I Pledge allegiance to the Confederate Flag

I Pledge allegiance to the Confederate Flag, and to the Southern People and the Culture for which it stands

The Confederate flag is again under attack, as it has always been, and as it always will be. It is under attack because of what it symbolizes. The problem is that to many Southerners have forgotten just what it does symbolize.

The Confederate Nation of 1860 - 1865 was the intellectual, as well as the spiritual, continuation of the United States of America as founded, planned, and formed by Southerners. It was the stated, and often repeated, position of almost all Southerners in the 1860’s that they, and the South, were the heirs of the original political theory embodied in the U. S. Constitution of 1789. In 1860 their attempted to separate from the rest of the states and form their own nation since that was the only way the South could preserve the philosophy and the virtues that had made the United States the magnificent nation it had become.

In both of these contentions, that is, the South was the true repository of the original political theory that made the United States great, and the South was the true home of the people who took the necessary actions to found, make, and preserve the original United States, Southerners have been proven by the passage of time to be correct.

The Southern colonies of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Maryland were where the majority of the original American population resided until the 1700’s despite the fact Massachusetts was settled only 13 years after Virginia and New York was settled 18 years before South Carolina. As the population of the colonies grew, the New England States and the middle Atlantic states, gained population so that by the time of the American Revolutionary War the two general areas of the north and the South were generally equal in size with a small population advantage being shown by Virginia. This slight difference in population by a southern state was to have a profound effect on the development of the United States.

First of all, the New England states managed to start a war with England, which they verbalized as "taxation without representation." In truth the problem from their point of view was the taxes on their trade. Having started the war they then promptly managed to lose it. The British, after conquering the entire north from Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to Boston, to Providence, to New York, to the new nation’s capital, Philadelphia, shifted their military forces to move against the Southern colonies. They secured their foothold in the South by capturing Savannah and Charleston and then proceeded to move inland to subdue the Southern population. They planed to catch the Virginia forces under General Washington in a coordinated attack moving down from the north, which they held, and up from the South that they thought they would also conquer.

The British army that had mastered the north found they could not defeat the Southern people. Once in the backwoods of the South they found themselves to be the beaten Army. The British defeats at Kings Mountain and Cowpens were absolute. Their Pyrrhic victories at Camden and Guilford Courthouse were tantamount to defeat. In both North Carolina and South Carolina they were so weakened they had to retreat from the area of their few "victories" within days. Their defeats at those well-known sites among others, along with their defeat at Yorktown in Virginia, led directly to their surrender.

Having secured the political freedom from England for all the colonists, Southerners then mistakenly sat back and took a smaller role in forming the new American government that operated under an "Articles of Confederation." That first attempt at forming a government fell to the firebrands of New England who has started the war and who still asserted their moral position of leadership despite their poor showing on the field of battle. These Articles of Confederation, the product of the Yankee political mind, gave too much economic self determination to the separate colonies (as the Northern colonies had demanded in an attempt to protect their shipping, trade and manufacturing) and too little power of enforcement to a central government.

After a period of six difficult years, when the Articles of Confederation failed as a form of government, another convention was called and a new form of government was drawn up. This time the convention was under the leadership of Southerners and they brought forth the document we all refer to as the U.S. Constitution. Even northern historians do not try to pretend the Constitution and the ideas embodied therein are anything other than a product of the Southern political mind. (Yankee historians cannot deny it, but they do choose to ignore it so their students grow up ignorant of the fact that the Constitution is Southern.) So, as it turns out, when the new nation found itself in political trouble it was the South which, once again, came to the rescue just as it had when the nation found itself previously in military trouble.

With the slight population advantage it enjoyed over other states, Virginia was able to give to the new nation politicians who are nothing short of demigods. Their names are revered in all areas of the civilized world wherever political theorists converge. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Randolph, Henry, Taylor and Monroe are just a few, there are many more. These men along with the leading political minds of South Carolina, Rutledge, Heyward, and, most importantly, Pinckney, saw their new nation through its birth and establishment.

