COLLEGE STUDENT REACTS | Facts About Slavery Never Mentioned In School

FLT-bird on Southern paid tariffs: "The denial of it is a flat out lie.
Everybody including even the Northern newspapers at the time admitted it was true.
The lying denial is just laughable in fact."

One proof that you're wrong has been posted by DiogenesLamp, endlessly, to make his points.

Notice these numbers were for 1859 and reported to Congress in 1860, so they were public knowledge.

The graph clearly shows that 92% of all US tariff revenues came from Northern and Western ports.
And of the 8% which came from Southern ports, 83% of that came from New Orleans and Baltimore, both of which shipped much of their imports to Northerners in cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati.

Only 1% of all Federal tariff revenues came from the Southern cities between Baltimore and New Orleans (including Galveston).

That's the first proof, and it's indisputable, especially since DiogenesLamp has used those numbers so often to make his points.

So then it's claimed that, yes, Northern cities may have paid the tariffs, but those goods all then trans-shipped to the South, so in reality, Southerners paid the tariffs.

But they didn't, none of them did.
That's because Northern cities imported raw materials, especially wool, cotton, silk, iron, sugar, coffee, tea and wines.
What they "exported" to the South were finished products, especially goods made from wool, cotton, leather (i.e. shoes), silk, iron, wood & paper.
Northerners also shipped to Southerners smoked fish, which were not imported and nearly all the tea, which was imported.

So, how much of the raw material imported by Northern cities ended up in finished products they later "exported" to the South?

30% of woolen goods were "exported" to the South, plus
25% of cotton woven goods plus
15% of silk goods
35% of iron manufactured goods, but
0% of sugar, coffee & wine imports were then "exported" to the South.

The average then comes out around 15% of US raw material imports found their way into products then "exported" to the South.
And that corresponds to estimates of the South's GDP, which are around 15% of the US total annual GDP of $4.4 billion.

No, no!, it's claimed, we mustn't look at it that way.
The only thing we are supposed to consider is this: Southern exports were 75+% of total US exports, and they "paid for" all of US imports, and therefore, don't you see?, "the South" (meaning slave labor), "paid for" nearly all the Federal import tariff revenues.

And that is not 100% false, since cotton is clearly a Southern product and cotton alone accounted for around 50% of US total exports (including specie) in, say, 1860.
So, we might logically say that slave-labor "paid for" about 50% of US import tariffs.

But once we look past cotton, the list of "Southern Products" drops off very rapidly.

50% of US exports in, say, 1860, was raw cotton.
6% of US exports were tobacco products, and right away there's a problem, since tobacco was mostly grown not in the Confederate South, but rather in Union states and regions.
We know this because in 1861, when Confederate exports were deleted from US totals, tobacco exports fell only 14%.
So 86% of allegedly Southern tobacco actually came from Union states.
one half of 1% of US exports was turpentine, allegedly a Southern product, but exports fell only 38% in 1861, so the majority was produced in Union states.
Finally, the most curious "Southern Product" items of all, hops and clover seed.
These went from virtually no exports in 1860, but over $3 million total in 1861.
How can that happen if these are truly "Southern Products"?
The answer is, somebody has misclassified them.

So the true answer for Southern exports is roughly 50% of total US exports, and nearly all of that was cotton.

FLT-bird: "Everybody including even the Northern newspapers at the time admitted it was true."

Northern Democrat newspapers, of course, would parrot the lies of Southern Democrats.
We should expect that Republican papers stuck closer to the known facts.

FLT-bird: "Another case of a flat out lying denial of the obvious truth.
It was absolutely true that Northern States got the lion's share of federal expenditures despite paying only a tiny fraction of the taxes."

First, we've already established that Southerners paid virtually no import tariffs directly.
Indirectly, Southerners paid maybe 15% of total tariffs in the form of higher prices on tariff-protected manufactured goods they "imported" from the North.

Southern cotton did account for around 50% of total US exports, however, cotton itself was protected by a 19% tariff, so, when Southerners "imported" cotton products (i.e., clothing) from the North, some of the extra cost was for tariffs that protected their own products.

As for Federal spending, there are no numbers showing long term preferences for Northern versus Southern projects, none.
Here are the real facts for the period 1850 to 1860:

30% of all US voters in 1860, were Southerners.
53% of Federal spending on fortifications went to the South.
That is 76% more than the South's population justified.
45% of Internal Improvements (aka infrastructure) spending went to the South.
That is 50% more than the South's population justified.
41% of Federal spending on lighthouses went to the South.
That is 37% more than the South's population justified.
52% of Federal hospitalization spending went to the South.
That is 73% more than the South's population justified.
34% of Federal pensions were paid to Southerners.
That is 13% more than the South's population justified.
44% is the overall average of Federal spending, in the South between 1850 and 1860, which is 47% more than the South's population justified.
52% is the overall average of Federal spending in the South between 1789 and 1860, which is 73% more than the South's 1860 population justified.

There are no numbers which purport to show the South getting less than it's "fair share" of Federal spending.

FLT-bird "Southerners were a minority in Congress for years and years prior to Secession and the last few presidents - Buchanan and Lincoln - were Northerners."

Irrelevant, because Southerners exercised their political powers through control over the Democrat party, and Democrats ruled over Washington, DC, almost continuously from 1801 until secession in 1861.

Democrat President Buchanan is a typical example of what Southerners called "Dough-faced" Northerners, meaning Northerners eager to bend over and kiss Southern... ah... rings.
Buchanan was only a Northerner by about 10 miles -- meaning he was born 10 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, and was happy to support Southerners on critical matters such as the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott decision.

The Democrat party was full of people like Pres. Buchanan, and so were the old Whigs before around 1852.
Indeed, it was the Old Republican, Virginia Senator John Randolph of Roanoke who first coined the term "Doughfaced Northerners" to describe such people.
Through Northern Doughfaces, Southerners controlled the Democrat party and through the party they ruled over Washington, DC.

"In 1820 seventeen doughfaces made the Missouri Compromise possible.
"In 1836 sixty northern congressmen voted with the South in the passage of a gag rule to prevent anti-slavery petitions from being formally received in the House of Representatives.
"In 1847 twenty-seven northerners joined with the South in opposing the Wilmot Proviso, and
"In 1850 thirty-five supported a stronger fugitive slave law.
"By 1854 the South had changed its position on the Missouri Compromise and fifty-eight northerners supported its repeal in the Kansas–Nebraska Act.[4]
"Richards has classified 320 congressmen in the period from 1820 to 1860 as doughfaces.
"The two U.S. Presidents preceding Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Pierce[6] and James Buchanan, were both commonly referred to as doughfaces.
"Stephen A. Douglas was severely criticized by Lincoln as the "worst doughface of them all",[7] even though he broke with his party over the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas in 1857."

From the beginning of the Republic until secession, Southern Democrats were never completely powerless and only for brief periods suffered any reduction in their absolute powers over Washington, DC.

FLT-bird: "Henry Clay was a Kentuckian who was a nationalist and who championed the "American plan" of high protective tariffs and lots of corporate welfare.
This is what Lincoln believed in as well."

Henry Clay was a Virginia-born slaveholder who represented Kentucky in Congress.
Lincoln, like Jefferson Davis, was born in Kentucky while Clay was a young politician, a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican.
This was at a time when Thomas Jefferson had flipped sides on the issue of Internal Improvements (aka infrastructure) and was supporting the most massive infrastructure project yet proposed, called the 1807 Gallatin Plan.
Like Presidents Jefferson and Madison, Clay continued to support Federal infrastructure spending, protective tariffs and even the National Bank.
When other Democratic-Republicans began opposing those, it lead to the party's split, making Kentuckian Clay a Whig opposed to Tennessean Andrew Jackson's Democrats.

Both Whig Clay and Democrat Jackson were Southern slaveholders.

FLT-bird "It wasn't a strictly North-South fight getting the Tariff of Abominations passed but once Southerners saw how damaging it was to their economy, they became staunchly opposed to the point that South Carolina nullified it touching off a national crisis."

And yet, and yet... the 1828 Tariff of Abominations' greatest defender was a Democrat Southern Slaveholder named Andrew Jackson.
So, it was not strictly North vs. South because there were many Southerners who fully understood the value of encouraging US producers.

And it was Southern Democrat President Jackson who put down the nascent South Carolina rebellion with not only stern words, but also by sending a war-fleet with soldiers to invade Charleston Harbor, should the need arrise.

FLT-bird "in reality, Southerners became more and more of a minority in Washington DC and by 1860 it was clear to everybody that they no longer had the strength to prevent passage of the Morrill Tariff which eventually TRIPLED tariff rates.
Southerners knew exactly how harmful this would be to them - and their response was secession."

Of course they had plenty of political power, even in 1860, until they first sabotaged their own cause by splitting the Democrat party and then committed political suicide by declaring secession.

The original Morrill proposal in 1859 was to return tariffs from the historically low 1857 rates to those of the 1846 Walker Tariff, which had been proposed and supported by Democrats at the time.
The original Morrill proposal increased overall rates from 16% to 26%.
Here is the comparison on major items.

TABLE COMPARING TARIFF RATES OF
1846 Walker, 1857 Democrats' & 1860 MORRILL:

Commodity	1846 Walker	1857 Democrats'	1860 Morrill
Woolens	30%	24%	37%
Brown Sugar	30%	24%	26%
Cotton	25	19	25
Iron mfg	30	24	29
Tobacco	40	30	25
Wines	40	30	40
Average tariffs:	33%	25%	30%

FLT-bird: "The Corwin Amendment would have expressly protected slavery effectively forever in the US Constitution.
Lincoln and the Northern dominated Congress also offered strengthened fugitive slave laws."

And so, like any good Democrat, you keep repeating your lies, even after you know the real truth of it.
Maybe if you just say it often enough, maybe, somehow you can magically make it true, right?

Once again, here's the truth: Corwin would provide no additional protection to slavery beyond what was already in the US Constitution.
Any proposals which did provide extra protections, such as the ones by Mississippi Democrat Senator Jefferson Davis, were rejected by Republicans, causing Mississippi to join South Carolina in declaring secession.

Corwin was supported 100% by Democrats and signed by Democrat President Buchanan.
Corwin was opposed by a majority of Republicans, and only transmitted to states by incoming Pres. Lincoln, without endorsing it.

Corwin could never offer Southerners the long list of explicit protections for slavery to be found in their new Confederate constitution.

FLT-bird on Corwin's intentions: "That is false.
It was definitely intended to persuade the original 7 seceding states to re-enter the union.
Anybody who reads Lincoln's first Inaugural Address will see it right away."

You've obviously not read it, or are so brainwashed you can't see the truth when it's staring you in the face.
Here's what Lincoln said:

"I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution, which amendment, however, I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service.
To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable."

He didn't endorse it, he said it made no change.

FLT-bird: "Lots of people saw slavery and its effects as pernicious.
Pretty much nobody was willing to shed their blood for its abolition.
Nor were the 94.33% of Southerners who did not own so much as a single slave willing to shed their blood for its preservation.
Slavey is not what people on each side were fighting over."

And yet, protecting slavery was the biggest reason, sometimes the only reason, secessionists gave in their "Reasons for Secession" documents.

Plus, your 94.33% statistic is off by an order of magnitude.
In fact, the numbers of families who owned slaves varied from:

1/3 to 1/2 of families in the Deep South (SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, LA & TX)
1/4 to 1/3 of families in the Upper South (VA, NC, TN & AR)
5% to 15% in the Border South (DE, MD, KY & MO)

Where you had 1/3 to 1/2 of families owning slaves, you also had another 1/3 or more of white families who worked for or joined socially with those slaveholding families.
So, the average Confederate soldier did not own slaves himself, but his family, uncles, cousins & neighbors did, and so the soldier understood how important slavery was to them economically and also socially.

FLT-bird: "Since the denial of it is the standard pro federal government propaganda and lies, it shows just how deep the propaganda goes that I was not exposed to the truth even all the way through college."

I'm certain you were taught the truth as best it was understood at the time.
But you didn't like the truth, somehow it made you feeeeeeel bad, and so you searched out a barrel of propaganda lies, and you've been drinking that Kool-Aid ever since.
And now you're addicted and can't get off it.

