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So, if you study the Presidents, Congresses and Supreme Court from, say 1800 until secession in 1861, what you’ll see is that Democrats were almost never totally out of power, very frequently controlled all branches of Federal government, and were always themselves controlled by their majority faction: Southern Democrats.

The Democrats did not even exist until 1828. Learn some history.

You’re right, they couldn’t just “snap their fingers”, sometimes they had to crack their whips, sometimes (i.e., Brooks) they raised cain, and who knows, sometimes they might have to schmooze their Doughfaced Northern allies.
So what do you think, was that too much to ask?

I think your claim is laughable and you have offered zero evidence for it. Brooks caning Sumner had everything to do with Sumner being a complete jerk and attacking Brooks’ cousin mocking him for just having had a stroke.

Wrong again.
The so-called Tariff of Abominations only passed in 1828 because of the strong initial backing from Vice President Calhoun (South Carolina) and future President Jackson (Tennessee).
And it was opposed by the vast majority of New Englanders.
So it was not a simple issue of North vs. South, rather there were many complex issues at play, and the most important to President Jackson was his intention to abolish the National Bank and pay off the national debt (Jackson was the only president ever to do that), and for that he needed very high tariffs.
Jackson also wanted to “make America great”, the first time, and so favored protecting US manufacturing, North, South, East & West.

After 1830 Southerners were the driving force behind a steady reduction in overall tariffs which by 1860 brought them near their lowest levels ever.

As for alleged “unequal Federal spending”, here again is the data I have on that and it shows: long term, there was no such thing.
Sure, if you carefully pick & chose your data points, you can “prove” most anything, but in the big picture the South received its “fair share” and then some.

Wrong. I am right again. The Tariff of Abominations was hugely destructive to the Southern economy. Not surprisingly, Yankees came to love it even if some had not supported it initially. It was so destructive in fact that South Carolina nullified it and prepared to fight about it. As for the unequal federal spending, I have provided ample evidence that it was indeed quite unequal and I have done so from a variety of sources. You meanwhile cling desperately to one 1928 book.

The South did not receive its fair share of federal spending - not even close.

Yes, but Southerners steadily and drastically reduced those tariffs over the following 30 years.

Yes and? Lower tariffs were what was in the South’s economic interest. Even the “lowest ever” tariffs were still about twice the maximum the CSA allowed. That says a lot about how disadvantageous the Tariff of Abominations had been and the Morrill Tariff would be.

But the initial Morrill proposal, the one Southerners defeated in 1860, was far from “sky high”, it merely returned average rates to roughly their levels of 1850.
And Morrill only passed Congress in 1861 after Southern Democrats walked out.

Further, both Morrill’s passage and secession were results of Democrat party self destruction engineered by Fire Eaters in their 1860 presidential conventions.
So Southern Democrats had only themselves to blame for both the passage and higher rates in the 1861 Morrill tariff.

It DOUBLE the rates. That was obviously extremely damaging to the Southern economy. Remember the Confederate Constitution just about set HALF the rate of the Walker tariff as the MAXIMUM. Meanwhile the Morill Tariff DOUBLED the Walker Tariff rate...and as everybody knew this would just be the first bite of the apple. They eventually TRIPLED the rate and kept it there for 50 years.

Of course, everybody knew the Morrill tariff was going to pass. All that was required was to flip a Senator or two.

So our Lost Cause mythologizers keep posting, but Lincoln himself was focused on other issues, specifically what to do about Confederate demands for the surrender of Fort Sumter, and other Federal properties.

Laughable BS from our resident PC Revisionists. Lincoln was entirely focused on collecting the tariff....the one what had just been doubled..... the one who campaigned on and told audiences was THE single most important issue. He and his corporate backers could not afford to see the big cash generators - ie the Southern states - leave. That’s why he started a war to prevent it.

And you have data somewhere to support your claim that “Southerners” owned all (or nearly all) US imports?

Yes and I’ve posted it many times already. Even Northerners admitted it openly. Its in the editorials of numerous Northern Newspapers explaining how they’d be economically ruined if the Southern states went their own way.

Now you’ve stumbled into DiogenesLamp’s self-proclaimed “expertise” and I doubt if he agrees with you.
In DiogenesLamp’s world-view, Southerners themselves owned nothing, it was all those evil, nasty, greedy “New York power brokers” who owned everything, extracted their pound of flesh from every transaction and oppressed the pooooor, poooor Southern planters.
That’s why they had to secede, says DiogenesLamp, to get out from under the thumbs of evil New Yorkers.

So here we see FLT-bird claiming, no, it wasn’t New Yorkers in charge, it was actually the Southern planters themselves.
Hmmmmm...

an intentional misreading on your part. Southerners owned the goods to be imported. Northerners made a lot of profit servicing the export of Southern Cash crops.

But warehousing cannot possibly explain:

rice fell only 46%
turpentine fell only 40%
manufactured cotton products fell only 25%
tobacco fell only 14%
clover seed increased 85%
brown sugar increased 178%
hops multiplied 60 times!

So clearly, it’s all about factors other than warehousing.

As for your alleged “trade between both sides”, no, I don’t think so.
For one thing, the vast Mississippi River watershed (over a million square miles!) was cut off from trade from New Orleans north to almost St. Louis.
So exporters were forced to extra expense & trouble of using railroads to transport products to Eastern seaboard cities.
That does not sound to me conducive to “trade between both sides”.

So what I think happened was products like, say, tobacco were grown in Confederate Virginia, but also in Union regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana & Ohio.
In 1861 those regions planted enough extra tobacco to almost entirely offset the loss of Virginia tobacco.
So my point here is that all this talk about “Southern products” accounting for, what, 80% or 90% of US exports is just bogus nonsense.
Yes cotton did amount to 50% (including specie), but everything else could be and was produced in regions outside the Confederate South.

