Neither does it establish what it as the biggest "sticking point," as you call it. If I recall correctly, your "proof" that the slavery extension issue was the main conflict was that many compromise proposals dealt heavily with this issue. I responded by noting that the North worked hard to make sure the debate was framed on this issue and openly admitted doing so. You respond that they worked hard to frame the debate around this issue because it was the main issue, your supposed proof of which being that the debate was framed around it. You are using a circular argument.
Lincoln framed the entire Lincoln-Douglas series of debates around slavery. Certainly it was to his advantage.
Then why did he lose the debates?
If you are talking of his "Cotton is King" speech, that has got to be one of the more delusional and arrogant pieces of work of the period.
Call it all the names that you like, it still doesn't change the fact that one of the most powerful secessionists rallied southerners to the secession call by citing economic grounds rather than slavery as the reason for leaving the union.
Basically, he is saying that cotton is far more important than food.
No. He's saying that in economic agricultural terms, the cotton market is king. Other commodoties are smaller in market sizes and more easily substituted by other agricultural markets than cotton is.
In fact, he goes so far as to say that if England has a famine in corn but plenty of cotton, there are few problems.
Considering that England could substitute away for its corn shortage with any one of the dozens of other agricultural food products whereas cotton was not near as easily substituted, the argument is reasonable.
However, if the situation is reversed, there are riots. Apparently, this guy never heard of the corn riots in England.
The corn riots were class-based "fair cost" uprisings caused in the fallout of the last remnants of a pre-industrial earlier feudal society. They happened long before cotton's 19th century emergence as what it was in 1860 and are economically incomparable to the situation at the time the speech was given. Try again.
But to get to the text of the speech: He mentions that the strength of the government is the military chest and the almighty dollar. He even talks a bit about one specific tariff (totally ignoring any others).
The obvious grievance is protectionism. His point is that money is driving the northern side of things, and argues that northerners need for the southern market might even prompt them to take up the then-extreme and unthinkable measure of direct taxation to pay for their government.
He also talks a bit about slavery and shows (indirectly) southern economics is based on it.
Barely if at all, and it's definately not the central argument of his speech. Economics and taxation are. He never talks about yankees at all (although I grant you that it could be reasonably inferred that he was talking of northern interests in his speech).
Really? Cause much of the speech itself is directed as a message toward the northerners - "When you have lost your market; when your operatives are turned out; when your capitalists are broken, will you go to direct taxation?"
He also lodges repeated grievances with yankeeland by referring to it by name repeatedly:
"Your irrepressible conflict is predicated upon the supposition that this is a consolidated Government; that there are no States; that there is a national Government, as they call it; that the people who live between the two oceans and between the Gulf and the lakes are one people; that the boundaries of Massachusetts have, by some hocus pocus, been extending themselves until they embrace all the remainder of the Union"
His remarks are directed at the government - of which he is a member.
Actually, they are directed at a government which he argues to have become dominated by a specifically yankee brand of doing things. See above for his description of that government - its as if Massachusetts has extended itself around the remainder of the union and demanded everything be done by the massachusetts way, or yankee way.
If economics were the overriding reason, the south would have split in the 1830s when taxes and tariffs were more onerous.
Do you not recall your history? South Carolina almost did. As for taxes, they were about to become their highest level in over a decade and a half. When Wigfall spoke, the protectionist Morrill tariff bill had already passed the house several months earlier. It was up for debate in the senate, the last place it had any opposition, and would pass out of that chamber by the end of the session. Further, the incoming president, Lincoln, was an open protectionist who advocated the reinstatement of the tariff and would later assert that if it did not pass before he took office, it should be a legislative priority of the following session. The tariff threat was very real in 1861 and southerners openly noted it to be so.
He also ignores the tariffs which were designed to help the south (such as the tariff on imported sugar - which was a boon to Louisiana).
Irrelevent to the matter at hand. One pro-southern tariff does not change the pro-northern nature of protectionism and the favor given to it by that same region.
Now contrast that with the comments of Lincoln and Alexander Stephens (vice-president of the Confederacy).
I suppose you are referring to the supposed "cornerstone" speech. Fair enough. I need only note that Stephens was a unionist until the very last moment whereas Wigfall was one of the first secessionists. Wigfall spoke on behalf of the movement as a leader of the secessionist cause. No speech of Stephens can be said to contain the same. As for his "cornerstone" speech, make of it what you may as it does represent _a_ position taken by a prominent southerner. Just be careful while reading Stephens that you don't mistake him for a secessionist and that you always remain mindful of his own eccentricity as a person.
They both felt strongly that the entire issue hung on expansion of slavery to the territories
Wigfall doesn't in that speech. It's almost entirely economics.