Let the South Adopt the Free-Trade System and the North’s Commerce Must Be Reduced to Less Than Half What It Now Is

In the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers were openly associated with one political party or another, and numerous Republican newspapers in the North had been calling for the bombardment of the Southern ports in order to destroy the South’s free-trade policy long before Fort Sumter.

On December 10, 1860, the Daily Chicago Times candidly admitted that the tariff was indeed a tool used by Northerners for the purpose of plundering the South. The editor of the newspaper warned that the benefits of this political plunder would be threatened by the existence of free trade in the South:

The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole . . . we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually. 

 “Let the South adopt the free-trade system,” the Chicago paper ominously warned, and the North’s “commerce must be reduced to less than half what it now is.” In addition “[o]ur labor could not compete . . . with the labor of Europe” and “a large portion of our shipping interest would pass into the hands of the South,” leading to “very general bankruptcy and ruin.” . . .

The Newark Daily Advertiser was clearly aware that the free-trade doctrines of Adam Smith had taken a strong hold in England, France, and the Southern states. On April 2, 1861, the paper warned that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade” and that they “might be willing to go . . . toward free trade with the European powers,” which “must operate to the serious disadvantage of the North,” as “commerce will be largely diverted to the Southern cities.” “We apprehend,” the New Jersey editorialists wrote, that “the chief instigator of the present troubles—South Carolina—have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of free trade,” and must be stopped by “the closing of the ports” by military force.

—Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), 242-243.