LOL! and I do mean that I’m not just typing that every time. I am actually laughing at the BS you spew. Anyway....you think YOU know better than all the commentators at the time North, South and Foreign where the cash crops that provided the bulk of US exports came from? Furthermore, you think you know this based on one year’s data?

and yes trading did occur during the war. Try reading some history some time.

Sure, I “get” that, but am thinking those people could not see the forest for the trees.
Once again, this site breaks down the actual products of each region.
It does show “Southern products” predominate, but it also shows just what I posted above.
When Confederate exports were deleted in 1861, “Southern exports” excluding cotton net-net fell only $3 million.
So even if those were “Southern products” they weren’t Confederate products

Your position is “I have one year’s worth of data, therefore everything everybody was saying at the time was false - they didn’t know anyway - and I know better....150+ years later....based on one year of export data.”

LOL!

But certainly not by Confederate states, which is my point here.
Plus, at the same time that “Southern products” (excluding cotton) net-net fell only $3 million in 1861, Western and Northern exports increased $61 million or almost 60%.
So the whole claim that the 1860 US economy was somehow dependent on “Southern products” is just bogus to the max.
When push came to shove, the US economy got along perfectly well without Confederate exports.

Yes by Confederate states - which is my point here. annnnd you’re back to trying to use one year of data to explain away what everybody else observed at the time. Ridiculous.

Sure, if you cherry pick your data, you can “prove” pretty much anything.
But when you look at the whole picture here, it turns out Federal spending balanced out, over time.
For examples, over time the South got nearly 40% more in fortifications, 20% less in lighthouses and 30% less in internal improvements.
But for any particular time period, i.e., 1834 - 1847 the South got more in internal improvements.
Overall, by my calculations, the South got 52% and the North 48% of Federal spending, not including pensions.

Hello pot! I’m kettle! You’re black! Talk about cherrypicking data....holy chit! That’s all you do.

Your calculations are self interested horse crap. Everybody at the time admitted the North got far more in federal payments. Buchanan the Pennsylvanian openly said the South had not gotten its fair share. There was a long history of Southerners complaining about it. Various Northern newspapers also openly said it.

No, it says nothing except Democrats playing politics, as usual.
Federal marshals were only sent to arrest one of the six, Sanborn, and they were so clumsy about it, a crowd of 150 friends & neighbors gathered to protect him, so they gave up.
No attempts were even made to arrest the others, and whose fault is that?
The Feds of course, and who controlled the Feds?
Washington, DC, Democrat administration under substantial control of Southern Democrats.
For examples, President Buchanan’s cabinet Southerners included V.P., Secretaries of Treasury, War, Interior & Postmaster General.
Buchanan’s Attorney General was his fellow Pennsylvania Democrat, Jeremiah Black.
So it seems to me that had serious demands been made to arrest all six Brown backers, it would happen, but they weren’t.

There was only a half hearted attempt to arrest even one of the 6 and he was not arrested thanks to mob violence backed by state judges and legislators colluding with the mobs to prevent it. That alone showed Southerners that Northerners sympathized with terrorism directed against the South.

And once again your pet theory that Southerners controlled the federal government is complete horse crap unsupported by any evidence.

We know for certain that Confederates in 1861 never asked for terms & conditions of return.
And we know they never seriously considered anything the Union did as enticement to return.
Indeed it has been argued that one reason Jefferson Davis needed war in April, 1861, was to cement the loyalties of any Southerners who might be somehow tempted to reunite with their Northern brethren.
Once the Confederacy declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861, then any such talk would be treasonous.

We know they rejected the Corwin amendment and the high Morrill Tariff. Jefferson Davis did not need war. Indeed he sent representatives to Washington DC to negotiate terms of separation including taking on a share of the national debt as well as compensation for federal property that had been nationalized by various Southern states. It was the Lincoln administration that refused to meet with them.

Oh and the Lincoln declared hostilities in April 15th 1861 when he called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the CSA. This is yet more BS you simply spew without any evidence to support it hoping it will pass without challenge. It won’t.

Sure, once secession was declared, then other matters became primary in the Confederacy.
But the fact remains that protecting slavery was the number one reason given by all secessionists, and for many the only reason.

Sure violation of the compact over slavery by the Northern states was the legal means of saying the Northern states had violated the compact. However once offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment to return, they rejected it.

OK, one more time: the Georgia “Reasons for Secession” document has 14 paragraphs, with 3,300 words.
Only the second paragraph with 111 words is devoted to tariffs, and even it ends with the following words:

“...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.
The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy.
There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all.”

Sure, “duties” are mentioned, briefly, and “protection”, but neither “tariff” nor “Morrill” are.
By contrast slavery is mentioned in every paragraph except the second.

As for alleged “unequal expenditures”, those are not mentioned at all by Georgia.

So any claims that Georgia’s “Reasons for Secession” document is not “all about slavery” is simply bogus to the max.

Yet more tapdancing. Georgia laid out the economic case EVEN THOUGH this was NOT unconstitutional. That says a lot about how much they were upset by it. They also laid out the case for saying the northern states had violated the compact over slavery.

I note you left out the part in the Georgia declaration where they said each side started casting about for new allies and that Northern protectionists settled on the slavery issue to use as a wedge issue to unite the Northern states against the South in order to get high tariffs back in place.

Duties and Tariff are the same thing.

Any claim that Georgia’s declaration was “all about slavery” is patently false as anybody who reads it can see quite quickly.

OK, Texas: In 22 shorter reasons paragraphs, 1,644 words, two of those paragraphs (#6 & 19) refer to RE Lee’s failure to protect Texans against “Indian savages” and “banditti”.
One (#18) does briefly mention “unequal legislation”.
None mention tariffs, taxes, duties, bounties, or protections for Northern industries.

All the rest which give reasons talk about slavery.
So there’s no way you can seriously claim that Texans were not, first & foremost, concerned to protect slavery.

No it does not talk about “RE Lee’s Failure”. That is a LIE born of your irrational hatred of all things Southern. It talks about the federal government’s failure. RE Lee the LT Col. of one federal brigade and thus the 2nd in command of that brigade was not mentioned.

