You attempt to reduce the irreducable and that is your argument's fundamental flaw.
I'd say this relates more to McPherson than to myself. I've alreay made clear that I have some qualms about his approach, but the question is whether these things really are 'irreducible.' To use another analogy from science, there will always be some 'remainder' something left over. You will be able to find non-slavery-related reasons why slave states wanted more territory or wanted power within the union. Pride, honor, group loyalty, self-assertion and self-respect are all reasons for not backing down. There was also the concern about issues like the tariff. The question is whether this remainder justifies making these things causes equal with slavery, or whether one sees them as by and large subordinate to the conflict over slavery.
Given that alliances with other groups in the North and West would have gotten Southerners much of what they wanted, I have to ask why they didn't make those alliances, and the expansion and defense of slavery go a long way to explaining why they didn't. I would see the emotional factors like honor and shame as more important than tariffs or land-grants, but less important than slavery.
New Mexico was below the line established in 1820 to separate the free states from the slave states. Kansas and Nebraska were above it. One could suggest that the political ineptitude shown in opening the opportunity to admit Kansas as a slave state was a major factor in making war possible. But I suspect that even without this, the slave states would feel constrained by the growth of the free states, and likely to consider secession. One could imagine that the Democrats succeeded in acquiring Cuba or other Carribean territories as potential slave states. Whether this would have prevented secession and war or not is another question. My suspicion is that it wouldn't.
My comment on a method yielding one answer relates to "public choice theory." You have taken it out of context or maybe I wasn't clear enough. Public choice theory is DiLorenzo's explanation and defense of his analysis. But the answers he gets depends on how he construes and represents the situation. This means that he can't hide behind "public choice theory." I have already expressed my doubts about McPherson's search for one root cause or single answer.
The South had its Whigs and advocates of industrialization. It's true that the North had more Democrats and low tariff men. But this fact precisely undercuts the argument that the tariff was a major cause. For if it were, what would be easier than for Southerners to cooperate with Northern Democrats to keep tariffs low forever. The fact that there were fewer protectionists in the South than free traders in the North supports McPherson, not you, since it presented Southerners with a golden opportunity that they did not make use of. Slavery prevented low tariff men from working together. The tariff did not prevent pro-slavery or anti-slavery groups from cooperating and coalescing. This suggests that slavery was more of a primary cause than the tariff.
McPherson also gives the blanket dissmisal: "The Civil War was not fought over the issue of tariff or of industrialization or of land grants." Regardless of what degree you or anybody else believes these issues influenced the war, to deny their existence completely is to deny the historical record itself where they were cited as issues of the war.
You are working with different vocabularies and ambiguous words. To argue that the "war was not fought" over certain issues doesn't necessarily "deny the existence" of such factors "completely." It might mean that. It could also mean that those issues alone wouldn't have caused a war. It may also mean that men did not go to war over those issues. McPherson denies that these were a cause or the cause of the war, but that doesn't mean that they may not have been factors. The language is ambiguous and can be read in different ways. History teachers always had to explain that America didn't declare war in 1917 "because of" the sinking of the Lusitania, but that certainly doesn't mean it wasn't a factor.
You do have a good point about the view McPherson takes of Northern free-soil sentiment. The current approach, shown in the recent PBS series on slavery is to demean free-soil sentiment as meaning 'keeping people of color out' and reserving the territories for 'white men.' I don't think McPherson's comments are wholly wrong on their face or that the current politically correct view is unimpeachable, but McPherson does oversimplify things and leave out an important aspect of Northern sentiments. It certainly would have been better had he noted the important differences between the free-soil and anti-slavery movements.
McPherson's article is only a popular sketch. It's a bit akin to an explanation of difficult science for a popular audience. I'd say it certainly isn't the best history. I made clear in my comments that he was seeking the big explanation, the primal cause, that would explain everything, and this isn't generally the way historians procede. As a rough hypothesis to explain the era it does have its uses, but I'm more inclined to give more credit the reasons people gave themselves for acting as they did. Whether or not one can reduce "the Southern way of life" and other slogans of 1860 to slavery with little remainder is a very live question though. Probably it will never be resolved.
