Ranking of U.S. Presidents by historians

Originally Posted by tater

thorn69 posits something that no thinking person can agree with, hence instant derailment.

SS has no agenda at all. Gotta love thorn69 saying that he'd be a nazi supporter had THEY won. Absurd. Facts are facts. Southern secession had the fate of slavery as the primary cause.

Thorn claims it was the Morrill Tariff that made the South break apart, even though it was passed AFTER the bulk of States had already left (which is precisely how it passed (signed 2 days before Lincoln took office, BTW) since the reduced congress was unbalanced to the North politically then.

Quit while you're only behind a lot.

Believe what you want but you're only making yourself look foolish. The South didn't secede from the north over slavery. It was their constitutional right to buy and own slaves at that time. You're logic doesn't make any sense at all. Unfair taxes targeted at wealthy Southerners is what caused the Southern states to secede from the north. All of it falls under states rights and US Constitutional rights. Slavery was mixed into all of this because people had the right to buy and sell slaves, but that one thing had very little if anything to do with the want to secede from the Union.

@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.

But what's changed? Today we don't call it slavery but in essence everyone is a slave to somebody. You make like 1/1000th that your employer makes most likely. You work for him just like a slave had to work for his master. You hate him for being rich and powerful and making you work so hard for your keep but you remain quite about it because you know that only fools bite the hand that feeds them! So we don't call it slavery and before someone states that you're not forced to work I think you're wrong. Try to live a life without a job in the country and see if you don't land in jail eventually. You still owe taxes believe it or not. Imagine all the homeless people going to go to Federal prison under Obama's health care plan. Can't pay for health care you get fined. Don't pay the fine - Go to prison and still get fined! That's freedom? Give me a break!

[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.