Before income tax, custom duties (or tariffs) provided revenue for the United States government.
Carey lumped together the duties paid by New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut from 1791 until 1810: $10, 591,000.[1]
From 1791 until 1810 Maryland paid $17, 831,000; Virginia paid $11,580,000 and South Carolina paid $11,894,000.[2]
The commercial states of Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania paid more during the same period. Massachusetts paid $38,407,000; New York, the leader, paid $57,215,000 and Pennsylvania paid $37,305,000. [3]
While all the states of New England paid $48,998,000 their total duties do not come close to that of New York. Carey failed to include the figures for Georgia and New Orleans. The figures he provided did prove that even using duties as a measure of commerce, New England was not pre-eminent.
Carey argued that Southerners and Westerners were the most capable congressmen. The middle states rarely elected “respectable figures.” While New England sometimes sent talented representatives to Congress, New England, he wrote, had fewer accomplished politicians than Virginia, South Carolina or Kentucky.[4]
Carey wrote “Among the features of the present crisis, the most lamentable one is, that she cannot suffer the punishment due to her folly, her arrogance, her restlessness, her faction, her Jacobinism, her anti-Washingtonism, without inflicting an equal degree of misfortune on her innocent neighbors.”[5]
Why specie flowed to New England
Look for it Monday, July 1
