[x]

I have no idea if any of this is true. The general POV is that the North wanted immediate end to the Trade, and the South did not, particularly SC.

South Carolina and Georgia opposed limits on the slave trade. Rutledge and Pinckney of SC even declared that South Carolina's support for the Constitution would hinge on this point.

Some Northerners like Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut worked out the 1808 (originally 1800) compromise. Sherman wanted to keep SC and GA in the union. Ellsworth assumed slavery would eventually disappear (and wasn't apparently troubled by what happened in the meantime).

Now if one finds Virginia slaveowner George Mason passionately arguing for the abolition of the slave trade in the very near future and Northerners like Ellsworth and Sherman objecting one might interpret that as Southerners wanting the abolition of the trade and Northerners opposing it, but that would be a distortion and one would be wrong.

[Sherman Logan]

One of the most interesting thing about history is how often its reality, and particularly the political groupings, fail to line up with our perceptions from today. This is largely because we tend to project today's issues into the past.

For instance, the neo-confeds Exhibit 1 in the "protective tariff as intentional repression of the South" display is the Tariff of Abominations of 1828. This is portrayed as the North (in this context generally meaning the NE and in particular New England) using its power to impose policies that would enrich the North at the cost of despoliation of the South.

While that may indeed, to some extent, have been its effect, that bears little relationship to the intent of the parties involved.

That this particular tariff ever got to a floor vote was because of a disastrously failed southern parliamentary maneuver.

The presumption that a unanimous NE imposed its will is also inaccurate.

Here's how the House vote went:

Region - For - Against

New England - 16 - 23

Middle States (Mid-Atlantic) - 57 - 11

West (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri)- 17 - 1

South (including Louisiana) - 3 - 50

Southwest (Tennessee, Kentucky) - 12 - 9

Total - 105 - 94

So in no region was the vote unanimous. New England actually voted against it.The greatest number of For votes were from the Middle States, but the greatest percentage For vote was from the West, which at this point was every bit as agricultural as the South, possibly more so. Even the South was not unanimous Against.

The Southwest, slave states, along with Missouri, included in the West, were solidly For. Indeed, the leader of the protection forces, Henry Clay, was a large slaveowner from KY.

So the common southern portrayal of this as a solid industrial North (free states) vote intentionally imposing destruction on the agricultural South (slave states) is just inaccurate.