Confederate plaque in Texas Capitol to come down after vote

WFAA ^ | January 11, 2019 | Jason Whitely

[TexasGunLover]

AUSTIN, Texas — A historically inaccurate brass plaque honoring confederate veterans will come down after a vote this morning, WFAA has learned.

The State Preservation Board, which is in charge of the capitol building and grounds, meets this morning at 10:30 a.m. to officially decide the fate of the metal plate.

[x]

Of course you have probably found out that the Northwest Ordinance was also enacted in 1787 and think you have set some kind of trap for me.

The difference between 1787 and 1861 is that real politics was still possible in 1787. Slave states didn't yet believe that everything that wasn't a 100% affirmation of slavery as a positive good was a threat to their interests.

There was still a sense - in both North and South, though to varying degrees in different places - that slavery was something the new nation had to (eventually) put behind it.

The Deep South states knew that they were getting the Old Southwest (Mississippi and Alabama) for their expansion. Consequently, there were willing to let the Old Northwest (The Great Lakes states) go.

Prominent Virginians still looked forward to the eventual abolition of slavery, and it was a long way from South Carolina or Georgia to Michigan or Wisconsin. Pioneers from the Deep South would move into the adjoining territories, not make the long trek north.

For Georgia and South Carolina, maintaining the transatlantic slave trade for at least a generation was a matter of greater importance, an issue they weren't willing to compromise on.

I am aware that some Northerners also didn't want the international slave trade to end, but they weren't threatening to reject the Constitution if they didn't get their way.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: quoting Boston Transcript, March 18, 1861: "The difference is so great between thee tariff of the Union and that of Confederate States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York."

This references debate over the Morrill Tariff, passed on March 2, 1861, supported by Republicans opposed by Democrats North and South.
Democrats opposed would include Boston merchants and industrialists who didn't want to disturb their long-standing trade patterns with the South.

But Republicans who supported Merrill were not tied to the South and had more interest in promoting their own industries than preserving the Southern based New England economy.
Regardless, the appropriate peacetime response to this editorial would be to adjust Morrill rates to make them competitive with pre-Morrill rates then in effect in the Confederacy.

Nothing in this editorial suggests anything else.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Senator Wigfall’s view was definitely a minority view by that point."

Then you must have a long list of quotes from other prominent Fire Eaters who thought contrary to Wigfall?

[x]

This is almost a masterpiece.

I could tell that immediately by the lack of paragraphs - a true mark of creative genius.

Like I said, when two nut cases find each other it can be a beautiful thing.

It exactly corresponds with what I have realized after three years of researching the social and financial dynamics involved prior to the civil war.

No, it's the same BS that's been circulating for years. They turn that garbage out by the yard on some websites today.

Slavery was a real issue, and the one that tore the country apart. Northern hatred for the South was not universal in 1860, and it was fully matched by Southern hatred for the North. Southern contempt for New Englanders may have been stronger than any feelings Northerners had about the South.

[OIFVeteran]

It was not a bait and switch. From my readings of the constitutional convention it was the only way to get Georgia and South Carolina to agree to the constitution. There were proposals to get rid of slavery during the convention but Georgia and South Carolina would not agree to them.

The founders believed it was more important to get all the states to agree on the constitution then putting an end to slavery. Considering that the articles of confederation were a failure I would have to reluctantly agree with them.

Though I wonder if they would have told Georgia and South Carolina to go pound sand maybe they would have eventually agreed to join the Unites States and we could have ended slavery much sooner.

[jeffersondem]

“For example?”

The challenge in your post 417 juxtaposed to my magnanimous post 412 makes me look - well, magnanimous.

