History of the United States I / Unit 10 USH1 1359 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Tariff of Abominations
The idea
Southerners held that the federal government favoured one region, the North, over another, the South. Northern manufacturing was expanding while the South relied on imports, so the South bore the heaviest burden of a tax on imported goods. They named the eighteen twenty-eight measure the Tariff of Abominations.
In practice
A region paying more for manufactured goods so that another region's factories could grow.
Where people slip
The anchor states the deeper fear outright, and it is not economic. The tariff suggested to southerners that the federal government would unilaterally take steps that hurt the South, and that slavery could come under attack from a hostile northern majority in Congress. The tariff argument is never only about the tariff. It is a rehearsal of the argument about slavery, conducted in a safer vocabulary.
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Builds on
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