First of all, it didn’t turn out to be a lie. He was using the power confided to him to “hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government” when Sumter was fired on.
Second, how is that objectionable? He’s trying to make sure the laws are enforced. it’s not for “his government looting cronyists in the North”. It’s the taxes required to, you know, run the government, and pay the army and all that. (Something that’s even more important at the time because a bunch of people are in active rebellion against the lawfully elected government, don’t forget).
No they are supposed to protect cronies from competition.
This is one of the sillier arguments I’ve seen. Are you seriously suggesting that business people should tailor their plans to government policy instead of consumer demand?
Prices change for many reasons, the fact that you refuse to admit that the tariff played a role in worsening the economic conditions in the South is a reflection of your own biases. The simple fact that nearly every vote in the South was against the tariff is prima facie evidence of its effects.
Uhh was he though? Pretty much every scholar would likely concede that he went well beyond the “power confided to him”. Those people may feel it was for the greater good, but that is the result of their own corrupt morality.
It’s objectionable because he is placing the extortion of unwilling citizens as his top priority. And yes it indeed for his cronies. Where do you think the tax money went? Individual profiteers. Who benefitted from the tariff? Northern cronies who elected Lincoln. Lincoln went to great length to prove his protectionist credentials to the North. Affiliating himself with Henry Clay at every opportunity. It is Clays system that was the basis for Lincoln’s rise and subsequent reign. Whig economics were tailor-made for cronyism.
No, I think business people should deal with the realities of the marketplace. When they find they can’t sell their product for enough money, they shouldn’t cry that it’s not their fault. The government doesn’t owe them a living. Other businessmen don’t owe them a living. The general public doesn’t owe them a living. Overseas markets don’t owe them a living. And nature itself doesn’t owe them a living.
You took the other side on all of these positions. You made poorly considered arguments about subjects because you hadn’t learned the relevant facts or considered the consequences of what you were saying. As a result, your argument is collapsing.
Perhaps you will blame me for this or decide that conditions on the board are biased against you or that it’s history’s fault for having facts that are different than what you’d like. Or maybe you’ll follow your usual pattern and just blame the government for your problems. But you’d be better off accepting that it was your own responsibility.
Wll Farnaby’s evil cabal of industrialists and Lincoln’s association with and dependence upon them are a bit far fetched, but your rebuttal fails.
Clay was a firm advocate of higher tariffs. He and Lincoln were friends dating back at least as far as Lincoln’s brief stay in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he and Clay both opposed the War on Mexico. At that time, they were from the same political party, the Whigs. (Clay could not have been a Republican, since he died before the party was formed, but the dissolving Whig party provided the majority of members to the nascent Republican Party–including Lincoln.)
Texas v. White. If it was ever arguable that secession was legal, it hasn’t been since 1869.
About the subject of what Lincoln believed and wanted and when, remember he was a master politician, and politics is the art of the possible. The fact that he and all of the Republican leadership publicly supported only partial measures earlier on, and even claimed they’d be satisfied with them, reflects only that full abolition was politically infeasible at the time. But he ordered emancipation as soon as he thought it would stick, and muscled the 13th Amendment through (on its second try - the movie doesn’t show that) as soon as that became politically possible. The slaveholders and their sympathizers were quite right to see Republican public positions as slippery slopes, since it was no secret that the Republicans were founded for the purpose of abolition.
Most white people at the time were probably white supremacists- that is, they held the belief that black people were intrinsically inferior. But white supremacists that opposed slavery (like Lincoln) were far, far superior, morally speaking, to white supremacists that supported slavery.
The southern states seceded because of slavery- it’s very obvious when looking at what the states and Confederate leaders said at the time. No one back then would have denied that secession was about slavery. Any possible misdeeds by the North (and I’m sure there were some) are miniscule in comparison to slavery.
As noted, drops in prices to Southern cotton had little to do with U.S. tariffs. The British industry preferred long fiber American cotton to Egyptian cotton, but the rise of multiple sources of cotton from various regions of the world was a natural price suppressor.
