Postmasters were appointed by the president in those days. That was a massive number of political appointments It’s why presidents were besieged by office seekers. Under the Democrats postmasters could forbid the spreading of abolitionist materials through the mails. That policy could have been changed by Lincoln, and since the mails were the main means of spreading opinion beyond the immediate area, this would be a major change. You say that the post office was the only way most people experienced government, but then conjure up some powerful government strangling the South. There’s a contradiction there. In any case, control of the post office was important in the arguments over slavery.
I'm well aware of the spoils system. There weren't enough postmaster jobs for anybody to build a political machine that would have influence in an entire region base on that relatively small number of jobs. The post office was the only direct interaction most people had with the federal government. They did not see the tariff collectors at the ports of entry. They didn't travel more than 20 miles from their homes in most cases. They therefore did not see a federal official who was making them get less from the wholesaler for their goods or who saw them be able to sell less of their cotton or tobacco or other crop. They did not see the official who made all the manufactured goods they needed become more expensive. Yet it was the federal government making that happen via its tariff and trade policy as they well knew. So no, there was no contradiction.
You set up a straw man of “it was all about slavery” to prop up your “it was about tariffs” doll or puppet, but totally ignore the emotions of the time.
The "all about slavery" myth is no strawman. That is literally what the PC Revisionists argue.
John Brown’s actions had raised the possibility of a slave uprising.
Had it? No slaves rose up to join him. What it showed was not only that there were bloodthirsty Northern fanatics who literally wanted them dead. It also showed Southerners that these terrorists enjoyed widespread sympathy and support in places like Massachusetts and the government there refused to bring them to justice. Imagine if we found that prominent Saudis had openly financed the 911 terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia refused to bring them to justice or extradite them. That was how Southerners now viewed New England in particular.....not that there would be an imminent slave uprising but that these people were not merely political opponents but actual enemies who were trying to do them harm.
Texans were convinced that prairie wildfires had been set by abolitionists. Secessionists in the Deep South were convinced that Republicans would find a way to take away their slaves or inspire them to revolt. There were many slaveowning families in the Cotton States and they controlled the governments of those states.
Woah! That last point is one the PCers have always claimed and it was always false. Certainly the landed elites had a lot of influence. They did not however control the governments of those states by themselves. They could not get elected nor act without popular support. The vast majority of White Southerners did not own any slaves. And no, they weren't shoeless, toothless, illiterates easily led around by their noses either. That is another ridiculous trope the PCers trot out in support of their bogus claims that the Southern states were some kind of slaveocracy.
They saw how slavery was fading away in Delaware and Maryland and feared that anti-slavery feeling might spread southward.
You repeat this claim yet I haven't seen this thought widely expressed in all my readings of the the events and the politics leading up to the war.
Even if emancipation was far down the road, the rise of an anti-slavery or non-slavery party like the Republicans in the slave states, built up around federal judges, marshalls, customs officials, and postmasters, terrified those in power in the South. They weren’t in the mood for a two party system if slavery was to be the dividing issue. They had convinced themselves that if Republicans held the White House and Congress, it would threaten their “institutions” and their way of life.
No it was more like what both Robert Tombs in the Georgia Declaration of Causes and Robert Barnwell Rhett described in his address. They were concerned that the Republicans were successfully using slavery as a wedge issue to get the Midwest to go along with New England in pushing for extremely high tariffs which would both fatten the profit margins of Northern industrialists as well as allow them to gain market share BUT which at the same time would be economically ruinous to the Southern States They had already been down that road before. As Rhett said:
"To make, however, their numerical power available to rule the Union, the North must consolidate their power. It would not be united, on any matter common to the whole Union in other words, on any constitutional subject for on such subjects divisions are as likely to exist in the North as in the South. Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest. If this could be made the criterion of parties at the North, the North could be united in its power; and thus carry out its measures of sectional ambition, encroachment, and aggrandizement. To build up their sectional predominance in the Union, the Constitution must be first abolished by constructions; but that being done, the consolidation of the North to rule the South, by the tariff and slavery issues, was in the obvious course of things."
Get it? They weren't worried slavery would be abolished. They were worried this new sectional political party would be able to use the slavery issue to unite the North and push through huge tariffs.
Lincoln was absent and relatively inexperienced. Seward, Stanton and other members of his cabinet assumed that they were more qualified than he was. Similarly, Trump was the “leader of his party” in 2017, but McConnell and Ryan definitely didn’t take direction from him. Lincoln did have a role in the formation of the Corwin Amendment, but that amendment was hashed out in committee meetings behind closed doors in a variety of compromises that he didn’t have any role in making.
You are massively underselling Lincoln's role in the formulation of the Corwin Amendment, in whipping votes for it among Republicans and in getting the whole party machinery behind it to get it ratified in multiple Northern states.
Lincoln had a lot on his hands after being inaugurated. Goodwin relates that he was uncertain about whether to even mention the amendment in his inaugural address. He did so, but distanced himself from it. I don’t see anything in Goodwin’s book proving lobbying efforts behind the scenes. It’s doubtful that Lincoln was campaigning even secretly for the amendment when he had Sumter and so many other things to worry about.
