-hunters that the most oppressed of the agricultural States had formed their combination to resist the plunder of Federal tariff, as well as other sectional aggressions.

Lincoln's policy of reenforcing Federal forts in the South (the immediate cause of the war) was bottomed on a purpose to collect this odious tax (the tariff of 1861), a policy which Alexander H. Stephens says was not determined upon until the "seven war Governors" (from the seven most protected States) offered to furnish the troops requisite to subdue the States then seceded. The border States had decided for the Union before Lincoln's acts of aggression; and he, therefore, though erroneously, supposed that they all would either aid him or remain neutral until he could "strengthen the Government" by the conquest of the cotton States.

By means of the tariff the cotton crop had been made the scapegoat upon which, in relief of wealth and monopoly, was piled the huge iniquity of Federal taxes; but more than that, and worse than that, the tariff was the engine by which the political combination of spinners and shippers forced down the price of that crop.

As far back as 1791, Hamilton and those in charge of the revenue department of the General Government (a certain school of politicians has always had a Judas-like fondness for carrying the bag), finding the express powers under the Constitution too weak for the purposes of exploit, began to lay the foundation for a new government by implied powers under court construction; by means of which they and "their successors in office" have slowly but steadily amended the Constitution, consolidated our Federation, and undermined the rights of the States. While they were experimenting to discover which States it was most advantageous to form into a copartnership with the General Government, they invented an unequal and discriminating tax on carriages, which fell heaviest on New Jersey, where they were principally manufactured. Seeing the burden of half a dozen States fall on one, North Carolina and some others denounced it as infamous and unconstitutional.

After a few more such experiments, in which it was learned effectually that the purely agricultural States could not be seduced into taking advantage of their sisters, the manipulators of the Treasury induced the General Government to coquet with the States which were more or less under the control of the political combinations of merchants, manufacturers, bankers, and speculators; and with more success.

A copartnership was perfected between the General Government and the protected States by the tariff of 1816; and the mutual considerations passed were first named "incidental benefit" for one party to the contract and "liberal construction" of implied powers for the other. Angry protests and sectional incriminations and recriminations followed, and awakened Jefferson, like "an alarm-bell at night," out of the sleep of old age. The "peculiar institution" of one section gave the other a terrible advantage, which it was quick to see and to seize; and it was used remorselessly. Greed, suddenly joining philanthropy, religion, and fanaticism, organized and led a crusade against _African_ slavery. The agitation about the negro, as a counter-irritant to distract attention from the injustice of Federal revenue laws, was more than a success: for the shallow politicians of both sections forgot the real issue; but the beneficiaries never lost sight of it. I will use a homely illustration: A and B are doing business on opposite sides of a street; B begins to undersell A; A becomes angry, but cannot afford to tell his customers the cause; he hears that B once cheated a negro out of a mule; he makes that charge; they fight; the court record of the trial shows that the fight was about the negro and the mule; but there is not a business man on the street who does not know that the record speaks a lie.

The first speech in this book opens with old Nat. Macon lecturing (in 1820) a Representative from Pennsylvania, the most protected State, for expressing a desire to see the Union dissolved rather than that slavery should be extended beyond the Mississippi.

Slavery, itself, while for several generations usually beneficial to the negro, was, doubtless, in many respects injurious to his masters. It made us provincial, of necessity, sensitive and intolerant of criticism, easily susceptible of misrepresentation, and cut us off from the sympathy of some who else had been our friends. It cramped thought, invention, progress, poetry, and literature. It enabled monopoly to divide and conquer the tillers of the soil. It tended to create caste and it _degraded manual labor_--as necessary as death after sin and decreed in the same Divine judgment. Skilled manual labor gutted the Confederacy by driving war-ships up its rivers: and the felt want of it, in late years, has established a great industrial institution at our State capital, the mother of many others, and destined to revolutionize education among us.

