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Walt
??
I am under the impressions that much of the hostility and racism existing up to modern times is a direct result of reconstruction, imposed by the Republicans after Lincoln's assassination. If memory serves, Lincoln had intended a far less harsh approach, which he hoped might heal some of the wounds of war.
Complete nonsense. Northern capitalists were for appeasement of the south, not confrontation. There -was- a symbiotic relationship between northern mills and southern cotton providers, but the maintenance of slavery was more important to the secessionists:
"Edmund Ruffin was writing to Yancey, saying that it would be a "clear and unmistakable indication of future and fixed domination of the Northern section & its abolition policy over the southern states & their institutions, & the beginning of a sure and speedy progress to the extermination of negro slavery & the consequent utter ruin of the prosperity of the South." The only possible answer to this, he wrote, must be secession.
In his diary, Ruffin wrote that his sons hoped that Lincoln would be defeated but that he did not. "I most earnestly & anxiously desire Lincoln to be elected -- because I have hope that at least one state, S.C. will secede & that others will follow -- & even if otherwise, I wish the question tested & settled now. If there is a general submission now, there never will be future maintenance of our rights -- & the end of negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions and our fate.
Few men were as realistic or as outspoken as Edmund Ruffin. There were even times when it seemed as if the pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties were repeating the same ugly words. Yancey himself got into New York, in the middle of this campaign, and he made a light-hearted taunting speech which was strangely like the thoughts which that Cincinnati campaign newspaper, the Railsplitter, had given to the north a few weeks earlier.
Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the south and to the north as well; and furthermore, it was nothing any northerner need worry about. "It is an institution, too, that doesn't harm you, for we don't let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don't trouble you with that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the nose of a Northerner." Yet the north might elect Lincoln, who would "build up an abolitionist party in every southern state," and Yancey warned that this would not be borne: "With the election of a black Republican, all the south would be menaced. Emissaries will percolate between master and slave as water between the crevices of the rocks underground....The keystone of the arch of the Union is already crumbling. A more weighty question was never before you. One freighted with the fate of societies and of nationalities is on your mind."
--"The Coming Fury" p. 98-99 by Bruce Catton
As to the tariffs:
"The next evil that my friend complained of, was the Tariff. Well, let us look at that for a moment. About the time I commenced noticing public matters, this question was agitating the country almost as fearfully as the Slave question now is. In 1832, when I was in college, South Carolina was ready to nullify or secede from the Union on this account. And what have we seen? The tariff no longer distracts the public councils. Reason has triumphed. The present tariff was voted for by Massachusetts and South Carolina. The lion and the lamb lay down together-- every man in the Senate and House from Massachusetts and South Carolina, I think, voted for it, as did my honorable friend himself. And if it be true, to use the figure of speech of my honorable friend, that every man in the North, that works in iron and brass and wood, has his muscle strengthened by the protection of the government, that stimulant was given by his vote, and I believe every other Southern man. So we ought not to complain of that.
[Mr. Toombs: That tariff lessened the duties.]
Mr. Stephens: Yes, and Massachusetts, with unanimity, voted with the South to lessen them, and they were made just as low as Southern men asked them to be, and those are the rates they are now at. If reason and argument, with experience, produced such changes in the sentiments of Massachusetts from 1832 to 1857, on the subject of the tariff, may not like changes be effected there by the same means, reason and argument, and appeals to patriotism on the present vexed question? And who can say that by 1875 or 1890, Massachusetts may not vote with South Carolina and Georgia upon all those questions that now distract the country and threaten its peace and existence? I believe in the power and efficiency of truth, in the omnipotence of truth, and its ultimate triumph when properly wielded. (Applause.)"
-- Alexander Stephens, November, 1860
Walt
Complete nonsense. The rebel government adopted conscription a full year before the federal government. And there was no conscription at all between 1865 and 1940. It's hard to imagine how Lincoln could be blamed for events in 1940.
There was no income tax either, between 1865 and 1916 or so. Lincoln was buried in two tons of cement at that time.
Walt