Amazing. None of them supplied any data from Commerce Department which is easy to find.
Seems as if none of them heard of the Morriil Tariff which more than doubled the tariff costs passed onto Southern consumers.
It conforms with the public school classroom narrative that the South started the war so let's talk about slavery.
No one is taught that there was an operating and stable peace until Lincoln sent the Navy to invade Pensacola and Charleston.
That was exactly my point in my response. All they offered were opinions and allegations without providing amy hard numbers to back up their claims.
It conforms with the public school classroom narrative that the South started the war so let's talk about slavery.
Steering the discussion into a referendum on slavery is a tactic intended on keeping anyone from looking at the money situation. They introduce "slavery" as the central and in many case only topic they will allow to be discussed regarding the Civil War, and the money motive gets completely lost in the ensuing confusion.
Lincoln did not provoke a war with the South over slavery. He provoked a war with the South because the South was going to severely hurt his base of support in the North East, economically.
The civil war was over money, and the potential industrial/financial competition that would occur with the North if the South became independent.
A further threat to the North was the potential for more states (especially the Midwest territories) to leave the orbit of the Union and join the economic orbit of the Confederacy.
The people getting cut out of power in this scenario are the Northeaster Industrialists, Bankers, Insurers, Shippers and Washington DC. You know, the people who have more or less ran our government ever since 1860.
Do you have a link to those Commerce Department numbers? I think our FRiend is mostly out of the discussion, but I would like to show him some numbers that he cannot rebuke because they came out of a "racist" book written in 1860. Official government numbers are hard to argue with, because they are the acknowledged "good guy" by most of the people who think the Civil War was a good thing.