[jeffersondem]

“In the Wizard of Oz the revolution within the Democratic Party was characterized by a cyclone. The cyclone killed the wicked witch of the east (Grover Cleveland of New York), but the American people (represented by Dorothy), including factory workers (the tin man), farmers (the scarecrow), and Wm. Jennings Bryan (the cowardly lion), along with the tiny Prohibitionist Party (Toto), still had to kill the wicked witch of the west (Wm. McKinley of Ohio). The true path would be to walk along the yellow brick road (gold) with the silver slippers (sorry, MGM changed them to ruby slippers because ruby showed better in technicolor), to go to the Emerald City (Washington, where money - green - rules). There they would meet the wizard, who was only a figurehead, since Mark Hanna called the shots within the Republican Party.”

Fascinating.

[FLT-bird]

Then you must have a long list of quotes from other prominent Fire Eaters who thought contrary to Wigfall?

You think there was some widespread view in the South to the effect that they should shun industrialization?

[jeffersondem]

“The founders believed it was more important to get all the states to agree on the constitution then putting an end to slavery.”

Why blame it on “the founders.” In the context of this discussion, the northern states believed it was more important to agree on the constitution with slavery than to put an end to slavery.

I would add that, even then, the northern states only agreed to enshrine slavery into the U.S. Constitution because it was in their economic and political best self-interest. Otherwise, you can be sure, the North would have stood firm against slavery.

[FLT-bird]

The belief that the North was draining money off from the South was not necessarily connected with a desire to industrialize, nor were most Southerners convinced that industrialization was the way to wealth. In his inaugural address Jefferson Davis referred to the South as “An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country …” How much clearer could he be?

Here’s what Davis said in the US Senate in 1860

“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South AND THEIR INDUSTRY.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate

Here is another Speech by Davis after becoming CSA president. As in the speech you reference he describes the Southern economy as being overwhelmingly agricultural but of course does not express any desire not to industrialize.

“The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control.” Jefferson Davis Address to the Confederate Congress April 29, 1861

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There was a small elite in Charleston or New Orleans that dreamed of the South as an industrial power. They were the Hamiltonians of what was a very Jeffersonian (agrarian) region, and more intellectual than effective. There were also actual industrialists in Virginia and Tennessee, but they weren’t for secession in the beginning. Before Sumter, they were willing to take their chances in the US.

Further South, people wanted to rely on cotton. Think about it for a minute: all those books and pamphlets about King Cotton and how valuable it was and how the world couldn’t live without it. And all those books and articles about how horrible and cold and miserable Northern urban life and factory work were. People who write and think that way usually aren’t thinking first and foremost about industrializing their region.

There were people who noted - correctly - that investments in cotton production did yield the highest ROI to that point in time. Thus the Southern states specialized in its production. But Southerns did not fail to notice that since returns on cotton production were good, it was attracting others - most notably the British Empire - to follow suit and indeed Britain’s empire ramped up cotton production considerably thus driving down the margins. Southerners well understood from observing their chief customer Britain and others that industrialization was the way forward. The Upper South was industrializing at a pretty rapid rate by 1860.

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Hint: Compensated emancipation and colonization were perceived as a threat by militant slave owners. Anything that undercut the power of the slave owners was seen as a threat. By 1860, anything that suggested that slavery was a temporary and passing phase provoked hostility.

Hint: compensated emancipation was not seen as a threat by the vast majority of slave owners. Indeed it was how the British Empire and others had gotten rid of slavery and if slavery were to go - which many realized it would eventually - a compensated emancipation scheme was the most equitable way to do it.

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You’ve said that loss of the Senate was seen as a threat. One of the things that it threatened was the power and peace of mind of the slaveowning elite. As I said, there were many things a president could do - and many things a Congress could do - short of a constitutional amendment that would make slaveowners uneasy, and make them feel that they could do better on their own in a new nation dedicated to the preservation of slavery.

I said loss of the Senate was seen as a threat in terms of the federal government passing sectional partisan economic legislation that was very harmful to the South. I’ve also said there was no threat to slavery and that would hold true even if the Northern states held a clear majority in the Senate. It takes 3/4s of the states to pass a constitutional amendment and that was the only means of ending slavery. What Southerners really felt was that they could do much better for themselves economically if they could set a low tariff, severely limit crony capitalism and keep expenditures low. All of this would only be possible by getting away from the Northern states.

