Posted on 02/11/2026 10:47:43 AM PST by T Ruth
Director Steven Spielberg, whom I introduced last week [in 2012] at Gettysburg at ceremonies marking the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s greatest speech, said he was deeply humbled to be delivering an address on that history-making spot.
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… Daniel Day-Lewis gives the definitive portrayal of our time, perhaps ever, of Honest Abe.
For people like me, who have spent their lives studying Abraham Lincoln, the film is chilling — as if he’s really come to life.
Day-Lewis does it by avoiding the traps most Lincoln actors fall into, the stoic, “Hall of Presidents”-esque stereotype that probably most Americans imagine.
There are no moving pictures of Lincoln, no recordings of his voice. But after his death, everyone was Lincoln’s best friend, and there are descriptions of everything from his accent to his gait.
The most important thing is the voice. Far from having a stentorian, Gregory Peck-like bass, Lincoln’s was a high, piercing tenor. Those who attended his speeches even described it as shrill and unpleasant for the first 10 minutes, until he got warmed up (or his endless stories managed to cow them into submission).
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Few great people are appreciated in their time. And it’s good to remember that, no matter how right the decisions seem now, they were hard-fought then.
“I wanted — impossibly — to bring Lincoln back from his sleep of one-and-a-half centuries,” Steven Spielberg said at Gettysburg, “even if only for two-and-one-half hours, and even if only in a cinematic dream.”
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Harold Holzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln. ...
[At the end of the article Holzer gives thumbnail reviews of all prior Lincoln films, ranking them from worst to best, which Holzer considers to be Spielberg’s.]
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Excluding the plantation owner class and the urban residents of the few cities that the South had, the vast majority of the Southern population was made up of subsistence farmers. These farmers were largely self-sufficient. What they did not produce on their own would be locally produced items like horseshoes, plows, hand tools, firearms, tobacco, coffee. Save for coffee, those items were produced locally or manufactured domestically. High tariffs would have little effect on their lives. These farmers fought for the Confederacy due to their loyalty to their home states, not for economic benefits. The plantation owners were leaders in their communities, and it is worthy to note that the Unionist areas in the South, such as East Tennessee, were areas where there were no plantations.
Then on February 18, 1861, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy during a ceremony in Montgomery, Alabama.
The Morrill Tariff did not pass Congress until March 2, 1861, after the withdrawal of opposing Southern Senators due to secession.
Call me deluded, but in my history books, events do not happen before causes appear.
Most if not the vast majority of them knew full well it would be impossible to secure their borders or to prevent slaves from crossing over those borders. There were only 5.5 million White Southerners. The borders of the original 7 seceding states ran for 1500 miles and obviously mid 19th century technology was nothing like modern technology. Secession meant the rapid end of slavery and most knew it.
And again, not only the majority but the vast majority of White Southerners did not own any slaves. Protection of slavery was obviously not what was motivating them.
It was a common practice to devote 20% to 25% of their acreage to producing cash crops for yeomen farmers. Frequent purchases were clothes, windows, agricultural equipment, etc. The cash crops raised the money to buy all the things they could not produce. A collapse in the price of cotton or in cotton sales (or tobacco or sugar or other cash crops) would hurt their income. Simultaneously, an increase in the tariff would see Northern manufacturers raise their prices so those farmers would have less income and pay higher prices for the things they wanted to buy. That was quite painful during the tariff of Abominations so they knew full well what to expect a generation later.
In addition to that, there was a general sense that their region had been pushed around and taken advantage of - not to mention constantly insulted and derided. Not surprisingly, this bred considerable resentment. Also, Southerners were overwhelmingly Jeffersonians. They believed in limited government and decentralized power. For many of them, the post office was their only contact with the federal government. They objected to the constant drive for the federal government to usurp ever more power.
I thought I told you not to post to me. I guess I didn’t. So I’ll tell you now. You are so full of nonsense that I can’t be bothered with you. Diogenes is full of nonsense too, but I got used to having him around.
So, secession was intended as a way to get rid of slavery?
The Morrill Tariff passed the U.S. House of Representatives on May 10, 1860, before Lincoln's election and before any state had seceded. It passed the U.S. Senate on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln's inauguration. (Lincoln vigorously lobbied for the bill, telling a Pittsburgh, Pa. audience two weeks before his inauguration that no other issue — none — was more important.)
On November 19, 1860 Senator Robert Toombs gave a speech to the Georgia convention in which he denounced the "infamous Morrill bill." The tariff legislation, he argued, was the product of a coalition between abolitionists and protectionists in which "the free-trade abolitionists became protectionists; the non-abolition protectionists became abolitionists." Toombs described this coalition as "the robber and the incendiary... united in joint raid against the South."