"Protection" and discrimination in the operation of the Federal revenue laws, though still potent for evil, will probably never again be the principal, causing cause of another revolution unto blood; because from three to ten per cent. of our Southern population will henceforward be directly benefited by such laws, and their interests will soften the sectional aspect of the tax. But the unequal and sectional operation of the currency laws, alienating the West as well as the South; the heaping up of nearly all the wealth of the country into one section, and most of it in a few great cities of that section; the plunder of agriculture by legislation and by the unchecked conspiracy of capital; the monopoly of the carrying trade by the wealth of the cities; the growing distrust between the urban and rural populations; the sullen and fickle temper of our foreign elements--the nucleus, perhaps, of a future Prætorian Guard; the mutterings against the now "vested right" of protected labor to be fed or assisted by the government--and capital hides behind such labor; machine politics and party spirit; the prostitution of the electoral system by the national nominating mob system, which treats sovereign States as the provinces of a party; the fine Italian hand of a certain religio-political corporation in getting offices and holding the balance of power between the factions contending for public plunder; the growing intimacy of sectional wealth with foreign governments and aristocracies--these are the dangers which together threaten a perpetual Union of the States and the liberties of the people.

Before 1860, Macaulay prophesied that our government would go to pieces over a presidential election. In the face of these dangers, it is well for us to consider and carefully teach our children the causes which have worked our injury in the past, in order that we and they may be the better able to recognize and grapple them when they reappear, under changed names or in the shape of new laws.

But a tariff tax as a causing cause of the late war shall not rest upon the foregoing testimony alone. "Let the South go," exclaimed Abraham Lincoln, in 1861, "where then shall we get our revenues?" This man was noted for hitting the bull's-eye, and Divine Inspiration had forestalled him with the prophecy that the love of revenue was the root of all evil.

Thomas H. Benton is a witness who will be heard. In a speech in the Senate, in 1828, he shows how the tariff (which, except for about twelve years, had been mainly levied for revenue) had plundered the South. He said: "I feel for the sad changes which have taken place in the South during the last fifty years. Before the Revolution it was the seat of wealth as well as hospitality. Money, and all it commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed. Wealth has fled from the South, and settled in the regions north of the Potomac; and this in the face of the fact that the South, in four staples alone, has exported produce since the Revolution to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact? In the place of wealth a universal pressure for money is felt--not enough for current expenses--the price of property all down--the country drooping and languishing--towns and cities decaying--and the frugal habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for the preservation of their family estates. Such a result is a strange and wonderful phenomenon. It calls upon statesmen to inquire into the cause.

"Under Federal legislation the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenue. * * * * Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense of supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing, is returned to them in the shape of government expenditure. That expenditure flows in an opposite direction--it flows northwardly, in one uniform, uninterrupted, and perennial stream. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. Federal legislation does all this. It does it by the simple process of eternally taking from the South and returning nothing to it. If it returned to the South the whole or even a good part of what it exacted the four States south of the Potomac might stand the action of the system, but the South must be exhausted of its money and its property by a course of legislation which is forever taking away and never returning anything. Every new tariff increases the force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens imposed by them."--Benton's _Thirty Years View_, Vol. I, p. 98, quoted by Raphael Semmes in his _Memoirs of Service Afloat_.

In 1860 we find the South still furnished many millions more than two-thirds of the export crops, besides fifty millions to the North. In Colonial and Revolutionary times the South was the richest section, and so acknowledged to be in the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

No wonder that the South always insisted that the Federation was a limited partnership; and no wonder that her rapacious partners insisted on a government of unlimited powers, when they employed such powers for unequal taxation, sectional expenditures, and unlimited "protection." Those who have clamored most persistently for a "strong government" have never scrupled to sap its strength for purposes of private emolument. Those who have panted most for a consolidated republic have now fully disclosed their purpose of sequestering its assets. They have not consolidated the patriotism of the republic, but they have drawn a line of division from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes--a division of interests, division of sentiment, division of population, division of history, and a division of churches. Who can measure the hypocrisy of those writers and politicians who teach the people that the way to make the government strong is to give to one section "implied powers" to plunder the other? Having gotten their wealth by the craft of booming nationalism and centralization, they now perceive that in order to keep it they must hold themselves ready to "hedge" with the doctrine of States' rights and reserved powers. So, while college professors are confusing the mind of youth about "the two opposing theories of government," the facts of opposing interests are jarring the foundations of society and wrenching the fetters which bind the States in a "more perfect Union."