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By contrast, Southerners could usually count on the support of Northern Democrats to keep the tariff from rising too high. If it were all about tariffs and economics, the new Western agricultural states would be seen as allies by the South, rather than as a threat. Western farmers didn’t want to pay high import taxes either.

They - the western farmers - were usually seen as political allies by the Southern states. It took lots of promises and federal expenditures in those western states to buy them off so that they could form a united front against the South.

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The US tariff rate in the 1840s was about 20%. That’s not “far higher” than 10%.

uhhh yes it is. Its TWICE the MAXIMUM the South wanted.

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The rate reflected a country where agricultural interests had to be balanced against the interests of infant industries. The tariff had to pay for the costs of collecting the tax as well as the revenue it generated and 10% wouldn’t go very far in paying for customs houses, warehouses, and clerks.

Baloney. The collection costs were miniscule and would have been easily covered by a low single digit rate. As for “infant” industries...Northern industrialists had been claiming that for generations. The Georgia declaration of causes goes on at length about this.

“They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.”

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The 1846 tariff was written by Democrats with considerable Southern input. And what “massive corporate welfare and infrastructure spending” before the Civil War? Just what are you talking about that fits that description?

Just because the rate was lower than the ruinous 54% of the Morill Tariff or the equally ruinously high Tariff of Abominations does not mean it was low. Just because the South had some input into setting the tariff rate does not mean it was not quite harmful to the Southern economy. They were able to keep it from being even more harmful but once independent, they set a maximum 10% tariff rate. The Northern newspapers were filled with horror at the prospect of a CSA that had a tariff rate so low it “verged on free trade”.

As for infrastructure spending that had massively skewed toward the Northern states as had corporate subsidies. There are any of a number of sources for this ranging from the Pennsylvanian Buchanan to Thomas Jefferson to John C Calhoun to various Newspapers including Northern ones to the Georgia declaration of causes to Rhett’s address attached to South Carolina’s declaration of causes and issued along with it.

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If there was an epicenter it was more likely to be Liverpool or Bristol or Glasgow than Boston or Salem or New Haven. But if you consider the transatlantic slave trade as a whole there was no center. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, British and US slave traders competed with each other in a network that extended across four continents.

If you were talking about the mid 18th century you’d be right. If you were talking about the late 18th century up to 1860, you’d be dead wrong. New England was THE hub of the slave trade industry for the entire western hemisphere from that point on.

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The US and Britain abolished the slave trade at about the same time, 1807-1808. Most of the slaves sent to the US did not arrive in American ships or under the US flag. Most likely their ancestors arrived in colonial times or shortly afterwards.

Yes the US did officially ban the slave trade from 1808 but it was carried out illicitly on a very large scale by New England right up until 1860 with the appropriate bribes and winks and nods.

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After the ban, the US fleet was active in trying to stop slave ships. There were always illegal traders after the ban from a variety of countries - some were Southerners - but the notion that the trade was turning in massive profits for New Englanders or that foreign traders weren’t doing the same thing looks shaky.

There was no serious effort by the US to stop the slave trade and efforts to do so were rightly seen as nothing more than a fig leaf. The VAST MAJORITY of illicit slave trading was carried out by those who had always carried it out - Yankees. What really looks shaky is any attempt to deny that New England was in it up to their eyeballs or that they did not make huge profits from slave trading. I’ve already listed a source though there are plenty more confirming this.

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The US did refuse to make a treaty granting the British the right to board and search US ships. That had as much to do with national pride and the wishes of the Southern states as anything to do with the Northern states.

As I said, Yankee slave traders and their lackeys did all they could to cite national pride as a means of preventing the Royal Navy from stopping their lucrative slave trading. They hardly wanted the very profitable gravy train to stop when it was lining their pockets year after year.