Texas also talks about partisan legislation which “drains their substance”....ie squeezes money out of their pockets.

It also talks about how the Northern states supported terrorists sent to attack the South.

Any claim that the Texas declaration of causes was “all about slavery” is just a laughable lie.

OK, once again, on Rhett’s address to the slave-holding states, 14 long paragraphs with 4,200 words, the first eight paragraphs do indeed discuss taxes and compare 1861 to 1776, making out the North to be the new Great Britain.
It’s all nonsense, of course, because there was zero actual similarities, none.
Rhett does complain briefly of “duties on imports”, but Morrill is not mentioned, nor is even a threat of higher duties.

But where Rhett spends only 1,400 words comparing the North & taxes to 1776 Britain, when he starts in paragraph 9 to discuss slavery, then his natural verbosity comes out and it takes him twice the number, 2,800 words, to tell us his concerns to protect slavery.
So, even where, exceptionally, Rhett makes slavery play second fiddle to taxes, slavery still plays twice as long & loud as all other issues combined.

OK once again, Rhett talked about the economics first. Therefore that is what was most important. What? Its not more ridiculous than your word count?

Rhett had long talked about how the Southern states were being exploited economically. Once again, he said he would have supported secession on economic grounds alone.

Clearly it was all about tariffs and unequal federal government expenditures.

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but if he did, it wasn’t in this document.
It’s a simple fact: economic issues were not extensively used to sell secession, but slavery certainly was.

He did. The fact remains that economic issues were extensively used to persuade Southerners that they would be better off independent. Had anybody been worried about the preservation of slavery, Lincoln and the Northern states made it crystal clear they need have no concerns about that.

Certainly not just “on a par” among Deep South planters.
Statistically they were on average far and away the wealthiest people ever, to that time.
Of course, if you average them in with, for example, Appalachian mountain people, then overall the South was indeed “on a par”.
But it was the Deep South planters who called all the political shots and they were far better off than, for examples, average farmers up North.

Yes, some Northern industrialists might be compared to Southern planters, but there were a lot more planters and they were, along with their neighbors, on average better off.

So all claims that Southern wealth was somehow being “drained” are simply hokum.
As for your alleged “multiple sources”, none of them — not one — provides actual verifiable data.
But scholars who have studied 1850s era economics tell us the Deep South especially was doing very well, thank you.

Yes the rich people in the South were quite rich. Guess what. The rich people in the North were quite rich too. Yes there were poor people. Again guess what. There were poor people in the North too. In fact there were probably more people in dire poverty in the north judging from the horrid conditions they lived in and the terribly unsafe factories they were forced to work in - this was one of Southerners’ criticisms of industrialization. The rich no more called all the shots politically in the South than the rich called all the shots politically in the North.

The fact that there were some rich people in the South in no way invalidates the accurate claim that the Northern states had via federal government policy, drained a lot of wealth out of the Southern states. They just hadn’t managed to drain all of it. Did everybody in the Southern states have to be destitute in order to “prove” the case that they were getting a bad deal? Certainly not.

Several of my sources have provided verifiable data. Charles Adams wrote two books on the subject. Try reading them and you’ll find plenty of verifiable data.

No “shock” here because you’ve offered no evidence, merely an unsupported assertion.

Even his sycophants say he orchestrated the Corwin Amendment. They praise him at length for it.

Sorry, but you’re wrong on both counts.
There was no “offer” to Confederate states, they weren’t even recognized.
Rather, the Corwin Amendment was intended to hold the loyalties of Union slave states, like Kentucky & Maryland.
And it helped do just that.

Nah. I’m right on both counts. Lincoln and the Northern Dominated Congress passed the Corwin amendment. Lincoln offered it in order to entice the original 7 seceding states to come back in his inaugural address. It failed to do that. Had it been for the purposes of holding slaves states in which had not left, then they would have gone ahead and passed it because some slave states did not leave.

But of course we do know it, because no seceding state ever suggested a willingness to rejoin the Union short of Unconditional Surrender.

Were they offered much lower tariffs and equal federal government expenditures? No they were not. They were offered slavery forever and they turned that down. You don’t know that they would not have accepted had economic policy been better suited to their needs. That was never offered.

Maybe, but consider our situation today with so-called sanctuary cities or state.
Despite the Constitution’s clear language giving primacy to Federal law, they defy it, so what do we do?
If you answer, “well, we must declare secession”, that’s absurd, insane.
What we must do is enforce Federal laws and that’s what should also have happened during the 1850s.

Firstly the federal government was nowhere near as powerful in the 1850s. Secondly that was not the real reason the original 7 seceding states left - that was merely the pretext.

No, you’ve “shown” nothing, zero, nada.
You’ve only claimed what you don’t know and is certainly false: that no slave holders were heads of large families and therefore slave ownership was single digits. Nonsense.
The far more realistic model is that one person per family owned all the slaves and the family sizes averaged four people, totally reasonable assumptions.
It means that in Deep South states like South Carolina and Mississippi nearly 50% of families owned slaves.

In Upper South states like Virginia & Tennessee about 25% of families owned slaves and in Border states like Kentucky & Maryland, fewer than 15%.
And that explains why those states did not secede with the others.

You’ve shown nothing. You’ve simply claimed based on some BS back on the envelope estimates that just so happen to suit your politics. Don’t expect anybody who is not a PC Revisionist to buy this crock of crap. BTW, I never said no slave holders were heads of large families. YOU CLAIMED that heads of large families were the ONLY slaveholders. That you do not know and have not proven. You’ve made the ASSUMPTION that there could only be one owner per family because that happens to suit your politics. Anecdotally, I know of many examples of multiple owners in one family.

What we actually know is that slave owners comprised a total of 5.63% of the total free population in the states which seceded....meaning 94.37% did not own slaves.

