You mean he was willing to seal in a system of political power where the South could never again attain a sufficient majority to affect Federal law to level the playing field between themselves and the North.
Presidential war powers. Try to keep up or stop playing dumb.
Where are the limitations on these powers? Could he have simply murdered everyone in the South? Was that within his Presidential authority? Lincoln evaporated 4.5 billion dollars of their holdings. Basically the bulk of all their capital. It would be little different from a conqueror seizing all the money in all the banks and burning it.
And it looks like he did it mostly out of spite, and the rest as a political payoff to his supporters. Kinda like Obama seizing all the Chrysler dealerships and giving them to his friends and supporters.
Because they won.
Yes they won, and thereby established the principle that independence was a right. At least it was up until the 1860s, when suddenly the right to be independent was snuffed out.
Because they convinced people that they really had been oppressed, rather than oppressors.
I don't think that had a lot to do with their "winning", except for what Franklin managed in France.
No, we don't know that. Slave owners were afraid of losing their slaves.
You have already pointed out how that was an irrational fear and I pretty much agree about that.
They wanted the power that came with having their own country.
Power. Money. TomAto. Tomahtoe. Yes, being independent would enrich them greatly.
But independence would have shaken things up and just who would benefit economically or what would happen to the general economy wasn't so easy to predict.
It's pretty easy to predict what happens when you take 230 million out of the New York trade economy in 1861. It's also pretty easy to predict what will happen to the area that absorbs that 230 million.
Probably the rich do come out on top, but I wouldn't assume that everything would be hunky dory for the slaveowners just because they shook off the United States or that New York was doomed because half the country was gone. Maybe, maybe not.
Southern Shipping industry would boom. Southern tariff payments would have been kept South instead of being sent up North. Europeans would have bought more product because the prices are now lower. More money would capitalize and diversify more Industry.
It doesn't look hard to predict to me. We can't predict exact numbers, but we can certainly make a fair stab as to the direction for many industries.
You're pushing Marxist economic determinism, but human affairs are a lot more complicated than that.
You are trying to label it "Marxist" in an effort to discredit the idea, but it is indeed capitalistic through and through. What is more Socialistic, or perhaps more accurately "Crony Capitalistic" is the cooperation between government and industry to affect national policy.
The North gained the upper hand on national policy and made it very protectionist... for Northern industries. The South realized that their 1/4th of the citizens was paying 3/4ths of the cost of operating the Fed Gov, plus 40% of their earnings were being siphoned off by New York.
Sure, their money was earned by the labor of slaves, but they still regarded it as their money, and they wanted to keep more of it. The North wanted it too, and that is what the war was actually about.
Who gets the slave money.
Which contradicts what you were going on about before.
No it doesn't. You just didn't read carefully what I said. I said the South perceived him as a threat. People act on their perceptions, which are not necessarily realistic.
Many in the South saw him as a threat, and from their perspective this was all that mattered to them. That he couldn't actually be a threat simply wouldn't register with them, because all the people they knew agreed he was a threat.
Lincoln wasn't an actual threat to slavery where it existed. They didn't believe that.
And you would have lost your shirt. Egypt, India, Mexico, Brazil, and maybe Turkey, Central Asia and China coming on as major cotton producers would have doomed the dream of continuing fabulous wealth for the cotton states. Even without a civil war, that bonanza wasn't going to last much longer.
Meanwhile New York City went on to prosper spectacularly in the late 19th century. To be sure the Civil War had something to do with it, but so did Europe's demand for grain, flour, and meat, and the ability of Americans to sell machinery and manufactured goods in the wider world. For the North, too, cotton was never the king you make it out to be.
Many in the South saw him as a threat, and from their perspective this was all that mattered to them.
Yes, because politics is all about our unexamined feeelings. That's how wars start, countries become ungovernable and we end up in the messes we do. Thank goodness that people actually do have to argue and prove things with facts every now and then.
Where are you getting that from? Look around the 19th century world. Whether there was a right to independence and the circumstances under which that right could be exercised was very much in question. Losing independence or being denied self-determination was common throughout the century and didn't have much to do with the American Civil War.
That's not to condemn the idea of a right to self-determination, but when an idea faces the kind of opposition that it did in the world until very recently, it's bad policy to waste the principle on unworthy causes. If you have a written constitution and democratic representation that the rest of the world is denied, you don't throw it away in an emotional fit. You use those rights and opportunities to achieve a peaceful and mutually acceptable solution.