Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, with Illustrations and Speeches

by Unknown

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.