If you want to understand how the war came about, and what the intentions of the Lincoln administration were in regard to initiating it, you have to look at what was actually being done in the months leading up to Ft. Sumter.
After the seven states of the deep south seceded, many of them citing (in their declarations of independence) fears that the Northern Republican party would eventually threaten the existence of slavery, the politicians from the border states and north came together to work out a compromise that they hoped might lure the seceded states back into the federal union.
So, with the Representatives and Senators from the seven Confederate states no longer participating in the US Congress, both the House and Senate approved by the necessary two-thirds margins a proposed constitutional amendment that would have guaranteed the continued existence of slavery (in the states where it then existed) forever. At this point, to put it bluntly, if preserving slavery forever had been the primary goal of the seceded states, all they had to do in order to effect this was renounce the Confederacy, return to the USA, and along with all of the slave states and most of the free states, vote to amend the Constitution. The fact that the Northern congressmen and state governments were willing to do this, however, suggests very strongly that their invasion of the south had nothing to do with ending slavery.
In regard to President Lincoln, whose lifelong political agenda required that the Confederate states remain part of the USA and in compliance with federal law, he was in favor of this compromise as well, as he stated in his inaugural address.
“I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution—which amendment, however, I have not seen—has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”
While the president’s feigned ignorance in regard to the specifics of the recently approved Corwin Amendment was entirely disingenuous, his support for it was not, and as the president would repeatedly say throughout the coming war, he was more than willing to make compromises on slavery if that’s what it would take to preserve or restore the union. To underscore this point, take a look at what the Emancipation Proclamation, decreed as an executive order in September 1862, actually said.
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, (January 1, 1863) all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free...”
As you can see, the Emancipation Proclamation was actually an ultimatum given to the Confederate States still waging their war for independence, and as with any ultimatum, if the recipients of this ultimatum had accepted its terms within a certain time frame (in this case the first day of the next year), then the punishment (in this case freeing the slaves) for rejecting the ultimatum would not go into effect. Had the Confederate States accepted the ultimatum and come back to the USA by January 1, 1863, they could have kept their slaves and then proceeded to ratify the Corwin Amendment, which had no time limits set to it and which had already been ratified by a couple northern states as a gesture of “good faith” to the South, amending the Constitution in order to guarantee that protection forever.
None of the Confederate States accepted the ultimatum, suggesting again that they were willing to risk the loss of their slaves if that was, ultimately, the gamble they had to take in order to achieve their political independence. Of course, had this same choice been given in late ‘64 or perhaps early ‘65 instead of 1862-63... my guess is they would have taken the deal, as by then their chances of actually winning their independence looked very grim.
Going back to the Lincoln’s inaugural, while he expressed in clear language that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” and he had “no lawful right to do so,” and “no inclination to do so,” he did clearly state why he would launch an invasion of the south.
“The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.”
While President Lincoln said this in a way which implied that he wasn’t going to invade the south, what he was really saying was that he would invade the south, if the Confederate States refused to pay taxes to the US government. Think about that for a minute. If the Confederates refused to pay taxes to what they now considered a foreign government, they would be invaded by that foreign country.
Why was it so important to collect taxes from the southerners now part of the CSA that President Lincoln would threaten to invade them? The answer is really very simple if you look at the history of Lincoln’s political career and the logic of the situation from his (and many, but certainly not most at the time, northerners’ perspectives).
First, we must recall the history of Abraham Lincoln’s political career. While he was, like most Republicans, opposed to the further expansion of slavery into the western territories, he was not and had never been an abolitionist. In fact, on a few occasions, he even went out of his way to evoke hostility to the real abolitionists and their arguments, even ridiculing them and dismissing them publicly, repeatedly said that he did not regard blacks and whites as equals, and thought the best solution to the race problem, if slavery ever did come to an end, was to get them to leave the United States altogether. But for Lincoln, the issue of slavery (at any level) was not what he spent most of his life focused upon.
Instead, Lincoln spent most of his political career, first as a Whig and then as a Republican, working to establish the so-called “American System” of high protective tariffs, subsidies (called euphemistically “internal improvements”) for the railroad corporations, and the reestablishment of a national bank. Before we take a closer look at these issues, it is important to note, of course, that neither a national bank, subsidies for big business, nor protective tariffs are authorized by Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution.