It's certainly apt to be disputed by Southern partisans, but McPherson's not saying that the antebellum South and it's culture are to be reduced to slavery, just that slavery substantially accounts for the differences between North and South that made the war. That doesn't mean that there may not have been things of great worth in the Southern way of life, though some may read his argument that way.
I don't agree with your explanation and think there's much truth in McPherson's article, but there are certainly grounds to criticize the McPherson of this article as a historian. There are real problems with reductive "debunking." Either it's applied selectively to one side and not the other, or else it never ends or else it always yields the same results because one doesn't stop until one achieves a certain answer that pleases. Another problem with the debunking or denuding approach that tries to find 'the real' reason for this or that and ignores other factors is that it depends much more on us than on the past. As I've said, if slavery had lasted and industrialism had failed, we'd read Northern and Southern motivations very differently.
It would be curious to submit McPherson's essay to history professors and see how they would grade it as history. But between two broad schools -- one that emphasises slavery and one that downplays it -- the first seems to have more of the truth.
If you say so, I can agree to that. It is my main point of contention with McPherson's article.
But this fact precisely undercuts the argument that the tariff was a major cause. For if it were, what would be easier than for Southerners to cooperate with Northern Democrats to keep tariffs low forever.
Pro-Tariff numerical strengths in Congress and a pro-tariff president. The House had already passed the Morrill bill in May of 1860. When Lincoln was elected, everyone knew the new president would sign it AND push heavily for it...that is if it didn't pass the Senate before his inauguration, where Buchanan would sign it just the same. The latter is what happened. When it did pass the Senate, Lincoln had already publicly pledged to make the tariff bill his top legislative priority in the next session if it were not law already.
Had the South stayed in the union, their only block on tariffs would have been a shaky sectionally divided majority in the senate under constant pressure from the white house and their representative counterparts to enact a new tax. Add projected budget shortfalls into the mix and a natural, albeit economically fallacious, call to raise taxes begins to resonate with the public - especially those who gain some benefit from it (the north) over those who actually incur its wrath (the south).
You are working with different vocabularies and ambiguous words.
No, not really. McPherson could not have been more direct in his statement. Only by torturing his wording could one conclude that, by saying "The Civil War was not fought over the issue of tariff or of industrialization or of land grants," McPherson intended anything other than to exclude arguments for their presence among the reasons why the war was fought. His statement was one of exclusion and a blanket dismissal, not one of prioritization or hidden meanings to suggest that he didn't really exclude what his statement directly excludes.
McPherson's article is only a popular sketch.
That is true, but it is also not an excuse for the mistakes and historically dishonest assertions made throughout that article - especially by someone of McPherson's alleged stature.
It's a bit akin to an explanation of difficult science for a popular audience.
If the article was properly written with correct consideration of history it potentially could be. McPherson's article is not that though. It's closer to the popularized grade school story of Columbus as the explorer who stood up to the scientists of his day and declared that the world was round. McPherson's article is little more than a "flat earth" account of the civil war.
I'd say it certainly isn't the best history.
And that is part of the problem - according to many, McPherson represents the "best of the best" in the field of civil war history.
It's certainly apt to be disputed by Southern partisans, but McPherson's not saying that the antebellum South and it's culture are to be reduced to slavery
His article seems to suggest otherwise. He says point blank that slavery defined the entirity of the south and nothing more. I don't believe one could assert in more direct terms that which you claim he did not assert.
It would be curious to submit McPherson's essay to history professors and see how they would grade it as history.
That would be an interesting experiment. I predict much of it would depend upon whether or not his name were attached to it. In cases that the essay was signed "James McPherson" I have little doubt he would recieve an A almost every time except among those who know McPherson as a rabidly pro-north historian. Submitted anonymously, the grades would probably vary more. I firmly believe there is a group of otherwise accredited historians out there who have convinced themselves that Lincoln can do little if any wrong. This seems to be the case within the Claremonster cult, who without doubt would give the thing an A. Elsewhere grades would be mixed. Those who would have failed McPherson knowing his name would probably do the same without. Those historians with less of an interest in the war or any side in it would also be inclined to give McPherson lower marks, absent his name, strictly on issues of factual content. But those are just my predictions.