No Border State ever voted for secession.
Yes, the Confederacy did claim Kentucky and Missouri, but it was totally bogus, nothing more than a few slaveholders who got together and said, “we’re Confederates”.
But neither the voters nor legislatures of either state ever voted for secession, just the opposite.
And all the Border States, including Maryland & Delaware, provided more Union troops than confederates by a factor of at least two to one.
So Border states not only said they wanted to be Union, they were willing to fight & die for it.

And like Kentucky & Missouri, Maryland’s legislature also voted decisively against secession, while it was still lawful to do so.
But once Confederates formally declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861, then it became, by definition, an act of treason for Marylanders to “provide aid & comfort” or vote for secession.

Missouri’s Governor and a part of its legislature voted for secession. They were prevented from meeting and voting on the matter in full like the Maryland Legislature had been when Lincoln threw a bunch of them in a federal gulag without charge or trial before they could vote.

Oh and Lincoln declared war when he called up 75,000 volunteers to invade the Southern states on April 15th.

“With the suspension of habeas corpus [the right not to be arrested without reasonable charges being presented], Lincoln authorized General Scott to make arrests without specific charges to protect secessionist Marylanders from interfering with communications between Washington and the rest of the Union. In the next few months, Baltimore’s Mayor William Brown, the police chief, and nine members of the Maryland legislature were arrested to prevent them from voting to secede from the Union. . . .

“Twice more during the war Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, including the suspension ‘throughout the United States’ on September 24, 1862. Although the records are somewhat unclear, more than thirteen thousand Americans, most of them opposition Democrats, were arrested during the war years, giving rise to the charge that Lincoln was a tyrant and a dictator.” (Davis, Don’t Know Much About the Civil War, pp. 182-183)

One of those imprisoned for fourteen months for simply questioning the unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus was Francis Key Howard, the grandson of Francis Scott Key and editor of the Baltimore Exchange newspaper. In response to an editorial in his newspaper that was critical of the fact that the Lincoln administration had imprisoned without due process the mayor of Baltimore, Congressman Henry May, and some twenty members of the Maryland legislature, he was imprisoned near the very spot where his grandfather composed the Star Spangled Banner. After his release, he noted the deep irony of his grandfather’s beloved flag flying over “the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed” (John Marshall, American Bastile, pp. 645—646).

After his release, Francis Key Howard wrote a book about his experiences entitled Fourteen Months in American Bastilles in which he described daily life as “a constant agony, the jailers as modified monsters and the government as an unfeeling persecutor which took delight in abusing its political prisoners” (Sprague, p. 284). In his defense and whitewashing of Lincoln’s civil liberties abuses even Lincoln apologist Mark Neely, Jr., author of The Fate of Liberty, noted that in Fort Lafayette (aka “the American Bastille”) and in other dungeons where political prisoners where held, “Handcuffs and hanging by the wrists were rare [but not nonexistent], but in the summer of 1863 the army had developed a water torture that came to be used routinely” (p. 110) Repeatedly, whenever Congress asked for information on the arrests, he replied that it was not in the public interest to furnish the information (p. 302).

Wait don’t tell me. These quotes are damned inconvenient. Therefore they must be fake! LOL!

Sure, but “Liberty and way of life” is code-talk for slavery.

No its not. Had slavery been the concern, the Corwin Amendment would have allayed those concerns.

Which is what DiogenesLamp most curiously claims would have happened, had not that evil Lincoln started war to prevent it.
But it’s all total BS, cockamamie nonsense because the new Confederate constitution was dedicated first & foremost to protecting slavery, and no state or territory would ever be allowed to join without recognizing full “rights” in African slavery.

They were fully prepared to recognize it anyway.....remember the Corwin Amendment?

Oh and the Confederate Constitution is very similar to the US Constitution except that it has provisions to limit spending and graft. So your claims about it being first and foremost about slavery are just your usual BS.

Which implies that unless Confederates intended to industrialize with slave labor, there would be no industrialization period.
Of course, slaves did serve very well in Southern factories which means there was no reason not to use them, and no possibility that slavery would ever become obsolete in the Confederacy.

It implies no such thing. This is just more of your self serving BS. It is not necessary to have a huge tariff barrier in order to industrialize. Those areas of the South that were most industrialized had the highest percentage of freedmen in the population. Industrialization is incompatible with slavery. Industrialization is why slavery died out in the entire western world over the course of about 75 years in the 19th century.

But of course it was all about “slavery, slavery, slavery”.
Explicit protections for slavery were first & foremost in the Confederate constitution.
Then they got down to saying, “how can we improve on our forefathers’ constitution,” and yes, they did devise some minor changes, which may have improved something, or not.
My own opinion is that such specific forms of government are, in the end, far less important than the good will, honesty and honorable intentions of its members

But of course it wasn’t and this is just self serving BS. Only 4 states issued declarations of causes. 3 of the 4 listed causes other than slavery even though those other causes were not unconstitutional and refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the constitution was. The north offered slavery forever. The original 7 seceding states turned that down. The northern dominated congress then expressly said it was not fighting over slavery. The Upper South seceded over Lincoln starting a war to impose a government by force without consent.

Not slavery.

Only to the most cynical, and I’m not one.
Consider our current President.
He earned all the money, power & prestige anyone could want, but he won election at least in part for saying he wouldn’t accept his government salary and would devote 100% of his efforts to make America great again by putting Americans first.

That has been the Federalist, Whig and Republican message from Day One of the Republic.
The Democrat message was always different and went, in one expression or another of it: vote for us, we’ll make those other people pay for your free stuff.

Confederates were all, to a man, Democrats.
That’s my case in a nutshell.

To the realistic. You are fixate on parties and have the erroneous notion that they have always been the same. That is simply false.

FLT-bird: "The Democrats did not even exist until 1828. Learn some history."

Wrong again.

