<P> The Democrats in Congress, controlled by Southerners, wrote the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates so that the 1857 rates were the lowest since 1816 . The Whigs and Republicans complained because they favored high tariffs to stimulate industrial growth, and Republicans called for an increase in tariffs in the 1860 election . The increases were only enacted in 1861 after Southerners resigned their seats in Congress . The tariff issue was and is sometimes cited--long after the war--by Lost Cause historians and neo-Confederate apologists . In 1860--61 none of the groups that proposed compromises to head off secession raised the tariff issue . Pamphleteers North and South rarely mentioned the tariff, and when some did, for instance, Matthew Fontaine Maury and John Lothrop Motley, they were generally writing for a foreign audience . </P> <P> The South argued that each state had the right to secede--leave the Union--at any time, that the Constitution was a "compact" or agreement among the states . Northerners (including President Buchanan) rejected that notion as opposed to the will of the Founding Fathers who said they were setting up a perpetual union . Historian James McPherson writes concerning states' rights and other non-slavery explanations: </P> <P> While one or more of these interpretations remain popular among the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other Southern heritage groups, few professional historians now subscribe to them . Of all these interpretations, the states' - rights argument is perhaps the weakest . It fails to ask the question, states' rights for what purpose? States' rights, or sovereignty, was always more a means than an end, an instrument to achieve a certain goal more than a principle . </P> <P> Between 1803 and 1854, the United States achieved a vast expansion of territory through purchase, negotiation, and conquest . At first, the new states carved out of these territories entering the union were apportioned equally between slave and free states . It was over territories west of the Mississippi that the proslavery and antislavery forces collided . </P>

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