[lentulusgracchus]

Flush with ownership of railroads and shipping lines, protected in their carriage of freight by federal laws mandating that cargoes be carried in American bottoms in the coastwise trade, and sucking mightily on the sugar-teat of the 1848 Warehouse Act's favorable tax provisions, New York business interests weren't about to give up their constricting grip on the sweet deal of a lifetime.

The South got between a bunch of Yankee merchants and a New York payday -- between bottomlessly avaricious men and unimaginable wealth. With Yankee businessmen on this side of the room and a vast pile of bullion on the other, the South simply got run over.

Or, to use an astrophysical analogy, the South's situation was rather like living between two mutually-attractive, rapidly accelerating planetary objects -- big ones.

What scholarship needs to do is to get into the flow of communication among the leading New York banks and merchant houses, on the one hand, and its friends in the Lincoln Administration on the other -- Seward and Cameron, specifically, and perhaps also Salmon P. Chase, he of the flexuous jurisprudence -- and among themselves, and between them and their mouthpiece newspapers in New York and Boston.

What do you think -- would that be an apt subject for discussion?

Some Astor and Vanderbilt diaries might be terrifically revealing, as well. Or how about that fellow you dug up, that very busy, railroading, ambassadorial, Supreme Court Clerk?

[PaRebel]

My suspicion has been that lincoln was the "tool"(witting or unwitting) of these very men of which you speak.

[4CJ]

Some Astor and Vanderbilt diaries might be terrifically revealing, as well.

I would think such would have been purged of anything incriminating long ago.