At its birth in 1776, the United States was a small agrarian confederation strung along the eastern seaboard of North America, huddled hard by the Appalachian range. The northern and southern states were divided not only by the peculiar institution of slavery, but also by deep and abiding differences in trade policy. It is not much of an exaggeration to consider the fight over tariffs equal to that over abolition as a cause of the Civil War. Only a minority of southerners owned slaves, and an even smaller minority of northerners were abolitionists, but nearly all Americans either consumed or
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