The military leadership, as well as the political leadership, of the South saw the nation through its expansion. Under Southern leadership the British were defeated a second time in 1814. Under Southerners, most obviously John Tyler and Andrew Jackson, Florida was added as a state. The defeat of Mexico in 1846, under the Southern leadership of James Polk and numerous Southern military officers, established of the United States as a force to be feared. That was an astonishing accomplishment for so small and so young a nation

Thomas Jefferson, who added the Louisiana Purchase, barely escaped impeachment for his efforts. The north argued continuously against the war with Mexico that added the area from Texas to California just as they had argued against the Louisiana Purchase. One Congressman from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, was particularly vehement against Texas being made a state. Northerners, having seen Mexico defeated and the United States enlarged all the way to the Pacific Ocean, then objected to the methods and motives of the acquisition of the Washington and Oregon territories in the northwest. Polk, who had added that vast area from Louisiana to California to Colorado to the pacific northwest, served only one term as President due to the constant attacks he sufferer in the Northern press. Left to the people of the north, the French would still control from Minnesota to Louisiana and Mexico would control from Texas to the Pacific while Canada would still include Washington, Oregon Idaho and Montana.

Every square inch of soil that now comprises the continental United States was added under a Southern president, and they did it over the strenuous political objections of the north. The provincial and mercenary Yankee people fought every effort to expand the United States. The expansion of the United States became a regional political disagreement that spread ill feeling north and South. Its accomplishment by Southerners was no small feat. It was accomplished under Southern military leadership and with much Southern blood. (Which is why Tennessee is called "The Volunteer State" and the names of Southerners are almost exclusively the only ones found on memorial tablets and monuments from Texas to California.). The expansion of the original colonies into the continental power it became was completely the results of the Southern mind and Southern leadership.

Having secured the freedom of the United States from England and then having formed and led the successful government into a new political age under a written constitution that is still the envy of the whole world, the South gave the entire military and political leadership that formed the United States into the boundaries it now enjoys. But these magnificent accomplishments were soon to be overshadowed by population shifts and the ensuing results that brings in a representative government. By the early 1820s the north had finally secured just enough additional population that it had achieved enough political clout to start protecting its first love, its money. The unfair and punitive tariffs that were passed in 1828 led to the South’s first half-hearted attempt to form its own separate government with the Nullification movement of 1832. The threat of war that South Carolina held out in 1832 then caused a negotiated modification of those laws to where the South could live with them. For the time being, the political question was settled by compromise.

While those changes pacified the political leaders of the South for the time being, some statesmen could see, even then, that if the North ever became totally dominant politically, the South would be destroyed, not just economically, but philosophically and spiritually as well. Those statesmen, with Calhoun in the lead, then started planting the intellectual seeds that led to the South’s second attempt at political freedom in 1860.

Unfortunately, in the 1840’s Yankee abolitionist introduced the new poison of the "voluntary end" of slavery as a political issue. There were attempts by many Southerners to defuse this situation by offering an economic solution. That is, Southerners offered to end slavery in the South just as England had ended it in the West Indies, by having the slave-holders paid for their losses when the slaves were freed. The abolitionist Yankees would have none of that. Their position was simple, the South could give up it slaves for free and each farmer could absorb the loss personally. There was to be no payment. To the Yankee abolitionists it was either their way or war.

The fact that the abolitionist movement became a dominant presence in the northern part of the United States from the 1840’s on is primarily because a liberal can politicize any subject and enrage any body of people regardless of the level of preexisting good will. (As current liberals have turned the simple good sense argument that one should not litter one’s own environment into the political upheaval of "the ecology movement." The effectiveness of liberal methods can currently be seen in the simple instance that most people believe such nonsense as the chemical cause of "ozone depletion" and "the greenhouse effect" despite any evidence of either. Liberals are absolutely capable, by their strident, activist natures of raising any question to harmful emotional heights.)

Unfortunately, the loss of the War for Southern Independence in 1865 caused the very thing that Southern statesmen had foreseen in the 1830’s; that is, the north became dominant and the cultural, spiritual, and economic base of the South was decimated. The loss of the war was most severely felt in the South, of course, but it has also had political repercussions in the north as well.

Without the South in a position of dominance, the leadership of the United States has gone from Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Tyler and Polk to the inept, or leftist, Grant, Harding, Arthur, Harrison and Roosevelt, among others. Plus, the ascendancy of the leftist north to national prominence has also caused the rise of leaders in the South who had to be acceptable to the north. Such spectacularly immoral or totally incompetent Southern politicians as Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are examples of the quality of the men that the South must now produce to garner northern votes. When these modern day jackals are contrasted with the demigods the South produced when unfettered by the northern voter, that in itself should be enough to make all people reject northern philosophy and northern politics and embrace all things Southern.

As the forces of the left have gained ascendancy in the United States, the pressure intensifies to completely obliterate anything that remains between them and complete leftist victory. That means that the traditional enemy of leftists, the South, must be erased in its every form. That is why leftists always demand that even symbols of the South be eradicated.

