Within the next several days, barring intervention from Congress, the Biden Regime, in violation of the law, will remove the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery

Here is some additional info on the "political and section bitterness" swirling around the Gadsden Purchase and a proposed southern transcontinental rail route.

Yes, thanks. Davis in the thick of it. The future President of the Confederate States certainly had delusions of grandeur and gold fever. One might think he was motivated simply by greed and money!

Concur...Happy Holidays...

Likewise, I’m sure.

Yet the CSA did not annex those territories nor did the seceding states make any claim to the Western territories when they seceded.

In fact, the Confederacy did claim the Southern part of the New Mexico Territory as their Arizona Territory.

That is why there was fighting there during the Civil War.

"Our people hate the Negro with a perfect if not a supreme hatred,' said Congressman George Julian of Indiana.

One can find any number of quotes by ordinary soldiers and citizens that express a different view.

Sgt. James Jessee, Eighth Illinois, diary entry, December 31, 1863: “As sure as God is God and right is right, so sure may we look for the war to end... in the accomplishment of its glorious object, ... the liberation of this oppressed and down trodden race... I would prefer ten years war yet and no more slavery, than Peace tomorrow, with slavery. Such is my abhorance of that Barbarous institution.” [Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, p. 119]

John P. Jones to his wife, August 24, 1862: "I am getting to be more and more of an abolitionist. I believe that this accursed institution must go down. We can never have a permanent peace as long … as this curse stains our otherwise fair insignia. The ruler of nations can never prosper these United States until it blots slavery from existence. He can no longer wink at such atrocities. This must be the grand, the final issue. I hope the powers that be will soon see it and act accordingly. It may be that we have not suffered enough yet, that the bones of a few more thousands of soldiers must bleach in the dismal swamps of the south, that a few more homes must be desolated, that suffering and desolation be more widely sown throughout the land, but come it must, postpone it as we may. Thank God a few bright spots are luring up in the distant horizon, small it is true. But they will expand and grow brighter. We are to guard rebel property no more, and fugitives are no longer to be returned when they come within our lines. Thank God the American Soldier is no longer to be used as a slave catcher, no longer to drive helpless women around at the point of the bayonet, and be obliged to obey orders that makes him almost ashamed of being an American Soldier.” [Donald Benham Civil War Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress]

I give you a few quotes and you give me back a mess of quotations from secession advocates, and their Northern and British allies, the sort of thing politicians and propagandists are always saying without any regard for the truth. And the quotes are spread out over years of history without any context.

*

James Spence might have had a point if he was writing during the American Civil War, as he apparently was. The very high war tariffs may well have affected British ability and willingness to buy American goods. But in earlier years with a tariff of 17% this wouldn’t have been a great factor. Britain’s plan had been to abolish British tariffs, buy cheap foreign raw materials, and flood the world with British manufactures. Other countries didn’t want to play along, and they were right not to. No country that hoped to preserve or develop its own industries would have thrown their borders open to British goods.

*

“Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty free,” wrote the New York Times.

Which country? There would be two of them. The border would be a tense one. Tariffs would be imposed on goods coming up from New Orleans to the Western states. Smuggling would involve breaking up goods into concealable packages, and some goods could not be broken down.

*

“Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, ‘to fire the Southern Heart’ and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation”

Out of context. The author goes on to say, “If the nullification of 1832 had become an active rebellion, the tariff would not have been the cause of the war, but only the pretext for it.” In the writer’s view, Southern politicians desire for power was the root of the war, not slavery, but also not the tariff or economics: “It is the inordinate political ambition of the Southern politicians which is the cause of the rebellion, — slavery being only a remote agency, as it fosters and develops that ambition, and furnishes it with a subject for agitation ...”

*

“[T]he South, in four staples alone, has exported produce, since the Revolution, to the value of eight hundred millions of dollars; and the North has exported comparatively nothing. Such an export would indicate unparalleled wealth, but what is the fact?”

This is the “have your cake and eat it too” theory of economics. Money circulates. It’s used to buy things and then it isn’t there. While the Southern states exported much to Britain and Europe, they also “imported” much from the North. In effect, they had a negative “balance of payments” with the North. Northerners then had money to import goods from abroad and pay taxes on them. Plantation owners complained about the fees involved in cotton exportation, but they would not have gotten easier credit and insurance terms from British or European merchants.

*

“You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and our institutions.”

Turn it around. Congressman Reagan’s real complaint isn’t his litany of real and invented economic complaints, it’s the “relentless crusade” against slavery. That’s the climax his rhetoric is building up to and the thing that really motivates him.