During the middle of the 1800s Abraham Lincoln was, whenever he wasn’t playing government in either the Illinois state legislature or for a short time in the US Congress, one of the premier railroad company lawyers and lobbyists in the country, making a career out of lobbying state governments and the federal government to appropriate funds in order to subsidize the building of privately owned railroads (overwhelmingly in the northern states). In essence, we’re talking about corporate welfare here... socialism, except that we’re stealing from the poor (and middle class) to give to the rich instead of the other way around. Of course, to give taxpayer funds away to well connected big business (who will then bankroll the politicians who regularly vote them other people’s money), the government first has to tax the people.
This leads us back to the protective tariffs. First, regardless of how much taxpayer money the tariff brings in, protective tariffs were supported by Abraham Lincoln and other proponents of the “American System” partly because they, by hiking up so much the prices on imports, insulated (hence the moniker “protective” tariffs) big businesses in America (overwhelmingly in the northern states) from foreign competition. For this reason alone, it should not surprise anyone that some of the largest manufacturers in America, especially in the steel industry, lined up behind Lincoln and the Republicans. In fact, at the Republican convention in 1860 held in Pennsylvania, it was the steel manufacturers lining up behind candidate Lincoln and his staunch support for high taxes, that likely secured him the party’s nomination for President of the United States. While Lincoln and the Republicans loved high tariffs, however, the south, almost unanimously, did not. Because southerners did most of their trade with England they ended up paying, despite the fact that they comprised only about 30% of the American population, approximately 70% of the tax burden, in order to “protect” industries that were almost entirely non-existent in their section of the country. Not only did they find these taxes objectionable on moral grounds, southerners objected to them on constitutional grounds as well, given that Article 1 Section 8 declares that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”
Nonetheless, there was a fundamental connection between Lincoln and the Republicans support for high taxes and corporate welfare, and the south’s rejection of both. Back in those days, before we had income taxes, tariffs comprised about 90% of all federal revenues. To put it bluntly, southerners paid 70% of the taxes, so that the northerners in the US Congress could then turn around and give away southerner’s money, in the form of unconstitutional wealth transfer payments, to a bunch of well-connected corporate fat-cats in the north. Or to put it another way, the northern states overtaxed the southern states so that they could enrich themselves at the south’s expense.
Thus, when President Lincoln declared in his inaugural speech that he would only invade the south to “possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts” he was deadly serious and, from his perspective, not without reason. After all, imagine what would have happened if he had simply let the south go (and not tried to collect taxes from them), as most in the north (prior to Ft. Sumter) were calling for?
First, with the northern harbors charging 50% or higher protective tariffs (the US tariff) and the Confederate harbors charging only a modest (10-15%) revenue tariff, very quickly most foreign shipping to America would have shifted to the Confederate harbors. Almost overnight, the trade that regularly shipped to New York, Philadelphia, Boston and the remaining New England harbors would have diverted to Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, or Galveston, impoverishing the economies of the northern states in the process.
Second, without the ability to collect taxes from foreigners (enforce US tariffs inside Confederate territory), the US government would have been immediately denied the vast majority of its traditional revenues. Not only would this have nearly bankrupted the US government, it would have forced them to raise taxes on their own people in order to pay for all of their redistributionist schemes like the railroad subsidies, rather than continuing to seize the wealth of their outnumbered former countrymen in the south for those purposes.
And to wrap up this post, that’s exactly what the Lincoln administration did during the war. Unable to finance both the war and their domestic policy priorities - such as the Pacific Railway Acts that subsidized the construction of the first transcontinental railroad - they enacted the first income tax in US history, which was of course, like almost everything Lincoln did during the war, unconstitutional as well.
Thank you for your exhaustive post. It’s an excellent jumping point for even the most ardent of ear stoppers, to jump off from, and begin their own research. Kudos, and again, THANK YOU!
Thank you for your most excellent post!!
Question - why are myths perpetuated in the US history that is taught to our children and repeated ad nauseum by the MSM and our fearless leaders? :)
You trivialize the effort required to ratify US Constitutional amendments, but make a valid (albeit unintentional) point that it was always within the power of the so-called "confederacy" to prevent/end the conflict.
Bravo.