Another Response to all the Sons of the South and Their "Lost Cause"

Just posted on Tumblr:

The next time some cracker-assed Son of the South tells you the Civil War (or more accurately the Southern Insurrection) wasn't about slavery, it was about Lincoln's unfair tariffs, remember the following.

In 1860, there was no federal income tax.  The federal government paid its way with land sales and tariffs.  Tariffs on imported and exported goods.  Goods produced domestically for domestic consumption didn't involve tariffs.  Goods produced domestically for export did.  This included manufactured goods, but as the US was still very much an agrarian economy, manufacturing wasn't the tariff generator you might expect.  Most tariff revenue came from agriculture, especially the Big Three export crops: cotton, tobacco, and rice.  And cotton was the overwhelming export leader.

In the 1860 election Republicans campaigned on raising tariffs, which were about the lowest in the industrial world.  They had reasons ranging from protecting domestic industry to expanding federal projects.  And Southern legislatures and newspapers immediately started decrying these tariffs as being unfair to Southern farmers.  But wait, most people in the North were farmers.  Weren't the tariffs also unfair to them?  No.  And they weren't unfair to actual farmers in the South either.

As in the North, the vast majority of farms in the South were small.  And as in the North, these farms produced effectively nothing for export, so tariffs didn't affect them at all.  So what farms were being targeted?  The ones that were producing the Big Three.  The plantations.  Which were no more farms than a Monsanto factory cropping operation is now.  They were industrial sites, like coal mines and steel mills.

For most Northerners, and a number of Southerners, increasing the tariffs seemed eminently fair.  To their minds, this class of Southern industrialists, the plantation owners, were receiving preferential treatment.  They got to sell to British buyers at prices New England buyers couldn't match.  They got to pocket just about all that profit because tariffs were so low.  And oh yes, they got to pocket that profit because they owned their workforce.  Northern industrialists figured that, if Southern industrialists wanted to have slavery instead of paying their workers (however poorly), they should have to pay some sort of premium to even things up.

The plantation owners saw this as an attack on the economic viability of slavery and just another step in the Great Yankee Conspiracy to destroy their cherished and peculiar institution.  They saw it as an attack on owning slaves.  A "personal property tax", if you will.  And they went on the attack, careful to couch the debate as much as possible in terms of tariffs.

And Sons of the South (SOTS) go, "See, the South, slave owner and non, rose up over tariffs!"  Which of course ignores about every piece of evidence there is.  It ignores the actual rhetoric in legislative debates and newspaper opinions where slavery was expressly an issue.  It ignores that the plantation class controlled the legislatures and owned the newspapers.  It ignores that the plantation class owned or controlled most of the mechanisms and institutions Southern towns and small farmers depended on to survive.  And it ignores the actual language of the secession documents.  But "Lost Cause" proponents have never let facts and reality stand in the way of their moonlight and magnolias romanticism.  The problem is they're still given platforms to shovel this bullshit, when the only "platforms" they should have are the walls of the padded cells they've so thoroughly earned.