Justin Morrill for 30 years led the fight to raise tariffs on goods that competed with U.S. products. For that, he took the blame — unjustly — for starting the Civil War.
Charles Dickens was one of the critics who disapproved of Justin Morrill, a Vermont congressman he probably never met.
Charles Dickens
Morrill had shepherded through Congress a tariff protecting U.S. industry and raising workers’ wages. It also punished southern cotton exporters and British textile manufacturers that hungered for raw cotton.
Many, including Dickens, wrongly believed the South seceded from the Union because of the Morrill Tariff.
But historians argue the Morrill Tariff did NOT start the Civil War — and that it helped the United States emerge as a major industrial power.
Justin Morrill
Justin Morrill today is best known for starting land grant schools like the University of Connecticut, University of New Hampshire, MIT and more than 100 others. He was also the single most important Republican in Congress on trade issues from the Civil War to the turn of the 20th century.
Thompson Hall at the University of New Hampshire, a land grant college.
As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, Morrill represented the interests of Vermont farmers.
“The farmer of Vermont felt himself robbed by every pound of butter, every cord of wood, and every head of cattle that came across the border to be sold in competition with his own products,” wrote a biographer. The same held true for manufacturers.
Justin Morrill
Morrill fought what was then called “reciprocity treaties” – “you cut my tariff, I’ll cut yours.” Today they’d be called bilateral trade treaties. Morrill fought them all, “tooth and nail,” he told a friend. While Morrill was head of the Senate Finance Committee from 1877 to 1898, no new reciprocity treaty passed the Senate.
“I am for ruling America for the benefit, first, of Americans, and for the ‘rest of mankind’ afterwards,” he said.
“Free trade abjures patriotism and boasts of cosmopolitism. It regards the labor of our own people with no more favor than that of the barbarian on the Danube or the cooly on the Ganges.”
Morrill Tariff
For those who believe globalization is inevitable, the Tariff of 1857 proves otherwise.
Shipping cotton from Savannah
Morrill was a sophomore congressman when the Tariff of 1857 lowered tariffs to about 17 percent. Southerners and farm states supported it, believing U.S. trade partners would lower their tariffs and create more demand for cotton and agricultural exports. Then the Panic of 1857 struck later in the year, and free traders lost the upper hand.
From 1858-98, as a Whig congressman and Republican senator, Morrill pushed for tariffs protecting products made in the United States.
On March 2, 1861, the Morrill Tariff passed. It increased duties in order to raise wages for industrial workers and to protect specific industries such as wool, iron, textiles and other manufactured goods.
Southerners tried to blame the Morrill Tariff for starting the Civil War despite the fact that southerners had already left the Senate. South Carolina had already seceded more than two months earlier.
The British, including Dickens, hated the Morrill Tariff and bought the southerners’ argument.
In 1861, American historian John Motley wrote the Morrill Tariff ‘has done more than any commissioner from the Southern republic could do to alienate the feelings of the English public towards the United States.’
Dickens owned a magazine called All the Year Round. In it, an article attacked the tariff . “…under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle,” it said. “Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this, as of many other evils…”
Karl Marx, also writing from London, argued slavery caused the Civil War and the tariff was just a pretext.
Post-War Prosperity
Justin Morrill Homestead in Strafford, Vt.
Historians argue whether the Morrill Tariff did or did not cause the Civil War. Most have less interest in whether protective tariffs helped or hurt the U.S. economy.
One historian notes the Civil War — and the Morrill Tariff — “was the forcing ground…of American industrial development.”
“The increase in manufactured output was phenomenal,” wrote A.J. Youngson Brown in the American Economy 1860-1940. “The value of manufactured products increased from about $2,000 million in 1859 to about $13,000 million in 1899 … This stupendous increase has many significances; most notably, from the international viewport, America by the 1890s had become the premier manufacturing nation of the world.”
Morrill sponsored two higher tariffs during Abraham Lincoln‘s administration to raise money for the Civil War.
Overall, tariffs didn’t fall until the Revenue Act of 1913, known as the Underwood tariff.
From 1860 to World War II, every Republican presidential candidate supported protective tariffs, according to U.S. Trade Policy: History, Theory, and the WTO by William A. Lovett, Alfred E. Eckes, Jr. and Richard L. Brinkman.
“They preached class harmony and warned that removal of the protective tariff would ‘bring widespread discontent’,” they wrote.
President William McKinley said, “Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations.”
Justin Morrill died in office on Dec. 28, 1899, at the age of 88. The Morrill Homestead in Strafford, Vt., is a National Historic Landmark.
This story about Justin Morrill was updated in 2023.
Image: By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50733908
9 comments
[…] King Ed often worked for the Great Northern Paper Co., which owned the world’s largest paper mill in East Millinocket, Maine. The mill produced a stupendous amount of newsprint, 300 tons a day, enough for nearly every newspaper in the United States. (It’s now shut down.) […]
Tariffs were the cause of the wat. Lincoln could not let the South go because the north was dependent on Southern revenues. Lincoln wanted to make slavery permanent if the South would come back and pay the tariffs. New England radicals forced Lincoln into war because of their greed. Lesrn your history instead of Yankee: Marxist propaganda.
Um, the story acknowledges the tariff issue.
The south was 30% of the population yet paid up to 75% of all Federal Taxes in the form of Tariffs. Tariffs were collected in southern ports only and spent by northern politicians. The representative members by population insured that the north due to their higher population always have the prevailing power in congress. Nice try New Yorker but your turnabout doesn’t hold water. The south knew it never had the representative votes to overturn the northern vote that was happy to prosper from the southern tariffs.
[…] in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee […]
Slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Period. From the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Southern Slave States fought to keep the balance with the Northern Free States so they could not be outvoted with regard to the issue, and slavery outlawed. With each territory seeking statehood in the Union, the fight resurfaced. There were actually several very angry and divisive fights in congress years before the Civil War. Several Southern leaders mentioned succession as a final solution to their problem long before the 1850’s.
Slavery became the Great Issue by the time of the War. After the Dred Scott case of 1856-1857, Slavers stripped ‘Border” states of ‘Free’ Blacks, claiming they were all escaped slaves, further enraging Northern Abolitionists.
Lincoln’s hostility to Slavery is well recorded in both his private and public statements. Tough luck if he didn’t speak like a modern Left-wing Liberal. He hated slavery. One of the reasons that Booth planned Lincoln’s assassination so carefully, even arranging an improvised mechanism to secure the door to Lincoln’s box so he could escape, was because he hated the very idea of Black equality, and feared Lincoln might support the right of African Americans to vote.
Please read the history of the early Republican Party, and throw in Copperhead Democrats for good measure. In addition, there are several very good books on Lincoln’s murder, including minute by minute reconstructions of the murder, and Booth’s mismanaged flight into Virginia looking for Southern Sympathizers to help him escape.
[…] wealth to buy equipment for the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry of the Union Army during the Civil War. Howe enlisted in the regiment as a private, though he was 42 years old and in ill […]
[…] was swept up by the spirit of the Civil War and followed Union troops north. The young run-away was befriended by Vermont troops who saw he attended Leland and Gray Seminary in Townsend, Vt. He taught school and attended college […]
[…] Justin Morrill was a congressman from Vermont in 1860 and later a U.S. senator. He founded the Republican Party, but is best known for the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act that helped establish many public colleges and universities in the United States — the kind of school Alice Watts might have attended had she only been born a few decades later. […]
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