HISTORICAL IGNORANCE II: Forgotten facts about Lincoln, slavery and the Civil War

FrontPage Mag ^ | 07/22/2015 | Prof. Walter Williams

[SeekAndFind]

We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?

Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let's look at his words. In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, "I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists." In a Springfield, Illinois, speech, he explained: "My declarations upon this subject of Negro slavery may be misrepresented but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects." Debating Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."

What about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation? Here are his words: "I view the matter (of slaves' emancipation) as a practical war measure, to be decided upon according to the advantages or disadvantages it may offer to the suppression of the rebellion." He also wrote: "I will also concede that emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition." When Lincoln first drafted the proclamation, war was going badly for the Union.

London and Paris were considering recognizing the Confederacy and assisting it in its war against the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation was not a universal declaration. It specifically detailed where slaves were to be freed: only in those states "in rebellion against the United States." Slaves remained slaves in states not in rebellion — such as Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and Missouri. The hypocrisy of the Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. Lincoln's own secretary of state, William Seward, sarcastically said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."

Lincoln did articulate a view of secession that would have been heartily endorsed by the Confederacy: "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one that suits them better. ... Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit." Lincoln expressed that view in an 1848 speech in the U.S. House of Representatives, supporting the war with Mexico and the secession of Texas.

Why didn't Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our nation's history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What "responsible" politician would let that much revenue go?

[DuncanWaring]

Now post it to the NAACP who hold Lincoln in such high regard.

"P.S. Lincoln was a Republican."

[HandyDandy]

I agree. It is misleading. Lincoln had signed an oath to uphold The Constitution. He was, in the main, concerned with preserving the Union. It was his view that secession was unconstitutional.

I highly recommend that anybody interested in the matter read Lincoln's First Innaugural Address, then the Gettysburg Address and finally the short and sweet Second Innaugural Adddress.

[Sherman Logan]

Walter, Walter, Walter. Selective quoting does not become you. Lincoln at the debate at Ottawa: "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. ... I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. ... But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

This simply cannot be extrapolated to Lincoln not opposing slavery. All it shows is that, in common with most white men of his time, he opposed (at the time he spoke) giving blacks full civil rights.

Saying otherwise verges on a lie.

[DiogenesLamp]

The total south only collected $4.0 million in tariff revenues, whereas New York City collected $34.9 million in tariff revenues and the total for northern ports was $48.3 million."

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/the-georgia-scv-lies-about-history-morrill-tariff-edition/

IOW, northern ports paid well over 90% of tariffs.

And what was that 90% of all stuff that New York was Importing. What was Europe selling that the people of New York just couldn't do without?

I think New York collected 90% of tarrifs, but I very much doubt New York Imported 90% of the merchandise. Most likely it was destined to go elsewhere.

Sweet deal for New York. Get a share of everything coming into the country, and let Other people pay the markup.

I suspect that either you are obtuse, or you are deliberately trying to hide the truth from us.

[iowamark]

http://deadconfederates.com/tag/southern-ports-paid-75-percent-of-tariffs-in-1859/
Walter E. Williams Polishes the Turd on Tariffs

"The other day, George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams published an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, asking in the title, “was the Civil War about tariff revenue?” Like many of his columns that deal with that conflict, he tosses in all sorts of obfuscatory boilerplate about Lincoln not liking black folks much, how the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free all the slaves, and how Lincoln, more than a decade before the war began, had made some general comments about the inherent right of revolution. Williams doesn’t get around to discussing, you know, tariff revenue, until the very end, more than nine-tenths of the way through the 657-word piece, when he says (my emphasis),

 

Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What “responsible” politician would let that much revenue go?

 

I want to focus on that line about Southern ports paying 75% of import tariffs, because it’s the core of his entire argument. He’s playing an classic trick, throwing out some impressive factoid, and then asking a rhetorical question based on it, that seemingly has an obvious answer. The problem is that, in this case, his devastating “fact” — “Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859″ — isn’t even close to being true.

The first red flag here is that annual tariff data was not collected and reported by the Treasury Department based on calendar years, but by fiscal years that ran from July 1 to June 30. So when Williams says “in 1859,” it’s unclear whether he’s talking about the reporting year that ended in 1859 (FY 1859), or the reporting year that began in 1859 (FY 1860). That’s a revealing slip-up, but it’s also one that doesn’t matter, because the claim is demonstrably untrue for both fiscal years, and so for the calendar year of 1859, as well.

Data for imports and tariffs collected for the year just prior to secession (July 1, 1859 to June 30, 1860, inclusive) is provided in the Annual Report of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, for the Year 1860-61 (New York: John Amerman, 1861), 57-66. I’ve uploaded a PDF copy of the relevant pages here. The first two pages include imports that were not tariffed; in case anyone was wondering, manures and guano were duty-free.

