Yes, the tariff argument is a crock.
It is not a crock, and it is not simply about Tariffs. Tariffs were only one part of the problem. The other part of the problem had to do with New York Skimming off 40% of all Southern produced goods profits.
The South paid 3/4ths of all the tariffs which funded the US Government. The 4 Million Southern Citizens were paying 3/4s of the bill, while the Northern 20 million people were only paying 25% of the cost.
But worse than that was the laws jiggered to not only protect northern industry, but also to subsidize it with the taxes the South was paying into the treasury.
The people who say it is a crock, simply haven't looked at the real numbers underpinning the point.
And the idea that the North was envious of the wealth of the South is equally ridiculous.
I'm sure there was some of that, but the Merchanitlists of the North were more interested in continuing to intercept the profits they were making off of those South produced exports.
At the start of the war, the gross industrial output of New York state alone was greater than that of the entire South. The cotton industry was rapidly being dwarfed by heavy industry mainly located above the M-D line.
While that is undoubtedly true, it is an irrelevant point. Just because Northern Industrialists were making money in the North manufacturing and selling Domestic products, (To a Captive Market in the South because of Federal protectionism) the Shipping, Insurance, Warehousing and Banking Industries of New York were making quite a lot of money exporting Southern Agriculture products and Importing European goods in payment for them.
The notion that the Northern Robber Barons would simply let go of a significant portion of their economic interests is just silly. Sure they may have made more money running factories, but they still wanted that import/export money too.
There were the Ordinances of Secession that made (keeping) slavery their main point.
And now we are going to that misdirection of focusing on why the Southern states left, (as they had the right to do for whatever reason) instead of why the Norther states thought they had a right to force them back in.
The Armies of the North did not invade the South because the South had slavery. Everyone knew the South had slavery for at least the last "Four Score and Seven Years." The Union Armies invaded the South to stop economic independence from the Union, not to stop slavery.
You want to focus on the South's reasons for leaving instead of the North's reasons for fighting because when looked at objectively, your argument doesn't stand up very well.
What you are in fact trying to do is use the Union's actions nearly two years after the fact, to justify their initial invasion. You are trying to make the subsequent effect justify the cause. You are deliberately trying to reverse cause and effect.
The Union didn't invade to free the slaves. They invaded to subjugate the Southerners, and when the fight became bitter, they incidentally freed the slaves as a war tactic and possibly to permanently damage their previous economic rival.
