Rebellion Record: Introduction., Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

---

“ [27] on the waters” the South can never be. She has live oak, naval stores, and gallant officers; but her climate and its diseases, the bars at the mouth of nearly all her harbors, the Teredo, the want of a merchant marine and of fisheries, and the character of her laboring population, will forever prevent her becoming a great naval power. Without the protection of the Navy of the United States, of which the strength centres at the North, she would hold the ingress and egress of every port on her coast at the mercy, I will not say of the great maritime States of Europe, but of Holland, and Denmark, and Austria, and Spain--of any second or third-rate power, which can keep a few steam frigates at sea.

It must be confessed, however, that there is a sad congruity between the conduct of our seceding fellow-citizens and the motives which they assign for it. They attempt a suicidal separation of themselves from a great naval power, of which they are now an integral part, and they put forward, as the reason for this self-destructive course, the legislative measures which have contributed to the growth of the navy. A judicious policy designed to promote that end has built up the commercial and military marine of the Union to its present commanding stature and power; the South, though unable to contribute any thing to its prosperity but the service of her naval officers, enjoys her full share of the honor which it reflects on the country, and the protection which it extends to our flag, our coasts, and our commerce, but under the influence of a narrow-minded sectional jealousy, she is willing to abdicate the noble position which she now fills among the nations of the earth; to depend for her very existence on the exigencies of the cotton market, to live upon the tolerance of the navies of Europe, and she assigns as leading causes for this amazing fatuity, that the Northern fisheries have been encouraged by a trifling bounty, and that the Northern commercial marine has the monopoly of the coastwise trade. And the politicians, who, for reasons like these, almost too frivolous to merit the time we have devoted to their examination, are sapping a noble framework of government, and drenching a fair and but for them prosperous country in blood, appeal to the public opinion of mankind for the justice of their cause, and the purity of their motives, and lift their eyes to Heaven for a blessing on their arms!

---

The tariff.

But the tariff is, with one exception, the alleged monster wrong — for which South Carolina in 1832 drove the Union to the verge of a civil war, and which, next to the slavery question, the South has been taught to regard as the most grievous of the oppressions which she suffers at the hands of the North, and that by which she seeks to win the sympathy of the manufacturing States of Europe. It was so treated in the debate referred to. I am certainly not going so far to abuse your patience, as to enter into a discussion of the constitutionality or expediency of the protective policy, on which I am aware that opinions at the North differ, nor do I deem it necessary to expose the utter fallacy of the monstrous paradox, that duties, enhancing the price of imported articles, are paid, not by the consumer of the merchandise imported, but by the producer of the last article of export given in exchange. It is sufficient to say that for this maxim, (the forty-bale theory so called,) which has grown into an article of faith at the South, not the slightest authority ever has been, to my knowledge, adduced from any political economist of any school. Indeed, it can be shown to be a shallow sophism, inasmuch as the consumer