Slavery, you dumbass

[Budget_Player_Cadet]

@monstro

Even President Comcacho would be better than Trump right now.

Yes, the most unrealistic thing about Comcacho was simultaneously his sole redeeming factor: he could recognize when someone was way, way smarter than him and take advice from that person.

[mhendo]

@HeXen

Trump was referring back to the nullification crisis during Jackson’s time and the tariff’s derived from that. It was the expansion of slavery that caused the Civil war, not slavery in of itself. You guys need to understand the culture of the era and the political nature of that time period and more importantly for this discussion, the economy. Jackson preserved the union in the 30’s…that lived on in the Civil War.

This is incredibly disingenuous, and demonstrates a stunning ignorance of the historical developments that occurred in the United States between the Nullification Crisis and the start of the Civil War.

You can’t just make the leap from 1830 to 1861 without considering the massive changes of the intervening period, including but not limited to:

[ul]
[li] the war for Texas and the emergence of an independent, slaveholding Texas republic[/li][li] court decisions like Prigg v. Pennsylvania[/li][li] Polk, Manifest Destiny, the annexation of Texas, and the war with Mexico, resulting in a significant addition of territory[/li][li] corresponding debates over the fate of slavery in the new territories, including contests over measures like the Wilmot Proviso[/li][li] the Compromise of 1850, with its dramatically expanded Fugitive Slave Act, and the emerging principle of popular sovereignty as a central factor in the contest between Slavery and Free Soil[/li][li] the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its repudiation of the Missouri Compromise[/li][li] the popular sovereignty battles over “bleeding Kansas,” and the contemporaneous battles (sometimes physical, as in the case of Preston Brooks’ beating of Charles Sumner) on the floor of Congress[/li][li] the Dred Scott decision and its consequences for the idea of black citizenship, as well as its judicial nullification of the Missouri Compromise[/li][li] the doubling of the slave population, and the massive increase in cotton production in that 30-year period[/li][li] the increasingly sectional alignment of the Democratic Party, along with the demise of the Whigs and the rise of a sectional Republican Party[/li][li] the rise of a relatively small but vocal abolitionist movement committed to immediate rather than gradual abolition, based in considerable measure on the evangelical Protestant Christianity of the Second Great Awakening[/li][/ul]To jump straight from the Nullification Crisis to the Civil War, and to argue that the connection is bridged by the principles and ideals of Andrew Jackson is, quite frankly, risible. You should be embarrassed. So should the President, but he has shown himself incapable of such an emotion; i’m hoping you’re not yet beyond hope.

@HeXen

Where Trump says “I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.” He was clearly giving opinion on what he thought potentially could have been.

But what “potentially could have been,” when we’re talking about history, relies on a willingness to deal honestly with the counterfactual questions in all their complexity, not to simply glide over the decades as if nothing actually happened.

@HeXen

The nullification crisis helped lead to the Civil War because it boiled sectional tensions between the north and hesSouth to the surface.

This is idiotic.

Yes, there were sectional tensions evident in the Nullification Crisis, but such tensions had been evident beforehand in the three-fifths compromise of the US Constitution, and the debates over the Missouri Compromise. John Quincy Adams, in his diary entries on the Missouri issue, said things like:

But he says he received yesterday a letter from a very sober and respectable neighbor of his, who asks him whether a civil war would not be preferable to the extension of slavery beyond the Mississippi. This is a question between the rights of human nature and the Constitution of the United States. (February 20, 1820)

I had some conversation with Calhoun on the slave question pending in Congress. He said he did not think it would produce a dissolution of the Union, but, if it should, the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance, offensive and defensive, with Great Britain…I pressed the conversation no further; but if the dissolution of the Union should result from the slave question, it is as obvious as anything that can be foreseen of futurity, that it must shortly afterwards be followed by the universal emancipation of the slaves. (February 24, 1820)

And after the Nullification Crisis, there were events FAR more important in creating and sustaining sectional tensions than the issue of tariff nullification had ever been, including many of the historical developments in my list above.

@HeXen

That leaves the obvious counter question, but I seriously don’t think that’s what his contention was. I think his contention was that all of everything going on, including slavery could have been worked out to end slavery without a war…which was possible.