Today's Democrat party started off as anti-Federalists lead by Southerners like Patrick Henry and James Monroe, opposed to ratification of the US Constitution.
After ratification (1788), anti-Federalists became the new anti-Administration faction now lead by Southerners Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
They opposed Northern Federalists like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton.
Around 1792 Jefferson's anti-Federalists faction became known as the Democratic-Republican party, lead by Southerners it destroyed the old Northern Federalist party and lasted until around 1825.
By 1825 Jefferson's Democratic-Republican party split, with Southerners like Andrew Jackson supporting the new Democrat party and Northerners like John Quincy Adams the new Whig party.
Northern Whigs eventually became Lincoln Republicans while Jefferson-Jackson Democrats became the party of Wilson, FDR, LBJ, WJC & BHO.
And, oh yeh, the party of slavery, secession, Civil War, Black Laws, segregation, KKK, etc., etc.

In summary, Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans were the party of the South which became Jacksonian Democrats, allied with Big City Northerners like Martin Van Buren.

Today's Democrats are the same people except that where old Democrats were slave-holders allied to Big City Northerners, today it is Big City Democrats allied to the descendants of slaves.
But the program & practices are largely the same.

FLT-bird: "I think your claim is laughable and you have offered zero evidence for it."

It's just basic history, which you should have learned in school.
You can find its details spelled out with any internet search.
Wikipedia does as good a job as any on that.

FLT-bird: "Brooks caning Sumner had everything to do with Sumner being a complete jerk and attacking Brooks’ cousin mocking him for just having had a stroke."

Sure, but it does demonstrate that Southerners would stop at nothing to assert their dominance.

FLT-bird: "Wrong.
I am right again.
The Tariff of Abominations was hugely destructive to the Southern economy.
Not surprisingly, Yankees came to love it even if some had not supported it initially"

Some Yankees may have loved it, others did not.
New Englanders opposed it (23-16), along with most Southerners but Mid-Atlantic and Western states supported it.
Original supporters included VP John C. Calhoun from South Carolina who later resigned when President Jackson (from Tennessee) didn't fully repeal it.

Point it: there were a lot of hands on that bill, and far from all were "Northern", just as far from all opposed were "Southern".

FLT-bird: "It was so destructive in fact that South Carolina nullified it and prepared to fight about it."

To which President Jackson responded strongly and South Carolinians backed down.

FLT-bird: "As for the unequal federal spending, I have provided ample evidence that it was indeed quite unequal and I have done so from a variety of sources.
You meanwhile cling desperately to one 1928 book."

But you've provided no actual data, none, just political quotes that we have no way of verifying.
And no, I don't "cling desperately", but so far that 1928 book is the only actual data we have.
When you produce something else, we can consider it.

FLT-bird: "The South did not receive its fair share of federal spending - not even close."

Long term, the South received about half of Federal expenditures.
That sounds fair to me.

FLT-bird: "Lower tariffs were what was in the South’s economic interest.
Even the 'lowest ever' tariffs were still about twice the maximum the CSA allowed."

Wrong again:

"The

import tariff, enacted in May 1861, was set at 12.5% and it roughly matched in coverage the previously existing Federal tariff, the Tariff of 1857.[9]
Between February 17 and May 1 of 1861, 65% of all government revenue was raised from the import tariff."

The Confederate tariff of 1861 was roughly the same as the Union tariff of 1857.
It was expected to bring in $25 million in revenues.
It didn't.

FLT-bird: "It DOUBLE the rates.
That was obviously extremely damaging to the Southern economy.
Remember the Confederate Constitution just about set HALF the rate of the Walker tariff as the MAXIMUM.
Meanwhile the Morill Tariff DOUBLED the Walker Tariff rate...and as everybody knew this would just be the first bite of the apple.
They eventually TRIPLED the rate and kept it there for 50 years."

There were many different tariffs and average rates went up & down:

"The Democrats in Congress, dominated by Southern Democrats, wrote and passed the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates, so that the 1857 rates were down to about 15%, a move that boosted trade so overwhelmingly that revenues actually increased, from just over $20 million in 1840 ($0.5 billion in 2016 dollars), to more than $80 million by 1856 ($1.7 billion).[27]
The South had almost no complaints but the low rates angered many Northern industrialists and factory workers, especially in Pennsylvania, who demanded protection for their growing iron industry."

Following the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations" there were several new tariffs nearly all lowered rates:

1828 -- Tariff of Abominations = 55% average
1832 -- returned levels to 1824 rates = 40%
1833 -- gradual reduction to 1816 levels = 22%
1842 -- increased rates after Panic of 1837 = 30%
1846 -- Walker tariff reduced tariffs to new lows = 20%
1857 -- reduced to same rate as President Washington = 15%
1860 -- original Morrill proposal = 23%
Civil War = 45%
post war reduced to 30%

FLT-bird: "Of course, everybody knew the Morrill tariff was going to pass.
All that was required was to flip a Senator or two."

No, Morrill only passed after secessionists walked out of Congress.
Indeed, Republicans only won the 1860 election because Southern Fire Eaters split their national Democrat party apart making Democrat victory impossible.
So secessionists had only themselves to blame for the results of their actions.

FLT-bird: "Laughable BS from our resident PC Revisionists.
Lincoln was entirely focused on collecting the tariff....the one what had just been doubled..... the one who campaigned on and told audiences was THE single most important issue."

So Lost Cause mythologizers repeatedly claim, but can provide no actual historical data to support it.

FLT-bird: "He and his corporate backers could not afford to see the big cash generators - ie the Southern states - leave.
That’s why he started a war to prevent it. to prevent it."

Total fantasy.

FLT-bird: "Yes and I’ve posted it many times already.
Even Northerners admitted it openly.
Its in the editorials of numerous Northern Newspapers explaining how they’d be economically ruined if the Southern states went their own way."

No, your posts don't support your ridiculous claim that all imports were owned by Southerners.

FLT-bird: "an intentional misreading on your part.
Southerners owned the goods to be imported.
Northerners made a lot of profit servicing the export of Southern Cash crops."