*

“Secession, southerners argued, would ‘liberate’ the South and produce the kind of balanced economy that was proving so successful in the North and so unachievable in the South.”

A twentieth century opinion. The trend of the other remarks you cite and of secessionist argumentation at the time was that the South was a rural region that would happily provide raw materials to Britain in exchange for manufactured goods. There was a wish to remain agricultural and a belief that the South could. See Senator James Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech if you still think Wigfall was an outlier (Wigfall was certainly eccentric in his personality, but not in his preference for an agrarian slave-based society). Some of the elite looked forward to building up industry, but that was a minority opinion. If there were real conflicts between slavery and industrialization, that was recognized by people at the time and the choice was made in favor of the agriculture and slavery.

*

Stephen Colwell’s 1861 book “The Five Cotton States and New York” provides a good rebuttal of secessionist economic arguments.

*

Another startling find:
Did Tariffs Really Cause the American Civil War?
https://mises.org/wire/did-tariffs-really-cause-american-civil-war

Mises.org has been a hotbed of the “Tariffs caused the Civil War” nonsense, but they had the honesty to put up an article that rebuts that theory.

*

Here’s what Laurence Keitt, a US and then a CS Congressman, said at South Carolina’s secession convention:

“But the Tariff is not the question which brought the people up to their present attitude. We are to give a summary of our causes to the world, but mainly to the other Southern States, whose co-action we wish, and we must not make a fight on the Tariff question. ...

“African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism. . . . The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.”

*

“Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it” Laurence Keitt (Charleston, South Carolina, Courier, Dec. 22, 1860)

In fact, the Confederacy did claim the Southern part of the New Mexico Territory as their Arizona Territory. That is why there was fighting there during the Civil War.

We've gone over this before. The Southern states made no claim until after Lincoln started a war. Once a war was on, all bets were off.

One can find any number of quotes by ordinary soldiers and citizens that express a different view. Sgt. James Jessee, Eighth Illinois, diary entry, December 31, 1863: “As sure as God is God and right is right, so sure may we look for the war to end... in the accomplishment of its glorious object, ... the liberation of this oppressed and down trodden race... I would prefer ten years war yet and no more slavery, than Peace tomorrow, with slavery. Such is my abhorance of that Barbarous institution.” [Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, p. 119] John P. Jones to his wife, August 24, 1862: "I am getting to be more and more of an abolitionist. I believe that this accursed institution must go down. We can never have a permanent peace as long … as this curse stains our otherwise fair insignia. The ruler of nations can never prosper these United States until it blots slavery from existence. He can no longer wink at such atrocities. This must be the grand, the final issue. I hope the powers that be will soon see it and act accordingly. It may be that we have not suffered enough yet, that the bones of a few more thousands of soldiers must bleach in the dismal swamps of the south, that a few more homes must be desolated, that suffering and desolation be more widely sown throughout the land, but come it must, postpone it as we may. Thank God a few bright spots are luring up in the distant horizon, small it is true. But they will expand and grow brighter. We are to guard rebel property no more, and fugitives are no longer to be returned when they come within our lines. Thank God the American Soldier is no longer to be used as a slave catcher, no longer to drive helpless women around at the point of the bayonet, and be obliged to obey orders that makes him almost ashamed of being an American Soldier.” [Donald Benham Civil War Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress]

OK if you want to play this game......

"The Indiana constitutional convention of 1851 adopted a provision forbidding black migration into the state. This supplemented the state's laws barring blacks already there from voting, serving on juries or in the militia, testifying against whites in court, marrying whites, or going to school with whites. Iowa and Illinois had similar laws on the books and banned black immigration by statute in 1851 and 1853 respectively. These measures reflected the racist sentiments of most whites in those states." (McPherson, Ordeal By Fire, p. 80)

"There can be no doubt that many blacks were sorely mistreated in the North and West. Observers like Fanny Kemble and Frederick L. Olmsted mentioned incidents in their writings. Kemble said of Northern blacks, 'They are not slaves indeed, but they are pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own despised race. . . . All hands are extended to thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues . . . have learned to turn the very name of their race into an insult and a reproach.' Olmsted seems to have believed the Louisiana black who told him that they could associate with whites more freely in the South than in the North and that he preferred to live in the South because he was less likely to be insulted there." (John Franklin and Alfred Moss, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000, p. 185.