Robert Toombs said, in a speech before the Georgia Legislature, in November, 1860: "The instant the Government was organized, at the very first Congress, the Northern States evinced a general desire and purpose to use it for their own benefit, and to pervert its powers for sectional advantage, and they have steadily pursued that policy to this day. They demanded a monopoly of the business of ship-building, and got a prohibition against the sale of foreign ships to citizens of the United States, which exists to this day. They demanded a monopoly of the coasting trade, in order to get higher freights than they could get in open competition with the carriers of the world. Congress gave it to them, and they yet hold this monopoly. * * * These same shipping interests, with cormorant rapacity, have steadily burrowed their way through your legislative halls, until they have saddled the agricultural classes with a large portion of the legitimate expenses of their own business. We pay a million dollars per annum for the lights which guide them in and out of your ports. We have built, and keep up, at the cost of at least another million a year, hospitals for their sick and disabled seamen, when they wear them out and cast them ashore. We pay half a million to support and bring home those they cast away in foreign lands. They demand, and have received, millions of the public money to increase the safety of harbors and lessen the danger of navigating our rivers; all of which expenses legitimately fall upon their business, and should come out of their own pockets, instead of a common treasury.

"Even the fishermen of Massachusetts and New England demand and receive from the public treasury about half a million dollars per annum as a pure bounty in their business of catching codfish. The North, at the very first Congress, demanded and received bounties, under the name of protection, for every trade, craft and calling which its people pursue, and there is not an artisan in brass, or iron, or wood, or weaver or spinner in wool or cotton, or calico-maker, or iron-master, or a coal-owner, in all the Northern or Middle States, who has not received what he calls the protection of his government on his industry to the extent of from fifteen to two hundred per cent. from the year 1791 to this day. They will not strike a blow or stretch a muscle without bounties from the government. No wonder they cry aloud for the glorious Union. They have the same reason for praising it that the craftsmen of Ephesus had for shouting 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' By it they get their wealth, by it they levy tribute on honest labor."

The future historian will devote a long chapter to show how the slavery agitation "ebbed and flowed with the sinking and the swelling" in the voices of protest from the much-plundered South; voices which were keyed to the pitch of secession and revolution against the tariff of 1828, and which again, in 1861, shouted in warlike defiance until they were hushed in blood. That chapter will point also in shame to the dark record which shows that on March 2, 1861, after seven States had seceded and their Representatives in Congress had withdrawn, and while four other States were preparing to secede if found necessary, greed thrust its "lewd snout" into the purity of that chastening hour when many thousand patriots still prayed that the awful catastrophe might be averted, and got by force a tariff with sixty per cent. protection in it! Hear the effect of that measure from the lips of a North Carolinian, General Clingman, who was lingering in the Senate in the hope of reconciliation: "But, Mr. President, there is another difficulty in the way, and we might as well talk of this frankly. I know it is present to the minds of Senators on the other side, and they must see the difficulty. The honorable Senator from Rhode Island (Mr. Simmons) particularly, who engineered the tariff bill through, of course sees the difficulty. * * * The revenues under that tariff bill cannot be collected anywhere, I think, if the declarations which gentlemen make are to be acted out. If they are to hold that all the Confederate States are in the Union, and that you are to have no custom-houses, on the line between them and the other States, what will be the result? Goods will come into New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, and other places; they will come in paying a low tariff, and merchants from Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and Ohio, if they choose to go down there and buy goods, will take them home and pay no duties. No man from the Northwest will go to New York and pay a duty of fifty per cent. on goods that he can get at a fifteen or twenty per cent. duty at New Orleans. That will be the course of trade, of course. Senators must see that you cannot have two tariffs, one high and one low, in operation in the country at once, with any effect produced by the high tariff. If you go to a man and say: 'You may pay me a high price or a low price for an article,' you will never get the high price. When, therefore, you attempt to carry out the new tariff, which contains rates, I think, of fifty per cent., and some of one hundred per cent., and some even above one hundred per cent., you cannot collect those rates at Boston and New York and Philadelphia, while the men who want to consume the goods can get them by paying a duty of one-third as much. That is impossible. I presume the Senator from Rhode Island, and those who acted with him, did not intend the tariff, which has lately passed, to be a mere farce, a mere thing on paper, not to be acted out. Of course they mean to get duties under it some way or other. If you do not mean to have your line of custom-houses along the border of the Confederate States you must expect to stop importations there."--_Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman_, pp. 61, 62: extract from speech delivered in United States Senate, March 19, 1861.

Yes, and it was the armed attempt to "stop importations there" that brought on the war!