There are lots of things in history that might have been possible, if particular decisions had been made differently. But i know of no historical interpretation of the lead-up to the Civil War which suggests that the South was willing to compromise in any meaningful way over the existence of slavery. Nor, during the thirty years before the war, did they show much willingness to compromise even over the territorial expansion of slavery. Historical developments like the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act were, for the most part, more beneficial to the slave power than to the free soil interests. This was especially the case with the Fugitive Slave Act (Southerners didn’t care too much for states’ rights when it came to that issue, did they?), and with the repudiation of the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition on slavery north of 36[sup]o[/sup]30’. And, as Merneith notes, you should read up on some of the secession declarations if you really think that anyone in the South was ready to negotiate in good faith over this.

Finally:

@HeXen

Fact check:

The President said that he thinks if Jackson had “been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.”

This much is true: Andrew Jackson, who was president from 1829-1837, helped to avert a plausible civil war, generations before the actual one. In the 1830’s, South Carolina insisted on its right to nullify, or ignore, federal law. The South Carolinians objected to taxes — federal tariffs on the imported goods they were buying from Europe.

As Abraham Lincoln led the Union to ultimate victory and the abolition of slavery 30 years later, he apparently liked Jackson’s powerful example. He, like Trump, kept a portrait of Andrew Jackson on his wall. Of course Jackson, however, never favored abolition. But history is complicated, and it is all our legacy, even the parts we dislike.

Nice selective quoting there, you dishonest piece of crap. Why don’t you provide the full quotation regarding Jackson and the Civil War? Here it is:

The President said that he thinks if Jackson had “been a little bit later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.” Give some context here, do you think that’s true?

This much is true: Andrew Jackson, who was president from 1829-1837, helped to avert a plausible civil war, generations before the actual one. In the 1830’s, South Carolina insisted on its right to nullify, or ignore, federal law. The South Carolinians objected to taxes — federal tariffs on the imported goods they were buying from Europe.

Jackson insisted that federal law reigned supreme. Through a carefully calibrated mixture of threats (a warship actually appeared in the harbor at Charleston, ready to open fire if need be) and compromises (Congress cut the tariff a little), he persuaded the nullifiers to back down.

But this is also true: Jackson never questioned the underlying, fundamental difference between North and South, which was on slavery. He didn’t actually disagree with his fellow Southern leaders about that issue.

It was much, much harder to compromise as the Civil War broke out in 1861, because the nation was more squarely confronting that issue. Northern votes had just elected Abraham Lincoln, a president from an allegedly radical new party that insisted that slavery was wrong and must be contained to the South.

Southerners saw this as a threat to their property, and tried to secede from the Union. From the very beginning the South tried to obscure what the conflict was truly about, citing state rights, Southern theories of liberty, or the economic oppression of the North; but the Confederate vice president, Alexander H. Stephens, made it plain in a speech: the United States was in “error” to believe in “the equality of the races,” and the Confederacy aimed to build on a different foundation.

People did try, desperately, to “work out” that problem before the shooting started in 1861, but it was in the end an irreconcilable difference.

Link

[Bryan_Ekers]

In Trump’s view, the northern states should have fooled around with Upper Canada for a while, before dumping the south. The north would get to keep Fort Sumter because it was in the pre-nup.

[RickJay]

Upper Canada didn’t exist in 1861 (as a political entity.) That ceased to exist in 1841.

So, to put this in Trump terms, Upper Canada is… Ivanka Trump. By 1861, the North could have started screwing around with the United Province of Canada, which is the Marla Maples of this comparison, and eventually settled on the confederation of Canada as its Melania.

[Czarcasm]

@RickJay

Upper Canada didn’t exist in 1861 (as a political entity.) That ceased to exist in 1841.

So, to put this in Trump terms, Upper Canada is… Ivanka Trump.

Nice mountains, but rather frigid?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@RickJay

So, to put this in Trump terms, Upper Canada is… Ivanka Trump. By 1861, the North could have started screwing around with the United Province of Canada, which is the Marla Maples of this comparison, and eventually settled on the confederation of Canada as its Melania.

I think you mean Ivana Trump (The Donald’s first wife), but given some of the comments Trump has made about his daughter (“Can I say this? A piece of ass.”) you can be excused for getting them confused.

And if you really meant Ivanka, then what does that make Tiffany? Would she be Puerto Rico? I don’t even want to know what territories Donald Jr., Eric, and Barron would represent.

Stranger

[RickJay]

Guam, American Samoa, and, of course, the U.S. Virgin Islands.