Still voting in Chicago, then?
Couldn't not walk through that open door......
As an old Whig, Stephens continued to advocate whiggish improvement schemes, and if he'd been in the Senate, he might have voted even for Morrill -- we can't know.
But he did oppose Toombs on the general subject of tariffs and free trade, and his attempts to palliate Toombs's argument are really controversion of his opponent and general rhetorical defense of the Whig legacy rather than any explicit, coherent plan of action that he would carry forward himself in the Congress in the name of his new party.
His argument that the South ought not to secede, by the way, overlooks the fact that some Southerners continued to cooperate out of interest with Northern advocates of tariffs -- otherwise the Tariff of 1828 would never have passed, for instance. The Virginia Unionists (mostly big planters) who voted for John Bell -- the Constitutional Union Party -- are good evidence for this political fact of life.
But as he also pointed out the tariff rates were "made just as low as Southern men asked them to be, and those are the rates they are now at."
Rhetoric. Some of them also passed, as I just pointed out, some high tariffs from time to time.
And had the southern senators not pulled out of the Congress the Morrill Tariff would never have gotten out of the Senate, just as if had been killed the year before.
That's how Stephens said he would have tried to play it, if you can believe him -- the term "DiNO" might apply here -- and how I'd have tried to play it; but the Southern cause would eventually have come to grief when Lincoln inevitably (I think it was his "solution" -- or rather his "other solution", if the South had knuckled under and the war option wasn't necessary to keep them in the Union) pulled some skanky, extraconstitutional, middle-of-the-night crap to get around the Constitution and the Congress and have his way on tariffs, on slavery, on everything on his list.
Lincoln was a lawyer, a railroad lawyer at that. He believed in winning, not scruples -- he was the nineteenth-century Kentucky version of LBJ. He didn't believe in faithfully following the Constitution, as his "all the laws but one" crack proves beyond any peradventure, and as his choice of political associates demonstrates if you still resist the idea that he was first and foremost a machine politician, dedicated to building a national political machine that would muffle or crush all dissent and rule by machinations and expedients.
You know, you can make cracks about how you think Southerners were cowards, and they were this and that -- but they'd have deserved your obloquy more, if they hadn't fought for their rights. Bottom line.
They fought the Machine. The Northerners didn't. Bottom line.
Absolutely not. The dead may vote but only if they are residents.