“The events leading up to the historical separation of the two sections are too well known to need detailed review. Economic and political disagreements arose to accentuate the underlying differences. The first issue to poison the relations between North and south following the “Era of Good Feeling” was the tariff.
It is unquestionable that the protective tariff has worked great injury to the South from that date until, as one might say, the South was partly transformed into an image of the North through industrialization. For the interest of the South as a region producing agricultural surpluses has historically lain in free trade. The South sent abroad rice, indigo, cotton and tobacco and took in exchange the manufactured products of Europe.
The North began to use the Federal Union to put an artificially high price upon manufactured goods in order to help its industries. The South was therefore put into the position of selling cheap and buying dear. All this meant that the agrarian way of livelihood, characterized by Jefferson as the most innocent form of vocation, could not be continued except under penalty of heavy tax.
As Abbott Lawrence of Massachusetts wrote to Daniel Webster regarding the Tariff of 1828: “This bill if adopted as amended will keep the South and West in debt to New England for the next hundred years.”
There was of course the curse of slavery. During the Civil War one ingenious Northern general pronounced the Negroes to be “contrabands.” Contrabands they may well have been from the beginning, and I have often wondered why the sellers of this article were not held more reprehensible than the users, as it is true of those who peddle cocaine. A large number of these hapless slaves were brought to American in New England bottoms, and more than one fortune in Newport and New Bedford owes its origin to profits in black flesh.
The facts could be represented thus: New England sold the slaves to the South, then later declared their possession immoral and confiscated the holding. The morality of the case was less clear to the Southerners than to the agitators of Boston, and even Lincoln, if we may judge by his less political utterances, tended to believe the common guilt of the nation.”
(The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver, George Curtis/James Thompson, editors, Liberty Press, 1987, pp. 241-242)
