Imagining "A Great Manufacturing Empire": Virginia and the Possibilities of a Confederate Tariff

Confederate support for free trade seems incontestable. The long movement for Southern independence began, after all, in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33, which revolved around South Carolina's resistance to the "Tariff of Abominations." For the rest of the antebellum period, Southern economists, politicians, and editors frequently argued that protective tariffs transferred hundreds of millions of dollars from Southern planters to Northern manufacturers. South Carolina's 1860 "Address to the People of the Slaveholding States," for example, bitterly complained that Southerners had been taxed to support "Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufacturers." The great transfer of wealth—likened to the unjust taxation of the British Parliament in the Colonial period—"made the cities of the South provincial. Their growth is paralyzed; whilst they are mere suburbs of Northern cities." ¹ When the Confederacy formulated its new Constitution in April 1861, it reinforced its free trade image by prohibiting "any duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations to be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry." With the passage of the Confederate revenue tariff of 15 percent the following summer—significantly lower than U.S. tariffs in the antebellum period— "the issue of the protective tariff was laid to rest, as far as the Confederacy was concerned." ²

The image of a South devoted to free trade, however powerful at first glance, ignores a crucial point that was not lost to contemporaries: the Confederacy lowered tariff rates, but vastly increased the number of dutiable goods by changing the geographical scope of the nation-state. ³ Under the Confederacy, Northern goods once considered part of the domestic trade suddenly were redefined as foreign goods. A Confederate tariff, no matter how low, might result in a radical change in trade patterns; hundreds of millions of dollars of Northern goods would be stopped at the Confederate border, stored in special warehouses, inspected by Confederate customs officers, and then taxed a specified percentage of their value. How did Confederates view this potentially massive disruption of trade between North and South? Did Southerners fear the consequences of altering long-established trade relations, or did they see it as an opportunity?

The debates over tariffs in Confederate Virginia provide an excellent starting point for answering these questions. With a total population of more than 1.2 million in 1860, Virginia was the largest slave state in the Union. Although still largely rural, its economy nevertheless contained a small manufacturing sector located in cities such as Richmond, Petersburg, and Alexandria. The seven cotton states that initially formed the Confederacy in February 1861 ardently desired to incorporate Virginia's land, people, and wealth into their new nation. How the cotton states sought to entice the Old Dominion into the Southern Confederacy—and how Virginia's secessionists sought to persuade the state's large contingent of Unionists—opens a window into the Confederate political economy. Virginia secessionists and their cotton state allies, after all, would have to make concrete predictions about the economic vitality of the Confederacy. The consequences of a Confederate tariff—a potential means of altering the trading patterns of North America and perhaps the entire Atlantic world—became a central issue as Virginia secessionists imagined their new economic world.

This analysis of Virginia seeks to complicate the Confederacy's unequivocal support of free trade. Virginia secessionists eagerly endorsed a Confederate "revenue tariff" that also would provide "incidental" protection, giving manufacturers in the Old Dominion an important advantage over Northern competitors. Secessionists argued that a Confederate tariff would accelerate Virginia's industrialization by classifying Northern products as dutiable foreign goods. Safely protected from more efficient Northern competitors, Virginia would give Southerners the industrial muscle they needed to sustain political independence. Far from conceiving their state as part of an agrarian nation committed to staple-crop agriculture, Virginians envisioned a Confederacy filled with...