No misreading by me.
Here again you claim "Southerners owned the goods to be imported.".
I'm merely reporting to you that DiogenesLamp claims everything was controlled by evil "New York power brokers".
But if Southerners owned their goods, then they'd have no need of "power brokers", right?

FLT-bird: "LOL! and I do mean that I’m not just typing that every time.
I am actually laughing at the BS you spew.
Anyway....you think YOU know better than all the commentators at the time North, South and Foreign where the cash crops that provided the bulk of US exports came from?"

The numbers we have don't support your assertions.
Instead they tell us that, except for cotton, "Southern products" did not equate to Confederate products.
They tell us that, except cotton, much or all of it was produced in Union states (i.e., Kentucky, Missouri) or in Unionist regions of Confederate states (I.e., E Tennessee, W Virginia).
Confederate territory under Union army control would continue with business as usual.

FLT-bird: "Furthermore, you think you know this based on one year’s data?"

Sure, since 1861 was the key year, when the Confederacy was whole and could do what it wished, i.e., block the Mississippi River to Union commerce.
So Mid-West exports had to ship east on railroads instead of south on steamboats.
And Southern products were not going to ship north on the Mississippi past Confederate gun boats there to stop them.

After 1861, as more & more of the Confederacy was returned to the Union, then its products would return to Union export data.

Here's the bottom line: there was a huge difference, it turned out, between alleged "Southern products" and Confederate products.
That means all the economic analysis based on percentages of "Southern products" was & is flawed.

FLT-bird: "and yes trading did occur during the war. Try reading some history some time."

Of course, especially from regions under Union army control.

FLT-bird: "Your position is 'I have one year’s worth of data, therefore everything everybody was saying at the time was false - they didn’t know anyway - and I know better....150+ years later....based on one year of export data.'
LOL!"

Sure, because 1861 was the key year, the year of truth, when all the lies told for decades before were put to the real test: what was the true percent of "Southern products" in US total exports?
Answer: about 50% and everything else, when push came to shove, even if "Southern" were not necessarily Confederate products.

FLT-bird: "Yes by Confederate states - which is my point here. annnnd you’re back to trying to use one year of data to explain away what everybody else observed at the time. Ridiculous."

Yet, 1861 puts the lie to claims that "Southern products" represented 3/4 or 80% or whatever of US total exports.
When Confederate products were removed from US exports, including 80% of cotton, total US exports fell just 35%.
And excluding cotton, the reduction in "Southern" exports was only $3 million.
The mystery is solved when you remember that "Southern products" included exports from several Union states, including Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland & Delaware.

FLT-bird: "Hello pot! I’m kettle! You’re black! Talk about cherrypicking data....holy chit!
That’s all you do.
Your calculations are self interested horse crap.
Everybody at the time admitted the North got far more in federal payments."

But the data we have doesn't show it.
It shows roughly equal spending, over time, North & South.
The claim that "everybody knew" doesn't make it true.

FLT-bird: "Buchanan the Pennsylvanian openly said the South had not gotten its fair share.
There was a long history of Southerners complaining about it."

Buchanan the Doughfaced Northern Democrat would say whatever his Southern masters wanted to hear, so he's hardly a credible source.
The data we have does not support your claims.

FLT-bird: "And once again your pet theory that Southerners controlled the federal government is complete horse crap unsupported by any evidence."

No, it's supported by all the data we have, including records of Congress, presidents' cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, army commanders, etc.
All those records tell us that Southerners ruled over Washington, DC, until secession in 1861, with very few exceptions.

FLT-bird: "We know they rejected the Corwin amendment and the high Morrill Tariff. "

There was no Corwin amendment for Confederates to reject, because it never got to them.
There was no Morrill tariff for them to vote on because they walked out long before it finally passed.

FLT-bird: "Jefferson Davis did not need war."

Davis absolutely needed war because Virginia refused to secede without it, and along with Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas.

FLT-bird: "Indeed he sent representatives to Washington DC to negotiate terms of separation including taking on a share of the national debt as well as compensation for federal property that had been nationalized by various Southern states.
It was the Lincoln administration that refused to meet with them."

Just as Doughfaced Democrat President Buchanan had refused.
In this matter, if in no others, both Buchanan and Lincoln understood & agreed where their duty lay.

FLT-bird: "Oh and the Lincoln declared hostilities in April 15th 1861 when he called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the CSA.
This is yet more BS you simply spew without any evidence to support it hoping it will pass without challenge.
It won’t."

So claims Mr. NO-EVIDENCE-bird himself!
You can look up the Confederate declaration of war on May 6, 1861 on line -- here, for example.
The Union never did formally declare war, doubtless because that was not considered appropriate in cases of rebellion.
But Congress did approve all of Lincoln's actions and authorized his military operations.

FLT-bird: "Sure violation of the compact over slavery by the Northern states was the legal means of saying the Northern states had violated the compact.
However once offered slavery forever by express constitutional amendment to return, they rejected it."

First, there was no "violation of compact", because the 1850 compromise made it irrelevant.
Second, secessionists were offered nothing, so they rejected nothing.
That's all pure fantasy on your part.

FLT-bird: "Yet more tapdancing.
Georgia laid out the economic case EVEN THOUGH this was NOT unconstitutional.
That says a lot about how much they were upset by it."

But they didn't "lay it out", they briefly mentioned it in one paragraph out of 14.
The rest were devoted to slavery.
Clearly Georgians knew where their real priorities lay, even if FLT-bird misses it.

FLT-bird: "I note you left out the part in the Georgia declaration where they said each side started casting about for new allies and that Northern protectionists settled on the slavery issue to use as a wedge issue to unite the Northern states against the South in order to get high tariffs back in place."

Just one of many complaints focused on their real reason for secession: slavery.

FLT-bird: "Any claim that Georgia’s declaration was “all about slavery” is patently false as anybody who reads it can see quite quickly."

It takes a special kind of self-imposed blindness not to see that 13 of 14 paragraphs in the Georgia reasons are devoted to slavery.
Only one paragraph is devoted to all other reasons.