In summary, during that year the Port of New York took in $233.7M, of which $203.4M were subject to tariffs ranging from 4 to 30%. During that same period, all other U.S. ports combined received $128.5M in imports, of which $76.5M was subject to tariff. So the Port of New York, by itself, handled almost two-thirds (64.5%) of the value of all U.S. imports, and almost three-quarters (72.7%) of the value of all tariffed imports:

What about earlier years? The previous year’s report from the New York State Chamber of Commerce carries a table (p. 2) that breaks out imports clearing customs in all of New York State for the previous four fiscal years:

A glance at these numbers makes clear that in spite of some year-to-year variation in import volumes — there was an economic crash in 1857 — the share of imports coming into New York remained remarkably stable, at around two-thirds of all imports coming into the United States. (And this isn’t even including other major ports like Boston and Philadelphia.)

What about customs revenues, specifically? The Chamber of Commerce from 1860 reports — on the very first page — customs revenue for Port of New York for 1859 at $38,834,212, or about 63.5% of the $61.1M in federal revenue that year. The Port of New York, alone, accounted for nearly two-thirds of U.S. Government revenue in 1859. Williams’ assertion that “Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859″ isn’t a case of “lying with statistics,” because the statistics don’t actually say anything remotely like that. It’s a case of lying, period.

So where does this made-up-from-whole-cloth assertion come from? Williams’ column has been splattered all over the Internet in the last few days, no doubt because it seemingly affirms modern cultural/political fears about big gubmint avarice. But the idea that Lincoln refused to accede to the Southern states’ secession because they represented the large majority of federal government’s revenue has been percolating around for a while. Thomas DiLorenzo — who Williams cites in the first graf of the piece — made a related and equally implausible claim in his 2002 book, (The Real Lincoln, pp. 125-26) that “in 1860 the Southern states were paying in excess of 80 percent of all tariffs. . . .” People who’d looked at the actual numbers, including friend-of-this-blog Jim Epperson, called him out on that claim, which DiLorenzo eventually (and quietly) revised in his most recent edition to a somewhat more vague “were paying the Lion’s share of all tariffs.” DiLorenzo, not surprisingly, provides no citation to back this claim. But it’s and old turd of a notion that’s been around a long time, that Walter Williams has pulled out, polished off, and given new life on the interwebs.

(DiLorenzo’s wording is a little different, saying that the “Southern states” were paying tariffs. It’s a strange construction, given that the states weren’t paying tariffs at all, and the tariffs were paid by the merchants doing the importing — who were generally Northerners. Even if DiLorenzo were to argue that it was the end-of-the-line consumer who “paid” the tarfiff through higher costs for goods, it’s a claim that defies credulity, as it would require the eleven states that ultimately seceded, with less than a third of the nation’s population, to be consuming more than four-fifths of all the tariffed good brought into the entire county. It’s a ludicrous notion, which is probably why DiLorenzo doesn’t even pretend to offer a source for it.)

Williams and DiLorenzo have both made a good living writing books and essays and giving speeches that are full of half-truths, selective quotes, and (as in this case) outright fabrications, all directed to a narrow but extremely-loyal audience of people who are primed to believe anything bad about the federal government (then or now). Both men hold endowed academic appointments, which means they cost their respective institutions relatively little, and in return are free of heavy teaching loads and the imperative of generating peer-reviewed publications that stalk most faculty members through much of their careers. Fair enough, but Williams’ assertion that “Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs” is surely in a league by itself. On its face it strains credulity; one needs only a basic understanding of American history to know how overwhelmingly the Northern Atlantic states and New England dominated this country’s maritime trade through the end of the 19th century. True Southrons™ often cite the heavy involvement of Northern shipping interests in the transatlantic slave trade, but that’s a selective and self-serving focus; that same region overwhelmingly dominated every other aspect of American maritime enterprise, from shipbuilding to whaling to the China trade to the nascent practice of marine engineering.

Williams surely knows this, and knows his assertion about the share of import tariffs paid through Southern ports is preposterous. If he doesn’t know it, he’s unworthy of his credentials, and if he does and asserts it anyway because that’s what his audience wants to hear, then he’s a charlatan on the order of someone like David Barton. I really can’t imagine what’s worse — the idea that he doesn’t actually know he’s wrong, or the idea that he doesn’t give a damn.

____________

UPDATE, February 25: In the comments, Craig Swain points out that he covered this same ground two years ago, over at Robert Moore’s place. I owe Craig an apology, because I not only read that post of his at the time, I also commented on it. I’d completely forgotten about that, at least consciously. Craig does a particularly good job of showing how those same tariff laws, which supposedly were so beneficial to Northern industries, also protected Southerners’ production of things like cotton, tobacco and sugar from competition from overseas.