We, therefore, now have a coalition of people who want the Southern flag taken down and hidden from public view. This coalition is composed of three main groups. First of all are African-Americans, whose emotional position is totally unmitigated by any knowledge of history. Secondly, there are Yankees who have moved to the South and who, despite their remarkable political failures in their own states, have learned nothing and continue to vote leftist here too. Or either these northern imports have been transferred here to run the newspapers that are owned by the people who live outside the South. And, thirdly, there are leftist Southerners, or Southerners of "politically correct" leaning, who have apparently learned their history from the television and movies and who feel the South is a bad place because it is not egalitarian enough.

But the demands of this coalition of political thinkers need to be put in proper perspective. Before anyone starts to tell someone else how to act and how to think, it is incumbent on him to demonstrate the success of his own ideas and actions. So far the introduction and enforcement of leftist ideas in our world has led to nothing but sorrow and degeneration. The force necessary to make people live under a leftist government has been the direct cause of the murder of over one hundred million people in this century alone. Leftist political theory has enslaved and impoverished billions of people worldwide. Its introduction has weakened even such great nations as England and France and reduced them to the status of third rate nations. Socialism in Scandinavia has reduced it to an economic level even less than that of England. In the United States leftist ideas have turned our country into the increasingly sick society it has become.

So until this coalition of leftist can point to a single successful instance of where their leftist philosophy has improved a country, or a people, rather than to the spectacular political failures the left has precipitated in any place into which its poisonous philosophy has been introduced, they have no right to demand anything of anybody. Leftist, the most spectacular political failures in all of history, have no standing to demand that Southerners accept anything that flows from their false philosophy. And of all people, leftist have the least demand on Southerners, the people who formed, guided, expanded and gave them a great country.

The Confederate flag is a symbol. It stands for the people who had the spirit, the courage, and the intelligence to give the world its greatest governmental entity. As long as the Confederate flag flies there is hope that the terrible scourge leftists have placed on the world will pass. It represents the culture that produced the most wished for, the most just, and the finest political system on earth. And as long as the Confederate flies there is hope that the greatness that was once ours may someday be reestablished.

Lincoln totally opposed Westward expansion of slavery which is exactly what the radicals in the South demanded. Lincoln would not compromise on that moral issue, and the greedy slave owning bastards looking to make a big buck selling human beings out West would not back off on their demands to make every Western territory country." They knew they needed more "slave states" if they were going to keep the institution alive and growing and continue to show a profit from their human breeding farms.

Ohhhh come on. Lincoln signed off on all the anti-black laws in his own state of Illinois when he was in the congress. No blacks could take up residency in Illie... They could pass through, but they couldn't stay. Lincoln wanted the western territories to be white!

BTW. Show me where Lincoln ever proposed or sponsored an amendment to guarantee slavery where it existed. I'd like to see your source for that. Such an amendment would have been redundant in the first place since the constitution already acknowledged the legality of slavery.

On 2 March 1861, the 36th U. S. Congress (minus, of course, the seven seceded states of the Deep South) passed by a two-thirds majority a proposed amendment to the Constitution. Had it been ratified by the requisite number of states before the war intervened and signed by President Lincoln (who looked favourably on it as a way to lure the Southern states back into the Union), the proposed 13th Amendment would have prohibited the U. S. government from ever abolishing or interfering with slavery in any state.

The proposed 13th Amendment reads: "No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

Note well that this amendment was designed to be unrepealable (i.e. "No amendment shall be made . . . .") This gives the lie to claims that a righteous North went to war in 1861 to free the slaves. Moreover, it undermines the claim that the South seceded to preserve the institution of slavery. If that had been the South's goal, then what better guarantee did it need than an unrepealable amendment to the Constitution to protect slavery as it then existed?

All one has to do is read what Lincoln, himself, said about it. Any library has his first inaugural speech of May 4, 1861. In it, speaking of his intent and powers, Lincoln says, to collect the duties and imposts (taxes); but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.? Notice, no mention of slavery here.

However, near the end of his inaugural address, he did mention slavery. U.S. President Lincoln offered slavery to the States, which desired it forever. Two days earlier, on May 2, 1861, both houses of the U.S. Congress, after most of the Southern states had already withdrawn, passed by a two-thirds vote a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution. This Northern pro-slavery Amendment stated: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State. Source: U.S. Statutes at Large (1861) page 251.

The U.S. Congress had offered the Southern States slavery forever if they would just come back and continue paying the oppressive taxes.