FLT-bird "Republicans lied every bit as much back then as Establishment Republicans aka RINOs lie today.
They are after all, part of the Establishment.
As we've all seen on issue after issue, there is simply no lie they will not stoop to in order to keep themselves in power and to keep the cash flowing into their pockets."

Here's the real truth of it: Republicans were not the establishment in 1860, Democrats were and had been almost exclusively since 1801.

Republicans today are about 50% corrupt, meaning it takes a constant struggle to keep Republicans on the straight and narrow path.
Democrats are 100% corrupt, meaning nothing can ever bring them to see the light of reason & virtue.
So, if you believe a word that comes from Democrats, be it in 1860 or today, it's only because you hate the truth and wish to delude yourself with lies.

FLT-bird "Once you swallow the Establishment's likes like BroJoeK, it is nearly impossible to get through to you just as it is with him."

So long as you post lies here, you have no chance of persuading anyone who doesn't buy your lies.
That's a fact.

DiogenesLamp: "The Northeastern liberals were Northeastern liberals back then, and they are still Northeastern liberals today...

...But BroJoeK wants to believe the Republicans were always the conservatives, and that the Democrats were always the liberals because he finds that idea comforting and it lets him ignore who was doing what to whom during the Civil War."

As usual, DL, you have no real clue what you're talking about, you're just babbling nonsense which makes you feeeeeel good.

The truth is this:
The anti-Constitution party was always the

anti-Federalist of 1788 who became
Thomas Jefferson's anti-Administration faction from 1789 to 1792 who became
Jefferson's Democratic-Republican party (calling themselves "Democratics") from 1792 to circa 1828 who became
Andrew Jackson's Democratics, aka "The Democracy", since around 1828.

From the beginning, Democrats' leadership was Southern, but as early as the election of 1800, a Democratic-Republican from New York City, Aaron Burr, used the then new Tammany Hall political organization to flip New York away from John Adams' Federalists to support Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans.
New York voting Democratic was critical in electing Jefferson President and Aaron Burr was rewarded with the Vice Presidency.

In today's terms, Thomas Jefferson was a big-business globalist ("big business" meaning plantations which grew cash crops for export), who supported increasing exports and low tariffs on imports, while his Northern allies, corrupt Tammany Hall, represented masses of poor Big City immigrants.
To this day, that alliance remains the basic core of Democrats' politics.

Meanwhile, the pro-Constitution party was:

The pro-Constitution Federalists of 1787-'88 who became
The Federalist party from 1789 to around 1833 who became
The Whig party from about 1833 to circa 1854, who became
The Republicans since 1854.

Federalist - Whig - Republican political strength always came from the "middle class", rural, small-town and suburban property owners, skilled workers, professionals, family farms and businesses, traditional views on religion, economy and politics, they (we) are patriots and pro-Constitution as they understood it.

Typically, since their alliance in 1800, the masses of Big City immigrant Democrat voters plus globalist Big Business money have overwhelmed the smaller numbers of traditional patriotic Republicans, to win the majority of elections before 1860 and since 1932.

So, all this other cr*p about Republicans being the party of corruption and Big Business control over New York and Washington, DC, is pure anti-historical nonsense.
Before 1860 and since 1932, it's always been the Democrats.

Even during (especially during) the period from 1860 to 1932, when Republicans generally controlled US politics, Democrats still dominated in their alliance of Southern and Northern Big-Business with Big-City immigrant voters.

As early as the election of 1876, that Democratic alliance came close enough to election victory to force Republicans to remove Union troops from the South and, in effect, abandon the Solid South to white Democrats.

Today, the only thing that's changed is more and more white Southerners consider themselves to be "middle class" defenders of traditional values, including the Constitution, and so vote Republican, while black voters see themselves as opposing the Constitution's restrictions on Federal power, and so vote for Democrats.

But the old alliances and basic values are the same today as ever.

One proof that you're wrong has been posted by DiogenesLamp, endlessly, to make his points. Notice these numbers were for 1859 and reported to Congress in 1860, so they were public knowledge. The graph clearly shows that 92% of all US tariff revenues came from Northern and Western ports. And of the 8% which came from Southern ports, 83% of that came from New Orleans and Baltimore, both of which shipped much of their imports to Northerners in cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati. Only 1% of all Federal tariff revenues came from the Southern cities between Baltimore and New Orleans (including Galveston). That's the first proof, and it's indisputable, especially since DiogenesLamp has used those numbers so often to make his points. So then it's claimed that, yes, Northern cities may have paid the tariffs, but those goods all then trans-shipped to the South, so in reality, Southerners paid the tariffs. But they didn't, none of them did. That's because Northern cities imported raw materials, especially wool, cotton, silk, iron, sugar, coffee, tea and wines. What they "exported" to the South were finished products, especially goods made from wool, cotton, leather (i.e. shoes), silk, iron, wood & paper. Northerners also shipped to Southerners smoked fish, which were not imported and nearly all the tea, which was imported. So, how much of the raw material imported by Northern cities ended up in finished products they later "exported" to the South? 1. 30% of woolen goods were "exported" to the South, plus 2. 25% of cotton woven goods plus 3. 15% of silk goods 4. 35% of iron manufactured goods, but 5. 0% of sugar, coffee & wine imports were then "exported" to the South. The average then comes out around 15% of US raw material imports found their way into products then "exported" to the South.

Except that is not proof. That merely shows WHERE the tariff was paid, not WHO paid it. We've had this discussion at least a dozen times before and I have explained that to you at least a dozen times before. You just talk for the sake of talking don't you?

And that corresponds to estimates of the South's GDP, which are around 15% of the US total annual GDP of $4.4 billion.

Estimates by who? Where are these estimates?

No, no!, it's claimed, we mustn't look at it that way. The only thing we are supposed to consider is this: Southern exports were 75+% of total US exports, and they "paid for" all of US imports, and therefore, don't you see?, "the South" (meaning slave labor), "paid for" nearly all the Federal import tariff revenues.

The standard pack of lies I see. Nobody said the South paid for "all" of US imports - just about 75% of them. The South does not mean exclusively slave labor of course. Most Southerners were White. Most worked in jobs requiring manual labor. Ergo, the majority of the South's labor was White.

And that is not 100% false, since cotton is clearly a Southern product and cotton alone accounted for around 50% of US total exports (including specie) in, say, 1860. So, we might logically say that slave-labor "paid for" about 50% of US import tariffs.

We might...if we were being dishonest. Not all cotton was grown and harvested with slave labor. That was a laughably wrong assumption from the start.

But once we look past cotton, the list of "Southern Products" drops off very rapidly. 1. 50% of US exports in, say, 1860, was raw cotton. 2. 6% of US exports were tobacco products, and right away there's a problem, since tobacco was mostly grown not in the Confederate South, but rather in Union states and regions.

False. Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, etc were the largest producers of Tobacco.

We know this because in 1861, when Confederate exports were deleted from US totals, tobacco exports fell only 14%. So 86% of allegedly Southern tobacco actually came from Union states.

1. I'd need to see the source for the statistics you are citing. I would also need to see that they aren't including goods exported from the Southern states. The blockade wasn't very effective in 1861.

3. one half of 1% of US exports was turpentine, allegedly a Southern product, but exports fell only 38% in 1861, so the majority was produced in Union states. 4. Finally, the most curious "Southern Product" items of all, hops and clover seed. These went from virtually no exports in 1860, but over $3 million total in 1861. How can that happen if these are truly "Southern Products"? The answer is, somebody has misclassified them. So the true answer for Southern exports is roughly 50% of total US exports, and nearly all of that was cotton.

Odd that you came to the "true answer" and all those Northern newspapers at the time got it so drastically wrong. You'd think the people at the time would understand the economics better than some guy over 160 years later......

Northern Democrat newspapers, of course, would parrot the lies of Southern Democrats. We should expect that Republican papers stuck closer to the known facts.

Several of the newspapers I cited were in fact Republican. The editorials I cited were from Northern papers calling for war because they recognized the loss of their cash cows - ie the Southern states, would be economically devastating to the Northern states. That doesn't seem to be a position Democrats at the time would champion.

First, we've already established that Southerners paid virtually no import tariffs directly.

First, we've already established that they did and that your denials are pure hogwash.

Indirectly, Southerners paid maybe 15% of total tariffs in the form of higher prices on tariff-protected manufactured goods they "imported" from the North.

yet more pure hogwash. The imported goods were hit with at first double the 15% rate they had been subject to before and eventually under the Morrill Tariff they were subject to a staggering 50% tariff. Needless to say, Northern manufacturers jacked up their prices only a tiny bit less in order to maximize profits. So the cost of manufactured goods rose dramatically.

Southern cotton did account for around 50% of total US exports, however, cotton itself was protected by a 19% tariff, so, when Southerners "imported" cotton products (i.e., clothing) from the North, some of the extra cost was for tariffs that protected their own products.

Clothing was one of the items subject to the dramatic increase in prices due to the tariff. It did not "protect" Southern products at all. In fact, Southerners saw their sales of cotton and other goods decrease during the Tariff of Abominations as Britain and France no longer had as much money to buy their products due to the tariff. The same no doubt was taking place in the 1860s.

As for Federal spending, there are no numbers showing long term preferences for Northern versus Southern projects, none.

Yet another falsehood from you.

Here are the real facts for the period 1850 to 1860: 1. 30% of all US voters in 1860, were Southerners. 2. 53% of Federal spending on fortifications went to the South. That is 76% more than the South's population justified. 3. 45% of Internal Improvements (aka infrastructure) spending went to the South. That is 50% more than the South's population justified. 4. 41% of Federal spending on lighthouses went to the South. That is 37% more than the South's population justified. 5. 52% of Federal hospitalization spending went to the South. That is 73% more than the South's population justified. 6. 34% of Federal pensions were paid to Southerners. That is 13% more than the South's population justified. 7. 44% is the overall average of Federal spending, in the South between 1850 and 1860, which is 47% more than the South's population justified. 8. 52% is the overall average of Federal spending in the South between 1789 and 1860, which is 73% more than the South's 1860 population justified. There are no numbers which purport to show the South getting less than it's "fair share" of Federal spending.

How odd that your numbers say the exact opposite of what Northern Newspapers were saying...and what Southern political leaders were saying...and what Southern commentators had been saying...and what tax expert Charles Adams said. How convenient your numbers are for your argument. Almost as if they were complete and utter BS.

Irrelevant, because Southerners exercised their political powers through control over the Democrat party, and Democrats ruled over Washington, DC, almost continuously from 1801 until secession in 1861. Democrat President Buchanan is a typical example of what Southerners called "Dough-faced" Northerners, meaning Northerners eager to bend over and kiss Southern... ah... rings. Buchanan was only a Northerner by about 10 miles -- meaning he was born 10 miles north of the Mason-Dixon line, and was happy to support Southerners on critical matters such as the 1857 SCOTUS Dred Scott decision. The Democrat party was full of people like Pres. Buchanan, and so were the old Whigs before around 1852. Indeed, it was the Old Republican, Virginia Senator John Randolph of Roanoke who first coined the term "Doughfaced Northerners" to describe such people. Through Northern Doughfaces, Southerners controlled the Democrat party and through the party they ruled over Washington, DC. 1. "In 1820 seventeen doughfaces made the Missouri Compromise possible. 2. "In 1836 sixty northern congressmen voted with the South in the passage of a gag rule to prevent anti-slavery petitions from being formally received in the House of Representatives. 3. "In 1847 twenty-seven northerners joined with the South in opposing the Wilmot Proviso, and 4. "In 1850 thirty-five supported a stronger fugitive slave law. 5. "By 1854 the South had changed its position on the Missouri Compromise and fifty-eight northerners supported its repeal in the Kansas–Nebraska Act.[4] 6. "Richards has classified 320 congressmen in the period from 1820 to 1860 as doughfaces. 7. "The two U.S. Presidents preceding Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Pierce[6] and James Buchanan, were both commonly referred to as doughfaces. 8. "Stephen A. Douglas was severely criticized by Lincoln as the "worst doughface of them all",[7] even though he broke with his party over the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas in 1857." From the beginning of the Republic until secession, Southern Democrats were never completely powerless and only for brief periods suffered any reduction in their absolute powers over Washington, DC.

Ah so even when a political leader was from the North and was elected by Northern voters, if he in any way cooperated or compromised with Southerners he was of course a "doughface" and was "controlled" by Southerners. ROTF! You actually seem to believe this crap.

