“Just read some history. The South was being disproportionately taxed for the benefit of the industrial North. You don’t really think the Southerners decided to leave on a whim, do you?”
Well no. The taxes and tariffs that the South groused so much about were applied uniformly across all of the states. There is no act that said “Georgia shall pay this tax...). Yes, the impact of these laws was not uniformly felt. The South as a region took a heavier hit. But those same laws hurt the farmers in PA and NY as they did SC and GA. A countrywide civil war between agrarians and industrialists may have been justifiable. But that little bothersome difference between northern agrarians(who paid their laborers) and southern agrarians(who didn’t) over slavery didn’t make that possible.
Do you really think supporting someone full-time, including before and after they stop working, was cheaper than hiring labor? I seem to recall that de Tocqueville talked about this when he made a comparison of the opposite banks of the Ohio River.
ML/NJ
How?