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I don't see any reasonable suggestions as to how that could have worked. The Northern coalition had gotten the government to tax the Southerners for their benefit, and passed other laws to keep them from getting a competitive leg up. The Northerners (especially the wealthy captains of industry) liked the situation they had the South in, and they probably felt the South deserved it because slavery was evil, and so they were doing their part to make the world a better place by getting a big cut of the Wealth that would otherwise go to those slave owners.

That's nonsense. Southern Democrats had largely controlled Congress before the Civil War. Many plantation owners were rich. That was "the situation the South was in" during the 1840s and 1850s -- at least for the slave owners. The rest is speculation.

The country had been through a depression (the Panic of 1857) and there was a feeling that a modest increase in the tariff could get industry back and running again. And while debate about slavery was heated in the 1850s, I doubt budding industrialists saw the tariff and trade questions as North vs. South, freedom vs. slavery terms.

If anybody's paying attention, they'll note how you deny moral values and portray everything in materialistic terms, but in the tariff debate, which largely was based on economics, you want to make it moralistic -- and how you make the anti-slavery moralism that you claim to find there a bad thing.

What bone could have or would have been thrown to the South? Apart from the financial issues involved, i've read quite a few accounts where people were utterly fed up with being portrayed as the incarnation of evil on the earth, and so they just wanted to tell their moral superiors to go f*** themselves.

What bone? Plantation owners were doing just fine economically. They weren't being oppressed. They weren't losing out to Yankees.

And that business about "moral superiors" is wildly exaggerated. You tell us over and over again that Northerners didn't care about slavery. But now you tell us that they despised the plantation owners as morally inferior for owning slaves.

Aside from the moral complications involved in your view, it should be obvious to anybody who's paying attention that you are no authority on what America was like 150 years ago. You just project your own ideas and resentments about the present back on to the past.

(Kinda the way we feel about Liberals today preaching their "transgender" this and "girl-power" that.)

You ought to realize that equating opposition to transgender or feminists agendas with support for slavery weakens whatever case you think you're making about modern-day politics.

You tell us over and over again that Northerners didn't care about slavery. But now you tell us that they despised the plantation owners as morally inferior for owning slaves.

That's because he's making it up as he goes along.

And that business about "moral superiors" is wildly exaggerated. You tell us over and over again that Northerners didn't care about slavery. But now you tell us that they despised the plantation owners as morally inferior for owning slaves.

Both of those things are true at the same time. They didn't care about slaves themselves, they only cared about virtue signaling how moral they were by pretending to care about slaves. Despising the plantation owners was a means by which they could do this.

Seriously, look at the Liberal world view right now. Do they promote policies that actually help the underclass, or do they promote policies that make themselves feel good while doing nothing for the underclass?

Abortion is a liberal sacrament. Do you know how the abortion movement began, and who it was directed at? Were they really trying to help people, or were they just exploiting them? I think the abortion movement clarifies greatly how liberals perceived a certain group of people.

Actions speak louder than words.