"For all the good intentions of many early white abolitionists, blacks were not especially welcome in the free states of America. Several territories and states, such as Ohio, not only refused to allow slavery but also had passed laws specifically limiting or excluding any blacks from entering its territory or owning property." (Davis, Don't Know Much About the Civil War, p. 54)

". . . discouragement was deepened by the outcome of three Northern state referendums in the fall of 1865. The legislatures of Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota placed on the ballot constitutional amendments to enfranchise the few black men in those states. Everyone recognized that, in some measure, the popular vote on these amendments would serve as a barometer of Northern opinion on black suffrage. . . . Republican leaders worked for passage of the amendments but fell short of success in all three states. . . . the defeat of the amendments could be seen as a mandate against black suffrage by a majority of Northern voters." (McPherson, Ordeal By Fire, p. 501)

"Numerous [Union] army officials who advocated the use of black troops viewed Negroes as little more than cannon fodder. 'For my part,' announced an officer stationed in South Carolina, 'I make bold to say that I am not so fastidious as to object to a negro being food for powder and I would arm every man of them.' Governor Israel Washburn of Maine agreed. 'Why have our rulers so little regard for the true and brave white men of the north?' asked Washburn. 'Will they continue to sacrifice them? Why will they refuse to save them by employing black men? . . . Why are our leaders unwilling that Sambo should save white boys?'" (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, p. 93)

"In the first half of the nineteenth century, state legislatures in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut took away Negroes' right to vote; and voters in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Maine, Iowa, and Wisconsin approved new constitutions that limited suffrage to whites. In Ohio, Negro males were permitted to vote only if they had "a greater visible admixture of white than colored blood." (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, p. 54)

"Lincoln remained unmoved. . . . 'I think Sumner [abolitionist Charles Sumner] and the rest of you would upset our applecart altogether if you had your way,' he told the Radicals. . . . 'We didn't go into this war to put down slavery . . . and to act differently at this moment would, I have no doubt, not only weaken our cause, but smack of bad faith.' Vindication of the president's view came a few weeks later, when the Massachusetts state Republican convention--perhaps the most Radical party organization in the North--defeated a resolution endorsing Fremont's proclamation." (Klingaman, Abraham Lincoln and the Road to Emancipation, pp. 75-76,

Abolition was not popular in the North until very late in the war.

I give you a few quotes and you give me back a mess of quotations from secession advocates, and their Northern and British allies, the sort of thing politicians and propagandists are always saying without any regard for the truth. And the quotes are spread out over years of history without any context.

You give me quotes and I give you quotes saying the opposite. Several of them were from Northern newspapers which were most definitely not "secession advocates". You trying to dismiss them is done without regard for the truth.

James Spence might have had a point if he was writing during the American Civil War, as he apparently was. The very high war tariffs may well have affected British ability and willingness to buy American goods. But in earlier years with a tariff of 17% this wouldn’t have been a great factor. Britain’s plan had been to abolish British tariffs, buy cheap foreign raw materials, and flood the world with British manufactures. Other countries didn’t want to play along, and they were right not to. No country that hoped to preserve or develop its own industries would have thrown their borders open to British goods.

Britain's tariffs at that time were quite low. You say 17% tariffs are "low" but that is only in comparison to what they had been before and the sky high Morrill Tariff which spurred the Southern states to secede. The Confederate Constitution only allowed for a revenue tariff which was commonly understood to mean a maximum of 10%. So 17% was quite a bit higher than the Southern states themselves had in mind.

Which country? There would be two of them. The border would be a tense one. Tariffs would be imposed on goods coming up from New Orleans to the Western states. Smuggling would involve breaking up goods into concealable packages, and some goods could not be broken down.

No doubt there would have been smuggling to avoid the tariff.

This is the “have your cake and eat it too” theory of economics. Money circulates. It’s used to buy things and then it isn’t there. While the Southern states exported much to Britain and Europe, they also “imported” much from the North. In effect, they had a negative “balance of payments” with the North. Northerners then had money to import goods from abroad and pay taxes on them. Plantation owners complained about the fees involved in cotton exportation, but they would not have gotten easier credit and insurance terms from British or European merchants.

Yes they imported from the North....at higher prices thanks to the tariff. Without the tariff they could have imported from abroad at much lower prices. The North did not import much from abroad, Southerners did the importing to fill the holds of the ships they had contracted to carry their goods to Europe for the return journey. The North was making quite a bit of money servicing Southern exports. Had the banking, insurance, shipping and Factors (ie wholesalers) been in the Southern states which they definitely would have been post secession, that would have kept a lot of money and jobs in the Southern states. Northern newspapers made this point several times.

