The French classical economist Frédéric Bastiat once remarked, “when goods do not cross borders, armies will.” Democratic Senator James Hammond of South Carolina infamously agreed with those sentiments on March 4, 1858, nearly eight years after Bastiat’s death. In a speech before the Senate, Hammond offered the following on sectional tensions and the cotton trade:
“But we have nothing to do but to take off restrictions on foreign merchandise and open our ports, and the whole world will come to us to trade…and we [the South] never shall dream of a war… You dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
Some people today turn to Bastiat’s dictum about free trade when discussing the Civil War. Their argument goes this way. The path to peacefully resolving sectional tensions lay in ending protectionism. Tariffs, by transferring southern wealth northward, incentivized southern secession. And, the North’s refusal to let the South leave the Union cost 600,000 lives and set dangerous precedents for centralized government power.
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