Yes, let’s just stop spinning it. Secession didn’t suddenly become verboten and “union” sacrosanct just because the southern states attempted it. The Constitutionality of secession had long been assumed, even by secessionist movements in prissy New England.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it. The African slave trade was almost entirely a creature of New England shipping interests, with a majority of so-called “slave ports” being decidedly north of the Mason-Dixon.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it, the 3/5ths Compromise, so ignorantly attributed to “racist” southerners and demagogued to infinity, was a compromise insisted upon by northern interests, who did not want slaves counted as fully human in order to prevent Congressional reapportionment from shifting political power to the south.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it. I could go on for quite a while.
“Yes, let’s just stop spinning it, the 3/5ths Compromise, so ignorantly attributed to “racist” southerners and demagogued to infinity, was a compromise insisted upon by northern interests, who did not want slaves counted as fully human in order to prevent Congressional reapportionment from shifting political power to the south.”
Why is it that the Southern States who wanted slaves to be counted as a whole person did not want to extend voting rights to those persons?
Aren't you overlooking one part of that equation? The buyers? Without demand for slaves those slave ships would never have left port.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it, the 3/5ths Compromise, so ignorantly attributed to “racist” southerners and demagogued to infinity, was a compromise insisted upon by northern interests, who did not want slaves counted as fully human in order to prevent Congressional reapportionment from shifting political power to the south.
Why would they want slaves counted the same as a free person? They were property in the South, not people. They had no more rights than a horse or a cow did. For the Southerners to demand that their chattel was entitled to representation was the height of hypocrisy. The 3/5ths clause still gave the South a disproportionate level of representation in the House.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it. Secession didn’t suddenly become verboten and “union” sacrosanct just because the southern states attempted it. The Constitutionality of secession had long been assumed, even by secessionist movements in prissy New England.Yes. Indeed.Yes, let’s just stop spinning it. The African slave trade was almost entirely a creature of New England shipping interests, with a majority of so-called “slave ports” being decidedly north of the Mason-Dixon.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it, the 3/5ths Compromise, so ignorantly attributed to “racist” southerners and demagogued to infinity, was a compromise insisted upon by northern interests, who did not want slaves counted as fully human in order to prevent Congressional reapportionment from shifting political power to the south.
Yes, let’s just stop spinning it.
“...I could go on for quite a while...”
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Please, do!
I disagree that the ports in the North were entrepots of the slave trade, however Yankee the hulls and masters may have been. (One of Carolina secession advocate Robert Rhett's serial beeves was that the Carolina shipbuilding trade had all but vanished by the end of the 18th century, the trade monopolized by Yankee yards. Which, if it happened, warrants academic investigation. It might have been an example of "comparative advantage" .... or it might have been an example of Yankees being yankeefied. Every contemporary group that dealt with them extensively had a low opinion of New England Yankees except the Yankees themselves ..... that alone is worth a scholarly book.)
But you've put your finger on something that has engaged my curiosity for ten years now.
What was the degree of merchant and banking/banker/"bankster" motivation in the development of the political issues and parties -- Free Soil, Whig, Republican -- that polarized the country regionally and led to the onset of civil war (using the term "civil war" advisedly)?
Someone needs to do a massive investigation of old newspaper morgues, business and leading-family correspondence, and political figures' letter files in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other Yankee "opinion leadership" circles. I think that there they will find the smoking gun that killed a million people and the Framers' noble American Experiment, and supplanted it with a banker's paradise of imperial, centralized, centripetal, gradually totalitarianizing government.
Excellent post!