[FLT-bird]

Not really:

The following information is from the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”. This database can be found at www.slavevoyages.org
The country listed below is the flag of the ship transporting slaves.
Country total voyages % of slave voyages
Portugal 35,994 61.6 %
Britain 12,010 20.5 %
France 4,199 7.2 %
USA 2,268 3.9 %
Spain 1,893 3.2 %
Holland 1704 2.9 %
Denmark 411 .7 %
Total 58,449 100 %
The website estimates that the database represents about 80 % of the total slave trade voyages from 1514 to 1866.
Looking at the country’s ships transporting slaves and the destination of the voyage shows the most of the slave voyages were ships of a specific country bound for the colonies of that country in the Western Hemisphere. As an example, most, but no all, Portugal’s slave voyages ended in Portuguese Brazil. Most, but not all, Britain’s slave voyages went to British colonies in the Caribbean. American slave ships transported mostly to the United States, and after 1808, to Cuba.

Yes really. The database cites all-time slave voyages. There was a lot of slave trading and slave voyages made prior to the late 18th century by various European countries. That dropped off and was almost entirely eliminated by the late 18th century at the latest by the Royal Navy. The US meanwhile refused to allow the Royal Navy to board their vessels and New England slave traders kept right on trading in slaves on a very large scale.

There were even agents of various New England shippers on board other countries vessels who upon sight of a British Warship would furnish a contract for the captain to sign that would sell his vessel and its slave cargo to the New England shipping company at a reduced rate. As soon as the contract was signed, the stars and stripes the New England shipping agent brought on board would be hauled up and the slave ship could no longer be boarded or inspected.

They went into this in detail in Conspiracy: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery. You should read it some time.

[DiogenesLamp]

The Jeffersonian Republicans were famously in favor of freeholders, and the Hamiltonian Federalists in favor of commerce. The Jeffersonians were agrarian and the Hamiltonians urban.

I constantly point out this distinction. I constantly tell people to look at this as a contest between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians.

Today, the Democrats have us surrounded. They are the elite and the rich, who tax us in order to bribe those they induce into dependency to vote for them. The Democrats are no longer the party of private-sector workers and farmers. Those people have dwindled into insignificance or have come over to our side.

Exactly right, and as a class, they are the same people who warred upon the South in 1861, and for the same reason. Money and Power.

[DiogenesLamp]

Of course you have probably found out that the Northwest Ordinance was also enacted in 1787 and think you have set some kind of trap for me.

:)

I am aware that some Northerners also didn't want the international slave trade to end, but they weren't threatening to reject the Constitution if they didn't get their way.

The salient aspect of this point is that if slave states could reject the constitution in 1787, why could they not do so in 1860?

[FLT-bird]

I’d say to you: one man’s “pretext” is another man’s “real reason” and you don’t know who considered slavery the “reason” and who just a “pretext”.

The fact is that few Southerners had direct contact with tariffs or “Northeastern power brokers” or “money flows from Europe”, and so would not respond to calls for secession over such matters.

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Here I would disagree. Tariffs touched every Southerners’ pocket. It did not matter whether you were a small farmer selling your cotton to the local plantation for a percentage (since only the larger producers had the volume necessary to arrange shipment and thus they bought from all the small farms around them acting as a wholesaler). The tariff meant you would get a lower rate for your cotton or other cash crop.

In addition, the manufactured goods you could not produce yourself and thus needed to buy would be more expensive as the tariff drove up the cost of those goods and Northern manufacturers were able to raise their prices while still undercutting foreign competitors on price. Thus even you, the small non slave owning family farmer were hit twice by the tariff.

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But every Southerner knew about slavery directly & personally, even if they “owned” no slaves.
A threat to slavery was a threat to all and so that was the appeal by Deep South Fire Eaters to convince their fellow Southerners secession was necessary.

Again, disagreed. The ending of slavery would be no threat to you as a non slave owner. High tariffs which meant lower profits for your cash crops and higher prices for the manufactured goods you needed to buy would harm you economically.

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By the way, the Corwin amendment was passed after the last Deep South state declared secession, so was a useless exercise in closing the barn door after the horse was gone.
It did seem to have some effect in Border States so was not entirely wasted.

