A Rising Industry's Battle for the Morrill Tariff

Extract

The number of historians who have touched upon the Morrill Tariff in 1861 is equaled only by the variety of ways in which they have interpreted it. Such a complex subject obviously cannot be treated definitively in the two documents that are presented in this note. On the other hand, it does seem reasonable that these two documents may prove of interest to every student of tariff history and hold a warning for all historians: that the simplified interpretation of our economic development in terms of sections or large economic groups frequently is not borne out by factual evidence. Indeed, most careful historians will agree that it is impossible to dismiss a major tariff law with a generalization like “this section was for it, and that section was against it.”