Replies

he south would've never seceded in the first place were it not under great pressure to do so. and i don't mean slavery. this was so beyond that. men like Jefferson Davis, Lee, Jackson et al did not do this because they were some slave-mongering "masters" - this had to do with money.

And what leads you to believe that they're two different things? After land, slaves were the single largest capital item in the south. Their total value, in today's dollars, would have been around $65 billion dollars. So any perceived threat to slavery (like stopping the expansion into the territories) WAS about money, and a lot more money than tariffs represented.

"And what leads you to believe that they're two different things? After land, slaves were the single largest capital item in the south. Their total value, in today's dollars, would have been around $65 billion dollars. So any perceived threat to slavery (like stopping the expansion into the territories) WAS about money, and a lot more money than tariffs represented."

Bubba, thanks for making an attempt, but the tariffs that were on the South eclipse slavery in terms of money. No comparison. The Confederacy actually ILLEGALIZED international slave trading in their own constitution while simultaneously illegalizing tariffs for pork. It's clear that this was their major issue (the tariffs).

Please imagine for moment that your average southerner circa 1850-1860 was not a slave owner. Please also imagine that instead the slave owners were a select few on large plantations (READ: farms with fancy palaces that were more or less equivalent to royalty) and imagine that even owning a slave was an expensive venture. So expensive that it involved insurance on the luxury level and that the mortality rate of the sailors bringing transporting slaves on ships was higher than that of their cargo because the slaves were worth something. Now, you may say "Well, the slave owners were the power brokers in the South yada yada yada..." but why would states, even northern ones(!) decades before come close to secession over tariffs? Also, why would northerners be overwhelmingly against a civil war with their southern brothers and sisters? Why would there be four slave states in the North? Come on!

There was widespred sentiment in the North to allow the Southern states to secede! This is a fact.

Secession was such an important part of the mindset that Lincoln's own words captured it perfectly:

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to raise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right- a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may chose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory they inhabit

Abraham Lincoln, Jan 12, 1848

Unfortuately, the man's ambition and personal vision outweighed his common-sense and basic humanity.