Rebellion Record: Introduction., Volume 1.
Frank Moore, Ed.

---

[26] should under constitutional limitations be done where it is required, offsetting the local benefit which may accrue from the expenditure made in one place and for one object, with the local benefit from the same source, in some other place for some other object. More money was expended by the United States in removing the Indians from Georgia, eight or ten times as much was expended for the same object in Florida, as has been paid for Fishing Bounties in seventy years. For the last year, to pay for the expense of the post-office in the seceding States, and enable our fellow-citizens there to enjoy the comforts of a newspaper and letter mail to the same extent as they are enjoyed in the other States, three millions of dollars were paid from the common Treasury. The post-office bounty paid to the seceding States exceeded seventeen fold the annual average amount of the Fishing Bounty paid to the North. In four years that excess would equal the sum total of the amount paid since 1792 in bounties to the deep-sea fishery! This circumstance probably explains the fact, that the pride of the Southern Confederacy was not alarmed at having the mails still conveyed by the United States, three or four months after the forts had been seized, the arsenals emptied, and the mints plundered.

---

Navigation laws.

The second of the grievances under which the South is laboring, and which, according to Mr. Stephens, was on the occasion alluded to pleaded by the Secretary of State of the new Confederacy as a ground for dissolving the Union, is the Navigation Laws, which give to American vessels the exclusive enjoyment of our own coasting trade. This also is a policy coeval with the Government of the United States, and universally adopted by maritime powers, though relaxed by England within the last few years. Like the fishing bounty, it is a policy adopted for the purpose of fostering the commercial and with that the naval marine of the United States. All administrations of all parties have favored it; under its influence our commercial tonnage has grown up to be second to no other in the world, and our navy has proved itself adequate to all the exigencies of peace and war. And are these no objects in a national point of view? Are the seceding politicians really insensible to interests of such paramount national importance? Can they, for the sake of an imaginary infinitesimal reduction of coastwise freights, be willing to run even the risk of impairing our naval prosperity? Are they insensible to the fact that nothing but the growth of the American commercial marine protects the entire freighting interest of the country, in which the South is more deeply interested than the North, from European monopoly? The South did not always take so narrow a view of the subject. When the Constitution was framed, and the American Merchant Marine was inconsiderable, the discrimination in favor of United States vessels, which then extended to the foreign trade, was an object of some apprehension on the part of the planting States. But there were statesmen in the South at that day, who did not regard the shipping interest as a local concern. “So far,” said Mr. Edward Rutledge, in the South Carolina Convention of 1788, “from not preferring the Northern States by a navigation act, it would be politic to increase their strength by every means in our power; for we had no other resource in our day of danger than in the naval force of our Northern friends, nor could we ever expect to become a great nation till we were powerful on the waters.” ¹ But “powerful ”