I ignore nothing.
The "Union cause" was total war, as Lincoln was the CiC.
His ethnocentrism and aggressive motivations for conquering the CS are verifiable matters of recorded history, for those willing to doff the blinders of hero worship to see.
And the Confederate States' aggressive policies and blatant disregard of human rights and liberties are also verifiable matters of history. They deserved destruction for their policies, and lo and behold they got it. The entire motivation for the rebellion was the preservation of slavery. Claiming it was the tariff is a joke; the tariff in 1860 was at its lowest level in decades. If that was the reason, they'd have seceded long before. No, as I have already thoroughly demonstrated through the declarations of the Confederate governments in this thread, their motivation was chattel slavery, for which they deserve nothing but scorn from posterity.
And Lincoln ran on a platform of raising the tariff, and while it was Buchanan that signed the actual Morrill Tariff Lincoln certainly supported it.
Morrill Tariff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
As for the Declarations of Secession, how about South Carolina's Address to the Slaveholding States:
And so with the Southern States, towards the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress, is useless to protect them against unjust taxation; and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit, exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years, the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports, not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.
Address of South Carolina to Slaveholding States by Convention of South Carolina
Kevin, the South had already seceded when the Morrill Tariff was passed.
The previous Tariff of 1857 was quite favorable to the South; no doubt pre-secession, the Tariff talk played a role, but most of the reasons given were slavery related. As Rogue states correctly, the Tariffs had been historically low in 1860.
In the snippet you provide from the Dec. 1860 SC convention, yes, Taxation is addressed, but a better portion of it deals with how important their slaves were to them in the whole matter. In fact, in their actual
Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, pretty much most of it was about Slavery.
But to draw on your citation...a few paragraphs later from your quote above:
"[At the time the Constitution was written] There was then, no Tariff � no fanaticism concerning negroes.
It was the delegates from New England, who proposed in the Convention which framed the Constitution, to the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, that if they would agree to give Congress the power of regulating commerce by a majority, that they would support the extension of the African Slave Trade for twenty years.
African Slavery, existed in all the States, but one. The idea, that the Southern States would be made to pay that tribute to their Northern confederates, which they had refused to pay to Great Britain; or that the institution of African slavery, would be made the grand basis of a sectional organization of the North to rule the South, never crossed the imaginations of our ancestors. The Union of the Constitution, was a union of slaveholding States. It rests on slavery, by prescribing a Representation in Congress for three�fifths of our slaves."
The believed the Union
rested on Slavery. They believed the Founders never could have
imagined any proposed abolition of the system of bondage and their way of life.
"But if African slavery in the Southern States, be the evil their political combination affirms it to be, the requisitions of an inexorable logic, must lead them to emancipation. If it is right, to preclude or abolish slavery in a territory�why should it be allowed to remain in the States? The one is not at all more unconstitutional than the other, according to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. And when it is considered, that the Northern States will soon have the power to make that Court what they please, and that the Constitution has never been any barrier whatever to their exercise of power�what check can there be, in the unrestrained councils of the North, to emancipation?
In Ironies of Ironies, above they cite the Dred Scott decision,
the one that states even Free Blacks could never be and never were Citizens of this country. ..
More than of third of the populace of the South were Non-Citizens, yet they carry on about Freedom and Liberty, Contentment and Happiness:
"Indeed, no people ever expect to preserve its rights and liberties, unless these be in its own custody. To plunder and oppress, where plunder and oppression can be practiced with impunity, seems to be the natural order of things. The fairest portions of the world elsewhere, have been turned into wilderness; and the most civilized and prosperous communities, have been impoverished and ruined by anti�slavery fanaticism. ...
The very object of all Constitutions, in free popular Government, is to restrain the majority. Constitutions, therefore, according to their theory, must be most unrighteous inventions, restricting liberty.
....Contentment, is a great element of happiness, with nations as with individuals. We, are satisfied with ours.
What they were concerned about, more than anything, was losing their free labor and subjugating their Non-Citizens, their Africans :
"We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor�by which our population doubles every twenty years�by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land�by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world, where the white man cannot labor, are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African..."
Second, since unlike some people around here I'm not a dishonest fucktard, the Union had been invading the Confederacy since 1861, but the Slave Power's partisans had been cutting off great swathes of United States territory since 1860 and if that's not enough for you had begun shooting at United States-flagged ships and U.S. federal forts before the federal government even called out the militia. Third, it was Southern aggression that had driven the government-rending controversy in the first place for the previous three decades at least. I conclusively proved this in no uncertain terms in the opening post of this thread, and you think you can dismiss it all with a one-liner about the late stages of the war? 
