Ranking of U.S. Presidents by historians

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by thorn69

@Tak Shin - I've said before that slavery was thought to be a necessity for building the foundations of our nation. This is why it was added to the Constitution. The north depended on slavery just as much as the South. But once people got jealous about how prosperous people in the South were getting off slavery - something had to be done to stop it. It was never the fact that those people grew a heart and wanted it to stop. They were bitterly jealous of the growth in the South and making only a few coins in a sweat shop up north as a white man didn't seem right when you saw another white man in the South living the high life off doing very little himself.

And so, the Fugitive Slave Act was part of the Compromise of 1850, which sought to achieve political balance between states relying upon forced labor and those not. This five-part legislative peace lasted until the Kansas-Missouri Act of 1854, which insenced both sides of the argument. At it's core was the economic reality of the slave-based agricultural system and it's survival. As such, the right to own slaves was the central issue of every event that lead to the beginning of the American Civil War, even by your own admission.

Quo erat demonstratum.

[tater]

Originally Posted by thorn69

Unfair taxes targeted at wealthy Southerners is what caused the Southern states to secede from the north.

What taxes, name them.

You said Lincoln imposed the taxes and therefore caused them to leave, yet the bulk of the Confederacy was already formed before Lincoln actually took office.

So you are claiming that Lincoln taxed the South which caused them to secede before he was elected. Also, the tax to which you almost certainly refer was passed into law AFTER they seceded, so I guess you think they were overtaxed after they left?

Slavery was the primary cause. Everything else was secondary to it, or related. There were mostly rich southerners entirely because of slavery (reinvigorated after the cotton gin was invented). So even southern wealth relates to slavery. The "State's Right" they wished to protect was SLAVERY. Nothing more.

Your take is revisionism, and makes serious conservatives (like myself) look like idiots when we're painted with the same brush.

[razark]

Originally Posted by thorn69

@Tak Shin - I've said before that slavery was thought to be a necessity for building the foundations of our nation. This is why it was added to the Constitution.

To be clear, the northern states kept slavery because with out it, the southern states wouldn't have ratified the Constitution.

The northern states considered slavery necessary for the foundation of the country, not for "building the foundations of our nation." There's a difference.