As to the lack of infrastructure in the South, that was a deliberate effort by Southern planters that stretched back decades. The South resolutely refused to participate in the development of canals or railroads or even highways, regardless whether they were private or included government support. They did nothing to encourage any participation in the Industrial Revolution, even within their own region. Athens and Birmingham were the notable exceptions when they could easily have been the rule, but the planters preferred to maintain their power by doing everything they could to keep the economy limited to their single source of income.
One could easily reverse your assertion by noting that the South strove to deny the North any profit from its labors by insisting that all imported goods be cheaply available from foreign sources while the South grew fat on its exports. Rather than greedy industrialists plotting to impose their will on honest farmers, we then see greedy plantation owners trying to impose their will on honest industrialists. The reality needs to be more nuanced than either of those caricatures. Indeed, the South’s political power was such that tariffs bounced up and down as one side or the other gained temporary control of Congress. In fact, just four years prior to the Civil War, the South had successfully slashed tariffs to the detriment of the U.S. Treasury. Tariffs only rose again when the Southern congresscritters refused to come to Washington following their various states’ secessions through the Spring of 1861.
Texas vs White is interesting, but …a SC decision in 1869, so soon after the civil war, with some some very good dissension. I doubt that really counts so much today as to what honest SC jurors might decide.
I’d say have the SC of today have another look at the legality or illegality of secession today. I bet the arguments on both sides would be fascinating. The result would probably be the same as in 1869,…after all almost no one today supports the idea os secession and an amendment prohibiting it would pass easily.
But I think a Supreme Court of today might easily determine that no justifiable decision could be made with the precedents at hand and recommend a constitutional amendment be passed to definitely make secession illegal.
I know the Articles of Confederation did use the word perpetual …but then again even though the original idea was just to modify the A of C, it was determined that wasn’t doable. They threw the whole A of C out and started over again.
And in starting over again they somehow left that perpetuity thing out. Why? Intentionally?
Anyway I would love to here pro and con arguments before the S C of today about secession. The S C of 1869 had to be a little on the biased side…just accepted some piss poor arguments to get the matter out of their hands.
Which tariff is the problem for the South again? Because they certainly benefitted from the 1857 tariff, and the Walker Tariff of 1846 was gleefully supported by them. Prior to that might as well have been ancient history.
There was the Tariff of 1861, but the pissy little South had already left the Union at that point.
The Tariff argument is rank revisionism from the mouth of the traitor Jeff Davis who tried to justify secession without mentioning slavery after the war was long over.
In realpolitik terms, if states could seceed at will the federal authority would diminish to almost nothing. A state could say “fuck you” rather than obey a duly passed federal law, and the mere threat of doing so would mean that every state would effectively hold a veto power on all national legislation. No federal government could endure like that.
Regarding Lincoln’s racism: when Lincoln was campaigning against slavery, the subject of the supposed natural inferiority of African-Americans had to be addressed. Lincoln’s stated position was that he was agnostic as to whether African-Americans were naturally less intelligent or capable than whites; what he claimed was that as human beings, African-Americans were morally equal to whites, and didn’t inherently deserve to be slaves any more than mentally inferior white people would. A backhanded compliment to be sure, but it was the best possible way at the time to argue for abolition.
The Tariff of Abominations (1828) is generally the tariff that most riled up the South. It does have an interesting thread linking it all the way from Thomas Jefferson to the Civil War, though. Tariffs did not lead to the Civil War at all, and arguments to that effect are misplaced. But tariffs were a large part of the Southern philosophical development of the concept of secession–which predated actual secession over the slavery issue following Lincoln’s election. [Secession as a concept thus, is not originally linked directly with slavery while secession as undertook by the CSA states was.]