Turn it around. Congressman Reagan’s real complaint isn’t his litany of real and invented economic complaints, it’s the “relentless crusade” against slavery. That’s the climax his rhetoric is building up to and the thing that really motivates him.

Wrong. That was an excerpt. Here is the full quote: You are not content with the vast millions of tribute we pay you annually under the operation of our revenue laws, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us. You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentless crusade against our rights and institutions.... We do not intend that you shall reduce us to such a condition. But I can tell you what your folly and injustice will compel us to do. It will compel us to be free from your domination, and more self-reliant than we have been. It will compel us to assert and maintain our separate independence. It will compel us to manufacture for ourselves, to build up our own commerce, our own great cities, our own railroads and canals; and to use the tribute money we now pay you for these things for the support of a government which will be friendly to all our interests, hostile to none of them.

His real complaint was economic. He made the point that the South would be better off independent from the North.

A twentieth century opinion. The trend of the other remarks you cite and of secessionist argumentation at the time was that the South was a rural region that would happily provide raw materials to Britain in exchange for manufactured goods. There was a wish to remain agricultural and a belief that the South could. See Senator James Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech if you still think Wigfall was an outlier (Wigfall was certainly eccentric in his personality, but not in his preference for an agrarian slave-based society). Some of the elite looked forward to building up industry, but that was a minority opinion. If there were real conflicts between slavery and industrialization, that was recognized by people at the time and the choice was made in favor of the agriculture and slavery.

Evidently it was not a 20th century opinion since the authors cited Southerners making that argument at the time. Some Southerners did not want to industrialize. Others did. Obviously the Upper South was industrializing at a rapid rate by 1860. The margins on cotton and other commodities would not stay high for too much longer. The British were developing a cotton industry of their own within their empire.

Stephen Colwell’s 1861 book “The Five Cotton States and New York” provides a good rebuttal of secessionist economic arguments.

You've cited this one book and I've cited others which argue to the contrary.

Another startling find: Did Tariffs Really Cause the American Civil War? https://mises.org/wire/did-tariffs-really-cause-american-civil-war

The article offers no evidence - only his opinions. He says the Southern states seceded to preserve slavery but never mentions that slavery was not threatened within the US nor does he mention that by seceding they were giving up the benefits and protections of the fugitive slave clause of the US constitution thus making it very easy for many slaves to simply cross the border and be free. Finally, he never even mentions the Corwin Amendment which would have expressly protected slavery effectively forever by constitutional amendment or the Southern states' rejection of it. In short, he offers nothing to support his opinion.

Mises.org has been a hotbed of the “Tariffs caused the Civil War” nonsense, but they had the honesty to put up an article that rebuts that theory.

The Mises Institute is a leading Libertarian think tank and supporter of Austrian economics. They've produced many excellent articles which argue persuasively that Tariffs lay at the very heart of both secession and the North's desire to wage a war of aggression to prevent secession.

Here’s what Laurence Keitt, a US and then a CS Congressman, said at South Carolina’s secession convention:

I've read it. That was his opinion. Others such as Jefferson Davis were of the opposite opinion.

That is why there was fighting there during the Civil War.

Agree...Hubert Bancroft also summed up the CSA's New Mexico invasion very concisely.

Bancroft considers California the chief cause of the invasion. He writes :

Confederate plans respecting the Southwest belong in their general scope to the history of California, which country was the chief prize in view, and in details of operations to that of New Mexico. . . . Here it suffices to say that those plans included the occupation of all the southern frontier regions to the Pacific.

Before secession Southern militants had dreams of annexing new territories. During and after secession they had dreams of breaking up the US or breaking off pieces of it. They were aware of the fragility of their project and were willing to go to great lengths to make it work. That is well known, and there’s no point denying it.

21 million people lived in the North. 9 million of whom 3.5 million were enslaved lived in the South. Of course the North imported more than the South. Wouldn’t 21 million people drink more coffee and tea than 9 million? Wouldn’t they naturally buy more furs and drink more wine? The North also had more industries, and they naturally imported some machinery from abroad.

It’s a fact that most of the imports landed in Northern ports, especially New York. Besides a larger population, the north had higher population density and better transportation. One reason so much cotton was shipped to NYC and then to Europe was that there wasn’t as much of a demand in the South for imports on the return trip.