The passage of the Corwin amendment shows that slavery was not threatened and the Northern states were only too willing to compromise over the slavery issue - as everybody knew. What was really at stake was economic advantage be it for the Northern business interests in keeping the Southern states in or for the Southern states in becoming independent and setting economic policies more suited to their economic needs.

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This is one of the weaker arguments in the Lost Cause quiver, and it was surprisingly made by none other that Robert Rhett himself, in December 1860, when Democrats had ruled Washington, DC, for nearly 60 years, with Southern Democrats the majority of Democrats and making 1860 Washington, DC, just what those Southerners wanted.
So all their complaints about Washington are simply complaints about what they themselves did there for 60 years, which makes no sense.

This is simply patently false. Rhett himself laid out how destructive to the South’s economy the tariffs and the unequal federal expenditures had been. The fact that the South had representation in the federal government does not mean that therefore federal policies couldn’t have been economically harmful to the South. That’s one of the weaker arguments the PC Revisionists put forth.

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Then we agree more than I had suspected.
But I also think that “cynical” reasons for some were seen as sincere and “real” reasons by many others.
We’re talking about human nature here, often a mixture of noble and not-so-noble motives.

Agreed. The Southern states were democratic and had freedom of speech and a lively free press. They were not a monolith. I’m sure some truly were animated by protection of slavery. I’m sure many were not and just saw it as a useful pretext to advance their economic interests by getting out of a union that had become an increasingly bad deal for them as their power and influence within the US steadily eroded over time. We will never find one quote or piece of definitive “proof” that one reason was the “real” reason the two sides acted as they did. Opinions differed among them greatly then as it still does today. I hold no moonlight and magnolias romantic notions that the Southern states at that time did not have brutality, corruption, lying etc etc. They certainly did. So did the Northern states. If anything, things were much worse in those days than they are now. Corruption was higher, violence was higher, brutality toward slaves and industrial workers was far worse than anything that goes on today. Nobody is lily white here.

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So our Lost Causers keep telling us, but the evidence on Lincoln’s motives suggests far less his financial interests and far more his constitutional & legal obligations.
That’s because rebellion has been recognized since time immemorial as a casus belli, for example the Whiskey Rebellion against President Washington in 1793.
Washington raised up an army of 13,000 to defeat it and the rebels quickly retreated.

I disagree with that. Lincoln was always hugely motivated by economics....he was one of the most highly paid corporate lobbyists in America after all. I also disagree that secession is rebellion. The union is voluntary. It was always intended to be so and had anybody said at the time of constitutional ratification that the union was not voluntary....that states were not free to leave it as they had just left the British Empire, the states would never have ratified the constitution.

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But in the American tradition secession alone was not defined as “rebellion”, so neither Presidents Buchanan nor Lincoln could move militarily against Confederates.
Lincoln needed an actual military attack against the Union before he could respond and that Jefferson Davis was only too happy to give him.

Lincoln cleverly set things up so that the Southern States would either have to surrender without firing a shot OR he could claim that they had fired the first shot....which they did....but of course he failed to mention that he had been the aggressor by sending a fleet of warships into their territorial waters to reinforce a military garrison right in the middle of one of their principal harbors.

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Why did Jefferson Davis seize Fort Sumter by military force?
Because he wanted to, reason one, and because it would bring the Upper South states into the Confederacy, reason two.

What else could he do? Could he allow a now foreign country to have a major fort right in the middle of one of the Southern states’ biggest harbors? Was he supposed to allow a foreign country to tax CSA commerce? To do so would be abject surrender. NO sovereign country would have allowed that.

[DiogenesLamp]

This references debate over the Morrill Tariff, passed on March 2, 1861, supported by Republicans opposed by Democrats North and South. Democrats opposed would include Boston merchants and industrialists who didn't want to disturb their long-standing trade patterns with the South.

Perish the thought that people would be motivated by money!

But Republicans who supported Merrill were not tied to the South and had more interest in promoting their own industries than preserving the Southern based New England economy.

Were they producing the bulk of the exports?

