HISTORIAN ADMITS THE TARIFF WAS A HUGE ISSUE
 
From: mtgriffith1@yahoo.com
 
By sheer luck, or perhaps with some help from Providence, I stumbled across a book by a "mainstream" historian that contains an amazingly frank, accurate chapter on the tariff as a major point of contention between North and South.  The author, Susan Dunn, certainly can’t be accused of being a "neo-confederate."  In fact, Dunn is very liberal.  Yet, her book, Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia (New York: Basic Books, 2007), documents in great detail that the South complained loudly and repeatedly about how tariff laws favored the North and hurt the South (pp. 171-184).
 
Among many other things, Dunn notes that "the outrage over tariffs would set Virginia and other Southern states on a long and ultimately lethal collision with the national government" (p. 171).  Dunn also notes that "there is little evidence that they [tariffs] stimulated American industry or that they had more than negligible effects" (p. 174).
 
Here are just a couple of her other helpful comments on the subject:
 
"Southerners objected to tariffs not only for economic reasons but also for ideological ones: Tariffs intruded on the autonomy and rights of the states as well as on the freedom of the individual." (pp. 173-174)
 
"The uproar over tariffs, especially over the tariff of abominations, proved to be far more than a banal dispute over expensive imports." (p. 176)
 
Mike Griffith
Civil War website
www.mtgriffith.com