Just you not understanding economics. No need for the rest of us to panic.
A whole series of elections had been going against them, and everyone could see what was happening. Lincoln's election was just the final straw in a long ongoing series of losses of political power in Washington DC.
Not so much. The Democrats, who were largely pro-Southern controlled the Senate up to 1861. So far as I've been able to find out, there would have been a tie in the Senate between the two parties if the Southern senators hadn't withdrawn. Democrats lost the House in 1854, 1858, and (I assume) 1860, but they had plenty of power still. Lincoln wasn't going to be president forever. The South would have "risen again" in Congress if they'd shown more patience.
If my money is being "voted" out of my hands because the other side has a majority, it may be Democratic, but that's not going to convince me it's fair.
If you were a slaveowner, probably nothing would be fair enough or good enough for you. But anybody with any understanding of history or economics would tell you that it doesn't matter if you are a great exporter of some commodity. If you aren't importing as much as other people, you don't pay as much in import taxes as they do.
Money circulates. You use your money to buy goods and services from other people and they can use that money to buy imports, and they pay the import taxes in higher prices for those goods.
This nation has long been suffering from allowing non taxpayers to vote so that politicians could bribe them with the money of the taxpayers. This creates a democratic majority, but it is in fact a form of legalized theft.
The Southerners felt the same way when Northern majorities kept expanding the system that had them paying most of the taxes, and Washington DC spending the money on things mostly of interest to Washington DC, and not necessarily for the benefit of the people from whom the money came.
So Northern manufacturers and the many many people who lived in the North were idle deadbeats? And the slaveowners were out there in the fields every day breaking their humps to earn and honest living. Where do you come up with this garbage?
You have it wrong. I understand them perfectly well, as do you, except when you look at the economics of the Civil War. It's not that you can't see them, it's that you absolutely refuse to see them.
Were the emotional component removed from your analysis, you would see that if 3/4ths of all the trade production comes from one area, and only 1/4 comes from the other, you would correctly conclude that 3/4ths of the imports were created by those exports when a normal balance of trade is maintained.
This is stark. It's not "grey" at the margins. If the trade production was closer to 50-50, you might be able to hide the economic reality by asserting all the intricacies of domestic distribution and other economic activity, but this is ridiculously lopsided in favor of the South, and the whole thing pokes out of the statistical noise to such a degree that no reasonable person can deny what was going on here.
Somehow New York had obtained control of virtually every aspect of trade with Europe. I've already covered how they did it, but you won't even recognize that they did it, so the how isn't really important.
So far as I've been able to find out, there would have been a tie in the Senate between the two parties if the Southern senators hadn't withdrawn. Democrats lost the House in 1854, 1858, and (I assume) 1860, but they had plenty of power still. Lincoln wasn't going to be president forever.
I'm pretty sure they could see the pattern. Reagan was elected in 1980, and he slowed down Liberal advancement a bit. Then Bush allowed it to move forward slowly, then Clinton advanced it greatly. Bush II slowed it down, but it kept advancing, and of course Barack Obama accelerated it massively. Trump has now stopped and in some cases even reversed it, but what do you suppose will happen when next Democrats win the Presidency or the Senate?
Can you not see the trend? Is public law and policy more liberal or more conservative than it was in the 1960s? It is clearly more liberal, and despite our efforts to slow or reverse it, it keeps growing and advancing.
And you don't think the Southerners could see the same thing happening to them since about the 1820s? The trend was unmistakable, and Lincoln simply represented the final straw that broke the camel's back. They realized they could never improve their situation as long as they remained the Milk Cow and whipping boy of the North.
If you aren't importing as much as other people, you don't pay as much in import taxes as they do.
And here you once again advance the idea that one can be an importer of 75% of all goods, while only balancing it with 25% of all exports. Somehow you just think the people creating the production will just walk away from that other 50% of the total value, with no questions asked.
Yes, you try to hide this stark contrast by asserting the idea that there are all sorts of these little trades between one group and the other that has the South losing that 50% to the North, and cumulatively they all result in transfer of ownership of that 50% of all goods from the South to the North. You also argue it was all free market voluntary and without coercion causing it.
I've pointed to the "navigation act of 1817" to explain how a great deal of that money got transferred from the South to the North, but you dismiss that without any reasonable consideration.
You simply ignore the great gobs of money involved in the relations between North and South, and would prefer to think the Southerners simply wanted to protect an institution already protected by American law, and under no real threat from any person or institution, while simultaneously dismissing the idea that they may have been very interested in the money they saw as being siphoned off from their income due to laws designed to help Northern industries, mostly at their expense.
You don't want to believe that at the bottom of this whole affair, the motivation for both sides was simply money.
And the slaveowners were out there in the fields every day breaking their humps to earn and honest living.
Nobody said that. Of course they weren't earning a moral living, but morality is not always the same thing as legal rights. They had a legal right at the time to force other people to work for them. They did not have a moral right to do so, but the whole system ran on legal rights, not on what was moral.
They were legally entitled to that money under the laws of the United States at the time, and though we may huff and fume about how immoral it was, the fact remains that this was what all the states agreed to when they ratified the US Constitution.