Henry Clay was a Virginia-born slaveholder who represented Kentucky in Congress. Lincoln, like Jefferson Davis, was born in Kentucky while Clay was a young politician, a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican. When other Democratic-Republicans began opposing those, it lead to the party's split, making Kentuckian Clay a Whig opposed to Tennessean Andrew Jackson's Democrats. Both Whig Clay and Democrat Jackson were Southern slaveholders.

Where someone is born is pretty much meaningless. Hell, Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia. Its where a politician was raised and where he worked and where he was elected that matters. Clay was from a border state. Davis was a Southerner. Lincoln was a Northerner.

And yet, and yet... the 1828 Tariff of Abominations' greatest defender was a Democrat Southern Slaveholder named Andrew Jackson. So, it was not strictly North vs. South because there were many Southerners who fully understood the value of encouraging US producers. And it was Southern Democrat President Jackson who put down the nascent South Carolina rebellion with not only stern words, but also by sending a war-fleet with soldiers to invade Charleston Harbor, should the need arrise.

and yet and yet, Southerners as a whole were staunchly opposed to the Tariff of Abominations once they saw how destructive it was to their economy. Also, the Nullification Crisis was ended by a compromise. The tariff was done away with and tariff rates were lowered dramatically. South Carolina got what it wanted.

Of course they had plenty of political power, even in 1860, until they first sabotaged their own cause by splitting the Democrat party and then committed political suicide by declaring secession.

Of course they did not have the political power to stop the passage of the Morrill Tariff which they knew from experience was going to devastate their economy.

The original Morrill proposal in 1859 was to return tariffs from the historically low 1857 rates to those of the 1846 Walker Tariff, which had been proposed and supported by Democrats at the time. The original Morrill proposal increased overall rates from 16% to 26%.

the original Morrill tariff DOUBLED tariff rates. It went on to more than TRIPLE tariff rates eventually.

And so, like any good Democrat, you keep repeating your lies, even after you know the real truth of it. Maybe if you just say it often enough, maybe, somehow you can magically make it true, right? Once again, here's the truth: Corwin would provide no additional protection to slavery beyond what was already in the US Constitution. Any proposals which did provide extra protections, such as the ones by Mississippi Democrat Senator Jefferson Davis, were rejected by Republicans, causing Mississippi to join South Carolina in declaring secession. Corwin was supported 100% by Democrats and signed by Democrat President Buchanan. Corwin was opposed by a majority of Republicans, and only transmitted to states by incoming Pres. Lincoln, without endorsing it.

And you just repeat your endless lies and BS. Lincoln orchestrated passage of the Corwin Amendment. REPUBLICAN Senator Thomas Corwin wrote it. REPUBLICAN William Seward supported it. Lots of other REPUBLICANS supported it too. Regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats, the Corwin Amendment passed the Northern dominated Congress by the necessary 2/3rds supermajority AFTER the Southern delegation had withdrawn. Lincoln endorsed it in his all important first inaugural address. That's the truth.

Corwin could never offer Southerners the long list of explicit protections for slavery to be found in their new Confederate constitution.

Pure lie on your part as usual. The protections of slavery in the Confederate Constitution were not more than those that existed in the US at the time with the sole provision that the Confederate government itself could not outlaw slavery.....ie the same thing the Corwin Amendment would have done in the US Constitution.

You've obviously not read it, or are so brainwashed you can't see the truth when it's staring you in the face.

You've obviously not read it or you are lying. I've come to the conclusion that its the latter.

Here's what Lincoln said: "I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution, which amendment, however, I have not seen, has passed Congress, to the effect that the federal government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." He didn't endorse it, he said it made no change.

He said it passed and he had no objections. Of course in reality ole Abe was lying. He had not only seen it, he had orchestrated it.

And yet, protecting slavery was the biggest reason, sometimes the only reason, secessionists gave in their "Reasons for Secession" documents.

And yet of the 4 states that issued declarations of causes only one listed exclusively that even though none of the other grievances listed were unconstitutional while the Northern states' violation of the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution actually was unconstitutional.

Plus, your 94.33% statistic is off by an order of magnitude.

No its not. Its directly from the 1860 US Census.

In fact, the numbers of families who owned slaves varied from: 1. 1/3 to 1/2 of families in the Deep South (SC, GA, FL, AL, MS, LA & TX) 2. 1/4 to 1/3 of families in the Upper South (VA, NC, TN & AR) 3. 5% to 15% in the Border South (DE, MD, KY & MO) Where you had 1/3 to 1/2 of families owning slaves, you also had another 1/3 or more of white families who worked for or joined socially with those slaveholding families.

Your estimates are WAY too high and are based on the faulty assumption that there could only be one slave owner per family. We know numerous examples of that not being true.

So, the average Confederate soldier did not own slaves himself, but his family, uncles, cousins & neighbors did, and so the soldier understood how important slavery was to them economically and also socially.

Except they didn't. Slave ownership was rare and of those who did own slaves, over half of them owned 5 or less. The big slave owners were a tiny minority.

I'm certain you were taught the truth as best it was understood at the time. But you didn't like the truth, somehow it made you feeeeeeel bad, and so you searched out a barrel of propaganda lies, and you've been drinking that Kool-Aid ever since. And now you're addicted and can't get off it.

No, I was taught the standard lies, propaganda and BS you constantly spew. I was absolutely shocked when I read more for myself and discovered the truth. It was an eye opening experience that made me start to question a lot of other things....ie the media, academia, the government, etc

Here's the real truth of it: Republicans were not the establishment in 1860, Democrats were and had been almost exclusively since 1801.

Laughable BS to say Republicans weren't part of the Establishment back then. Lincoln was the chief counsel and lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad - then the largest corporation on earth. If that's not Establishment, nothing is.

Republicans today are about 50% corrupt, meaning it takes a constant struggle to keep Republicans on the straight and narrow path. Democrats are 100% corrupt, meaning nothing can ever bring them to see the light of reason & virtue. So, if you believe a word that comes from Democrats, be it in 1860 or today, it's only because you hate the truth and wish to delude yourself with lies.

You keep making this idiotic assumption that the political parties never change. They do. They change drastically over time and the coalitions that drive the bus change. We've seen that in our own lifetimes. It has happened several times before. The Democrats of the JFK era were not nearly as corrupt as they are now. Even now there are some like RFK Jr who are not corrupt.

So long as you post lies here, you have no chance of persuading anyone who doesn't buy your lies. That's a fact.

That's exactly what I say about you.

It might have been fashionable to think of NYC as a blood-sucking exploiter, but that wasn't the reality.

Look at the coal industry in this era. We owe the rise of labor Unions in a large part to New York controlling the value of coal and setting the price low enough to cause massive labor unrest.

But it didn't. And the states that did ratify the amendment did so on their own, not at the behest of New York City or New York state.

Seward guaranteed that New York would pass it, and I think he knew what he was talking about.

On another website, I have another civil war discussion going on, and a point was made about what would have happened had the South capitulated quickly after the invasion.

I put forth the point that it was likely an absolute certainty that the Corwin amendment would have been ratified in an effort to avoid a future conflict.

I think if the South had given up quickly, we would have a constitutional amendment protecting slavery forever.

Congress took pains to pair new free states with new slave states, so the South, with the aid of Northern allies, could control the Senate pretty much all the time. Most of the antebellum Presidents and Chief Justices had been Southerners. Fillmore was an accident who didn’t last long, and Pierce and Buchanan were “Northern Men of Southern Principles.” By 1856, Southern Democrats realized that they had to carry Pennsylvania to win, so Buchanan was needed if they wanted to stay in power.

On another website, I have another civil war discussion going on, and a point was made about what would have happened had the South capitulated quickly after the invasion.

I put forth the point that it was likely an absolute certainty that the Corwin amendment would have been ratified in an effort to avoid a future conflict.

First of all, an incredible number of things would have had to have been different for the South to surrender shortly after the war began.

Secondly, there would have been no need for a Corwin Amendment if the South had surrendered. There was general agreement that the amendment wasn't really needed. The Constitution already protected slavery in states that wanted it. The Corwin Amendment was a desperate attempt to keep a few slave states in the union by giving them something that they would think was ironclad guarantee.

Surrender would make such an amendment unnecessary. It would mean that the rebels had accepted Lincoln's election and its results (that was something the rebels wouldn't do easily, which is why an early surrender wouldn't happen). It would meant that Southerners accepted his promise to leave slavery alone where it existed (and also his power to appoint anti-slavery officials to jobs in the slave states). It would also mean that the victorious Northerners wouldn't have to make gestures to appease the South. To say that ratification of the amendment was "likely an absolute certainty" is (besides being internally contradictory -- if it's "likely" it's not an "absolute certainty") absurd.

The territories couldn't grow cotton, and that was that.

Not much corn was grown in Kentucky. Tobacco, hemp, and corn cultivation did keep the slaves busy. Romans, Spaniards and others used slaves for mining. And of course, cotton had been grown in Arizona for centuries. Slaveowners needed new slave states for political reasons, and uses would be found for slave labor.

The primary organization responsible for putting forth this allegation was the "Free Soil Party", located in New York New York.

The Free Soil Party was founded in upstate New York. Most of the people there or their parents had come from New England, and many of their children had moved or were planning to move further west. Slavery in the territories was a real issue for them (a split in the state Democratic Party also provided an opportunity for the party). I don't know if they had a headquarters anywhere, but I don't think you do either. As I've said many times before, if you have any evidence that they had a headquarters in New York City, it's long past time to produce it.

You've already said that New York City depended on money from the South. What reason would they have to upset slaveowners and risk disrupting flows of trade and money? You also don't seem to understand that, while money always plays a role in politics, the country was more democratic in those days. There was no mass media telling people what to think. Newspaper editors might try, but they weren't as potent an influence as today's media. Small town people could act on their own. It wasn't all a matter of "astroturfing."

Back to letting other people do your thinking for you, eh?

Some people do read books and articles and don't assume that they have all the answers already.

“Not much corn was grown in Kentucky”

Meant to say

“Not much cotton was grown in Kentucky” compared to the Deep South states.

FLT-bird: "Except that is not proof.
That merely shows WHERE the tariff was paid, not WHO paid it.
We've had this discussion at least a dozen times before and I have explained that to you at least a dozen times before.
You just talk for the sake of talking don't you?"

All your handwaving here aside, the facts remain that:

Virtually no Southerner ever paid US import tariffs directly.
We know this because only 1% of US tariffs were paid in Southern ports between Baltimore and New Orleans, including Galveston. Baltimore and New Orleans combined paid 7%, but much, if not most, of their imports went to Union cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati.
92% of import tariffs were paid in Northern and Western ports ("western" meaning Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco).
Yes, indirectly, Southerners paid higher prices due to tariffs on raw materials, like wool and cotton, which Northern manufacturers turned into finished products, like clothing and linens.
However, not 100% of Northern manufactures shipped to the South.
- 15% was the overall average of imported raw materials which eventually shipped to Southern customers.
  The number is low because 0% of items like coffee, sugar and wine were re-"exported" to Southerners.
  Doubtless the reason is such imports shipped directly to Southern ports like Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, Savanah Charleston and Baltimore -- that was the 8% of tariffs directly paid by Southerners.
- Averages for other Northern manufactured products were higher -- 35% of iron manufacturers, 30% of woolens, 25% of cotton goods and 15% of silk products manufactured in the North from tariffed imports then shipped to Southern customers.
Deep South cotton exports, which allegedly "paid for" Northern imports, were in fact only 50% of US total exports, including specie.
One proof is, in 1861, with no Confederate exports counted, Southern products exports fell by 71%, while Northern and Western exports increased by 59%.
In other words, a huge portion of what had been classified as "Southern products" were or could be, in fact, produced in Union states.
Bottom line: while cotton exports (circa $200 million in 1860) were important to the entire US economy ($4.4 billion GDP), they were not as important as Southerners liked to think.
Turned out, "King Cotton" was not "King in the North", or in Europe.

FLT-bird on 1860 US GDP: "Estimates by who? Where are these estimates?"

Historical US GDP numbers are readily available many places, including here.
To see the Civil War years, simply type in 1860 as the start date and 1865 as the end date.
You'll see that for 1860 our nominal GDP was $4.4 billion, rising to $10 billion in 1865.
If you're interested in such things, that nominal $10 billion in 1865 was an inflated peak not reached again until 1880.
However, you can also see that when measured in constant dollars, real GDP had returned to its 1865 levels already in 1868 and grew rapidly from there.

