[FLT-bird]

I had never read Rhett’s address before. Thank you for recommending it. BTW, the full title is “The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States”. Not a great start for a document you claim proves that Secession wasn’t due to slavery. It does address the taxation issue, after a couple of paragraphs of intro and background. However, by the time you get to paragraph 9, it rapidly becomes about the issue of slavery. From then on, for the rest of the document (roughly half of the total), the talk is mainly of slavery, with nary a mention of taxes and tariffs. So, I hardly think that this document proves that secession was primarily about money, I think it rather proves that it was mainly about slavery. Interestingly enough, this document was addressed to the other slaveholding (his word, not mine) states. When you look at the document South Carolina addressed to the North, and the rest of the world, they only mentioned slavery and not tariffs or taxes. Kind of tells you what they wanted the world to think their primary cause of secession was, doesn’t it? In fact, when you read all of the Articles of Secession from the states, or those who actually mentioned a cause, 100% of them mentioned slavery. So, I stand by my contention that the primary cause of secession was slavery.

Rhett lays out the economic case. He details how the Southern states as of that time were in exactly the same position vis a vis the Northern states as the 13 colonies were vis a vis Great Britain in 1775. He goes on at length about how the high tariffs are harmful to the South's economy and how the North uses its congressional majority to lavish on itself the vast majority of the money raised by tariffs paid for overwhelmingly by Southerners.

The fact that he addressed it to the other slaveholding states....overwhelmingly the other states with economies primarily based on producing cash crops for export in no way undercuts the economic arguments.

The case would have been exactly the same had those states abolished slavery and produced cash crops for export via a sharecropping system which they adopted after the war.

[Team Cuda]

You are right, as far as you go – about halfway through Rhett’s address. If you read the second half of Rhett’s address, you find it talks almost exclusively about slavery, and not taxes or tariffs (I thought I had made that point in my original response). To summarize, it appears that the second half was spent a lot of time talking about how the South was a collection of slaveholding states, and that they never would have agreed to Union if they thought that the North would try to abolish slavery. I assume you have read the whole (not just the first 8 paragraphs) of the address. I’m sure you have seen the last line, which reads “We ask you to join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States”. It doesn’t say “join us in forming a Confederacy based on low tariffs, or low taxes. It appears that the definition of a Slaveholding Confederacy is the important definition, not taxes or tariffs. I am sure I am misreading the last half of Rhett’s address, and the constant references to slavery are somehow unimportant, and I am sure you will respond to let me know exactly how I am misreading it.

To be clear, it is not my contention that slavery was the only reason the South chose to secede. It is however the primary reason.