Letting the left meme is like giving a toddler a gun...
(media.communities.win)
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That wasn't the reason for the war according to Lincoln, the corporate railroad attorney turned President. He is the only president to call for an amendment to make slavery express and irrevocable:
He also explicitly stated that he would only invade the south if they didn't pay their taxes:
The civil war started because the Northern robber-barons wanted to tax the South to subsidize their corporate railroads.
Spez: As a native American whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy against the Federal government that displaced them, I'll be happy to accept the $2 million, adjusted for inflation, owed to me as compensation for the slaves and land stolen by whitey.
Which is why it makes so little sense to blame him for the Civil War. He bent over backwards to appease the South. Although this would merely make explicit what was already believed - that the Constitution protected slavery.
Which they of course didn't. That was just face-saving on his part, to pretend that he was going to continue to enforce the laws, when he sure as hell was not going to.
That makes little sense. This was not even cited as a grievance. And secession happened way before the new President even took office.
Personal liberty laws and the absence of protection for slavery in the territories were. Though the actual causes are quite complex. Once the first state forced a crisis, your choice is no longer whether or not you find secession desirable, but whether you're going to join SC in defying the Feds, or hanging SC out to dry.
You're killing the poor guy. There's no way he's going to solve that equation without his brain breaking even more than it was already.
Boiling the civil war down to a single issue will always be a bit spurious, but the tariff debate(Tariff of Abominations, Black Tariff, Walker Tariff, etc) was the most signifcant clevage point as it had almost pushed South Carolina over the edge in 1833.
Hardly really. The South was in control of the federal government for nearly all the time before the 1860s. And let us assume that the real issue, or the most important issue as you say, was tariffs. It is really strange that it was barely or not brought up in the extended negotiations about trying to mend the rift. It was always about concessions regarding slavery, and particularly slavery in the territories.
Slavery in the new territory is less about slavery itself and more about balance of power. Like all conflicts, it's ultimately a case of competing elites vying for control, and the side that only wanted to protect their own interests lost to the side that wanted to expand their control over the other, as is the most common resolution to such conflicts.
Well, precisely, and the significance of that Sean Wilentz describes in No Property In Men. However, considering the fact that the federal government, this was de facto protection for slavery, and the 3/5 Compromise, far from "WE WUZ CONSIDERED 3/5 OF A HUMAN", was a great boon to the slaveholders, who could now gain increased representation.