Economic
Independence - South
(a) “We will be free from your close
nation” Speech of John H.
Reagan of Texas to Congress, January 15 1861
You are not content with the vast millions of
tribute we pay annually under the operation of our revenue law, or navigation
laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our
merchant, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you
to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not
satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of
the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that
we the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseas for northern
capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a
relentless crusade against our rights and institutions..
We do not intend that you shall reduce us to
such a condition. But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel
us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more
self-reliant than we have been. It will compel us to assert and maintain our
separate independence. It will compel us to manufacture ourselves, to build up
our own commerce, our own great cities, our own railroads and canals; and to
use the tribute money we now pay you for these things for the support of a
government which will be friendly to all our interests, hostile to none of
them.
(b) “They dream that the centres of trade
can be changed from Northern to Southern Ports” Boston Transcript, March 18
1861
Alleged grievances in regard to slavery were
originally the causes for the separation of the cotton States; but the mask has
been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding
States are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of
traffic can be changed from Northern or Southern ports. The merchants of New
Orleans, Charleston and Savannah are possessed with the idea that New York,
Boston and Philadelphia may be shorn, in the future, of their mercantile
greatness, by a revenue system verging upon free trade. If the Southern
Confederation is allowed to carry out policy by which only nominal duty is laid
upon imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be
seriously injured thereby.
The difference is so great between thee
tariff of the Union and that of Confederate States, that the entire Northwest
must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans
rather than at New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the
country will suffer from the increased
importations resulting from low duties … The … [government] would be false to
all of its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against.