Northern brokers actually gave Southerners a better deal than Britons or Europeans gave each other. There were cotton factors in New Orleans and Charleston, but New York was involved because NYC could offer better credit and insurance terms. It’s not at all clear that cutting the New Yorkers out of the market would have benefited Southern planters.

The fictional Rhett Butler was very much the exception. Most Southerners weren’t thinking that industrialization was their future. Whatever might be going on in a modest way in Virginia or Tennessee, cotton growers further South were convinced that they were riding a wave and weren’t thinking that it would ever end.

This has gone on long enough and it’s not getting anywhere, so I’ll bow out now.

This has gone on long enough and it’s not getting anywhere, so I’ll bow out now.

Yep...Christmas preparations are intensifying. So, I'll close by saying the antebellum South chose to pursue an economic model that was not only obscenely immoral, but also not capable of competing with bare-knuckled capitalism. And, like spoiled children, the South took their marbles and started throwing them at a stronger opponent.

And if this was not enough, Dixie's shakers and movers were laboring under the delusion they could actually expand their heinous system to other regions and peoples. Fortunately, the madness was stopped, at great cost.

And lest anyone think I'm taking my marbles home in disappointment etc., allow me to say this has been a great thread with great points made by the participants. This is FR at it's best. Happy Holidays...

Before secession Southern militants had dreams of annexing new territories. During and after secession they had dreams of breaking up the US or breaking off pieces of it. They were aware of the fragility of their project and were willing to go to great lengths to make it work. That is well known, and there’s no point denying it.

Yes there were "Filibusters" as they were called such as William Walker. But as I've told you that was not limited to the South. There were plenty of supporters of "Manifest Destiny" in the North too. Plenty of these types did not stop lusting after Cuba when the war was over.

21 million people lived in the North. 9 million of whom 3.5 million were enslaved lived in the South. Of course the North imported more than the South. Wouldn’t 21 million people drink more coffee and tea than 9 million? Wouldn’t they naturally buy more furs and drink more wine? The North also had more industries, and they naturally imported some machinery from abroad.

Most of the importers were the exporters - as I've outlined already. They needed to fill the holds of the ships for the return journey across the Atlantic. Who were the exporters then? Southerners.

It’s a fact that most of the imports landed in Northern ports, especially New York.,/p>

OK. Not relevant since we're talking about who pays the tariff and that certainly was not the port, but OK.

Besides a larger population, the north had higher population density and better transportation. One reason so much cotton was shipped to NYC and then to Europe was that there wasn’t as much of a demand in the South for imports on the return trip.

Actually the North had worse transportation. That's why they needed so many more infrastructure projects. They didn't have as many navigable rivers. Most of the shipping industry was located in the Northeast and especially New York. That had long been the case even before the War of Secession from the British Empire. That's why the banking and insurance and wholesalers were located there.

Northern brokers actually gave Southerners a better deal than Britons or Europeans gave each other. There were cotton factors in New Orleans and Charleston, but New York was involved because NYC could offer better credit and insurance terms. It’s not at all clear that cutting the New Yorkers out of the market would have benefited Southern planters.

It may not have benefitted Southern Planters particularly to shift their business from New York to Southern locales. It would have benefitted the Southern states however and Southerners in general to have those support industries located in the South. Think of all those jobs. Think of the revenue that generates. In modern times it may not benefit customers via the price at the pump when we produce more gas domestically but it sure benefits the economy because we've shifted all that investment and all those jobs from the Middle East or Nigeria or Venezuela to America instead. We're employing Americans instead of foreigners in foreign countries.

The fictional Rhett Butler was very much the exception. Most Southerners weren’t thinking that industrialization was their future. Whatever might be going on in a modest way in Virginia or Tennessee, cotton growers further South were convinced that they were riding a wave and weren’t thinking that it would ever end.

Industrialization was already happening in the Upper South. I don't doubt those in the midst of the cotton boom were drunk on its success/profits and thought it would go on forever. You see that every time there is a boom in something - and it never lasts forever. That doesn't mean however that large scale industrialization wouldn't have happened. Of course it would have. Though on a smaller scale, Australia is an analog to the South. They too were a commodity supplier to Britain and imported manufactured goods from Britain. As long as Wool and other commodities could fetch high prices, Aussies were happy to invest their money in production of those commodities. As the margins dropped, they shifted their investments to areas that would provide the highest return - and Australia rapidly industrialized. The same would've happened in the South. Their investment was very heavily tied up in Cotton and Tobacco because these were so profitable. As margins dropped, they would have sought other areas to invest in for the highest returns they could get.