The tariff in 1860 was at historically low levels.
Obviously Lincoln's election meant high tariffs, really economic warfare against the South.
Prove it. Oh wait,
you can't. By the same argument, having no tariff or a token one amounted to economic warfare against the North, since it permitted European industry to outcompete it with already established manufacturing, but you didn't see the Upper Midwest seceding in the 1840s. Clearly, tariff policy wasn't enough to spur such an immediate and decisive reaction and we need another reason. Fortunately, the secessionists considerately provided it for us: The preservation of slavery.
Thomas DiLorenzo is an agenda-driven hack,
lol All you have is name-calling. Don't be so subservient to the academic establishment. African American scholars and libertarian scholars have demolished the Lincoln myth.
No, that's not all I have; you cut out the bit where I said
why. You should stop cherrypicking; it's unbecoming.
And there are valid economic policy reasons for doing so. Further, impeding Southern agriculture could only be good, because Southern agriculture was what drove demand for slaves and thus underpinned slavery as a whole. What's your point?
Thanks for posting those links. They really help to prove my point!
You may want to read the rest before you say that, Skippy.
Let's look at the declaration from Georgia:
Yes, let's: "The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our
non-slave-holding confederate States
with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin.
It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government,
anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state."
It's what they went to first. In the document right up front they say that everything else is incidental.
How about the other ones you ignored?
Mississippi: "In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and
a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but
submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."
Just for fun, Mississippi continued: "It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain."
So much for the state rights fantasy; they weren't concerned with it in the least except as a tool to advance their own interests. When free states wished to impede the operation of federal law to hinder slavery, their own doctrine became inconvenient and was abandoned at first opportunity.
Texas: "Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings.
She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean,
for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States."
"Waaaaaah, they won't let us keep beating our slaves!"
Also note: The idea that they were going to let slavery die out on its own continues to be pure fantasy.
South Carolina: "In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed.
But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.
In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York
even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation. "
Their complaint is again focused around personal liberty laws in the free states which mandated jury trials for men accused of being escaped slaves before deportation - laws which were overridden by Congress in a roughshod manner in amendments to the Fugitive Slave Act, effectively allowing any slaveholder to come into a free state, point to a black man, say "he was my slave," and haul him south in chains with no legal recourse. This federal provision had not in fact been repealed, so I can only presume they refer to the fear that the Lincoln government would repeal it.
Stephens: "But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other-though last, not least:
the new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split."
He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day.
Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world,
based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
You know, I think that stands for itself.
Just look at the documents you linked to.
I have.
So you don't believe in democracy? Don't be shy, give us a yes or no answer.
Yes, of course I believe in it. It clearly exists or has existed, but polling the whole citizenry on every issue is both wholly inefficient and, absent a constitution, is simply mob rule. Since the United States (thankfully) is a constitutional republic and has not and never has been a democracy, however, I fail to see the relevance of the question.
For a republic to function, elections must be sacrosanct, and the ability to freely secede in response to losing an election would rapidly balkanize any republic that tried to function in that manner.
Ridiculous. Many states (Ireland, Slovakia, etc.) have established independence without rapid balkanization. Isn't local rule preferable - more responsive to the will of the people?
That depends on circumstance. Clearly local Southern rule wasn't more responsive to the will of the people, since it kept four million of those people enslaved against their will. QED.
Under no circumstances are firing on a nation's armed forces and flagged ships "trivial."
These sort of provocations can be ignored by leaders who don't love war. For example, Cuban anti-aircraft gunners fired on U.S. planes in October 1962, but Kennedy didn't start a war. Too bad Kennedy wasn't always so wise.
You seem to think the pride of the central government is more important than all those lives.
Again you are unable to answer the question: If Lincoln had not decided to invade the South at Bull Run would there have been a war?
Yep. A good thing too, since the Slave Power was both evil and carving away a huge portion of U.S. territory. This isn't about the pride of the central government; it was about the survival of the nation. To be perfectly clear, we have established that the Confederate government was, in so many words, based upon the idea that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery is his natural and moral condition. It only existed to preserve and perpetuate that condition. Such a government deserves destruction no matter who is doing it. War is an ugly thing, but it isn't the ugliest of things.
Everything Lincoln did that could be found objectionable (in fact everything he did, since the conflict was underway when he took office) falls under the war power of the government. Take away the war, and what do you have? Maybe legislation restricting the expansion of slavery into the territories and an otherwise unremarkable presidency (probably punctuated with demands from the Slave Power that the United States conquer Cuba in order to create a new slave state from it). And there was only war because the Slave Power, in its childish tantrum over the predictable result of not getting a Democratic president after it intentionally split the ticket, made it so.
