Why don’t you talk about the $4 billion in assets that slaveholders feared losing if slavery was outlawed, and how that fear manifested in the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Every single time the topic of the "Civil War" is broached, the knee jerk reaction of most people is to bring up "Slavery" as the dominant cause of the war. Any effort to get people to stay out of this rut is usually ineffectual.
But let's look at it (for about the 100th time) for a moment, shall we? (I didn't want to get side tracked onto this old dodge, but I am not surprised that we have.)
A Constitutional amendment requires 3/4ths of the states to approve it to become law. There were 11 states in the old Confederacy. With 11 States against, it takes 33 states to override, which would require a Union of 44 states to even attempt. (Assuming all 11 states that became the Confederacy would all vote "no.")
If the South had not left the Union, it would take until 1896 to achieve a Union that had 44 states in it. (Utah, which would have been the 44th state, became a state in 1896.)
So the nation would have had to wait until 1896 to even take the first vote on abolition of slavery. But wait! There's more! When we add the "No" votes of the five *UNION* slave states, (if they were fighting to abolish slavery, why didn't they abolish it in areas they already controlled?) Then it would require a Union that had 64 states to make it law. We still don't have a Union with 64 states in it.
Bottom line, Slavery wasn't going anywhere in the US of A. It was literally impossible to legally get rid of slavery at this point in history.
Add to this the fact that Lincoln urged the ratification of the original 13th amendment, (The Corwin Amendment) making slavery even harder to abolish, and now you have a virtual impossibility of ever getting rid of slavery in the United States Union.
Why don’t you talk about the seccesion documents of the southern states who justify rebellion not on tariffs but on the institution of slavery.
You mean all four of them? (Out of an 11 state confederacy?) Because the reasons why some states claimed they were leaving are not relevant to the reasons why the North decided to invade them. Without the decision to invade, there would have been no war, so the reason why the North invaded is far more significant than the reasons claimed by some of the Southern states to be leaving.
Why did the North feel the need to invade them? It wasn't because of slavery, because slavery had been legal in the Union for "Four Score and Seven years".
Slavery, as I have shown above, was nearly impossible to get out of the Union, so it must have been for some other reason that the North invaded.
The answer is "Money." "Money" is the reason a war was launched against the South.
For some reason, you don't seem to want to talk about the money issue leading up to the civil war. I didn't ask you about slavery. (Yet here we are trying to side track the conversation into this ditch) I asked you about the European trade, and who was earning the money used to buy those imports.
I asked for your sources about who created most of the European trade. I'd like to get back to this focus on the money issue.
The rebellious Southern states were motivated by preserving slavery, not any other issue. They wished to keep it, and they viewed Lincoln as a threat. Like I said, they were Democrats who wouldn’t accept the results of an election.
You can’t even get the basic facts straight about exactly how many secession documents were drafted by the Confederate States. All eleven states of the CSA issued secession documents. Of those, seven listed either the election of Abraham Lincoln directly or slavery as the casus belli.
Georgia
“For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. “
By the way, this document SPECIFICALLY DENIES that tariffs were the reason for secession:
“...the country had put the principle of protection upon trial and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from 15 to 200 per cent. upon their entire business for above thirty years, the act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people.”
Mississippi
“It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion…
...It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst…
...It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.”
South Carolina (They got the party started)
“But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution…
...We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection…
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery”
(Democrats reusing to accept the results of an election, in other words)
Texas
“She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery— the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits— a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States.”
Virginia
“The people of Virginia, in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in Convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under the said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States, and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression; and the Federal Government, having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern Slaveholding States.”
Alabama
“Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama, preceded by many and dangerous infractions of the constitution of the United States by many of the States and people of the Northern section, is a political wrong of so insulting and menacing a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security..”
(Democrats reusing to accept the results of an election, in other words)
“And as it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States…”
Arkansas
“Whereas, in addition to the well-founded causes of complaint set forth by this convention, in resolutions adopted on the 11th of March, A.D. 1861, against the sectional party now in power in Washington City..”
(Democrats reusing to accept the results of an election, in other words)