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 Two days earlier, on May 2, 1861, both houses of the U.S. Congress, after most of the Southern states had already withdrawn, passed by a two-thirds vote a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution.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?
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"
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
I suggest you read Jefferson Davis 'First Inagural Address'
And I suggest you read the Declarations of the Causes of Secession published by South Carolina, Texas, Mississippi and Georgia. Then tell me it wasn't about slavery.
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
You guys must have reading comprehension problems. No one here said that the North went to war to end slavery.
Let me say that again just so it might sink through your thick skull.
The North did not go to war to end slavery! They went to war to preserve the Union!
Do you get it now?
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?
The radicals that caused secession knew full well that Lincoln and the vast majority of Republicans had no intention of ending slavery as it then existed. Lincoln said so very explicitly both before and after he was elected. He repeted that pledge in his innugural. But that was not good enough for those greedy bastards in Charleston and elsewhere. They were not interested in preserving slavery as it then existed. They were interested in the expansion of slavery to the west. They wanted that for two reasons. One was the money they could get from selling slaves and the second was to create additional slave states to maintain their political power in congress. They knew Lincoln and the Republicans would not roll over as the Whigs had done for 40 years and allow the slavers to get their way. Lincoln, the Republicans, and the vast majority of Northerners would never allow westward expansion of slavery and that is why the Slavocracy broke the Union. It was all about slavery. The radicals were a small faction, they were skillful propagandists. They used trumpted up states rights issues and outright fear of 'free blacks' raping and pilliging to fire up the citizenery into support for their scheem.
And if you don't think the seven deep south states that were the first to seceed didn't do it because of slavery, you must be calling those very same individuals liars. Whiskey Papa has alread posted the secession documents from those states that say quite plainly that they were breaking the Union and going to war to defend the instution of slavery.