“Sounds like you can’t do anything to forward your intentions if you tell the truth about them either. “
You have to go slow and exert gentle pressure to avoid resistance. FDR had a strong isolationist faction to contend with, so he had to keep his aid to Churchill and later Stalin off the budget, so he invented lend-lease, and left airplanes next to the Canadian border that mysteriously went missing. If he had “told the truth,” he would have been impeached or lost reelection. Competing factions retard abrupt movement to one direction or the other. See Federalist Papers for a full exposition.
“these colonies had put forth this declaration of principle that everyone who wanted to have independence was entitled to have it. “
No such thing. They put forth this declaration that everyone who wanted to have independence could have it if they could get it. The colonies fought long and hard for independence and won, with the help of the French. “Entitled to have it”? Are you Canadian or something? The South was not “entitled” to independence. They had to fight for it, and they lost.
” Lincoln would have just left them alone, it is quite likely there never would have been a war. “
They attacked Fort Sumter. If Buchanan had fully manned that fort, they would never have dared attack it. But they fired the first shot, and took the fort after a comic opera siege.
” The notion that any significant numbers of slaves were going to go into the territories is a Unicorn that farts rainbow skittles.
There was not ever going to be any significant level of slavery in the territories. The territories could not make sufficient money through slave labor to make it worthwhile to have slaves there. “
The territories needed to clear land for planting, dig shafts for mining, and build houses. And the land that they cleared was an unknown quantity. It could have been good for tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, beets, who knows. The venture of dumping southern slaves in the West might well have been a unicorn farting rainbow skittles, but to a quixotic people such as Southerners, who believed themselves chivalric knights of old along the lines of a Sir Walter Scott novel, this was the impossible dream, a noble cause worth fighting the unbeatable foe over. They thought it was for real, and fought as though it was for real, and nearly won. But the North outlasted them, and they got no overt help from Britain, as they had hoped.
“Alternatively if they had been left alone, the massive flow of new capital into their economy would have severely damaged the powerful and influential robber barons of the Northeast”
And this massive flow of new capital would have come from where? Unicorns? Their idea of economic expansion was for a planter to buy more land and slaves, and cultivate that land with implements originally designed in 1740 or earlier. Then as profits came in from that land, slowly, they would eventually buy more land and more slaves, or depend on the natural increase from the slaves that they already had, or both. Northern states had farmers who would buy the newest plows and harrows, able to spread manure as they break up the ground; learned that horses were stronger than oxen; that bat guano was a better fertilizer than cow manure; etc., etc., in short, increasing their production per acre year after year, while the Southern planters had the same output per acre, just owned more acres and more slaves. Northern states had factories, new inventions, new mining techniques, immigrants full of ambition and pluck. Southerners had slave workers, who had only two motivations for working hard, fear of the lash and a sense of belonging to the plantation on which they were born. As Virginia farmers liberated themselves from the plantation system by shipping slaves down to the Mississippi bottoms, the slaves so shipped lost their sense of belonging, and those remaining felt betrayed and alienated. It was a system ripe for rebellion, and they had one, and in that context, nobody was going to invest any capital anywhere, except maybe diversified, less slaves Virginia, if they would disregard that nastiness with Nat Turner. The other slave states yearned to be like Virginia, but Lincoln wanted to shut the door on their impossible dream, exporting slaves west, so they went at him like a windmill. He didn’t even get a chance to ‘leave them alone’.
To be fair, if we'd kept our nose out of WW1, we wouldn't have had to deal with the real threat that occurred in WW2.
No such thing. They put forth this declaration that everyone who wanted to have independence could have it if they could get it.
This is both a logical error and a factual error. The document says that "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them".
See there? It's a right granted by God. As for your logical error, if you have the power to win, you don't have to iterate a right. You don't need "rights" because you have power.
The colonies fought long and hard for independence and won, with the help of the French.
Yes they did, because the United Kingdom did not recognize such a right. But guess what? THIS nation did. We said so in our declaration of independence. This is what you call a "paradigm shift." We fought for the right of people to be independent, and we recognize the right of people to be independent if they want. Or at least we did until Lincoln came along and launched a war while claiming secession is illegal.
He even had the gall to quote the Declaration as he celebrated a victory over people trying to obtain independence.
They attacked Fort Sumter.
In response to Lincoln's attack, which was launched first. Bet you didn't know about that.
The territories needed to clear land for planting
What were they going to plant in Colorado, in New Mexico, in Arizona, in Utah? Would it be worth having a $1,000.00 slave doing it? Very doubtful.
dig shafts for mining,
How many do you think that would have taken? It might have been dozens, and that's assuming other miners would not object to this, which would be doubtful.
It could have been good for tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, beets, who knows.
Anyone that looks at it. None of that stuff would grow in the territories except perhaps beets, and OMG! They could corner the *BEET* market!
The whole threat of slavery in the territories was just an astro turf fake concern meant to panic people into voting against the Southern states in their representation.
And this massive flow of new capital would have come from where?
I'm glad you asked me that. Most people don't want to look at the actual finances involved here. First, some things you probably didn't know.
Southern production amounted to 200 million dollars per year in export trade value to Europe in 1860. This constituted 73% of the total trade value for United States exports that year. *The laws of the United States had been rigged by the "Navigation act of 1817" and other laws such as the "Warehousing act" to funnel money into the pockets of New York, and through them, into Washington DC.
The end result is that about 60% of all money produced by Southern exports (which were fueled by slave labor) ended up in New York and Washington DC pockets, with only 40% left over to go to the people who actually ran the slavery.
By getting rid of the requirements of the Navigation act of 1817, and the high tariffs, the South would see a net gain of about 120 million dollars a year if everything else remained the same.
The effect would have actually been greater than this because the purchasing power would have increased simply because the duties on European goods would have been reduced. They could buy more for less.
This 120 million would have come out of New York and Washington DC's hide. They would have been the losers of this money.
And this is the smaller economic threat New York and Washington DC was facing. There was a much worse threat to them than just that European money heading south.
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* This is what the territory fight was really about. The corrupt cartel of New York and Washington DC had managed to get 60% of the Southern production money flowing into their pockets, and if Southern states could get new allied states, they would be able to vote these unfair trade laws off the books, and recover a larger percentage of their production profits.
It wasn't possible to have any significant money making slavery in the territories, but if they would vote with the Southern block, the money would be made in the Southern states as a result of breaking Congress out of the control of the New York coalition.