Posted on 01/20/2014 1:42:16 PM PST by mhutcheson
Point game match to Rustbucket.
The years after proved more important.
By 1860 the protectionists had a solid majority in the House of Representatives. This majority was also strictly sectional. The northerners voted in near unanimity for the Morrill tariff while the southerners opposed it in equally unified form. The northerners outnumbered the southerners in the House, meaning it passed with a large majority.
The US House passed the Morill tariff on May 10, 1860. The bill passed by a vote of 105 to 64, and that was before secession.
To say that it was secession that enabled the Morrill Tariff to pass the Senate in 1861 is not true.
The senate was a slightly different situation in 1860 but its tide had shifted by 1861.
Even if one assumes that every single seceded state's senators had (a) remained and (b) voted against the Morrill act, they still would not have been able to muster enough votes to defeat the thing.
In the absolute best case voting scenario that could have occurred under the senate that took office in 1861, the best that the southerners could manage would be a tie vote, in which case VP Hanibal Hamlin would cast a tiebreaker in favor of the north and the tariff would pass.
The southerners recognized this fact almost immediately after the 1860 elections and publicly stated so.
Hopefully that is clear enough to you to not be ‘cryptic’.
I see you've met Pea. He'll deny that the sun rises in the east if he's contrived some way to prove it puts the north in the wrong.
The Truth About Abraham Lincoln
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-W5fGCAzOk
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