Day 1 of America's most important battle

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

b) That is assuming there was a war. Had the federal government not imposed tariffs on English goods (and I think some southern exports as well) the issue of states' rights would not have been a problem and there would have been no seccession. Of course, it may have happened again with some different issue, but I believe proper diplomatic response could avert war to any such crisis. Of course this is all speculation, no matter how reasoned it may be.

Sorry to isolate a single part of a post, but everyone has been carefully dancing around the slavery question, and I have to jump into it here.

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

This is not to say that the war was fought over slavery, as it was not.

The war was fought over secession and reunion. That much is obvious. But the state's right's and slavery problems date to the Constitution. Delegates from the northern states wanted to outlaw the importation of slaves. Delegates from the southern states threatened to abandon the convention if outvoted on that question. The Virginia Plan had representation being totally proportional to population. The smaller states wanted equal representation for each state. This led to the system we still have today, with the upper house (Senate) having equal representation for each state and the lower house (House of Representatives) having proportional representation. In either case Southern delegates argued that their populations were so small that slaves should be part of the enumeration (hence the 3/5ths rule, in which five slaves count as three free men for representation purposes). When the northern states objected, the southern states refused to take part unless they were accomodated. The northerners, realizing that unless they acted as a whole they would likely fail (there's that "hang together" thing again), were forced to compromise. The southerners agreed that importation of slaves would cease by 1807.

Side-note: did you know that a coalition of Federalists attempted to implement the secession of several New England states as a protest to the War of 1812?

The main argument of the early 1800s between North and South was the question of equality in numbers, the Southern states complaining that the vast majority of new states were 'Free' states. This lead to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which artificially forced the balance to remain equal. The Compromise of 1850 included the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Free States to return runaway slaves.

In 1854 South Carolina threatened to secede if John Fremont were to become president, simply because he represented the new Republican Party, and they were Abolitionist.

In 1860 South Carolina again threatened to secede if Abraham Lincoln was elected, for the same reason. They carried out this threat.

Of the original seven seceeding States, virtually every one of their Ordinances of Secession lists the leading cause as the refusal of certain Northern States to obey the Fugitive Slave Law, and South Carolina's refers to them directly as 'The Slave-Holding States'.

I don't argue that slavery was the only cause, or disagree with the concept that most of the soldiers and many of the leaders on both sides didn't have it in mind as a reason to go to war, but the war was fought over secession, and the Southern States seceded almost exclusively over the idea that the Northern States wanted them to give up their way of life, specifically slavery, and were willing to use Federal power to do it. Nowhere in their listed causes can I find mention of tariffs imposed on English goods.

Sorry to rant, but I think they stated their causes quite plainly, and nowhere in their listed causes can I find mention of tariffs imposed on English goods.