Given the way spurious claims about tariffs are made over and over again by folks like Williams, naturally they’ve been exposed by others before. But it’s hard to use evidence to counter a belief that’s not based on evidence to begin with."

[rockrr]

Excellent post! Bookmarked.

[DiogenesLamp]

Those are the wise words of a changed, much more mature, much deeper, man.

And that they explicitly serve his self interest at this juncture is merely a coincidence. Had he been so very much against slavery to the extent that he thinks it justifies a war of invasion, he should have said so at the beginning of the war, not after having expended 600,000 lives, and laid waste to entire regions and families, and having to justify the bloodshed with some ex post facto faked up moral rationalization.

This is Bill Clinton stuff. Almost two years into the war, he's still talking about Keeping slavery if the South would just stop fighting his invasion.

And of course, his refined-by-fire eloquence finally reached its zenith in his immortal address at Gettysburg.

You mean where he cited that slave owning secessionist movement that broke away from a Union "four score and seven years ago..." ?

Rather hypocritical, don't you think, when you are playing the role of a King George III, but to a more Insane degree?

Again, Bill Clinton stuff.

By the way, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the bitter fruit of the compromise of the founders on the matter of chattel slavery that would have to be eaten by their grandchildren, and he issued the stern warning that today is inscribed on his memorial in the national capital:

But not to the extent that he would free his own slaves. This was a sort of "Do as I say, Not as I do" sort of thing.

[DoodleDawg]

We have all been brainwashed with a comic-book version of what the Civil War was all about, and the ramifications that flow from it, and flowed into it.

Calling this Williams article a "comic-book version of what the Civil War was all about" would be an insult to comic books.

[Sherman Logan]

New York did not pay the tariff. Federal agents at the port simply collected it. My post was a response to Williams’ untrue and idiotic claim that southern ports collected 75% of tariffs. Utterly untrue. They collected well under 10%.

Does it bother you at all that what he said is untrue?

Most of what was imported thru NY was distributed to the rest of the country. The final purchaser actually paid the tariff, albeit indirectly, thru a higher price.

The increase in price was exactly the same whether in south or north.

What Walter was probably thinking about in his 75% number was the value of exports. For which the South did provide something along that percentage, mostly cotton.

But there is a huge gap between value of untaxed exports and amount of tariffs on imports.

[DoodleDawg]

Why is it that the only people who believe that the Union cause was over slavery are the Confederate supporters?

[EternalVigilance]

BAM.

[SomeCallMeTim]

ping

[DoodleDawg]

Lincoln's thinking on race changed significantly from 1847, when he defended a slaveowner's property rights in an Illinois court...

If defending a slaveowner in court means that you support slavery then does defending a murderer in court mean that you support murder?

[DiogenesLamp]

But they can't take the territory of the sovereign people of the United States without their consent.

No more than they can take the territory of the Sovereign of the British Union without his consent. Oh, wait...

It's that whole "consent of the governed" thing, you know. Right there in the Declaration as well.

The consent of people who do not live there is irrelevant. It is none of outsider's business what other people do with their own land.

[Boogieman]

“Why didn’t Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession?”

Because he was a hypocrite.

[Boogieman]

“The Romans used it to describe both wars that were waged to overthrow the government entirely, or to alienate territory from the government.”

The second category doesn’t fit either. The South seceded peacefully and was governing itself, and then the war started after that, as a war between two sovereign nations.

[DiogenesLamp]

Slave masters were fighting a war of independence? Independence for who?

For themselves, same as the 13 Slave holding colonies led by the Slave holding General Washington.

Stop trying to pull the old bait and switch. Slaves didn't have rights recognized by the Union at that time. Stop trying to apply rules from 4 years later to 1861. That is just deceitful.

I know why you do it. You do it because all your justification for invading falls apart if you don't do it.

You don't have a moral or legal leg to stand on unless you apply rules from 4 years later to 1861.

[EternalVigilance]

The men, flawed as they were, who broke away from Great Britain, had a moral basis for the break, one which, because of its intrinsic moral power, eventually persuaded the world.

The Confederacy had an immoral basis, one which unsurprisingly therefore lacked the moral power to convince anybody in the end.

Even you, I would suppose, support the sort of moral, constitutional, republican self-government to which the founders aspired, and oppose chattel slavery. Don’t you?

[DoodleDawg]

Because he was a hypocrite.

I don't know about that. Lincoln said being inclined and having the power. The South fell short in half of those requirements.

[Boogieman]

“It was the extension of slavery into Federal territories and the violation of free state statutes that precipitated the Confederate attack on the Union which began the war.”

Nonsense, it was the refusal of the Union to remove its troops from Confederate territory, and the attempt by the Union to resupply those troops in defiance of the Confederacy that precipitated the attack. The South had no interest in what happened with regards to slavery in Federal territories by the time the war began, because they had already left the Union.