Were these laws not meant to apply to everyone but them? Funny how that works.

But the larger point here is that the Boston Transcript recognized the threat to the manufactures of the North East from the Southern states becoming independent.

The entire NorthWest would be supplied by imported goods from New Orleans, and the existing power structure in New York/New England would lose those customers to cheaper foreign imports.

As I've said, Southern independence was a serious economic threat to the wealthy men whose hands were on the levers of Washington DC power.

Their bone of contention was not with slavery, it was with the competitive threat the South would later pose to their money stream and power structure.

The "war against slavery" was just propaganda to cover up the war against economic competition with the existing power structure of the Acela corridor.

[DiogenesLamp]

I could tell that immediately by the lack of paragraphs - a true mark of creative genius.

Form is nice, but substance is the thing of value.

Slavery was a real issue, and the one that tore the country apart.

Did you miss the discussion that indicated Lincoln was quite possibly the major player behind the Corwin amendment?

I suspect slavery then is like "Transgender rights" now. The existing mouth pieces constantly spew about it, and the easily manipulated bottom half of the population intelligence spectrum, gobbles it all up and regurgitates it.

Now this sh*t is everywhere, and all the major corporate players are demanding everyone recognize and support transgenderism and oppose "toxic masculinity."

Was the slavery issue astroturfed? I'm pretty sure some of it was, but the signal is often difficult to pry out of the noise.

[FLT-bird]

Sure and supported by Senator Seward, soon to be Lincoln’s Secretary of State. This was your typical “moderate” Republicans doing their moderate thing, trying to “compromise” with Democrats to keep Democrats from going insane. As usual, it didn’t work.

But evidence of Lincoln’s involvement or approval is slim to none.

Lincoln supported it and got his political machine to support its passage. This wasn’t a “moderate” Republican thing. This was a shrewd political move. The North and the vast majority of Northern voters didn’t give a damn about slavery. Neither did Northern business interests. They did however care a great deal about keeping the Southern states in. They stood to lose a lot of money if the Southern states left. So Lincoln and the Republicans offered up a bargaining chip they were quite willing to compromise on to get what they really wanted.

The Southern states for their part rejected it....even though they had cited the refusal of the Northern states to uphold the fugitive slave clause as violating the constitution and thus providing them an out clause....”hey we didn’t break the deal. Y’all did. Therefore we’re out of here and nobody can claim we acted in bad faith”. Their real motivations are pretty obvious when you see they never even entertained the Corwin Amendment as addressing their concerns.

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So blaming Corwin on Lincoln, regardless of how necessary to the Lost Cause mythology, is misguided & misdirected.

I don’t “blame” him for it. It was a shrewd political move. I just note that this was ground the Northern political establishment was only too happy to give but which the Southern political establishment would not accept as the basis for a deal even after claiming that’s officially why they had seceded.

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Until Confederates rejected his peace offers, after that, not so much.

The key point to note is he was willing to give it but they were not willing to take it as the basis for a deal.

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A basic tenet of Lost Cause mythology unsupported by any factual evidence.

Denying it is a basic part of PC Revisionist mythology unsupported by any evidence. Meanwhile there is ample evidence to support the opposite position.

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Lincoln’s “real interest” was to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” according to his oath of office.

Had that been so, he would not have violated the constitution on numerous occasions.

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Clay was a Southern Whig, Virginia born, a slave-holding plantation owner with no interest — none, zero, nada interest — in aggrandizing the North at the South’s expense. What Clay wanted was to, ahem, “put Americans first” by protecting US producers, North, South and West, against foreign competitions.

That was indeed Lincoln’s aim too, and was in no way antithetical to all Southerners. Instead it was just “politics as usual” in which tariff rates rose & fell over time depending on various coalitions & alliances in Congress.

Firstly, Clay was born in Virginia but he was a Kentuckian. Secondly, the way the economies of the regions developed with a huge amount of specialization, Henry Clay’s plan which Lincoln signed onto wholeheartedly would HUGELY benefit one region while doing huge economic damage to another. It may not have openly endorsed that, but that was the practical effect and everybody knew it. That had been what a lot of the most bitter political fighting had been about for the previous 2 generations.