LOL! That is not at all what Goodwin said. There were plenty of others who also discussed Lincoln's key role in getting the Corwin Amendment drafted and passed.
There’s a lot more to be said, but you aren’t likely to be convinced by facts, so what’s the point?
There you go projecting again.
Lowcountry secessionists agreed that Republicans would immediately attempt no overt antislavery laws. Such an effort would scare Southerners out of the Union and out of Yankees’ clutches. In contrast, Republicans’ deployment of southern patronage would leave the region enfeebled. John Townsend spread a spooky metaphor for nonovert enfeeblement, as chilling as a caged rat: a spider’s web. Imagine, wrote Townsend, “some insect, strong in itself, but which has sillily entangled itself in the meshes of a spider. With moderate exertions at first, it could … free itself. … But it prefers to be quiescent for awhile. Fatal hesitation!” The “artful” spider “dashes forth from his hiding place and fastens a cord around the wing,” then retreats, pauses, rushes forth, retreats, pauses, assaults, until the prey can barely move.
Republicans will creep southward “stealthily, cautiously at first, lest we break through their meshes, and form a government for ourselves.” By appointing southern turncoats to federal stations in the South, including custom houses, post offices, and court houses, Lincoln would spread his meshes inside the South. After we become “unable to resist,” we will have to “submit to…the mercy of the spider.”
Presidential patronage as creepy as a monster spider—and more spooky than the master image for territorial confinement, a rat in a poisoned cage?! Absolutely, for Republican office would supposedly be the poison inside the jailed South. The patronage bait would attract allegedly traitorous southern politicians to make agitation against slavery as democratically normal as arguments against tariffs and banks. It would be as if gag rules had been lifted not only inside Congress but also throughout the South, as if English abolitionists had been allowed to spread their ideology across the Texas Republic, as if Kansas free soilers had been permitted unrestricted access to western Missouri slaves and nonslaveholders, as if Border Northerners had been invited to perfect their Liberty Line inside the Border South— with all of this Jacobinical disruption now contaminating hidebound South Carolina.
You can’t just ignore or dismiss the real fears that people had at the time. The Blair family, whose patriarch had been a confidant and strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, was building the Republican Party in Missouri and Maryland. Germans in those states were also voting Republican. Politicians in South Carolina and other Deep South States looked at the Border States with alarm and could imagine Republicans building up their party in Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama.
Slave uprisings were a major fear in the slave states: Gabriel’s rebellion, the German Coast uprising, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner. Patrols for runaways were a major part of life, and they were vigilant about slave gatherings that they thought might spark a rebellion. Some slaveowners might believe that slaves were contented until abolitionists got to them, but they were terrified of abolitionists getting to them, even from a distance (hence the desire to keep slaves illiterate when possible).
In contrast, tariffs weren’t a major burden on most Southerners. If the slave states had stayed in the union, tariffs wouldn’t have gone up as high as they did. Lincoln would have lost control of Congress in the next election and tariffs would have gone down again. The militancy against the 1828 tariff was largely confined to South Carolina, the state where slave owning families were most powerful and had control of the government. Other states probably recognized that tariffs went up and down with the political climate. Later secessionists adopted talk about the tariff and fishing bounties because they were large slaveowners themselves, or because they wanted their revolt to be about more than worries about slavery. It wasn’t the main issue until after the war when no one who had supported the rebellion wanted to acknowledge the importance of slavey.
The percentage of slaveowning families in the Deep South States was rather high, estimated at 49% in Mississippi and 46% in South Carolina, at 36.7% in the first seven seceding states and at around 25.3% in the last four states to secede. Those numbers aren’t exact, but even if one lowers them they still reflect the place of slavery in the slave states. Those who didn’t own slaves were often dependent on the slaveowners — and of course they were concerned about what a post-slavery future would look like.
“Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest” — sure, until Southern states tried to overturn the Missouri Compromise and even the Northwest Ordinance. Slaveowners brought their problems upon themselves. Eventually, unless more territory were annexed, slave states would become a minority. Wouldn’t we have hoped that would be the case? The leading founders certainly wished for an eventual end to slavery. Slaveowners couldn’t face that so they engineered the situation that brought Northeast and Midwest together — just as their splitting the Democratic party created the situation where a Republican’s election would be inevitable.
Lincoln’s first draft of his inaugural address didn’t mention the Corwin Amendment. The amendment hadn’t been passed by Congress then, but still, he didn’t see fit to mention it. Several historians have suggested that Seward, who had put a lot of effort into crafting the amendment and spiriting it through the Congress, prevailed upon Lincoln to the mention amendment in his inaugural address. I haven’t been able to find out if that is true, but historians who have been suspicious of Lincoln in this matter have made that suggestion when it would benefit their cause not to.
Republican votes had to be “whipped” for the Corwin Amendment because more Republicans voted against it than voted for it, but Lincoln wasn’t the one doing the whipping, nor did he bring the “whole party machinery” behind it for ratification. I asked you to provide evidence for your claims, and you haven’t.
Pushing the amendment would have broken the Republican Party in two. A substantial part of the “party machinery” didn’t and wouldn’t support the amendment, which was quickly overtaken by events and became a dead letter. The amendment wasn’t going to be ratified by the necessary 3/4ths of states.