When the tariff was passed, several of the Southern states were extremely up in arms. None moreso than South Carolina, which didn’t outright say it would secede but the talk was there. What South Carolina did do, was declare it would be using the doctrine of “nullification.” Nullifcation was most substantially elucidated on by Vice President John Calhoun, but a lot of his rhetoric and thinking can actually be traced back to some of Jefferson’s writings and Calhoun certainly borrowed heavily from there (thus the link back to Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions.) Under the doctrine of nullification, South Carolina declared the tariff invalid in the State, and threatened to arrest any federal agent attempting to collect the duties.
While South Carolina never voted on secession (they said when they passed the nullification resolution that refusal to accept it by the Federal Govt could lead to secession), it was brought up countless times during the nullification crisis and the real genesis of this idea of potentially leaving the union over various dissatisfactions grew from that point and never lessened until the actual secession of southern states (lead by South Carolina.)
Andrew Jackson handled the nullification crisis, and even correctly predicted the future. In his view if he let nullification stand it would have been a permanent weakening of the Federal government leading inevitably to the southern states eventually leaving the union over the slavery issue (he said this in the 1830s–and he himself was a slaveholder.) I think Jackson was correct in that if he had allowed nullification to stand, it would have lead to that…and most likely in a manner that would have gained more “legal acceptance” by the country at large. Once you start letting the states veto Federal laws it would probably have been harder to argue that the Federal government had power to keep any states in the union. Of course, even with quelling the nullification issue, we were still on the path to secession by the confederate states.
Some of the government’s actions during the war, like the press censorship and such, might have gone beyond the bounds of the Constitution. But the whole raising troops and sending them is, isn’t. The Constitution explicitly gives the President the right to suppress insurrection and rebellion.
Requiring that US citizens pay their taxes to the US government isn’t extortion. Is it extortion when the government goes after tax cheats today? And the tax money went, as tax money has always gone, to those individuals who provided the government with goods and services. It was the case in the Lincoln administration, it was the case in the Buchanan administration, it was the case going back to the Washington administration. If there was graft in the letting of government contracts during the war (and there was), it was less deliberate corruption and more the urgent need of the government to get material that led unscrupulous individuals make money for themselves. And surely, the states didn’t secede because Lincoln was funneling money to profiteers. They seceded before he even was inaugurated.
And Henry Clay…that would be Senator Henry Clay? The Southern plantation owner? I’m not going to go into a detailed post about Southern Whiggism here, except to say that there were a lot of Southern Whigs, especially in the Upper South. The Whigs held the governor’s office in NC for 15 years, Kentucky for 15, Delaware for 12, VA for 6. The American System wasn’t just a sop to Northern Industry. It had supporters in the South as well.
I’d also suggest that the Civil War itself shows that a government that invests in infrastructure and and infrastructure improvements has an advantage over one that doesn’t. Turns out all those railroads, turnpikes, and cleared rivers come in handy, after all.
Lets note, though, that it only lasted for 4 years. It was replaced by the Tariff of 1832, which lowered rates, and then one in 1833, which solved the crisis and actually had southern support.
They are asking for free trade. How is that asking the government for a living? Your biases are showing. It is the industrialists who were asking for the government to support their businesses. The fact that the above was likely typed with a straight face shows the gumption of the Lincoln cult.
What the hell are you talking about? You still cannot admit the simple economic fact that a protective tariff helped the Northern industrialists while it hurt the exporting South. This is reflective of your own bias, or your lack of attention during economics 101.
If a government is instituting a protective tariff for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of all consumers, it is indeed the fault of that government if economic conditions are worsened. Who would you blame?
Is that why 9 states seceded and started their own United States upon ratifying the Constitution?
[QUOTE=Article VII]
The ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the states so ratifying the same.
[/QUOTE]
The South can in no way be framed as protectors of the ideal of Free Trade. In all the history of this country, no tax or tariff, no single ideal or institution, has had as great a distortion on the free market as the practice of slavery. Even if the only point on your moral compass is “Free Trade,” slavery still must be reckoned as one of the greatest evils ever perpetrated by man. For almost a century, the slave owners used the federal government to support and extend their ability to warp the markets to their benefit, and when they could no longer control that government, they declared war on it.