Estimates of Confederate GDP are trickier, because, on the one hand, in 1860 the South had never been more prosperous and average white heads of household were better off than their Northern cousins.
If considered a separate nation, the 1860 South would be the world's 4th richest, after the North and only Britain in Europe.

On the other hand, once the poverty of slaves is factored in, Southern per capita GDP is said to be about half the North's per capita GDP.
Based on that, and the South's population, we get a number for the South's GDP between 15% and 20%, depending on whether we're looking at just the Confederacy or every slave-state.

This site spells it out in detail.

FLT-bird: "The standard pack of lies I see.
Nobody said the South paid for "all" of US imports - just about 75% of them.
The South does not mean exclusively slave labor of course.
Most Southerners were White.
Most worked in jobs requiring manual labor.
Ergo, the majority of the South's labor was White."

Your 75% is a totally bogus number, but 50% is totally fair, and consists of only one major item -- King Cotton.
Cotton was grown mainly by slave-labor in the Deep South, as was sugar.
In the Deep Cotton South, slaves averaged 47% of the population.

FLT-bird can we say slave-labor produced most cotton? : "We might...if we were being dishonest.
Not all cotton was grown and harvested with slave labor.
That was a laughably wrong assumption from the start."

A reasonably fair estimate would be 80%, since, as Mississippians were unashamed to admit in their "Reasons for Secession" document:

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.
Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.
These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.
These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization... "

That seems pretty clear to me, and notice that their word was not "some" or "the majority" or "nearly all", but rather "none but the black race."

I don't know how you can dispute that word "none" without calling the 1861 secessionists liars, and why would they lie about it?

FLT-bird on Southern products: "False. Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, etc were the largest producers of Tobacco."

Kentucky was a Union state and tobacco was also grown in Union Southern Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Maryland.
Bottom line: in 1861, when Confederate tobacco was removed from Union numbers, tobacco exports fell only 14%.
So tobacco was not a strictly "Southern Product".

FLT-bird: "1. I'd need to see the source for the statistics you are citing.
I would also need to see that they aren't including goods exported from the Southern states.
The blockade wasn't very effective in 1861."

Well, first of all, regardless of the blockade, it was impossible to include Confederate exports in Union numbers -- just think about it, it's not arguable.

Second, my source is here.
Also here, this source puts 1860 total exports at $400,122,296 which means that cotton exports -- at roughly $200 million -- were about 50% of the total.

FLT-bird: "Odd that you came to the "true answer" and all those Northern newspapers at the time got it so drastically wrong.
You'd think the people at the time would understand the economics better than some guy over 160 years later......"

I have no idea what "Northern newspapers" you're talking about, but here is what the New York Times (link above) said at the time:

"Such are the Treasury returns.
In them the value of cotton exported is put down at only $34,051,483

, against $191,806,555 for 1860; the excess in value for that year being $157,755,073."

If you go on to read the rest of the New York Times article, you'll see that the reduction in Union imports more than offset the reduction in Union exports with a resulting increase of Union specie reserves.
Morrill Tariff reduced imports helped make financing the war easier for the Union.

FLT-bird: "Several of the newspapers I cited were in fact Republican.
The editorials I cited were from Northern papers calling for war because they recognized the loss of their cash cows - ie the Southern states, would be economically devastating to the Northern states.
That doesn't seem to be a position Democrats at the time would champion."

First of all, I've read many, but far from all, of your posts and I've never seen actual data to support your many ridiculous claims.

Second, it's clear you don't yet understand that Democrats then, just as now, were the party of globalized business, especially then in the production and shipment of cotton.
Northern Big-City, Big-Business Democrats would suffer the most from a loss of Confederate states' exports.

In early 1861, Northern Democrats wanted to "live and let live" with Confederate states.
New York's Democrat Mayor Wood even wanted to secede New York City too, to stay on good terms with the South.
All that ended when rumors of Confederate "free trade" began to circulate, and Northern Democrats were filled with fears of losing everything in the South.

Republicans were less concerned about the economics than with the Constitutional, legal, moral and military issues related to secession.

FLT-bird on Southern tariff payments: "First, we've already established that they did and that your denials are pure hogwash."

So far, you've shown no evidence of even one Southerner paying even one import tariff directly.
You are simply parroting propaganda claims of the time, without any evidence to support such claims.

FLT-bird: "yet more pure hogwash.
The imported goods were hit with at first double the 15% rate they had been subject to before and eventually under the Morrill Tariff they were subject to a staggering 50% tariff.
Needless to say, Northern manufacturers jacked up their prices only a tiny bit less in order to maximize profits.
So the cost of manufactured goods rose dramatically."

Surely you realize that all that is just babbling nonsense, for reason #1, the new Morrill tariff didn't take effect until after the Deep South had already declared their secessions.
Confederates never paid the higher rates.

Reason #2, Morrill originally increased average rates from 17% to 26% or roughly 50%.
But on specific major items, the increase merely returned rates to their levels in the Democratic 1846 Walker Tariff:

TABLE COMPARING TARIFFS OF 1846 Walker, 1857 Democrat & 1860 MORRILL:

Commodity	1846 Walker	1857 Democratic	1860 Morrill
Woolens	30%	24%	37%
Brown Sugar	30%	24%	26%
Cotton	25	19	25
Iron mfg	30	24	29
Tobacco	40	30	25
Wines	40	30	40
Average of above tariffs:	33%	25%	30%

So, while the overall average of increases was about 50% -- from 17% to 26% -- on major items like wool, sugar, cotton and iron, the Morrill increase was only 20% and simply returned rates to those of the 1846 Walker Tariff.

FLT-bird: "Clothing was one of the items subject to the dramatic increase in prices due to the tariff.
It did not "protect" Southern products at all.
In fact, Southerners saw their sales of cotton and other goods decrease during the Tariff of Abominations as Britain and France no longer had as much money to buy their products due to the tariff.
The same no doubt was taking place in the 1860s."

And once again you revert to your old narrative, regardless of facts, and once again, facts don't support your narrative.
So, let's begin with the 1828 Tariff of Abominations -- here is a graph showing US cotton exports, compared to total exports, not including specie.
Notice, there is no drop-off in cotton exports after 1828:

Next, let's look at US cotton imports from foreign countries.
In 1860 cotton (19% tariff) was our third largest dollar import commodity, only exceeded in value by sugar (24% tariff) and woolens (24% tariff).
Those tariff rates were the lowest 1857 tariffs, passed by Democrats.
And cotton was our number 3 import despite the fact that the South was the world's largest cotton producer, the North still imported about 20% as much as the South exported -- and that's with the 19% tariff on cotton preventing even more foreign imports.

My point is, Southern cotton (19% tariff) and sugar (24%) were both protected by US tariffs, as was tobacco (30%).
Such tariffs were believed necessary to fund the Federal government and to prevent foreign competitors from snuffing out Southern products.

Finally, I notice you often like to argue against the 1859 Morrill proposal, which was effectively a return to the Democrat approved 1846 rates, based on Civil War era increases that were strictly the result of secession and war, not their causes -- you're trying to reverse cause and effect.

"Some historians in recent decades have minimized the tariff issue as a cause of the war, noting that few people in 1860–61 said it was of central importance to them.
Compromises were proposed in 1860–61 to save the Union, but they did not involve the tariff.[38]
Arguably, the effects of a tariff enacted in March 1861 could have made little effect upon any delegation which met prior to its signing."

Will stop here for now, continue on later...

FLT-bird: "How odd that your numbers say the exact opposite of what Northern Newspapers were saying...and what Southern political leaders were saying...and what Southern commentators had been saying...and what tax expert Charles Adams said.
How convenient your numbers are for your argument.
Almost as if they were complete and utter BS."

And so you've claimed, but where are actual data to support your claims?
I've never seen them.

The source of my numbers is here: John van Deusen’s 1928 book, Economic bases of Disunion in South Carolina.
Van Deusen's numbers were reported here.

FLT-bird: "Ah so even when a political leader was from the North and was elected by Northern voters, if he in any way cooperated or compromised with Southerners he was of course a "doughface" and was "controlled" by Southerners. ROTF!
You actually seem to believe this crap."

And still, typical of your Democrat mind-set, which values narrative over everything else, when presented with actual facts, all you can do is handwave them away.

The truth about "Doughfaces" is that the term was coined by Virginia Senator John Randolph, circa 1820, as a sign of disrespect for Northerners eager to do what Randolph wanted them to do.
At that time, it was the Missouri Compromise, which passed due to the support of Northern Democratic "Doughfaces".
The term caught-on and was used up until 1861 to describe Northerners like Democrat Presidents Pierce and Buchanan.

Over the years from 1820 to 1861 there were hundreds of Northern Democrat Doughfaces in Congress who helped Southerners pass their major agenda items.

So handwave away and ignore all you want, it's still a fact.

FLT-bird: "Where someone is born is pretty much meaningless.
Hell, Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia.
Its where a politician was raised and where he worked and where he was elected that matters.
Clay was from a border state.
Davis was a Southerner.
Lincoln was a Northerner."

There were many Southerners.

Wilson was born and raised in the South, as was Clay.
Wilson's family owned slaves, Clay was himself a slaveholder.
Lincoln's family was originally from Massachusetts and did not own slaves, so far as I know.
Another Southern slaveholder who supported protective tariffs and even some internal improvements was Democrat Andrew Jackson.
Even South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, when he was a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican (until 1828), supported protective tariffs, internal improvements and the National Bank.
Plus, Whig Presidents Harrison, Tyler and Taylor were all Southern Virginia born slaveholders.

And yet again, my point is simply this: your suggestions that every Southerner before 1860 was a anti-American Neanderthal Democrat is simply false.
In fact, many Southerners were as patriotic and pro-American as our Southern Founders like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

It's inconceivable to me why anyone would want to deny that.

FLT-bird: "and yet and yet, Southerners as a whole were staunchly opposed to the Tariff of Abominations once they saw how destructive it was to their economy.
Also, the Nullification Crisis was ended by a compromise.
The tariff was done away with and tariff rates were lowered dramatically.
South Carolina got what it wanted."

No, not all Southerners.
In Southern states the House vote was 17 for and 65 against the 1828 Tariff.
In Northern states the vote was 88 for and 29 against.
So, there were more Northerners opposed than there were Southerners for the tariff.
In 1828 the "Solid South" was not 100% solid.

And no, the rates were not immediately lowered dramatically and South Carolina did not soon get what it wanted.
Instead, five years later the 1833 Compromise Tariff began to reduce tariffs gradually back to their 1820 levels of around 20%.

What South Carolina wanted in 1830 was to secede and that couldn't happen because no other states were willing to join South Carolina over just the issue of tariffs.
What South Carolinians realized then was that in order to secede, they needed an issue strong enough to outrage all Southerners, and there was only one such issue -- slavery.

FLT-bird: "Of course they did not have the political power to stop the passage of the Morrill Tariff which they knew from experience was going to devastate their economy."

Southerners absolutely did stop Morrill in 1860, and could have stopped it in 1861, or at least forced a compromise, had not their election strategy been to split their majority Democrat party, making them two minority parties.
Yes, it's true, that as minorities, Southern Democrats would lose much of their power over Congress, but that was their choice.
Nobody forced Southern Democrats to split their majority party, and they had nobody but themselves to blame for the results.

FLT-bird: "The original Morrill tariff DOUBLED tariff rates.
It went on to more than TRIPLE tariff rates eventually."

That's a lie, and you need to stop lying, it's not that hard, you can easily look it up yourself.
The average rate under the Democrats' 1857 tariff was a low 17%.
The originial Morrill proposal returned those to the 1846 Walker Tariff rates of circa 26%.
That's a 50% increase, not double, much less triple.
And within those numbers, our largest imports -- wool, sugar, cotton & iron -- those increases were only 20% on average.

So there's no need for you to keep lying about this, just look the numbers up yourself.

Of course, the later war-time tariffs are totally irrelevant to this discussion.
Those rates were caused by the Confederacy and no Confederate ever paid those higher tariffs.

FLT-bird: "Lincoln orchestrated passage of the Corwin Amendment."

