We should be burn8ng washington down due to income tax then.
50% of Southern financial assets were slaves. They could not imagine a life without theses assets, nor could they imagine a phasing in of freedom from slaves to employees.
Cooler heads would have saved many lives.
Except that the Morill tariff was passed with southern cooperation after the South Carolina pretended secession, and was signed by Buchanan without Lincoln’s involvement.
Aside from the facts, is is a wonderful theory.
It was the tariffs, the slaves, the competing cultures, the competing economic interests, a redux of Federalist vs anti-Federalist arguments, an Abe Lincoln with less than 40% of the vote raising an army to invade his own country, and dozens more reasons all played out with bayonets and cavalry.
There were as many reasons for it as there were people who fought in it.
The truth, as we know, is never so simple or neat as we are taught in school. Whether Weekly Reader in grade school or a PhD dissertation at Harvard, all are at best but summary and at worst, shameless advocacy.
A good way look at the complexity of the last civil war would be to ponder what would the jingoists 100 years from now opine caused our second civil war.
Abortion vs pro-life?
Gun culture vs the anti-gun culture?
Taxes payers vs tax eaters?
Big Government snooping vs libertarians?
Liberty vs tyranny?
Renewables and the EPA vs King Coal and Big Oil?
Homosexual rights vs Southern Baptists and Catholics?
Wall Street vs Main Street?
Free Traders vs Fair Traders
Pro illegal immigrant vs anti-illegal immigrant
Paper vs plastic?
and the list goes on.
All would be right.
In singularity, not enough to kill over. In total, well where is that damn bayonet.
Fort Sumter was under-construction fort intended to defend Charleston Harbor against seaborne attack. Not one dollar of taxes was ever collected there.
The truly funny part of the idea that the South seceded over taxation (besides the fact that almost nobody in the South said so at the time) is that had secession been successful the South (and North) would almost certainly have both had to impose much greater taxes on their citizens.
Even if the US had allowed the CSA to withdraw peacefully, there were still infinite sources of conflict: borders, trade, fugitive slaves, territories, etc. Almost certainly both sides would have felt obliged to maintain much heavier military forces than those of the pre-1860 US Army. It is entirely likely a European-style arms race would have developed.
It seems pretty unlikely, also, that the South would have been willing to leave its coasts open to blockade by the absence of a navy.
Armies and navies are very expensive and must be paid for. The South would probably have had to raise its tariff much higher than that of 1860 to pay for all this.
The CSA put in place a provision in its Constitution prohibiting protective tariffs, but again it seems likely this would have been repealed or circumvented in short order. Surely the CSA would have wanted armaments that were domestically produced, not produced by its potential enemy or subject to blockade. In fact, that’s exactly what it did during the war, generally quite successfully
So if secession had been successful, within a short time the CSA would have had higher taxes than under the Union, and a protective tariff or its equivalent to boot. Then Alabama and Texas could have gotten their panties all bunched up about Virginia and Tennessee making all the money off the government-supported protected industries.
Lincoln was a statist in many ways. Many of the Whigs were.
the real problem was the South’s one-dimensional
economy, export cotton, import everything else.-—>
every tax law becomes, here v. the other place
Seldom considered.... Let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that the North actually did think that the Southern States were evil. Why then, would they not welcome secession? It’s like begging Apartheid South Africa to join the Union. It makes no sense now, made no sense then... Unless...
The concept:
“Stay in our (political) group, or we will kill you. “
Makes no sense whatsoever.
An 11 year old plug by an author for his book? And this is newsworthy how?
As usual, Thomas DiLorenzo is telling lies to support his fantasies. Fort Sumter was never a tariff collection point and he should damn well know it.
If you read DiLorenzo's crap, you are only being misinformed. The man is not a historian nor is he even interested in attampting to present an honest history of events. He is a radical Liberatarian and will twist, distort and outright lie about any historical event to support his radical ideological views.