The Republican Party platform of May 1860 stated the minimal program of a historical bloc of northeastern financial and manufacturing interests and Midwestern and western farmers. It began on a high note of egalitarian and republican ideology, aired some Free Soil, antislavery grievances, and thudded to rest with some practical matters: protective tariffs, homesteads (good for votes but rather ambiguous), federally funded improvements of rivers and harbors (Great Lakes subsidies), and a Pacific railroad. In addition, the party’s friendliness to central (national) banking was no secret. The Hamiltonian mercantilism of the platform was its central theme, if not quite its only one. Alas for its adherents, they soon found a large bloc of their recent opponents (and potential taxpayers) leaving the Union, beginning with South Carolina in December 1860.
Your idiot contradicts himself and the facts by saying that the "Hamiltonian mercantilism of the platform was its central theme, if not quite its only one." The bulk of the platform is about freedom, slavery, federalism and civil peace. Only 4 of its 17 points are about economic policy. And the demand for a transcontinental railroad was also found in the Democrat platform (in both of them in fact).
Stromberg is making the same mistake DiLorenzo makes: he ignores or dismisses anything that's not economics and not likely to provide a basis for condemning the Republicans. His conclusions are the result of his biases, not of an objective analysis of the facts.
Stromberg goes on to cite Thomas C. Cochran's and William Miller's Age of Enterprise, which was written in 1942, when sympathy for the antebellum South was at a high point among historians. He doesn't mention this passage from the book:
Northern business took advantage of the Civil War once it began and after it was over, but that does not prove that business wanted the war; it does not prove, certainly, that business started the war. Northern and western businessmen were bound to the South by ties which they deemed strongest — ties of profit. Secession strained these almost to the breaking point ; war would shatter them altogether. New England cotton factories depended upon the South for raw materials; boot and shoe factories found their markets there, northern shippers their cargoes. All but the shippers could hope to preserve these ties with the South In or out of the Union, and the shippers certainly wanted no war. Commerce feeds on peace: no one knew It better than they.
From every section of the industrial North, from many types of industry, had come business spokesmen for peace. On December 19, 1860, August Belmont reported a meeting of “our leading men . . . composed of such names as Astor, Aspinwall, Moses H. Grinnell, Hamilton Fish, R. M. Blatchford, &c. They were unanimous for reconciliation, and that the first steps have to be taken by the North.” From New Jersey came the voice of Abram Hewitt, who had suffered as much as any one from southern tariff and railroad policies but who in November, i860, was “using every effort to induce the public mind to give up the idea of coercion, and to take that of peaceable separation.”
Stromberg's source doesn't quite agree with the argument he's making - and certainly doesn't agree with the one you're making.
Timothy Sandefur makes a compelling rebuttal of Stromberg's Howard Zinn-inspired screed here, continued here
This implies that the economic data condemns the Republicans.
But let us take a look at the modern world for just a moment. How important is "Abortion" to the Democrats? Is it more important than the money they make from government power?
How important is LGBT/homosexual stuff to the Democrats? Is it more important than the money they make from government power?
How important is "black lives matter"? Is it more important than the money they make from government power?
What all these things have in common is different constituency groups who will vote as a coalition if their interests are served.
I offer that the Democrat leadership does not really care about any of these issues beyond the utility to them of getting votes as a consequence of these constituency groups.
I may be cynical, but I believe their primary motivation is money and power, and these other issues are merely vehicles to obtaining that goal.
Do you think I am right about this motivation of the Democrats, or do you think they really deeply care about these issues as a matter of bedrock foundational principles near and dear to their heart?