You have no evidence that Lincoln "orchestrated" anything.
The evidence we have clearly shows that New York Senator Seward led the Republican efforts, and that he was generally acting as a loose cannon, on his own.
In his 1st Inaugural, Lincoln said he'd not even seen the proposed amendment.

FLT-bird: "REPUBLICAN Senator Thomas Corwin wrote it.
REPUBLICAN William Seward supported it.
Lots of other REPUBLICANS supported it too."

Sure, but the majority of Republicans opposed Corwin, even with Seward's support for it.
100% of Democrats supported Corwin and it was signed by Democrat President Buchanan, not Lincoln.

FLT-bird: "Lincoln endorsed it in his all important first inaugural address.
That's the truth."

That's not the truth, and you can easily see this yourself if you simply imagine, today, some Republican politician saying in an interview, "I am not opposed to Donald Trump as our Presidential nominee".
Would you consider that a real endorsement??
Really??
I don't, but that's what Lincoln said about Corwin's Amendment.

FLT-bird: "Pure lie on your part as usual.
The protections of slavery in the Confederate Constitution were not more than those that existed in the US at the time with the sole provision that the Confederate government itself could not outlaw slavery.....ie the same thing the Corwin Amendment would have done in the US Constitution."

And yet again, you've seen the truth, but look the other way.
So here, yet again, is the list of explicit new protections for slavery in the new Confederate constitution (from post #170):

Article I Section 9(4): "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.[13]
The Confederate constitution explicitly says, "no... law impairing the right of property in negro slaves..."
Article IV Section 2(1) "The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired."[31]
The Confederate constitution explicitly claims a "right of transit and soujourn" with slaves.
Such purported "rights" are not found in the US Constitution, regardless of what Crazy Roger Tanney may have fantasized.
Article IV Section 3(3) "In all such [Confederate] territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states."[32]
The Confederate constitution explicitly makes slavery lawful in every Confederate territory.
The US Constitution did no such thing.
Article I Section 9(1): "The importation of Negroes of the African race from any foreign country, other than the slave-holding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden..."
The Confederate constitution made importing slaves from the United States lawful.
United States law, as directed by the Constitution, forbade importing slaves, period.

Given these significant increases in protection for slavery in the Confederate constitution, there is no way Confederate states could seriously contemplate returning to the Union.

FLT-bird: "He said it passed and he had no objections.
Of course in reality ole Abe was lying.
He had not only seen it, he had orchestrated it."

Or so you claim, and yet without a scrap of evidence to support your claims, here or elsewhere.

FLT-bird on slavery: "And yet of the 4 states that issued declarations of causes only one listed exclusively that even though none of the other grievances listed were unconstitutional while the Northern states' violation of the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution actually was unconstitutional."

So here again is the breakdown of "Reasons for secession" documents:

"Reasons for Secession*" Documents before Fort Sumter

Reasons for Secession*	S. Carolina	Mississippi	Georgia	Texas	Rbt. Rhett	A. Stephens	AVERAGE OF 6
Historical context	41%	20%	23%	21%	20%	20%	24%
Slavery	20%	73%	56%	54%	35%	50%	48%
States' Rights	37%	3%	4%	15%	15%	10%	14%
Lincoln's election	2%	4%	4%	4%	5%	0%	3%
Economic issues**	0	0	15%	0%	25%	20%	10%
Military protection	0	0	0	6%	0%	0%	1%

* Alabama listed only slavery in its "whereas" reasons for secession.

** Economic issues include tariffs, "fishing smacks" and other alleged favoritism to Northerners in Federal spending.
(I've included Rhett's letter and Stephens' speech because they were highly influential in convincing other Southerners to vote for secession.)

On the Fugitive Slave Clause, all of the first four "Reasons for Secession" documents mention it, along with other slavery related issues, but, curiously, neither Rhett nor Stephens brought it up, though both did discuss slavery at length.

But most (not all) ignored the key fact about Fugitive Slaves -- at Southerners' insistence, the 1850 Compromise made Fugitive Slaves a matter of national, not states' responsibility.
The 1850 Compromise tasked Washington, not the states, to enforce its Fugitive Slave laws -- so any complaints about Fugitive Slaves in "Reasons for Secession" documents were totally misdirected and bogus.

FLT-bird (is it false that 94.33% were not slaveholders?): "No its not.
Its directly from the 1860 US Census....
...Your estimates are WAY too high and are based on the faulty assumption that there could only be one slave owner per family.
We know numerous examples of that not being true."

Noooo... the 1860 census says there were 393,975 slaveholders, which is 1.26% of the total population of 31,183,582.
That implies that 98.7% of Americans were not slaveholders.

Of course, virtually 100% of Northerners were not slaveholders, so if we just look at the Southern white population, it was 8,289,782, making non-slaveholders ~95%.

However, in 1860, according to the US census, the average family was about 5 people, meaning there were roughly 1,660,000 Southern white families.
If we assume only one slaveholder per family, then about 24% of families "owned" slaves -- and that number corresponds to reports from the time that about 1/4 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves.

Now you wish to argue that maybe some families had more than one slaveholder, even though typically, "the man of the house" owned everything.
So, only in a few elite families were women high-status enough to legally own slaves.
How many? Maybe 10% at most.
Therefore, instead of there being 393,975 slaveholding families, there were only around 355,000 families who "owned" slaves, or 21% of all Southern families.

But that's all Southern families.
If we only look at the Confederacy, we find the white population was 5,582,222 CSA individuals, which means roughly 1,116,000 CSA white families.
Of those, 316,632 individuals owned slaves, and if we apply the 90% factor, we have 284,969 CSA slaveholding families, or 26% of all CSA families.

But that's just the CSA average.
If we look at high-slave states like South Carolina and Mississippi, and again allow for 10% multiple slaveholders in one family, we see South Carolina had 41% and Mississippi 44% of families owning slaves.

And just to make the point clear, for every such family who did not own slaves, there were other family members -- brothers, uncles, cousins, in-laws and close neighbors -- who did.
And that is why the entire culture -- the "Southern Way of Life" -- was built around their "peculiar institution".

Those are facts, deny them as much as you wish.

FLT-bird: "Except they didn't.
Slave ownership was rare and of those who did own slaves, over half of them owned 5 or less.
The big slave owners were a tiny minority."

Not as rare as you pretend.
First of all, 393,975 slaveholders means the average slaveholder owned ~10 slaves.
Second, I have no reason to doubt your number that "half of them owned 5 or less," suggesting an average for them of 2.5 slaves, or roughly 500,000 slaves "owned" by about 200,000 slaveholders.
That means the other approx. 3,500,000 slaves were "owned" by just 300,000 slaveholders or 13 per slaveholder.
Those were large operations and suggest their families were also larger than average -- instead of just five members, they were 7 or 8 -- suggesting that 23% of Confederates belonged to large families which "owned" slaves.

FLT-bird: "No, I was taught the standard lies, propaganda and BS you constantly spew.
I was absolutely shocked when I read more for myself and discovered the truth.
It was an eye opening experience that made me start to question a lot of other things....ie the media, academia, the government, etc"

Except that you never read a single word of truth on your own.
What you discovered was a pack of lies that you were too ignorant and innocent to distinguish from real facts and way too eager to believe as opposed to the harsh and unchanging truth.

FLT-bird: "Laughable BS to say Republicans weren't part of the Establishment back then.
Lincoln was the chief counsel and lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad - then the largest corporation on earth.
If that's not Establishment, nothing is."

Naw... Lincoln was a small-time independent country lawyer who defended all kinds of people, both innocent and guilty, rich and poor.
The "Establishment" figure you're thinking of, was a Democrat, a very high-level corporate executive in charge of vast railroad operations, including in Illinois, politically connected to the Democrat administration in Washington, DC.
You might even remember his name, because he represented the Confederacy's last-best hope for Civil War political victory.
He was George McClellan.

FLT-bird: "The Democrats of the JFK era were not nearly as corrupt as they are now.
Even now there are some like RFK Jr who are not corrupt."

Truthfully, I never paid much attention to RFK Jr until very recently, and I do admit to being kind of impressed with him now.
The poor fellow has one ton of courage, that's for sure.

So, maybe you can tell me, what elected offices has RFK Jr held?
What positions of high responsibility, in business or government or some other enterprise, has he managed?

And based on that, are we to conclude that some number less than 100% of Democrats are corrupt?

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, for examples, I think the world of Democrat Andrew Jackson; Harry Truman was my kind of Democrat and I do grudgingly admire the Kennedy brothers, despite some hanky-panky which could make Slick William Clinton blush.
But in general, I think it's safe to say that virtually all Democrats were and are corrupt liars and deceivers, and only people predisposed to love their lies can be convinced to believe even one word of them.

And those sad people apparently include FLT-bird and DiogenesLamp here on Free Republic.

Sad {sigh}

x: "Meant to say
“Not much cotton was grown in Kentucky” compared to the Deep South states."

Here is one version of the map showing US economic regions in 1860, this one shows where large numbers of slaves lived, and didn't live.
Important to notice that in regions with few to no slaves, there were hotbeds of Unionism within the Confederacy -- notably, western Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, Northern Alabama and Northern Arkansas.

The map does not show the numbers of slaves in New Mexico (native Americans enslaved) and Oklahoma (owned by Native Americans).

You just talk for the sake of talking don't you?" All your handwaving here aside, the facts remain that: 1. Virtually no Southerner ever paid US import tariffs directly.

We know that you are not serious and are just going to keep repeating this lie ad infinitum. WHERE a tariff is paid is not WHO pays it. This has been explained to you over and over but you apparently have no life and live to just hear yourself talk. I'm done with this. Get a life and find something productive to do with your time. You're not going to waste more of mine with this nonsense.

3. Deep South cotton exports, which allegedly "paid for" Northern imports, were in fact only 50% of US total exports, including specie. One proof is, in 1861, with no Confederate exports counted, Southern products exports fell by 71%, while Northern and Western exports increased by 59%. In other words, a huge portion of what had been classified as "Southern products" were or could be, in fact, produced in Union states.

Again, lies and BS as the Northern newspapers themselves which I previously posted amply demonstrate.

Your 75% is a totally bogus number, but 50% is totally fair, and consists of only one major item -- King Cotton. Cotton was grown mainly by slave-labor in the Deep South, as was sugar.

No. This is a lie. Even the northern newspapers - let alone economists who have looked at the subject - have admitted that 75% of exports and imports were owned by Southerners. Thus, as the owners of the goods, Southerners paid 75% of the tariff.

A reasonably fair estimate would be 80%,

"reasonably fair"? Says who - you? LOL!

Kentucky was a Union state and tobacco was also grown in Union Southern Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Maryland. Bottom line: in 1861, when Confederate tobacco was removed from Union numbers, tobacco exports fell only 14%. So tobacco was not a strictly "Southern Product".

Kentucky was a border state. There were claims it did secede and claims it did not. The same goes for Missouri. Both were mostly occupied fairly early by union forces so they therefore put more men in the union army. A lot of these troops were not trusted by Washington and thus weren't asked to do more than guard their homes (ie they weren't sent South to seek combat for fear many of them would defect).

I have no idea what "Northern newspapers" you're talking about, but here is what the New York Times (link above) said at the time: "Such are the Treasury returns. In them the value of cotton exported is put down at only $34,051,483 [in 1861], against $191,806,555 for 1860; the excess in value for that year being $157,755,073." If you go on to read the rest of the New York Times article, you'll see that the reduction in Union imports more than offset the reduction in Union exports with a resulting increase of Union specie reserves.

If you have no idea which Northern newspapers I cited, go back and read. I posted them YET AGAIN in this thread after having posted them many many times in past such threads. Amazing how you managed to never see it.

First of all, I've read many, but far from all, of your posts and I've never seen actual data to support your many ridiculous claims.

then you haven't read. That's the only possible explanation since I've posted them over and over again including in this thread. Its your ridiculous claims that are unsupported.

Second, it's clear you don't yet understand that Democrats then, just as now, were the party of globalized business, especially then in the production and shipment of cotton. Northern Big-City, Big-Business Democrats would suffer the most from a loss of Confederate states' exports. In early 1861, Northern Democrats wanted to "live and let live" with Confederate states. New York's Democrat Mayor Wood even wanted to secede New York City too, to stay on good terms with the South. All that ended when rumors of Confederate "free trade" began to circulate, and Northern Democrats were filled with fears of losing everything in the South. Republicans were less concerned about the economics than with the Constitutional, legal, moral and military issues related to secession.

