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To: Partisan Gunslinger

No, I haven’t forgotten. Don’t you neglect to remember that those shots were fired in response to Northern acts of war. :-)

,.......
The Southern states did not rush headlong into secession. They had enormous grievances against the North that were much greater than even Northern violations of the Constitution. The unfairness of taxation, which had been the huge issue of the Revolution, was worse for the antebellum South because three-fourths of the taxes were paid by the South, while three-fourths of the tax money was spent in the North. It had held down the development of Southern industry for a half-century and Southerners were tired of it. Southerners felt the North was already at war with them in many ways. They saw Northern emissaries sent South to encourage slave uprisings, murder and rapine, then being applauded in the North for their grisly successes, especially John Brown. Southerners saw Hinton Helper’s book, The Impending Crisis, which was full of errors on its economics, call for bloody slave revolt yet be enthusiastically adopted by the Republicans in Congress as a campaign document. With the election of Republican Lincoln, Southerners believed those same Republicans would now put into effect the principles of Helper’s book, and there was nothing they could do about it. For their own safety, Southern states began debating secession. They did so peacefully and with great intellectual vigor and in the end, the people of the South struck for independence and self-government, just as their fathers in the Revolution had.

The North, however, had become wealthy manufacturing, shipping, and financing for the captive Southern market, which was rich itself because of King Cotton. The North could not let the South go without a complete economic collapse that was well underway during the secession winter and spring of 1860-1861. All the noble rhetoric of the Horace Greeleys in 1860 about the “just powers” of the government coming from the “consent of the governed” was cast aside due to the specter of economic collapse and financial ruin, thus the war came. (Courtesy of unlawful Union aggression of course)

http://www.bonniebluepublishing.com/The%20Right%20of%20Secession.htm


290 posted on 01/22/2015 8:28:43 AM PST by smoothsailing
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To: smoothsailing
The unfairness of taxation, which had been the huge issue of the Revolution, was worse for the antebellum South because three-fourths of the taxes were paid by the South, while three-fourths of the tax money was spent in the North.

Complete nonsense, a lie that's been told for 150 years. In 1860, the federal budget was $78 million. Of that, $29 million was spent on defense, $15 million was spent supporting the post office and $17 million payment on the national debt. You can find the complete Report of the Secretary of the Treasury for 1860 here. Feel free to read through it and demonstrate where three-quarters of the budget was being spent in the north.

The notion that the south was paying three-quarters of the taxes is equally absurd. The bulk of government revenue came from tariffs, and the south, with a fraction of the population, simply didn't consume that many imports. Tariff collection figures show that New York alone collected more than ten times as much as every port in the south put together.

Here's a graphic representation of the comparative amounts:


292 posted on 01/22/2015 9:39:33 AM PST by Bubba Ho-Tep ("The rat always knows when he's in with weasels"-- Tom Waits)
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To: smoothsailing
No, I haven’t forgotten. Don’t you neglect to remember that those shots were fired in response to Northern acts of war. :-)

I never knew sailing a ship was an act of war.

The unfairness of taxation, which had been the huge issue of the Revolution, was worse for the antebellum South because three-fourths of the taxes were paid by the South, while three-fourths of the tax money was spent in the North.

No, the southerners got what they wanted with the Tariff of 1857. The rest of your post is meaningless since you can't even get your basic fact right. The basic fact is the Tariff of 1857 was a southern-supported tariff, opposed by northern manufacturing, and was still in effect when the south seceded. The only reason the south fell so far behind in manufacturing was because they couldn't give up their peculiar institution, slavery. Slavery spoiled them. Why would the sons of plantation owners want to sweat away in factories when it was so much easier to make slaves provide their lifestyle?

302 posted on 01/24/2015 11:19:23 AM PST by Partisan Gunslinger
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