FLT-bird: "No it does not talk about “RE Lee’s Failure”.
That is a LIE born of your irrational hatred of all things Southern.
It talks about the federal government’s failure.
RE Lee the LT Col. of one federal brigade and thus the 2nd in command of that brigade was not mentioned."

But if Lee had done his job, Texans would have nothing to complain about.
It's not clear what his duties in Texas were, but he was there several years and Texans were not happy with the results.

As for "irrational hatred", coming from Mr. IRRATIONAL HATRED-bird, that's pretty rich.
But about half of my large family is Southern, and I don't hate them, I love them.
Of course, they don't fill up conversations with a bunch of godawful lies the way our Lost Cause mythologizers do.

FLT-bird: "Texas also talks about partisan legislation which “drains their substance”....ie squeezes money out of their pockets."

Sure, paragraph #18, very briefly, in passing.

FLT-bird: "It also talks about how the Northern states supported terrorists sent to attack the South.
Any claim that the Texas declaration of causes was “all about slavery” is just a laughable lie."

Two paragraphs talk about RE Lee's failure to protect Texans against "savage Indians" & "banditti", one (#18) complains about "unequal legislation", and all the rest, 19+ are devoted to their real reason: slavery.

So who's lying?

FLT-bird: "OK once again, Rhett talked about the economics first.
Therefore that is what was most important.
What? Its not more ridiculous than your word count?"

Or... you could just as well say that Rhett saved his strongest clinching arguments -- slavery -- for the end.
The fact remains that he spent twice as many words on slavery as he did on all other reasons combined.

FLT-bird: "Once again, he said he would have supported secession on economic grounds alone."

Sure, and some of our pro-Confederate posters claim they would have supported secession just as a chance to kill some Yankees, they didn't need any other excuses!
But the fact remains that at the time slavery was the main reason, if not the only reason, used to justify secession.

FLT-bird: "Clearly it was all about tariffs and unequal federal government expenditures."

Not.

FLT-bird: "The fact remains that economic issues were extensively used to persuade Southerners that they would be better off independent.
Had anybody been worried about the preservation of slavery, Lincoln and the Northern states made it crystal clear they need have no concerns about that."

But only after the fact.
The first seven declarations of secession came before Lincoln's inauguration, and were made anticipating Republican take-over in Washington, DC.
By the time Lincoln took office and might have done something about it, secession was done and a new Confederacy formed, so they weren't going back.

By the way, if you're interested in where the idea for the Corwin amendment came from, you might consider this:

"In the Congressional session that began in December 1860, more than 200 resolutions with respect to slavery,[7] including 57 resolutions proposing constitutional amendments,[8] were introduced in Congress.
Most represented compromises designed to avert military conflict.
Senator Jefferson Davis, a Democrat from Mississippi, proposed one that explicitly protected property rights in slaves.[8"

Of course, by the time Corwin finally passed Congress, Davis was long gone.

FLT-bird: "The rich no more called all the shots politically in the South than the rich called all the shots politically in the North."

DiogenesLamp will be disappointed to see you post that, because he believes that those rich power brokers are the root of all evil, Northerners, that is, not Southern.
Southern rich people are OK in DL's mind, but those deplorable Northerners were/are as bad as bad can get.

FLT-bird: "The fact that there were some rich people in the South in no way invalidates the accurate claim that the Northern states had via federal government policy, drained a lot of wealth out of the Southern states. "

Statistics say there were more rich people in the South than the North.
That suggests to me, if there was any "draining" going on, it went the other way.

FLT-bird: "Several of my sources have provided verifiable data.
Charles Adams wrote two books on the subject.
Try reading them and you’ll find plenty of verifiable data."

The book I posted in #385 above is very clear on those statistics.
You should read it.

FLT-bird: "Even his sycophants say he orchestrated the Corwin Amendment.
They praise him at length for it."

The amendment passed Congress before Lincoln was inaugurated.
Lincoln forwarded it to the states, but if he in fact "orchestrated" anything, it would have been Corwin's defeat, since only four, maybe five states ratified it.
Some "orchestration".

FLT-bird: "Nah. I’m right on both counts.
Lincoln and the Northern Dominated Congress passed the Corwin amendment.
Lincoln offered it in order to entice the original 7 seceding states to come back in his inaugural address.
It failed to do that.
Had it been for the purposes of holding slaves states in which had not left, then they would have gone ahead and passed it because some slave states did not leave."

Totally wrong, and now you're just making up nonsense.
Lincoln was not even there when Corwin passed -- President Buchanan signed it.
And the few states that did ratify Corwin included two critical slave-states, Kentucky & Maryland.
Corwin helped keep them in the Union, but was never "offered" to Confederate states.

FLT-bird: "Were they offered much lower tariffs and equal federal government expenditures?
No they were not.
They were offered slavery forever and they turned that down.
You don’t know that they would not have accepted had economic policy been better suited to their needs.
That was never offered."

I don't know where you get the idea that all these "offers" were made, they weren't.
There was no "offer" of representation to colonists in 1776 and there was no "offer" of Corwin to Confederates in 1861.
So it's all just fantasy in your imagination, not history.

FLT-bird: "Firstly the federal government was nowhere near as powerful in the 1850s.
Secondly that was not the real reason the original 7 seceding states left - that was merely the pretext."

Firstly, the federal government in 1860 was plenty powerful enough to do what it most needed to -- for example put a brigade of soldiers lead by RE Lee to fight off Indians in Texas.
So it had power if it had the will.
But fugitive slaves were not a high priority to the Southerners who dominated Washington, DC.

Secondly, your repeated claims of "pretext" are simply your own fantasies overruling the real facts of history.

FLT-bird: "I never said no slave holders were heads of large families.
YOU CLAIMED that heads of large families were the ONLY slaveholders.
That you do not know and have not proven."

