You know the denial of it is total BS.
The tariff was easy to compromise on. They did it all the time. Hell, in 1860 when the Southern states began seceding, we had the lowest tariffs in history and they would have stayed that way if the Southern states had stayed in the union.
False. The Walker Tariff was relatively low but it was still higher than would have been desirable to serve the needs of the Southern States. There is a reason a tariff for revenue (ie maximum 10%) was all that was allowed under the Confederate Constitution barring national emergency like war. Tariffs were the issue Lincoln and the Republicans refused to compromise on.
The Morrill Tariff passed the US House in 1860. All that was needed for it to pass the US Senate was to pick off 1 or 2 Senators which could be accomplished by the standard log rolling....ie give a sop to this or that Senator by exempting some key product from his state and threaten that if he doesn't make a deal with you before somebody else does, he'll get left out in the cold. "Protection of home industry" was one of the key slogans of the Lincoln campaign and with the House, Senate and White House aligned, passage of the Morrill tariff which would go on to TRIPLE tariff rates was certain to pass. Furthermore, everybody knew that.
Tariffs were not the issue even if you want to pretend they were.
Tariffs were the issue even if you want to pretend they weren't.
The issue was slavery, and with abolitionists on one side pushing to end it and fire eaters on the other pushing to expand it, there was no room left for compromise. As many members of the founding generation feared, it finally came to blows.
The issue was not slavery. The abolitionists were a tiny minority and could not get more than single digit percentages of the vote in election after election. As for the expansion of slavery being the issue, in 1860, in the New Mexico Territory, an area which encompassed the area presently occupied by the States of New Mexico and Arizona, there were a grand total of 22 slaves, only 12 of whom were actually domiciled there. If the South intended to be a “Slave Power,” spreading its labor system across the entire continent, it was doing a pretty poor job of it.
Commenting on this fact, an English publication in 1861 said, “When, therefore, so little pains are taken to propagate slavery outside the circle of the existing slave states, it cannot be that the extension of slavery is desired by the South on social or commercial grounds directly, and still less from any love for the thing itself for its own sake. But the value of New Mexico and Arizona politically is very great! In the Senate they would count as 4 votes with the South or with the North according as they ranked in the category of slave holding or Free soil states”. This is why I pointed out from the beginning that arguments over the spread of slavery were a power struggle which was all about votes in the Senate...which was really about the economic policy of the federal government. This is what Jefferson Davis was talking about when he accused Northerners of wanting to limit the spread of slavery solely to turn the federal government into "an engine of Northern aggrandizement". This is why the Southern states were happy to not claim one square inch of Western territory when they seceded. Once they were out of the US and no longer needed votes in the US Senate to protect themselves, they were no longer interested in expanding slavery to areas that were completely unsuited to cotton or tobacco anyway.
Yet you say slavery was no big deal, even though your own Vice President, (who was pro tariffs BTW) called slavery the Cornerstone of the Confederacy. You think he would have said 10% Tariff in the Cornerstone. But no, he said slavery.
So little pain taken… talk about total BS. I’d say Kansas was painful. I’d say the debates over Missouri, over The Fugitive Slave Act, over popular soverenty, or the admission of Texas, or the Wilmount Proviso, or the southern filibusters into Mexico and Central America, or the desire to annex Cuba or Dred Scott… I’d say they were are part of very painful preview of the war.
Your British journalist didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.