Here's what U.S. President Lincoln had to say about the guarantee of slavery forever. From his inaugural speech again, I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states, including that of persons held to service holding such a provision to now be implied Constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.

And where did you get the factoid that Fort Sumter was a customs house?

Click here

You will note that the year 1860 was a nearly all time low for tariffs followed by a very steep rise to an all time high of 45% to pay for the Civil War. I would assume that nearly all of that increase was paid by citizens of the North. The fact is however, that the total federal take in taxes was meaningless it was so small. It simply had little or no impact on the average person in those days.

Ahhhh. The Republic platform and Lincoln ran on the Morrill tariff which raised taxes to an all time high. And of course the southern states would have paid the vast majority of them.

By their own words, they did not break over tariffs. They broke over the issue of slavery!

I suggest you read Jefferson Davis'First Inaugural Address"> Slavery is never mentioned, but he does say "An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country, our true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our necessities will permit. It is alike our interest, and that of all those to whom we would sell and from whom we would buy, that there should be the fewest practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities"

That's right, it was only 5% who owned most of the slaves (does that include the numerous black and American Indian slave owners?) and duped the other 95% of the poor gullible rabble into joining the army in order to wage war just to keep them rich!

Yes, that's right.

"It might seem, at first thought, to be of little difference whether the present movement at the south be called "secession" or "rebellion." The movers, however, well understand the difference. At the beginning, they knew they could never raise their treason to any respectable magnitude, by any name that implies violation of law. They knew their people possessed as much of moral sense, as much of devotion to law and order, as much pride in, and reverence for, the history, and government, of their common country, as any other civilized and patriotic people. They knew they could make no advancement directly in the teeth of these strong and noble sentiments.

Accordingly they commenced by an insidious debauching of the public mind. They invented a sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps, through all the incidents, to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is, that any state of the Union may, consistently with the national constitution, and therefore lawfully, and peacefully, withdraw from the Union, without the consent of the Union, or of any other state. The little disguise that the supposed right is to be exercised only for just cause, themselves to be the sole judge of its justice, is to thin to merit any notice..."

A. Lincoln 7/4/61

And it is still too thin to merit notice.

Walt

Davis also said:

"As soon, however, as the Northern States that prohibited African slavery within their limits had reached a number sufficient to give their representation a controlling voice in the Congress, a persistent and organized system of hostile measures against the rights of the owners of slaves in the Southern States was inaugurated and gradually extended. A continuous series of measures was devised and prosecuted for the purpose of rendering insecure thetenure of property in slaves. . . .

Emboldened by success' the theatre of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights ofthe Southern States was transferred to the Congress. . . . Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government' with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by al1 the States in common, whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of those rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless' and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party' thus organized, succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States... the productions in the South of cotton' rice' sugar' and tobacco' for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable.'

--Jefferson Davis

The cause of the war was slavery, and anything of value you people might have to say is always going to be muted when you say otherwise.

Walt

Your canned responses and cookie cutter posts are getting old.

They'll remain fresh as long as the myth of CSA honor, propriety or legality is put forward.

Most of what I use is on the 'net.

I guess as a lazy, indolent southerner, you are unable or unwilling to prove they don't represent the true record.

Like these:

"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States...

They have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

(from South Carolina Decl. of Secession)

"...[the Northern States] have united in the election of a man to high office of the President of the United States, whose opinions and purpose are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that the `Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,' and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction."

And here is what Texans thought of the Republican party:

"They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States."

--Texas Declaration of Secession.

The Mississippi secession convention began their declaration of causes with the statement, "Our cause is thoroughly identified with the institution of African slavery."

Soon to be CSA congressman Lawrence Keitt, speaking in the South Carolina secession convention, said, "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it."

Emboldened by success' the theatre of agitation and aggression against the clearly expressed constitutional rights of the Southern States was transferred to the Congress. . . . Finally a great party was organized for the purpose of obtaining the administration of the Government' with the avowed object of using its power for the total exclusion of the slave States from all participation in the benefits of the public domain acquired by al1 the States in common' whether by conquest or purchase; of surrounding them entirely by States in which slavery should be prohibited; of those rendering the property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless' and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars. This party' thus organized' succeeded in the month of November last in the election of its candidate for the Presidency of the United States... the productions in the South of cotton' rice' sugar' and tobacco' for the full development and continuance of which the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable.'

--Jefferson Davis

From the Confederate Constitution: Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4: "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."

Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3: "The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government."