This is the most laughable and ridiculous pile of hogwash posted in this thread yet. The political parties have not remained the same over a century and a half. The Republicans were concerned about money above all because their voters were concerned about money above all - as the voters always are.

So far, you've shown no evidence of even one Southerner paying even one import tariff directly.

So far I've posted several newspaper articles from the North, the South and Abroad which all say the South was paying the vast majority of the tariff. I could also post quotes from Tax/Economics expert Charles Adams who looked at all this quite closely saying the same thing.

Surely you realize that all that is just babbling nonsense, for reason #1, the new Morrill tariff didn't take effect until after the Deep South had already declared their secessions.

Surely you realize that your denial of it is babbling nonsense and everything I posted is 100% true.

Confederates never paid the higher rates. Reason #2, Morrill originally increased average rates from 17% to 26% or roughly 50%. But on specific major items, the increase merely returned rates to their levels in the Democratic 1846 Walker Tariff: So, while the overall average of increases was about 50% -- from 17% to 26% -- on major items like wool, sugar, cotton and iron, the Morrill increase was only 20% and simply returned rates to those of the 1846 Walker Tariff.

The Confederate states seceded to avoid the tariff. The Morrill tariff eventually increased rates to TRIPLE what they were and left those rates sky high until the passage of the federal income tax. Did you see the word "eventually"? That means they did not it all at once. There were multiple rounds of rate hikes which everybody knew was coming once the initial tariff rate hikes went through.

And once again you revert to your old narrative, regardless of facts, and once again, facts don't support your narrative.

Once again you resort to your lying denials of the facts and once again the sources at the time all back up what I'm saying and all you have are your own cockamamie back of the envelope masturbating with numbers calculations to claim otherwise.

Such tariffs were believed necessary to fund the Federal government and to prevent foreign competitors from snuffing out Southern products.

LOL at you actually trying to sell this BS. Firstly, the money raised by the tariffs was not needed to pay for government. These were not revenue tariffs, they were protective tariffs. They raised far more money than was needed - which is what got the Northern states in the habit of getting all kinds of pork from the federal government. Secondly, Southern cash crops did not need protection. Southerners wanted LOW tariffs, remember? They were in no danger of being undercut by foreign competition. It was Northern manufacturers who were constantly clamoring for higher tariffs because they could not compete on price.

Finally, I notice you often like to argue against the 1859 Morrill proposal, which was effectively a return to the Democrat approved 1846 rates, based on Civil War era increases that were strictly the result of secession and war, not their causes -- you're trying to reverse cause and effect.

Everybody knew the first round of tariff rate increases proposed by the Morrill Tariff were not going to be the end of the matter. That was merely going to be the first bite of the apple. Once they proved they could push the first round through, it was always going to be a one way ratchet - with rates only ever going up up up. That's exactly what happened. You claim it was because of the war. No. That was just the fig leaf put on it. Those sky high rates stayed in place for over 60 years.

"Some historians in recent decades have minimized the tariff issue as a cause of the war, noting that few people in 1860–61 said it was of central importance to them.

Yes. We call those historians PC Revisionists.

Compromises were proposed in 1860–61 to save the Union, but they did not involve the tariff.[38] Arguably, the effects of a tariff enacted in March 1861 could have made little effect upon any delegation which met prior to its signing."

Let's see......compromises were offered but the one thing they did not offer to compromise on was the tariff. The compromise effort failed. Gosh....maybe if they had offered to compromise on the tariff.....after all, that's exactly what ended the Nullification Crisis a generation earlier......

And so you've claimed, but where are actual data to support your claims? I've never seen them.

I'm sure there are. I haven't noted them. What I have noted are the comments of everybody at the time saying exactly what I've said which is that the Southern states were responsible for about 75% of the exports and imports and thus were paying about 75% of the tariff. You of course, claim miraculously to have never seen them even though I've posted them multiple times every time this subject has come up.

And still, typical of your Democrat mind-set, which values narrative over everything else, when presented with actual facts, all you can do is handwave them away. The truth about "Doughfaces" is that the term was coined by Virginia Senator John Randolph, circa 1820, as a sign of disrespect for Northerners eager to do what Randolph wanted them to do.

This is what shrinks call "projection". You accuse me of exactly that which you yourself are guilty of. Northern politicians elected by Northern voters were controlled by....wait for it....Northerners. Duh. I guess the dishonest claims otherwise are part of your Democrat mindset. LOL!

So handwave away and ignore all you want, it's still a fact.

What is a fact is that these were Northerners elected by Northern voters in Northern states.

4. Even South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, when he was a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican (until 1828), supported protective tariffs, internal improvements and the National Bank.

He did at the time until he saw how destructive high tariffs were to the Southern economy. He also noted that Northern states got the lion's share of the federal budget. "The north has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the north ... The South as the great exporting portion of the Union has, in reality, paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue," John C Calhoun March 4, 1850

You will doubtless squeal that this can't possibly be true and gosh, that Calhoun guy is an evil, wicked, nasty, horrible guy and must be lying and slavery slavery slavery, blah blah blah. I will note that what Calhoun said here is no different from what numerous other political leaders and newspapers were saying.

your suggestions that every Southerner before 1860 was a anti-American Neanderthal Democrat is simply false. In fact, many Southerners were as patriotic and pro-American as our Southern Founders like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

Strawman alert. I never suggested any such thing.

In Southern states the House vote was 17 for and 65 against the 1828 Tariff. In Northern states the vote was 88 for and 29 against. So, there were more Northerners opposed than there were Southerners for the tariff. In 1828 the "Solid South" was not 100% solid. And no, the rates were not immediately lowered dramatically and South Carolina did not soon get what it wanted. Instead, five years later the 1833 Compromise Tariff began to reduce tariffs gradually back to their 1820 levels of around 20%.

As I said, Southerners became far more anti Tariff once they saw how destructive the Tariff of Abominations was to their states economically. Note the use of the word "became"...as in they weren't as opposed initially.

Also, I said the compromise reached to end the Nullification Crisis was that tariff rates were lowered. They were. I did not say "immediately".

What South Carolina wanted in 1830 was to secede and that couldn't happen because no other states were willing to join South Carolina over just the issue of tariffs.What South Carolina wanted was the tariffs to be lowered. That's what they got. Note they nullified the tariff. They did not secede. Had they wanted to secede, presumably, they would have seceded. They were still willing to compromise because they believed compromise possible.

What South Carolinians realized then was that in order to secede, they needed an issue strong enough to outrage all Southerners, and there was only one such issue -- slavery.

that was Andrew Jackson's view but it is debatable. Had they wanted to secede they would presumably have done so. After all, Massachusetts and Connecticut had threatened to secede over the Embargo Act about 15 years earlier during the Hartford Convention so the idea that each state could unilaterally secede was not limited to Southern states.

by the way, notice how secession is often what states threaten or resort to when their economy is crushed by blocking or impinging on foreign trade?

Southerners absolutely did stop Morrill in 1860, and could have stopped it in 1861, or at least forced a compromise, had not their election strategy been to split their majority Democrat party, making them two minority parties.

No they didn't stop it in 1860. It passed the House. The process of log rolling to pick up one or two more votes in the Senate was underway. It was a certainty that some Senator could be induced to flip for the right payoff for his constituents. Everybody knew this.

That's a lie, and you need to stop lying, it's not that hard, you can easily look it up yourself.,/p>

Your denial is a lie. You need to stop lying. Rates were 17% before the Morrill Tariff. "The bill immediately raised the average tariff rate from about 15 percent (according to Frank Taussig in Tariff History of the United States) to 37.5 percent, but with a greatly expanded list of covered items. The tax burden would about triple. Soon thereafter, a second tariff increase would increase the average rate to 47.06 percent, Taussig writes."

"At the time, Taussig says, the import-dependent South was paying as much as 80 percent of the tariff, while complaining bitterly that most of the revenues were being spent in the North. The South was being plundered by the tax system and wanted no more of it. Then along comes Lincoln and the Republicans, tripling (!) the rate of tariff taxation." https://mises.org/library/lincolns-tariff-war

Go ahead and emote about the source. We all know that's your go to response whenever you see information you don't like. LOL!

You have no evidence that Lincoln "orchestrated" anything. The evidence we have clearly shows that New York Senator Seward led the Republican efforts, and that he was generally acting as a loose cannon, on his own. In his 1st Inaugural, Lincoln said he'd not even seen the proposed amendment.

Lincoln orchestrated it.

"At this point the historical meaning of the amendment takes an intriguing turn. While Seward presented the measure before the committee in late December 1860, the circumstances of its introduction are enveloped in his own communications with the president-elect. Seward drafted the measure after conferring with his political ally and newspaperman Thurlow Weed on a train ride across New York. Weed had just come from Springfield, Illinois and carried both verbal and written instructions from Abraham Lincoln to his allies in Congress. Crofts reassembles the steps of each figure’s journey to make a cautious case that Lincoln had fingerprints on the Corwin amendment from the beginning.

The main challenge here, and the one that led Potter astray, is that Lincoln’s written instructions to Seward made no reference to a proslavery concession, though he did suggest elements of other parallel compromises that Seward submitted on the Fugitive Slave Act and a commitment to preserving the union. Seward’s subsequent letters to Lincoln intimate that the future Corwin amendment was part of the verbal instruction that Lincoln provided to Weed."

"Though not a part of his direct communications with Seward about the actions on the Committee of Thirteen, Lincoln drafted a parallel affirmation of ‘the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively’ a few days after he met with Weed. The amendment showed signs of stirring in the House almost immediately after Lincoln’s arrival."

"Lincoln apparently did much of the lifting to bring a sufficient number of Republican votes into the fold to secure the requisite two-thirds majorities. In other instances, antislavery legislators who could not countenance the measure were likely induced to intentionally abstain. Aside from a few direct witness attestations (Charles Francis Adams’ famous historian son Henry, then a young congressional staffer, provided one of them), Lincoln’s influence must be gleaned from sporadic reports of his private meetings with Corwin and other congressional leaders or, in one example teased out by Crofts, patterns in the patronage appointments he likely offered to a crucial congressional block from Maine."

Go ahead and attack this source too. LOL! https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2063

Sure, but the majority of Republicans opposed Corwin, even with Seward's support for it. 100% of Democrats supported Corwin and it was signed by Democrat President Buchanan, not Lincoln.

Sure, but a supermajority of Northerners supported it.

That's not the truth, and you can easily see this yourself if you simply imagine, today, some Republican politician saying in an interview, "I am not opposed to Donald Trump as our Presidential nominee". Would you consider that a real endorsement?? Really?? I don't, but that's what Lincoln said about Corwin's Amendment.

That is the truth and Lincoln's fingerprints were all over the Corwin Amendment right from the start - see above.

So here, yet again, is the list of explicit new protections for slavery in the new Confederate constitution (from post #170):

Here again is me telling you that the protections of slavery in the Confederate Constitution were no more than existed in the US Constitution plus the Corwin Amendment. ie slave owners could travel with their slaves through states or territories that did not have slavery. See Dred Scott. Importing slaves from Africa or indeed any place that it was no longer legal to import slaves from was barred....ie it was only legal to bring in slaves from other states just as the law was in the US.

Given these significant increases in protection for slavery in the Confederate constitution, there is no way Confederate states could seriously contemplate returning to the Union.

Given slavery had no significant increases in protection in the Confederate Constitution, accepting the Corwin Amendment would have offered the exact same protections in the US Constitution as existed in the Confederate Constitution. Yet the original 7 seceding states refused to return. They must have been motivated by something other than slavery.

Or so you claim, and yet without a scrap of evidence to support your claims, here or elsewhere.

See above. I provided ample evidence. His own hagiographer Doris Kearns-Goodwin also admitted Lincoln orchestrated its passage.

Here again is the breakdown of the reasons for secession" documents:here again is me telling you only 4 states issued declarations of causes and only one of those states listed slavery as the exclusive cause. 3 of the 4 states went on at length about the economic grievances even though these were not unconstitutional while the Northern states' refusal to enforce the fugitive slave clause of the US Constitution was unconstitutional.

