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It does little to explain it, especially when they knew that Morill would decrease revenues. Your repeated attempts to justify it with the deficit only make the situation more confusing.

Ah, but GOP has already established the fact that the Morrill tariff was implemented before the war started. Therefore, you are in fact alleging that they passed the tariff knowing that the war would decrease tariff income. To say the tariff decreased that income is about as cogent as arguing that the Titanic sank because it hit whale before it hit the iceberg. IN wartime, the consumption of common consumables is decreased. Consider what happened to sugar in WWII. The argument that a few cents here or there on a tax that in total represented only a few cents on the dollar is ridiculous by any economic evaluation. To argue as you do that a tax that raised some 20 to thrity million from a GNP over 1.5 billion would be too much to bare is just silly.

Zealotry in action.

Yes, that explains your motives quite aptly. Can I pull this back on topic by asking why it was that Lincoln refused all attempts to negotiate the debt?

Certainly. First of all, the south didn't negotiate for the hundreds of millions they took, they just took them and then made a pretense of negotiating payment. The reason it was absurd to honor such a suggestion was that it would have acknowledged that felony crime was lawful, which it isn't. Secondly, under no stretch of anyone's imaginiation was the south in an shape financially to begin to pay what it had taken, not just in the months before the war, but in all the years leading up to it. If some homeless and jobless guy with no credit steals your car and then offers tp you for it on time, are you obligated to take his note? I think not.

Certainly. First of all, the south didn't negotiate for the hundreds of millions they took, they just took them and then made a pretense of negotiating payment.

Oh really? In early 1861 Senator John Slidell of Louisiana stood on the floor of the United States Senate and offered, on behalf of his state, to negotiate a settlement. The yankees refused to talk with him.

At that same time the state of South Carolina authorized a negotiating team and sent their Attorney General to Washington for the purpose of negotiating a settlement with the north. The yankees refused to meet with him.

A few weeks later the newly organized CSA government sent a three man team including a US Congressman, a former Governor of Louisiana, and the mayor of Mobile Alabama to Washington for the purpose of negotiating a settlement and delivering payment according to any settled terms. The yankees refused to meet with them.

After the CSA team had arrived in Washington and found the new Lincoln administration unwilling to negotiate, two sitting US Senators who had not yet seceded (Louis T. Wigfall of Texas and Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia) offered to serve as intermediaries between the CSA negotiators and the Lincoln administration. Lincoln refused to meet with even the sitting senators.

After Lincoln refused even the senator's offer, a sitting justice of the US Supreme Court offered to act as an intermediary between the CSA negotiators and the Lincoln administration on a strictly informal basis. Lincoln refused to meet and, by way of Seward, conveyed false indications of his policy towards Fort Sumter to both the justice and the CSA negotiators.

Finding the new administration completely unwilling to engage in any form of diplomatic settlement to the secession crisis whatsoever, the CSA negotiators then returned to Montgomery. Upon return John Forsyth, one of the negotiators and mayor of Mobile, informed the confederate government of the situation he faced:

"There is little that I can add to letters and telegrams previously dispatched. We never had a chance to make Lincoln an offer of any kind. You can't negotiate with a man who says you don't exist"