FLT-bird:
"Only about 6% of the population of the Southern states owned slaves.
Even at the ridiculously claimed 25% of families PC Revisionists have tried to extrapolate that out to conveniently ignoring that more than one family member frequently was a slave owner, that’s still a relatively small percentage of the population that owned slaves." Seriously, can you even be honest about this topic?
If you could be honest, you'd confess the truth which is that slave ownership varied from very small and declining percentages in Border South states to much higher and growing percentages in Deep South states.
What were those percentages, exactly?
Well, that depends on how you count, but if you figure even a modest sized average slaveholding family, then some Deep South states came in at just under 50% slaveholders.
Sure, you want us to believe that some families had more than one slaveholder, that's fine, but there were many others -- i.e., singles or young married couples getting started -- who fully intended to purchase slaves as soon as they could afford them.
In other words, they were just as committed to the slavocracy as any large plantation owner.
But the bottim line is this: whatever percentage of slaveholders you chose was absolutely correct in some places and very wrong in others.
The rough estimate of 25% came first from Confederate soldiers themselves as to how many of their fellow soldiers came from slaveholding families.
FLT-bird: "The vast majority were not animated by something they never had.
What they were motivated by though were tariffs they overwhelmingly had to pay in order to drive up the price of manufactured goods which they didn’t make and then to add insult to injury, seeing most of the money the tariff raised lavished on the very people who had voted to drive up the price of the manufactured goods which they but not Southerners produced."
Some scholars have studied collections of Civil War soldiers' letters and found that many discuss slavery.
None discussed tariffs.
Further, your total economic argument about "Southern taxes paid for Northern benefits" is contradicted by both common sense and the facts of history.
- Common sense: Democrats ruled Washington and Southerners ruled Democrats, so no spending or taxes passed without Southern approval.
- Facts of history: Actual Federal spending summarized by category and Free States vs. slave states.
The historical fact is that Southerners did not pay more than their "fair share" and did not receive less than their "fair share" from Washington, DC, regardless what Fire Eater propagandists like Robert Rhett claimed.
Once again, here is that graphic showing which cities paid how much to Federal Revenues:
Seriously, can you even be honest about this topic?****
Can you?
If you could be honest, you’d confess the truth which is that slave ownership varied from very small and declining percentages in Border South states to much higher and growing percentages in Deep South states.****
Growing percentages? I’d need to see evidence of that.
What were those percentages, exactly?
Well, that depends on how you count, but if you figure even a modest sized average slaveholding family, then some Deep South states came in at just under 50% slaveholders.****
the evidence does not support that. Look at the US Census data.
Sure, you want us to believe that some families had more than one slaveholder, that’s fine, but there were many others — i.e., singles or young married couples getting started — who fully intended to purchase slaves as soon as they could afford them.
In other words, they were just as committed to the slavocracy as any large plantation owner.****
Pure speculation on your part. What we have is the Census data which shows the state with the highest percentage of the total free population owning slaves was South Carolina at 8.82%. Even Deep South states such as Alabama, Florida and Georgia had fewer than 7% slave ownership among the total free population as of the 1860 US census.
The rough estimate of 25% came first from Confederate soldiers themselves as to how many of their fellow soldiers came from slaveholding families.****
That may have been true in a few areas but is certainly a high estimate in others.
Some scholars have studied collections of Civil War soldiers’ letters and found that many discuss slavery.
None discussed tariffs.****
LOL! McPherson’s own book on the subject says otherwise...this is chief PC Revisionist James McPherson.
In his book What They Fought For, 1861-1865, historian James McPherson reported on his reading of more than 25,000 letters and more than 100 diaries of soldiers who fought on both sides of the War for Southern Independence and concluded that Confederate soldiers “fought for liberty and independence from what they regarded as a tyrannical government.” The letters and diaries of many Confederate soldiers “bristled with the rhetoric of liberty and self government,” writes McPherson, and spoke of a fear of being “subjugated” and “enslaved” by a tyrannical federal government. Sound familiar?
Further, your total economic argument about “Southern taxes paid for Northern benefits” is contradicted by both common sense and the facts of history.****
Au contraire
Common sense: Democrats ruled Washington and Southerners ruled Democrats, so no spending or taxes passed without Southern approval.****
Pure BS. A fantasy constructed in your own mind. If Southerners controlled Washington as you claim, tariffs would have been much lower, expenditures far more balanced between the regions and the federal govenrment would not have usurped all kinds of powers the states never delegated to it in the constitution.
Facts of history: Actual Federal spending summarized by category and Free States vs. slave states.
The historical fact is that Southerners did not pay more than their “fair share” and did not receive less than their “fair share” from Washington, DC, regardless what Fire Eater propagandists like Robert Rhett claimed.****
Here you are being dishonest again.
“The north has adopted a system of revenue and disbursements, in which an undue proportion of the burden of taxation has been imposed on the South, and an undue proportion of its proceeds appropriated to the north ... The South as the great exporting portion of the Union has, in reality, paid vastly more than her due proportion of the revenue,” John C Calhoun Speech on the Slavery Question,” March 4, 1850
“This question of tariffs and taxation, and not the negro question, keeps our country divided....the men of New York were called upon to keep out the Southern members because if they were admitted they would uphold [ie hold up or obstruct] our commercial greatness.” Governor of New York Horatio Seymour on not readmitting Southern representatives to Congress 1866
” If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern States? …Every year, for some years back, this or that Southern state had declared that it would submit to this extortion only while it had not the strength for resistance. With the election of Lincoln and an exclusive Northern party taking over the federal government, the time for withdrawal had arrived … The conflict is between semi-independent communities [in which] every feeling and interest [in the South] calls for political partition, and every pocket interest [in the North] calls for union. So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.” – Charles Dickens, as editor of All the Year Round, a British periodical in 1862
“Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, ‘to fire the Southern Heart’ and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation North American Review (Boston October 1862)
“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.” Charleston Mercury 2 days before the November 1860 election
“They [the South] know that it is their import trade that draws from the people’s pockets sixty or seventy millions of dollars per annum, in the shape of duties, to be expended mainly in the North, and in the protection and encouragement of Northern interests....These are the reasons why these people [the North] do not wish the South to secede from the Union.” The New Orleans Daily Crescent 21 January 1861
I can go on and on posting similar quotes. By the way...this is exactly the kind of quotes, facts, sources, etc you claim I have not posted.
Once again, here is that graphic showing which cities paid how much to Federal Revenues:****
ROTFLMAO! Repeating McPherson’s economic illiteracy and showing your own economic illiteracy. The cities paid those tariffs to the federal government did they? They just dipped into their own pockets out of the goodness of the hearts and coughed up the money right?
Or did somebody else pay those tariffs. Gosh...who do you think that might have been?
Hint: Where the ship unloads its cargo is irrelevant.