The Morrill tariff's passage in the Senate was a certainty. All that was needed was to flip one or two senators. This could easily be done by offering a key concession or two and threatening that if they did not agree to it and some other senator did, then his constituents would get whatever was offered to them in exchange for his vote and the offers made to other senators and their states would be withdrawn. The Morrill Tariff was the main political issue throughout the Fall of 1860.
Several English publications at the time. Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, one of the “workingman’s journals,” wrote on March 21, 1857, that a major source of conflict was that Northern business interests wanted the South to “consent to the high protective tariff,” and if they did, “anti-slavery agitation would stop.” “Antislavery agitation” meant opposition to the extension of slavery, not Southern slavery. Pretending to want to “check the progress of slavery” in this way “has been only a disguise under which to advance the interests of the [Republican] party.”
The Edinburgh Review was a prominent British journal that observed in 1858 that “abolition was not a policy of the North,” and that secession would actually spell the end of slavery because it would no longer be propped up by the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act. This view was echoed by other high-quality British publications such as Fraser’s Magazine and The Saturday Review, among others. Thus, the most prominent British journals agreed on the eve of the War with a statement that Alexander Stephens would make five or six years later, that slavery was actually “more secure” in the union than out of it. see the statement of Lincoln and others which I cited earlier. This was not a fringe view nor one that only Lincoln could see.
The Quarterly Review agreed wholeheartedly with Dickens, calling the protectionist tariff a “revolting tribute” paid to Northern businessmen by Southerners who “had been groaning for years under the crashing bondage of Northern protectionists.”
Blackwood’s Magazine, which is still being published, argued in 1861 that “slavery had no significant part in the conflict.” The union, through the Fugitive Slave Act, protected slavery, said Blackwood’s, repeating the view of other British journals that secession would actually lead to the demise of slavery by nullifying that federal law. The tariff laws, on the other hand, were “ruinous to the South.” They were “the chief complaint of the South,” and “have been for thirty years oppressive and unjust.”
Similarly Robert Barnwell Rhett aka "the Father of Secession" a few years before the war stated: "The legislation of this Union has impoverished them [the Southern States] by taxation and by a diversion of the proceeds of our labor and trade to enriching Northern Cities and States. These results are not only sufficient reasons why we would prosper better out of the union but are of themselves sufficient causes of our secession. Upon the mere score of commercial prosperity, we should insist upon disunion. Let Charleston be relieved from her present constrained vassalage in trade to the North, and be made a free port and my life on it, she will at once expand into a great and controlling city."
US Senator from South Carolina James H. Hammond likewise stated in 1858, "I have no hesitation in saying that the Plantation States should discard any government that makes a protective tariff its policy."
No, the Morrill Tariff did not magically become an issue on the day it passed the Senate and was signed into law by the president. It had been the major issue in the country for the previous year.
Very well. I accept your surrender.
That wasn't the point. The slave states feared that Republicans in the Border States could abolish slavery in those states and the next step would be for Republicans to build a party in the Upper South that would abolish slavery there. This was seen by the Deep South states as a threat to slavery. No constitutional amendment would have been necessary. If it seems unlikely that Virginia or Tennessee would ever abolish slavery on their own, slaveowners were frightened and convinced that the Republicans were out to get them.
Like Illinois, where you could sell any black person into slavery if they didn't have their paperwork proving they were free?
How often did that happen? There were free blacks in Illinois. Their chief fear was being kidnapped and taken to Missouri and sold into slavery.
My reference was to the "personal liberty laws" that Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maine, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Kansas and possibly other states had passed requiring a court hearing (due process) for runaways and others before they could be taken South and made slaves.
The idea that slavery was more secure inside the Union than outside of it wasn't shared by the secessionists. When they wrote their constitution they included explicit protections for slavery. They were convinced that secession would keep meddlesome Yankees out. They certainly would have been willing to fortify the border, especially if they were able to hold Kentucky and make the Ohio River the border.
Anyway, I keep telling you: talk to a reputable historian or economist who could straighten you out. You're starting to sound like those people who are convinced that Hitler wanted peace but the English and the Poles wouldn't let him have it.
So, they’re giving Lincoln a Pee-Wee Herman voice?
"Intended"? No. But many if not most knew that secession would cause its collapse before very long. But they also knew it was doomed anyway. They could see what had been slowly happening in the Northern states, what had happened in the British Empire a generation earlier, what was happening in the other European colonial empires, etc.
