[Wallace T.]

Slavery was not the only issue. The Republican Party, as the successor to the Whigs, was a pro-tariff party. The South was overwhelmingly agricultural, a fact of life for both slaveholders and small farmers who owned no slaves. Their primary cash crops, cotton and tobacco, were largely shipped abroad, to England, France, and other European nations. (This differed from the Midwest and rural Northeast, where their main products, grains, meat, and fruit and vegetable crops, mainly went for domestic consumption.) Tariffs were established to protect domestic manufacturers, who were mostly in the Northeast, from lower priced foreign products. That drove up the cost of manufactured goods and brought up the specter of trade war. Southern agricultural goods competed with Turkish and Balkan tobacco and Indian and Egyptian cotton. England and France, if they decided to perform a trade war, could impose retaliatory tariffs on American cotton and tobacco and use competing sources. In fact, during the Union naval embargo, the European mills switched to the South's competitors.

In fact, Lincoln offered, as a peace gesture, not to interfere with slavery where it existed and promised to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law in the North, as long as the Federal government could collect tariffs in Southern ports. For the first year and a half of the war, emancipation was not a war strategy of the Lincoln Administration.

Tariffs, as well as slavery, were primary issues that led to the Southern secession. After all, why would the large majority of Confederate soldiers come from non-slaveholding homes? Concern on the effects of high tariffs to their livelihoods, as well as patriotism to their native states, motivated Johnny Reb for the most part.

[Mr Rogers]

“Slavery was not the only issue.”

No, it was not. But it was certainly a significant part of the rationale for succession. It isn’t surprising that flying the Confederate flag in a church would interfere with the mission of the church...assuming someone can FIND a SBC church that has been flying the Confederate flag. I became a Christian in 1971 and a Baptist in 1977, and I’ve never seen it done.

Seems like a silly resolution to bring up, but I’d have found it hard to vote AGAINST it!