From the Georgia Constitution of 1861:"The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves." (This is the entire text of Article 2, Sec. VII, Paragraph 3.)

From the Alabama Constitution of 1861: "No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country." (This is the entire text of Article IV, Section 1 (on slavery).)

Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, referring to the Confederate government: "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition." [Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, March 30, 1861.]

A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]

Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"

Alfred P. Aldrich, South Carolina legislator from Barnwell: "If the Republican party with its platform of principles, the main feature of which is the abolition of slavery and, therefore, the destruction of the South, carries the country at the next Presidential election, shall we remain in the Union, or form a separate Confederacy? This is the great, grave issue. It is not who shall be President, it is not which party shall rule -- it is a question of political and social existence." [Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear, pp. 141-142.]

Senator Hunter of VA. During the Negro Soldier Bill debate on March 7, 1865, the SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS notes him as stating his opinion of the Bill as follows:

"When we had left the old Government he had thought we had gotten rid forever of the slavery agitation....But to his surprise he finds that this Government assumes the power to arm the slaves, which involves also the power of enamcipation....It was regarded as a confession of despair and an abandonment of the ground upon which we had seceded from the old Union. We had insisted that Congress had no right to interfere with slavery, and upon the coming into power of the party who it was known would assume and exercise that power, we seceded....and we vindicated ourselves against the accusations of the abolitionists by asserting that slavery was the best and happiest condition of the negro. Now what does this proposition admit? The right of the central Government to put slaves into the militia, and to emancipate at least so many as shall be placed in the military service. It is a clear claim of the central Government to emancipate the slaves."

"If we are right in passing this measure we were wrong in denying to the old government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery and to emancipate the slaves."

"He now believed....that arming and emancipating the slaves was an abandonment of this contest - an abandonment of the grounds upon which it had been undertaken."

Now I'd say based on this selection that the cause of the war was slavery.

If you don't like my cut and paste record, you need to show it is wrong.

But I guess you are just too lazy to do that.

Walt

That being said I do believe that membership in the Union is voluntary and a state or states should be allowed to leave if they so choose. It ought to also be possible to expel a state if its behavior, policies or laws are viewed as unacceptable.

Some reflection might give you a different perspective.

"What is now combatted, is the position that secession consistent with the Constitution -- is lawful, and peaceful. It is not contended that there is any express law for it; and nothing should ever be implied as law, which leads to unjust or absurd consequences. The nation purchased, with money, the countries out of which several of these states were formed. Is it just that they shall go off without leave, and without refunding? The nation paid very large sums, (in the aggregate, I believe, nearly a hundred millions) to relieve Florida of the aboriginal tribes. Is it just that she shall now be off without consent, or without making any return? The nation is now in debt for money applied to the benefit of the so-called seceding states, in common with the rest. Is it just, either that creditors shall go unpaid, or the remaining States pay for the whole?

A part of the present national debt was contracted to pay the old debts of Texas. Is it just that she shall leave, pay no part of it herself?

Again, if one state may secede, so may another; and then when all shall have seceded, none is left to pay the debts. Is this quite just to creditors? Did we notify them of this sage view of ours when we borrowed there money? If we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace, it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to extort terms terms upon which they will promise to remain...

If all the states, save one, should assert the power to drive that one out of the Union, it is presumed the whole class of seceder politicians would at once deny the power, and denounce the act as the greatest outrage upon State rights. But suppose that precisely the same act, instead of being called "driving the one out," should be called "the seceding of the others from that one," it would exactly what the seceders claim to do; unless, indeed, they make the point, that the one, because it is a minority, may rightfully do, what the others because they are a majority may not rightfully do. These politicians are subtle, and profound, on the rights of minorities. They are not so partial to that power, which made the Constitution, and speaks from the preamble, calling itself "We the People."

A. Lincoln, 7/4/61

The framers met to modify the Articles of Confederation because they were a failure. The document that superceded the Articles created a permanent union. Many resisted this, but finally acquiesed because nothing else would work.

Walt

The U.S. Congress had offered the Southern States slavery forever if they would just come back and continue paying the oppressive taxes.

False.

