(Or: The Real Cause of the
American 'Civil War')
This was
Abe Lincoln’s moment. What he was saying was essentially this:
“Here’s the deal. Slavery is already legal and
constitutional under the U.S. system of government, and has been since
1776. We in the North have no qualms about making slavery “express and
irrevocable” right in the text of the U.S. Constitution. So if you are
worried about Northern instigators of slave rebellions, you are mistaken.
Stay in the union and your slave property will continue to be very well
protected.”
“Slavery is a very profitable business, and we in the North
intend to share in those profits. That is one of the main purposes of the
Morrill Tariff, which has just more than doubled the average tariff rate.
Since you, the South, export at least three-fourths of all your agricultural
products and rely so heavily on foreign trade, we in the North cannot – and
will not – tolerate the free-trade policies that you have written into your
Confederate Constitution. [The Confederate Constitution outlawed protectionist
tariffs altogether]. Free trade in the South, and a 50% tariff rate in
the North, the cornerstone of the Republican Party Platform of 1860, will
destroy the Northern ports and much of our commerce. We will not allow
this to happen. We have the willingness and the ability to inflict
violence, bloodshed, force, and invasion on the Southern people. We will
not back down this time to the South Carolina tariff nullifiers as my
predecessor, President Andrew Jackson did some thirty years ago.”
“We are not being any more greedy here than say, our European
counterparts. We only want to wet our beaks, so to speak, by taxing a
portion of your slave profits. There need not be any violence or
bloodshed –as long as you do what we say.”
This is how the Southern politicians understood the motivations
of the Yankee political elite in early 1861. Jefferson Davis himself
demonstrated this understanding in his own first inaugural address, delivered
in Montomery, Alabama, on February 18, 1861:
“[O]ur true policy is peace, and the freest trade which our
necessities will permit . . . and that . . . there should be the fewest
practicable restrictions upon the interchange of commodities . . . . If,
however, passion or the lust of dominion should cloud the judgment or inflame
the ambition of [the Northern states], we must prepare to meet the emergency
and to maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position we have
assumed . . .”
Whatever other reasons some of the
Southern states might have given for secession is irrelevant to the question of why
there was a war. Secession does not
necessitate war. Lincoln promised war over tax collection in his first
inaugural address. When the Southern states refused to pay his beloved
Morrill Tariff at the Southern ports, he kept his promise of “invasion and
bloodshed” and waged war on the Southern states. No gangster in the
history of the world has ever enforced an extortion racket on such a gargantuan
scale of death, plunder, and destruction.
