Civil War

The tariff issue of 1830 to 1860 and its relation to slavery

Are the two really totally separate issues?

Yes these were two separate issues. The Civil War wasn’t just about slavery, money, and power. Its main purpose was to decide if states rights should be over federal rights. The north wanted it to be the federal rights over states right, and the south wanted it to be states rights over federal rights.

The society evolving in the North and its reform movements challenged the South's way of life, its traditions, and its political power. Industrialism, the free labor philosophy, and especially abolitionism threatened states' rights and revived the constitutional debate about the power of the federal government. The Nullification Crisis, precipitated over the issue of tariffs, proved a defining political issue during the 1830s and 1840s and aggravated the already troublesome sectional differences of slavery. South Carolina, which saw the tariffs as a bold extension of federal powers and a introduction to forced freedom of slaves, led the charge to reverse the cotton tariffs. Such action would allow a state to declare a national law unenforceable within state borders, an action that could eventually spur a state to secede from the Union. President Jackson viewed nullification as a direct threat to federal power and threatened military intervention, but Congress eventually worked out a compromise that defused the issue. Still, tariffs in the 1830s would strengthen the political tensions of sectionalism in the 1850s. Competing economic systems, the ideological, political, and social differences that grew out of such systems, the status of slavery in the western territories, and the abolitionist movement continued to make both northern and southern societies deeply suspicious of the other's political power. When southern states decided to secede in the 1860s, they called the action a protest against the over-extension of federal powers that challenged the core of...