"What makes emphasis on the tariff as a cause for secession particularly absurd is that the votes to pass the Morrill Tariff did not exist in Congress until *after* the secessionist Senators and Representatives resigned. More generally, an emphasis on economic (in the narrow sense) issues as an explanation for secession is thoroughly misguided for the reasons given by Allen Nevins more than a half century ago in *The Ordeal of the Union*: "One fact needs emphatic statement: of all the monistic explanations for the drift to war, that based upon supposed economic causes is the flimsiest. The theory was sharply rejected at the time by so astute an observer as Alexander H. Stephens. South Carolina, he wrote his brother on New Year's Day, 1861 was seceding from a tariff 'which is just what her own Senators and members of Congress made it.' As for the charges of consolidation and despotism made by some Carolinians, he thought they arose from peevishness, rather than a calm analysis of facts. 'The truth is, the South, almost in mass, has voted, I think, for every measure of general legislation that has passed both houses and become law for the last ten years.' The South, far from groaning under tyranny, had controlled the government almost from its beginning, and Stephens believed that its only real grievance lay in the Northern refusal to return fugitive slaves and to stop the antislavery agitation.

'All other complaints are founded on threatened dangers which may never come, and which I feel very sure would be averted if the South would pursue a judicious and wise course.'

Stephens was right. It was true that the whole tendency of federal legislation 1842 to 1860 was toward free trade; true that the tariff in force when secession began was largely Southern- made; true that it was the lowest tariff the country had known since 1816; true that it cost a nation of thirty million people but sixty million dollars in indirect revenue; true that without secession no new tariff law, obnoxious to the Democratic Party, could have been passed before 1863--if then. "In the official explanations which one Southern State after another published for its secession, economic grievances are either omitted entirely or given minor positions. There were few such supposed grievances which the agricultural states of Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota did not share with the South--and they never threatened to secede. Charles A. Beard finds the tap-root of the war in the resistance of the planter interest to Northern demands enlarging the old Hamilton-Webster policy. The South was adamant in standing for 'no high protective tariffs, no ship subsidies, no national banking and currency system; in short, none of the measures which business enterprise deemed essential to its progress.'

But the Republican platform in 1856 was silent on the tariff; in 1860, it carried a milk-and-water statement on the subject which Western Republicans took, mild as it was, with a wry face; the incoming President was little interested in the tariff; and any harsh legislation was impossible. Ship subsidies were not an issue in the campaign of 1860. Neither were a national banking system and a national currency system. They were not mentioned in the Republican platform nor discussed by party debaters. The Pacific Railroad was advocated both by the Douglas Democrats and the Republicans; and it is noteworthy that Seward and Douglas were for building both a Northern and a Southern line. In short, the divisive economic issues are easily exaggerated. At the same time, the unifying economic factors were both numerous and powerful. North and South had economies which were largely complementary. It was no misfortune to the South that Massachusetts cotton mills wanted its staple, and that New York ironmasters like Hewitt were eager to sell rails dirt-cheap to Southern railway builders; and sober businessmen on both sides, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers, were the men most anxious to keep the peace and hold the Union together." Nevins,

*The Ordeal of the Union* quoted on pp. 212-213 of Edwin C. Rozwenc (ed.), *The Causes of the American Civil War* (Boston: D. C. Heath 1961). In view of these facts, and in view of the fact that Southern pamphlets on the secession issue *invariably* emphasized the alleged danger to slavery represented by Lincoln and said comparatively little about economics (anyone who doubts this is invited to read Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., *Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861* [University of North Carolina Press 1996])

--why have so many people emphasized issues like the tariff? I would say there are three reasons: (1) It was a much more respectable justification for Southerners after the war than "we seceded because we believed--rightly or wrongly--that Lincoln's election would be a menace to slavery." (For the same reason the tariff "explanation" of secession was often used by Confederate representatives in Great Britain *during* the war.) (2) The view of the South as the victim of Northern exploitation seemed to fit what happened *after* the war, when Northern capitalism reigned supreme and the South was very poor. It seemed logical to many people that this was what the South had seceded to resist and the North had fought to bring about. What tended to be forgotten is that in 1860 the South was wealthier than most nations in the world; that in per capita income of its *white* population it was about equal to the North; that it was making considerable progress in industrialization; and that Northern capitalists and bankers, so far from being determined to crush the South, were generally the most pro-Southern element in the Northern population. It was largely secession and the ensuing war which brought about the economic results Southerners later claimed they seceded to prevent. (3) Finally, the economic explanation of the war fit in well with vulgarized Marxism--something which influenced a considerable number of non-Marxists from the Progressive Era onward. "

-from the ACW moderated newsgroup.

Listen, check out what you post; don't go with what you -think-. You obviously have some really skewed ideas--ideas when can easily be refuted by looking at any search engine and plugging in words like "republican", "platform", and "Morrill."

It took me ten seconds to find this.

Walt

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