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Sure, the “tariff of abominations” did drive South Carolina to threaten nullification or secession in 1832 under President Jackson (Southern slaveholder), but nothing in effect or proposed in 1860 remotely approached such levels.

Southerners knew full well that this was only going to be the first bite of the apple. They knew Northern political interests would be back for more and more and more. Indeed that is exactly what happened. The Morill Tariff eventually more than tripled the rates of the Walker Tariff that preceded it.

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In 1860 moderate tariffs were “politics as usual” not cause for secession. That’s why Deep South Fire Eaters focused on the Black Republican threat to slavery.

Even the Walker tariff which was 17% was considerably higher than the South wanted. Once they seceded they put a cap of 10% in the Confederate constitution (ie revenue tariff rather than protective tariff). The impending Morill tariff which everybody knew was going to pass the Senate was enough for the Southern states to throw in the towel on the whole experiment.

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I think Davis was actually saying something a bit different, but if you do indeed have genuine quotes to that effect, then feel free to post them here. However — the bottom line with Davis is that he was a Unionist up until the moment Mississippi declared secession.

So none of his pre-secession statements can be read as justifying secession, but only as expressing his partisan political views within the United States Senate.

“Neither “love for the African” [witness the Northern laws against him], nor revulsion from “property in persons” [“No, you imported Africans and sold them as chattels in the slave markets”] motivated the present day agitators,”…... “No sir….the mask is off, the purpose is avowed…It is a struggle for political power.” Jefferson Davis 1848

“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate

Davis is hardly the only one to say that what opposition to the spread of slavery existed was pecuniary in nature and not moral in nature. That is, it was part of the broader political struggle over economics - not over moral outrage about slavery itself. I can cite British and even a few Northern abolitionists who said the same thing.

[DiogenesLamp]

The founders believed it was more important to get all the states to agree on the constitution then putting an end to slavery.

Because they anticipated later the ability to use the power of the collective government to destroy it anyways. Some of them as much as said so here.

And you say this does not constitute a bait and switch?

Though I wonder if they would have told Georgia and South Carolina to go pound sand maybe they would have eventually agreed to join the Unites States and we could have ended slavery much sooner.

If they prospered, then they would not have been alone for very long. The fear at the time was that England was powerful enough to defeat them, and that only by hanging together could they create a sufficient deterrence force to convince England not to try.

Had Georgia and South Carolina rejoined England, that would have wrecked the rest of the system, because then England would have had a better means of reconquering the Colonies.

With this in mind, it looks as if the very existence of the USA as an independent nation depended heavily on convincing the states to band together.

[FLT-bird]

In fact, DoodleDawg is a scholar, or at least “history buff” of considerable learning, more adept at arcane details of historiography than pretty much any of us here, certainly in a class with rustbucket.

So DoodleDawg’s challenge for FLT-bird to support his claims with real data is not a “troll”, but rather in the interest of simple historical accuracy.

Now it appears that FLT-bird doesn’t really have the “goods” and so huffs & puffs to blow smoke in our faces.

LOL! Bullshit. Its the standard trolling tactic.

- Make endless demands for quotes and sources. Make these demands even when you’ve already been provided with tons of quotes and sources of the exact kind you’re demanding.

- Set yourself up as judge over what is deemed acceptable as a source.

- claim any source or quote which is inconvenient for your arguments is not acceptable, not credible...just not good enough.

- send your opponent scurrying around for more quotes and sources to support his argument.

- no matter what quotes and sources he provides, deny all of them no matter what.

- waste as much of his time as possible.

- laugh about it.

Trolling 101.

[robowombat]

Why did slavery become the issue that caused a war if the US had been a slave holding republic from the founding? What possible real problem for someone in Michigan would be slave holding in Mississippi, you note I write real problem. Not one generated by an overactive psyche and a lot of slavery screaming preachers.