March 19, 1861; The New York Herald
We publish today the tariff recently adopted by the Northern Congress at Washington and the one virtually agreed upon by the Southern Congress at Montgomery, both in estenso, and they present, we think, a fair contrast between the legislative capacity of these two bodies. It is impossible to deny to the Southern tariff an exemplification of statesmanship, enlightenment, wisdom and a knowledge of governing a great and enterprising people, which are wholly wanting in the other document.
The two measures, in fact, differ as much in spirit as the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries; they are as widely different as the legislation of the Mountain in revolutionary France, or the Puritan legislation of the old Commonwealth of England, and the legislation of these two countries at the present day, as any commercial man who understands the subject may see by comparing the one with the other.
The tariff of the Washington Congress is the most ignorant, useless, blundering and pernicious enactment that ever was concocted for the avowed purpose of bettering the interests of the country. On the contrary, the tariff of the Montgomery Congress is a sound, practical and intelligible measure, and as such it will command the admiration of the statesmen of England and France, and all the commercial nations of Europe. They will discover, from the comparison, that the art of government is with the South, and not with the North, and they will be guided by that conviction in their policy as regards the two sections.
For the last forty years a set of stockjobbers and speculators in the North, and especially in New York, New England and Pennsylvania, have been using Congress on this question of tariff and revenue for their own benefit, and for purely stockjobbing purposes, just precisely as they operate in the corner gatherings in Wall street; and they have readily found such men as Morrill, who represents some grogshop, hole and corner interest in Vermont, to do the business for them in Washington. The country has suffered many times from ill judged tariffs, got up to suit the stockjobbing and other individual interests, as, for example, from the tariff of 1828, which was settled in 1832, but not before it almost drove South Carolina into nullification and secession; and now that the negro agitation had driven intelligent and practical Southern members out of Congress, the abolitionists and stockjobbers got affairs into their own hands, and we see the result in this most iniquitous measure, the Morrill tariff.
The combined effects of these two tariffs must be to desolate the entire North, to stop its importations, cripple its commerce and turn its capital into another channel; for, although there is specie now lying idle in New York to the amount of nearly forty millions of dollars, and as much more in the other large cities, waiting for an opportunity of investment, it will be soon scattered all over the country, wherever the most available means of using it are presented, and it will be lost to the trade of this city and the other Northern states. There is nothing to be predicted of the combination of results produced by the Northern and Southern tariffs but general ruin to the commerce of the Northern confederacy. France and England, in view of these two measures, will find but little difficulty now in recognizing the independence of the Confederate States of the South. The statesmen of these nations care nothing for our eternal nigger question. Their own commercial interests abroad are all in all to them; and, indeed, upon the subject of negroes, both the American governments stand now upon an equal footing, inasmuch as the Southern, as well as the Northern, constitution prohibits the African slave trade.
The tariff of the South opens its ports upon fair and equitable terms to the manufacturers of foreign countries, which it were folly to suppose will not be eagerly availed of; which the stupid and suicidal tariff just adopted by the Northern Congress imposes excessive and almost prohibitory duties upon the same articles. Thus the combination of abolition fanatics and stockjobbers in Washington has reduced the whole North to the verge of ruin, which nothing can avert unless the administration recognizes the necessity of at once calling an extra session of Congress to repeal the Morrill tariff, and enact such measures as may bring back the seceded States, and reconstruct the Union upon terms of conciliation, justice and right.