Noooo... the 1860 census says there were 393,975 slaveholders, which is 1.26% of the total population of 31,183,582. That implies that 98.7% of Americans were not slaveholders. Of course, virtually 100% of Northerners were not slaveholders, so if we just look at the Southern white population, it was 8,289,782, making non-slaveholders ~95%. However, in 1860, according to the US census, the average family was about 5 people, meaning there were roughly 1,660,000 Southern white families. If we assume only one slaveholder per family, then about 24% of families "owned" slaves -- and that number corresponds to reports from the time that about 1/4 of Confederate soldiers owned slaves. Now you wish to argue that maybe some families had more than one slaveholder, even though typically, "the man of the house" owned everything..

No. That was not typical. Look at Grant's wife. Look at Lee's wife. THEY owned the slaves - not Grant or Lee personally. This happened all the time. Ever heard of wills? Kids of large slaveholding families would also often be gifted slaves during the parents' lifetimes.

So, only in a few elite families were women high-status enough to legally own slaves. How many? Maybe 10% at most. Therefore, instead of there being 393,975 slaveholding families, there were only around 355,000 families who "owned" slaves, or 21% of all Southern families. But that's all Southern families. If we only look at the Confederacy, we find the white population was 5,582,222 CSA individuals, which means roughly 1,116,000 CSA white families. Of those, 316,632 individuals owned slaves, and if we apply the 90% factor, we have 284,969 CSA slaveholding families, or 26% of all CSA families. But that's just the CSA average. If we look at high-slave states like South Carolina and Mississippi, and again allow for 10% multiple slaveholders in one family, we see South Carolina had 41% and Mississippi 44% of families owning slaves. And just to make the point clear, for every such family who did not own slaves, there were other family members -- brothers, uncles, cousins, in-laws and close neighbors -- who did.

Just because one household owned slaves, that does not mean the rest of the extended family did. That's another bad assumption on your part.

And that is why the entire culture -- the "Southern Way of Life" -- was built around their "peculiar institution".

No it wasn't. That was a small minority.

here are the results of the 1860 US census by state:

Alabama Total Free Population 529121 Total # of Slaveowners 33730 % of Free population owning slaves 6.37%

Arkansas Total Free Population 324335 Total # of Slaveowners 11481 % of Free population owning slaves 3.54%

Florida Total Free Population 78679 Total # of Slaveowners 5152 % of Free population owning slaves 6.55%

Georgia Total Free Population 595088 Total # of Slaveowners 41084 % of Free population owning slaves 6.90%

Louisiana Total Free Population 376276 Total # of Slaveowners 22033 % of Free population owning slaves 5.86%

Mississippi Total Free Population 354674 Total # of Slaveowners 30943 % of Free population owning slaves 8.72%

North Carolina Total Free Population 661583 Total # of Slaveowners 34658 % of Free population owning slaves 5.24%

South Carolina Total Free Population 301302 Total # of Slaveowners 26701 % of Free population owning slaves 8.86%

Tennessee Total Free Population 834082 Total # of Slaveowners 36844 % of Free population owning slaves 4.42%

Texas Total Free Population 421649 Total # of Slaveowners 21878 % of Free population owning slaves 5.19%

Virginia Total Free Population 1105453 Total # of Slaveowners 52128 % of Free population owning slaves 4.72%

Total Total Free Population 5582242 Total # of Slaveowners 316632 % of Free population owning slaves 5.67%

Note this is total free population, not total White population. ie this includes Black slaveowners....and yes, there definitely were Blacks who owned slaves. We can see that even in the two states with the highest percentage of Blacks as a share of the population (South Carolina and Mississippi) the percentage of the total free population that owned slaves did not exceed 9%. As a whole, fewer than 6% of the total free population owned slaves. What percent of families did depends on your guesstimate of average family size and how many slaveowners there were per family. Thus, one family in which the rich husband owned slaves, the wife who was also from money inherited slaves from her family - or was gifted some slaves of her own as for example, a wedding gift, and the kids were gifted slaves could easily account for 4-5 slaveowners in just that one family. For the big plantations that had hundreds of slaves, this kind of pattern was not unusual.

Of that 5.67% of the total free population which owned slaves, half of them owned 5 or fewer. These often tended to be domestic servants (cooks, nannies, butlers, etc). Occasionally, there would be a yeoman farmer who owned 2-3 to help out on the farm but that was not common. Slaves were expensive. The vast vast majority of people were family farmers who did not own any slaves. Most family farmers had lots and lots of kids who served as farm labor.

Not as rare as you pretend.

Large plantations were not as common as you pretend. They were rather rare. Most people were nowhere near rich enough for that.

First of all, 393,975 slaveholders means the average slaveholder owned ~10 slaves. Second, I have no reason to doubt your number that "half of them owned 5 or less," suggesting an average for them of 2.5 slaves, or roughly 500,000 slaves "owned" by about 200,000 slaveholders. That means the other approx. 3,500,000 slaves were "owned" by just 300,000 slaveholders or 13 per slaveholder. Those were large operations and suggest their families were also larger than average -- instead of just five members, they were 7 or 8 -- suggesting that 23% of Confederates belonged to large families which "owned" slaves.

LOL! No. You seriously want to try to convince us that 23% of White Southerners came from rich families? Get out of here with that laughable BS. There were roughly 5.5 million White Southerners. Add in 3 or 4 hundred thousand free Blacks and you have a little less than 6 million people. There were about 3 million slaves. There were 316,632 slave owners. About half or 150,000 of those people owned less than 5 slaves. To that's 300-450,000 slaves total. Meaning 160,000 slave owners owned 2.6 or 2.7 million slaves. The really big slave owners were 160,000 out of 6 million. That's a tiny minority.

Except that you never read a single word of truth on your own. What you discovered was a pack of lies that you were too ignorant and innocent to distinguish from real facts and way too eager to believe as opposed to the harsh and unchanging truth.

Except that this is a complete lie. Sorry to do something I normally hate which is to toot my own horn, but I have 2 grad degrees, speak 3 languages, have lived in 8 states and 4 foreign countries. I am neither ignorant nor innocent. Quite the opposite. I've been exposed to vastly vastly more than most people ever will be. I learned through lots and lots of reading that what we are taught about this subject in the government schools, what is shown on PBS and the so-called history channel, etc are lies and BS. Of course, once you see how corrupted the media and a lot of government institutions are...how ready and willing they are to lie to suit their agenda, their lies about history become a whole lot less shocking. Its a pattern with them.

If that's not Establishment, nothing is." Naw... Lincoln was a small-time independent country lawyer who defended all kinds of people, both innocent and guilty, rich and poor.

early on in his career maybe. That was certainly not the case by the time he started his career in politics. He was a consummate insider by then.

The "Establishment" figure you're thinking of, was a Democrat, a very high-level corporate executive in charge of vast railroad operations, including in Illinois, politically connected to the Democrat administration in Washington, DC. You might even remember his name, because he represented the Confederacy's last-best hope for Civil War political victory. He was George McClellan.

There certainly were Democrats who were Establishment insiders. There were also lots of Republicans who were insiders. Lincoln and McClellan knew each other quite well and worked together on the Illinois Central Railroad long before the war.

BTW, since we are at the point where you are just repeating yourself endlessly while being as verbose as possible, I am out.

Feel free to spend as much time as you like spewing the same ole BS in this thread. I’m done spending any more time with it.

FLT-bird: "We know that you are not serious and are just going to keep repeating this lie ad infinitum.
WHERE a tariff is paid is not WHO pays it.
This has been explained to you over and over but you apparently have no life and live to just hear yourself talk."

Here is the absolute truth: you have never presented even one shred of evidence proving that even one Southerner paid even one import tariff directly.
Of course, I am willing to stipulate, without argument, that 8% of total US 1859 imports landed in, and the tariffs were paid directly by Southerners, in the Southern ports of Baltimore, Wilmington, Charleston, Savanah, Mobile, New Orleans and Galveston.

But 92% of US imports landed in Northern & Western ports and the tariffs were paid by Northerners and Westerners.
I've seen no scrap of evidence from you or anyone else proving that any of those tariffs were paid by any Southerners.

FLT-bird: "This has been explained to you over and over but you apparently have no life and live to just hear yourself talk.
I'm done with this.
Get a life and find something productive to do with your time.
You're not going to waste more of mine with this nonsense."

Of course you're done with it, because you have no evidence to support your ridiculous claims, so now name-calling becomes more important to you than anything else.

FLT-bird: "Again, lies and BS as the Northern newspapers themselves which I previously posted amply demonstrate."

Except you never posted even one word proving your ridiculous claims.

FLT-bird: "No.
This is a lie.
Even the northern newspapers - let alone economists who have looked at the subject - have admitted that 75% of exports and imports were owned by Southerners.
Thus, as the owners of the goods, Southerners paid 75% of the tariff."

As I said, roughly 50% of exports came from Deep South Cotton.
In 1860 cotton exports were $192 million out of $400 million total exports, according to the New York Times article I posted yesterday.
Here it is again.
There is zero evidence to support claims that any Southerners directly paid tariffs on any imports landed at any Northern or Western ports.

To cotton, we could add rice, at less than $3 million, less than 1% of the total.
Everything else, notably tobacco, was not strictly "Southern Products", but rather was mostly grown in Union states like Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Maryland.

Those are facts, deny or ignore them all you wish, they're still true.

FLT-bird: "reasonably fair"? Says who - you? LOL!"

I was giving you some benefit of the doubt, even though Mississippians in 1861 officially said, "by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun."

In 1861, they said there were no white people out working in the tropical sun, now FLT-bird claims there were lots of them.
Who am I to believe, them or you?

FLT-bird: "Kentucky was a border state.
There were claims it did secede and claims it did not.
The same goes for Missouri.
Both were mostly occupied fairly early by union forces so they therefore put more men in the union army."

Both Kentuckians and Missourians voted overwhelmingly against secession.
Despite that, the governors in both states, in rump sessions, tried to declare secession, and their rump-declarations were accepted by the regime in Richmond, Virginia, making them the Confederacy's 12th and 13th stars.

Both Kentucky and Missouri were major tobacco producers, so claimed as part of "Southern Products".
However, in 1861, when the Mississippi River was blocked and Confederate products were deleted from Union exports, then Kentucky and Missouri continued to ship their products to market via Northern railroads, and so Union tobacco exports fell only 14% compared to 1860.

Therefore, tobacco was not strictly a "Southern Product" which means the total value of Southern Products exported in 1860 was not 75%, it was just 50% from one main item, namely cotton.

FLT-bird: "If you have no idea which Northern newspapers I cited, go back and read.
I posted them YET AGAIN in this thread after having posted them many many times in past such threads.
Amazing how you managed to never see it."

The truth is, in our exchanges, you've never posted a single link supporting even one of your ridiculous claims.
That's why it's impossible to take you seriously.
Further, when I do post actual facts and figures, you totally ignore them, handwave them away and respond with insults.

In short, you're behaving like a typical Democrat, for whom facts are meaningless and narrative trumps everything.

FLT-bird: "then you haven't read.
That's the only possible explanation since I've posted them over and over again including in this thread.
Its your ridiculous claims that are unsupported."

In our exchanges, you've posted nothing to support any of your own ridiculous claims.

FLT-bird: "This is the most laughable and ridiculous pile of hogwash posted in this thread yet.
The political parties have not remained the same over a century and a half.
The Republicans were concerned about money above all because their voters were concerned about money above all - as the voters always are."

Seriously?
The truth is, no Republican was more -- or less -- concerned about money than any Democrat.
The differences are in how we earn our money.
Republicans (plus Whigs & Federalists before them) have always been middle-income small businesses, family farms, skilled workers and professionals in suburbs, small towns and rural areas.
By contrast, Democrats have always been the alliance of globalist elite Washington-protected Big Business (i.e., King Cotton plantations) with Big City impoverished immigrants' bosses (i.e., Tammany Hall).
The Democrats' alliance goes all the way back to at least the election of 1800.

Those are facts, regardless of how much you mock or ridicule them.

FLT-bird: "So far I've posted several newspaper articles from the North, the South and Abroad which all say the South was paying the vast majority of the tariff.
I could also post quotes from Tax/Economics expert Charles Adams who looked at all this quite closely saying the same thing."

In our exchanges, you've posted nothing of the sort, zero, nada, zilch, ever.
Why is that?

FLT-bird: "Surely you realize that your denial of it is babbling nonsense and everything I posted is 100% true."

