Protective Tariffs: The Primary Cause of the Civil War

[Русский агент]

How about, instead of feeding this history major facts without an argument (like, hey, did you know that the USSR invaded Poland from the east?), you try to persuade us of something?

sure thing chief

some other time, k?

[domer76]

1) Poland being invaded by the USSR doesn't change the fact that Poland did not start WWII by being invaded, as people are claiming was the case with Ft Sumter.

2) France and Britain's declaration of war doesn't change the fact the Doucheland began the war by invading Poland. The responsibility lies entirely with the krauts.

Just more diversionary bullshit to derail the uncomfortable facts of slavery and secession.

[Cypress]

If an intellectually honest person reads the Declarations of Secessions of the Southern States, their wails and whines can basically be summed up as follows:

"Leave our slaves alone!"

Texas Declaration of Secession, 1861

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.

https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/aboutt.../2feb1861.html

Confederate States of America - Mississippi Declaration of Secession, 1861

-- A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union. --

In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp

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You are not clever. Dumbfuck southerners actually used this rhetoric to describe northern industrial workers. Where do you expect blacks were going to start - especially in hostile territory?

Oh ok, so after a million or so died from disease and starvation, you're suggesting that their lives were magically transformed because they were supposedly emancipated. I am not even sure what the North gained anyway as they destroyed the cotton plantations and agrarian economy of the South for many years. Meanwhile Britain and France were able to secure new supplies of cotton from Egypt and India, so they also kissed goodbye to those punitive tariffs.

[cancel2 2022]

If an intellectually honest person reads the Declarations of Secessions of the Southern States, their wails and whines can basically be summed up as follows:

"Leave our slaves alone!"

Read the OP ffs!!

[BentBow]

You are not clever. Dumbfuck southerners actually used this rhetoric to describe northern industrial workers. Where do you expect blacks were going to start - especially in hostile territory?

So, you understand the real reason UNIONs were established to keep the cheap labor from being exploited, and taking their jobs.

[Minister of Truth]

Read the OP ffs!!

Still refuse to read the secession documents, then? The OP is fiction - they are real pieces of history.

[Buckly J. Ewer]

Still refuse to read the secession documents, then? The OP is fiction - they are real pieces of history.

Poor Tom

[cancel2 2022]

Still refuse to read the secession documents, then? The OP is fiction - they are real pieces of history.

I have read​ them and they are a red herring. I will reiterate yet again that the North was far more interested in the punitive tariffs they levied on the South. Why do you persist in denying that? At least Karl Marx and Charles Dickens could see it even if you can't.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the American Civil War. Karl Marx defined it as a struggle between two historical epochs – the feudal and the capitalist. The victory of the latter made possible the eventual recognition of the human dignity and the civil rights of African-Americans.

Yet throughout the war British public sentiment favoured the slave-holding South. In October 1861 Marx, who was living in Primrose Hill, summed up the view of the British press: ‘The war between the North and South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty.’ That view was shared by Charles Dickens, who wrote: ‘The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.’

What Marx and the modern reader understands to be a moral question – the question of whether or not one man could own another – many contemporaries understood in terms of economics and law.

Prior to fighting, relations between the North and South had been poisoned by disputes over taxes. The North financed its industrial development through crippling taxes imposed by Congress on imported goods. The South, which had an agricultural economy and had to buy machinery from abroad, ended up footing the bill. When recession hit in the 1850s Congress hiked the import tax from 15 to 37 per cent. The South threatened secession and the North was outraged. An editorial in the Chicago Daily Times warned that if the South left the Union ‘in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one half of what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits’. War was the only alternative to financial ruin.

The North was broadly opposed to slavery and this cultural difference shaped the rhetoric of war. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was a free labour movement – rabidly so. Northern popular culture depicted Southerners as decadent, un-Christian sponges. Lincoln’s election in 1860 put government in the hands of the man most identified with anti-Dixie prejudice. Inevitably Southerners interpreted it as a Northern coup d’état.

Economic and cultural fear propelled the country into war. But slavery was rarely the issue at hand. While the Republican Party was anti-slavery, it was not abolitionist. In his 1861 inaugural address Lincoln stated: ‘I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so … If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.’ High-minded though its rhetoric was, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 only freed slaves in areas occupied by Union forces. Slave-holding states fighting for the Union were exempted. Secretary of State William H. Steward commented: ‘We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.’

The roots of economic difference between North and South lay in their labour systems. As Marx observed: ‘The whole movement was and is based, as one sees, on the slave question. Not in the sense of whether the slaves within the existing slave states should be emancipated outright or not, but whether the 20 million free men of the North should submit any longer to an oligarchy of three hundred thousand slaveholders.’ But the record shows that Northern greed and anti-Southern prejudice played a big role in the Civil War too.

http://www.historytoday.com/tim-stan...h-south-divide

[BentBow]

You can always become the first southern apologist to read the secession documents to find out why. God knows Tom never will.

Also, blockades are an act of war, not sanctions. Otherwise Douchebag Donald's talk of protectionism is a shot fired at China.

You are being irrational, by using today's values, placed on 1860's mankind. That is being dishonest with yourself and everyone you are trying to sell, lies to.

[Minister of Truth]

You are being irrational, by using today's values, placed on 1860's mankind. That is being dishonest with yourself and everyone you are trying to sell, lies to.

There are certain timeless principles that are as relevant today. Racism may have been a universal trait in 1860, but, so was patriotism and the rule of law.

[Minister of Truth]

I have read​ them and they are a red herring. I will reiterate yet again that the North was far more interested in the punitive tariffs they levied on the South. Why do you persist in denying that? At least Karl Marx and Charles Dickens could see it even if you can't.



http://www.historytoday.com/tim-stan...h-south-divide

Tom, you are a lying dunce. The secession documents are the literal soul of the Confederacy. They are its founding creed; its very reason for existing.

[BentBow]

There are certain timeless principles that are as relevant today. Racism may have been a universal trait in 1860, but, so was patriotism and the rule of law.

Contract law, has always been used in a civilized society.
Someone broke the contract and still wanted the job done for free.
Again, you are placing the valued used today, on 1860's mankind. It doesn't work, to rationalize how we got where we are today, with so much hatred and resentment, over something that occurred 150 years ago. That is insanity.
Why create a victim, when they are all dead?

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Tom, you are a lying dunce. The secession documents are the literal soul of the Confederacy. They are its founding creed; its very reason for existing.

It is pointless talking to you, you say you have a history degree so you must know that the North was crucifying the South with tariffs and then spending most of the proceeds on themselves. That is a recipe for revolt, as described by Marx and Dickens.

According to author Leo Tolstoy, the most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he already knows, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.

[Minister of Truth]

Contract law, has always been used in a civilized society.
Someone broke the contract and still wanted the job done for free.
Again, you are placing the valued used today, on 1860's mankind. It doesn't work, to rationalize how we got where we are today, with so much hatred and resentment, over something that occurred 150 years ago. That is insanity.
Why create a victim, when they are all dead?

Are you saying treason (and subsequent attack) against America was virtuous in 1860? Is it still today?