"Secession, southerners argued, would 'liberate' the South and produce the kind of balanced economy that was proving so successful in the North and so unachievable in the South." (John A. Garraty and Robert McCaughey, The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877, Volume One, Sixth Edition, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1987, pp. 418-419, emphasis in original)
Secession would make the Southern states richer by freeing them of the burdens imposed on them by the Northern states. This extra money would speed up their own economic development/industrialization.
Sure, no doubt some of that is true.
However, Pareto's law of economics works in almost every circumstance -- 20% of producers make 80% of the product.
In 1860 there were roughly 300,000 cotton growing farms, of which 20% = 60,000 plantations with more than 25 slaves each.
These people were genuinely wealthy and lived lives envied by the other 80% of cotton growers who contributed relatively few bales -- <1 million of the 4.5 million standard 500 lb. bales produced in 1860.
FLT-bird: "Any of a number of newspapers on all sides, writers, politicians and tax experts have all attested that the Southern states did indeed pay the vast bulk of the Tariff.
Its laughable that some PCer now thinks he knows better how the economy worked than the people who lived back then and saw it with their own eyes and in their own bank accounts."
It was political propaganda then, just as it is today, since the "vast bulk of the Tariff" (90%) was paid in New York, Boston & Philadelphia.
Those tariffs were paid by Northern customers, not Southern planters.
What's true is that ~50% of 1860 US exports were cotton products, and that 90% of planters were paid for their produce at their property gates (by factors) or Freight On Board in New Orleans, or other ports (by British or Northern merchants).
Southern planters had nothing to do with selling their cotton in England or France and certainly did not buy foreign products for sale in New York, Boston & Philadelphia.
They absolutely did not pay tariffs on products sold to Northern customers out of bonded warehouses in New York, Boston & Philadelphia.
No doubt that large plantations with lots of slaves produced a lot of cotton. That said....there were a LOT of yeoman farmers with far more land under cultivation. The amount of cotton they were producing when added together was substantial.
It was political propaganda then, just as it is today, since the "vast bulk of the Tariff" (90%) was paid in New York, Boston & Philadelphia. Those tariffs were paid by Northern customers, not Southern planters.
No. The money came out of Southerner's pockets. It meant reduced sales of their cash crops and reduced prices for their cash crops.
What's true is that ~50% of 1860 US exports were cotton products, and that 90% of planters were paid for their produce at their property gates (by factors) or Freight On Board in New Orleans, or other ports (by British or Northern merchants). Southern planters had nothing to do with selling their cotton in England or France and certainly did not buy foreign products for sale in New York, Boston & Philadelphia. They absolutely did not pay tariffs on products sold to Northern customers out of bonded warehouses in New York, Boston & Philadelphia.
They got less money than they otherwise would have for their crops AND they paid more money for the manufactured goods they needed to buy. They absolutely did pay the vast majority of the tariff. I've posted zillions of quotes from everybody on all sides at the time saying Southerners paid the vast majority of the tariff. Its laughable for you to claim you understand the economy now better than the people who were alive at the time.
The claim does not stand because it places a great deal of weight on a thin reed. In truth, secession would not have been undertaken if it was thought likely to lead to the end of slavery.
Of course it stands up. What does not stand up is that 94+% of White Southerners voted to secede in order to protect the property of 6% who owned slaves....even though slavery was not threatened in the US and even though the union government went miles out of its way to make it clear that slavery was not threatened within the US.
What makes much more sense is they felt they were being screwed economically and wanted out.
Picking and slinging about bit and pieces of opinion at the margins does not change the fact that slavery was the cause of secession, not tariff rates.
Willful denial and fanatical devotion to the propaganda taught in the government schools does not change the fact that slavery was not the cause of either secession or the war. Tariffs and unequal federal outlays were the primary causes.
You miss. I was educated in Catholic schools up through HS, and then in a private university in the South, Tulane University, graduating with a degree in history after four years in a city (New Orleans) steeped in Southern history. The only “government school” I went to was the University of Florida College of Law.
The right to vote was restricted in the Antebellum South to substantial property holders, which commonly meant slaveholders. And slavery was integral to the South’s economy, even for non-slaveholders. Similarly, I do not own an oil well, but I want them to keep pumping.
This has become dogma throughout Academia ever since the 60s leftists engaging in their long march through the institutions became dominant around the late 80s/early 90s. I was educated in private high schools, got my undergrad degree at the University of Florida, my law degree at California Western and my MBA at Thunderbird. Of those only UF is public, but the point still stands.
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