Nothing you've claimed here is supported by a single shred of evidence that you've posted here.
That's a fact.

FLT-bird: "The Confederate states seceded to avoid the tariff."

After further review, I stand corrected -- in the first four "Reasons for Secession" documents issued by South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas, while slavery is listed as a major reason in all of them, tariffs, even in general terms, are not mentioned, much less the specific issues related to Morrill.

The one place tariffs are mentioned is in Alexander Stephens' Cornerstone Speech, where he remarks:

"This subject

came well nigh causing a rupture of the old Union, under the lead of the gallant Palmetto State, which lies on our border, in 1833.
This old thorn of the tariff, which was the cause of so much irritation in the old body politic, is removed forever from the new."

Even Stephens here refers back to the 1833 Nullification Crisis, not to the 1860 Morrill Tariff.

FLT-bird: "The Morrill tariff eventually increased rates to TRIPLE what they were and left those rates sky high until the passage of the federal income tax.
Did you see the word "eventually"?
That means they did not it all at once.
There were multiple rounds of rate hikes which everybody knew was coming once the initial tariff rate hikes went through."

Those additional tariff hikes were all caused by the Civil War.
So, for you to ridiculously claim Southerners knew those further increases were coming, they would have to have known in advance that their secession would lead to war.
And your evidence for that is what?

FLT-bird: "Once again you resort to your lying denials of the facts and once again the sources at the time all back up what I'm saying and all you have are your own cockamamie back of the envelope masturbating with numbers calculations to claim otherwise."

And yet, in all this time you've posted not even one fact to support even one of your ridiculous claims.
And so, lacking facts you do what any Democrat naturally does -- you hurl insults.

FLT-bird: "LOL at you actually trying to sell this BS.
Firstly, the money raised by the tariffs was not needed to pay for government.
These were not revenue tariffs, they were protective tariffs."

Seriously, do you understand anything real?
Do you understand why Democrat Pres. Andrew Jackson supported the 1828 Tariff of Abominations?
Do you think he was just being evil and mean?
No, it was because he used that extra money to pay off the national debt -- not just pay it down, he paid off the debt.
Then, when the debt was paid off, in 1836, then Democrats began seriously reducing tariffs, notably in the 1846 Walker Tariff and again in the 1857 Democrats' Tariff.

Reduced tariff rates did not, by themselves, reduce Federal revenues, which under the Walker Tariff rose from $32 million in 1846 to $84 million in 1854.
The problem was, being Democrats, they would not control their spending and so the national debt rose from zero in 1836 to $16 million in $1846, to $63 million in 1849 (for the Mexican War).
Under Whig Pres. Fillmore and Democrat Pres. Pierce, with rising revenues, the national debt was wrestled back down to $28 million in 1857.

So again in 1857, Democrats reduced tariffs to their lowest rates since 1820, around 17% overall.
The results were, revenues fell from $83 million in 1857 to $71 million in 1858 and remained low into the 1860s.
At the same time, Democrat spending under Pres. Buchanan rose from $79 million in 1857 to $87 million in 1858 and remained higher than revenues until 1867.
So, even before the Civil War, Democrats had more than doubled the national debt, from $29 million in 1857 to $65 million in 1860.

That is the factual reality behind the ridiculous claims you've made.

Democrats' spending -- not Whigs, not Republicans -- doubled the national debt between 1857 and 1860.
There was no excess of revenues over what Democrats believed was necessary to satisfy their voters.

FLT-bird: "Secondly, Southern cash crops did not need protection.
Southerners wanted LOW tariffs, remember?
They were in no danger of being undercut by foreign competition.
It was Northern manufacturers who were constantly clamoring for higher tariffs because they could not compete on price."

And yet, facts remain facts, however much you deny them.

25% 1846 Walker Tariff on COTTON, reduced to 19% in 1857, increased back to 25% under Morrill
30% 1846 Walker Tariff on SUGAR, reduced to 24% in 1857, increased back to 26% under Morrill
40% 1846 Walker Tariff on TOBACCO, reduced to 30% in 1857, reduced to 25% under Morrill

So Southern products were just as highly protected by tariffs as any Northern products.

FLT-bird: "Everybody knew the first round of tariff rate increases proposed by the Morrill Tariff were not going to be the end of the matter.
That was merely going to be the first bite of the apple.
Once they proved they could push the first round through, it was always going to be a one way ratchet - with rates only ever going up up up.
That's exactly what happened.
You claim it was because of the war.
No.
That was just the fig leaf put on it.
Those sky high rates stayed in place for over 60 years."

So, if supposedly, "everybody knew", then you must have lots and lots of quotes from all sides -- Democrats, Republicans, Southerners, Northerners, everybody, right? -- quotes which say exactly what you claim, "everybody knew", right?

In 1860 the National debt and Federal spending were both around 2% of US GDP.
During the Civil War the National debt rose to 31% and spending to 13% of GDP.
After the war both numbers fell very slowly, the National debt reaching a low of 7% of GDP in 1907 before beginning its inexorable rise to today's astronomical heights.
Federal spending, which included national debt reductions, also fell slowly, first reaching around 2% of GDP in 1889.

Overall tariffs (the blue line below), fell steadily after 1870, only rising temporarily to help pay for the Spanish American War, World War One and Smoot-Hawley.
By about 1914, after 50 years, overall tariffs had returned to the lowest levels achieved after 30 years in 1860.
The Civil War was vastly more expensive than the War of 1812 and the Mexican War combined, and so it took much longer for the government to recover economically.

quoting BJK's source: "Some historians in recent decades have minimized the tariff issue as a cause of the war, noting that few people in 1860–61 said it was of central importance to them."

FLT-bird: "Yes.
We call those historians PC Revisionists."

Sorry, no, by definition, "revisionists" are Lost Causers like FLT-bird who put words into the mouths of Confederates which Confederates themselves never even dreamed of saying.

Look it up, you'll see I'm right.

FLT-bird: "Let's see......compromises were offered but the one thing they did not offer to compromise on was the tariff.
The compromise effort failed.
Gosh....maybe if they had offered to compromise on the tariff.....after all, that's exactly what ended the Nullification Crisis a generation earlier......"

And yet... and yet... no Confederate "Reasons for Secession" document mentioned the Morrill Tariff.
When Mississippi's Democrat Senator Jefferson Davis was asked to concoct a "compromise bill" to keep Mississippi in the Union, his "compromise" said nothing about tariffs.
It was all about slavery, and that's a fact, deny it as loudly and often as you like, facts remain facts.

When it came to cotton, most of the physical labor was done by slaves, with free whites mostly in support and supervisory positions. What Northerners did to keep the cotton trade going was seen by plantation owners as exploitation and theft, but wouldn’t the same apply to Southerners who weren’t actually doing the planting, hoeing, and picking?

That’s not to say that the rest of the population wasn’t productive, but if cotton was the basis of the region’s economy and the thing to boast about, how it was produced counted for a lot. As for tobacco, secessionists hoped the Border States would join them. So from that point of view, tobacco did count as a largely Southern product. Northern states didn’t grow as much tobacco and it wasn’t valued as highly.

Bookmark for when I can watch the video.

x: "When it came to cotton, most of the physical labor was done by slaves, with free whites mostly in support and supervisory positions."

Right, but FLT-bird wants us to believe that most of the work was done by whites with slaves in relatively minor supporting roles.

So, the question here is whether we are to take the Mississippi "Reasons for Secession" document seriously when it says,

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.
Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.
These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.
These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization... "

"None but the black race" sounds pretty definitive to me.

x: "As for tobacco, secessionists hoped the Border States would join them.
So from that point of view, tobacco did count as a largely Southern product.
Northern states didn’t grow as much tobacco and it wasn’t valued as highly."

Well, of course, Southern propagandists wanted everyone to think that tobacco was a "Southern Product" and so, for this purpose only, they defined "The South" as broadly as possible, to include Border States of Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland, plus even tobacco produced in southern Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

But when push came to shove, all three of those Border States voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Union, meaning their tobacco exports were not "Southern Products", regardless of what Confederate propagandists claimed.

And, whereas secession nearly eliminated 1861 cotton exports, so cotton was undeniably a "Southern Product", at that same time tobacco exports fell only 14%, meaning tobacco was really a Union Product.

But even if, for sake of discussion, we granted that tobacco was 100% a "Southern Product", it's 1860 exports were only $19 million, meaning roughly 5% of total exports.
Add $19 for tobacco, plus $192 for cotton, gives us $211 million in "Southern Products" which is roughly 53% of 1860's total exports of $400 million.

And we could keep going -- $11 million in manufactured cotton products exported in 1860, nearly all of it produced in Northern states, especially New England, and yet counted as 100% "Southern Products".
Add to that nearly $4 million in turpentine products, which also declined only 40% in 1861, plus nearly $3 million for rice, a clear "Southern Product", and now we're up to $229 million in "Southern Products" exported in 1860.

Now, according to this New York Times article, from February 28, 1862, total 1860 exports were $400,122,296.
So, the exaggerated number of $229 million in "Southern Products" were a maximum 57% of total US exports, not the ridiculously claimed 75%.

Well then, how do they get from the already exaggerated 57% all the way up to the ridiculous 75%?
Obviously, by reducing the total value of 1860 exports from the NY Times figure of $400 million, by $84 million, all the way down to just $316 million, which makes $229 million in "Southern Products" 72% of the total.

Where did that $84 million in exports magically disappear to?
Well, first, there were preliminary numbers published in early 1861 showing total 1860 exports as $373 million, or $27 million less than the final total of $400 million.
So 72% is based first on sticking with the original number of $373 million, ignoring the later revision to $400 million.

Second, "specie" means exports of gold and silver which, thanks to discoveries in California and Nevada, were readily available to balance any trade deficits.
1860's preliminary numbers said we exported $57 million in specie that year.
When that $57 million is subtracted from preliminary total exports of $373 million, the new total is $316 million, of which $229 million in "Southern Products" is now 72%!

How did 72% magically become 75%?
No big deal, it's just a rounding error, close enough for government work.

The true number for "Southern Products", when we add in the revised numbers, plus specie exports, and we count only those exports which were truly Southern, is roughly 50% of total 1860 exports, regardless of how many insults Democrat propagandists hurl to make the number seem larger than it was.

Here is another version of a map showing the US economy in 1860.
Notice it shows where gold and silver were found, along with iron and coal, plus timber and cattle, orchards, shoe manufacturing and even the first oil well in western PA.
The map shows two major manufacturing cities in the Confederacy -- Richmond and New Orleans -- plus 16 major manufacturing Union cities, including two mega-manufacturing cities -- New York and Philadelphia -- whose products alone equaled the other 14 Union cities combined.

Madison wrote many years after the ratification of the Constitution that states do not have the right to unilaterally secede.

Actually, what Madison was referring to in his letters to Rivas (or Rives) as well as among several others wasn't the Constitution itself, but a theoretical essay concerning the Constitution written by Rivas and sent to Madison.

Rivas, who apparently had aspirations on becoming a newspaperman, also sent them to a local paper, where they published them under the nom de plume - A Friend of Union & State Rights.

Nor did Madison publicly reply to this writing. He wrote to Rivas directly, and against Madison's express wishes, Rivas then sent the letter to the paper himself.

From the Charlottesville (Va.) Review
In 1832, Mr. ALEXANDER RIVES, over the signature of "A Friend of Union and State Rights," published two communications in the Virginia (Charlottesville) Advocate. The letter of Mr. MADISON was called forth by these articles, and was addressed to the writer of them under his nom de plums. It bears no date, but a letter from Mr. RIVES, in reply to it, in our possession, is dated Jan. 7, 1833.

Even though the letter contains multiple caveats, it's still used as some kind of 'proof' about how Madison felt about unilateral succession. A reading of the closing paragraph shows the discussion was never meant for public consumption-

Having many reasons for marking this letter Confidential I must request that its publicity may not be permitted in any mode or thro’ any channel. Among the reasons is the risk of misapprehensions or misconstructions, so common without more attention & more development, than I could conveniently bestow on what is said.
James Madison to Alexander Rivas, Jan, 1833.

the only supporting evidence from the founding era that the founders considered secession to be illegal are two statements by James Madison,

Madison's statements concerning secession were taken out of context. Please see post #239.

(BTW - Mornin', DL! 🌞)