Here's what I know for certain: farm families 150 years ago were huge -- four, six, eight children & more.
And the bigger the farm, with a big plantation house on it, the more likely was it to have grandma & grandpa, single aunts & uncles & others there.
Could more than one own slaves?
Sure, but we're talking big families, and the children certainly would not be legal owners.
So the assumption of this calculation is only four people per family, a small enough number to take account of multiple slave-holders in the same family.

By stark contrast, your assumption is ludicrous: that none of the non-slave holders lived with or near slave-holders and therefore most had no stake in the success of that institution.

That is self-inflicted blindness, FRiend.

FLT-bird: "What we actually know is that slave owners comprised a total of 5.63% of the total free population in the states which seceded....meaning 94.37% did not own slaves."

Regardless if they "owned" or not, many times the 5.63 percent were invested in and dependent on slavery.
Every slave-holder had families, children, relatives & close neighbors dependent on the work of slaves, whether they legally "owned" them or not.
And beyond them were contractors who hired slaves from other slave-holders because that was still cheaper than hiring free-white laborers.
Point is: your ridiculous attempts to minimize the importance of slavery -- especially in the Deep South -- are beyond laughable.

FLT-bird: "Missouri’s Governor and a part of its legislature voted for secession."

Missouri's governor was a Confederate and did everything he could, including raising an army to fight the Union army, to make Missouri Confederate.
But Missourians didn't want secession, voted overwhelming against it and served the Union army in vastly greater numbers than Confederate, almost four to one.

FLT-bird: "They were prevented from meeting and voting on the matter in full like the Maryland Legislature had been when Lincoln threw a bunch of them in a federal gulag without charge or trial before they could vote."

On March 19, 1861 the Missouri Constitution Convention which the Governor called to consider secession voted 99 to 1 against secession.
There was never a legitimate vote for secession after that, though the Governor did run off with some Confederate legislators and declare themselves seceded.
The vast majority of Missourians opposed them.

Maryland also voted overwhelmingly against secession (53-13) and supported the Union army over two-to-one vs. Confederates.
But after May 6, 1861 when Confederates formally declared war on the United States, it became, by definition, an act of treason to provide aid & comfort to Confederates.
So there were no further votes on secession.

FLT-bird: "Oh and Lincoln declared war when he called up 75,000 volunteers to invade the Southern states on April 15th."

Constitutionally only Congress declares war, not a president.
In the Civil War Congress did not formally declare war, because that is not done in rebellions, but Congress did approve all of Lincoln's actions and fully supported his war effort.

FLT-bird: "Twice more during the war Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, including the suspension ‘throughout the United States’ on September 24, 1862.
Although the records are somewhat unclear, more than thirteen thousand Americans, most of them opposition Democrats, were arrested during the war years, giving rise to the charge that Lincoln was a tyrant and a dictator.” (Davis, Don’t Know Much About the Civil War, pp. 182-183)"

Studies suggest the vast majority of those arrested were residents of Confederate states, foreigners, or Border State (i.e., Maryland, Missouri) citizens sympathetic to Confederates.
Very few came from solid Union states (exception: New York), and that explains why Lincoln suffered no serious political consequences.

We might also note that Confederates arrested & held without trial over 3,000 Unionists in East Tennessee.
It means that as a percentage of the population, the number of pro-Confederates arrested in the Union was about the same as the number of Unionists arrested in the Confederacy.

FLT-bird: "Wait don’t tell me.
These quotes are damned inconvenient.
Therefore they must be fake! LOL!"

No, I'm certain that Civil War era prisons were no picnic.
Doubtless, the only place worse would be a POW camp, North or South.

But we should note again 3,000 Unionists in East Tennessee held without trial in conditions which cannot have been better than what you describe here.

FLT-bird: "No its not. Had slavery been the concern, the Corwin Amendment would have allayed those concerns."

Corwin did ally concerns in Union states, but contrary to your cockamamie claims, it was never "offered" to Confederates.

FLT-bird: "They were fully prepared to recognize it anyway.....remember the Corwin Amendment?"

A few were, the vast majority were not and did not ratify Corwin.

FLT-bird: "Oh and the Confederate Constitution is very similar to the US Constitution except that it has provisions to limit spending and graft.
So your claims about it being first and foremost about slavery are just your usual BS."

The Confederate constitution first & foremost addressed slavery specifically and by name, making certain that it could never be abolished, anywhere or any time.
Every other change was minor & inconsequential.

FLT-bird: "Industrialization is incompatible with slavery.
Industrialization is why slavery died out in the entire western world over the course of about 75 years in the 19th century."

Nonsense. Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond was the Confederacy's largest and half its work force were slaves.
Slaves did just fine in Southern factories and there would be no reason not to use them there.

Industrialization did not kill off slavery, just the opposite, the outlawing of cheap slave labor forced manufacturers to invent labor saving machines to reduce costs.
But slaves themselves were perfectly capable of working in any factory, just as their descendants do today.

FLT-bird: "Only 4 states issued declarations of causes.
3 of the 4 listed causes other than slavery even though those other causes were not unconstitutional and refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the constitution was.
The north offered slavery forever.
The original 7 seceding states turned that down.
The northern dominated congress then expressly said it was not fighting over slavery.
The Upper South seceded over Lincoln starting a war to impose a government by force without consent.
Not slavery."

In your own words: "this is just self serving BS."
None of it is true, regardless of how often you re-post it.
It's all a lie from the beginning, can never be anything but.

First, all of the original Declarations of Causes focus primarily if not exclusively on slavery, and you know it.
"The North" offered nothing to Confederate states, and you know it.
Slavery was the issue that drove secession and abolition became the cause of freedom for Union armies, including its 200 colored regiments, and you know all that, but just don't like to confess it.

FLT-bird: "You are fixate on parties and have the erroneous notion that they have always been the same.
That is simply false."

Naw, Democrats have always been just what they are today, dominating in power or rebellious out of power, cheating, always using the law to make others pay for their own free stuff, whether those others were slaves in 1860 or just any hard working Americans today.