[supremedoctrine]

Thanks for posting this. We have all been brainwashed with a comic-book version of what the Civil War was all about, and the ramifications that flow from it, and flowed into it.

[jsanders2001]

Good post. Now post it to the NAACP who hold Lincoln in such high regard.

[wideawake]

Uncharacteristically misleading commentary by Williams.

Not every civil war's sole focus is taking over the existing government.

We get the term from classical antiquity, and its use among the Romans.

The Romans used it to describe both wars that were waged to overthrow the government entirely, or to alienate territory from the government.

The US Civil War clearly fits into the latter category.

The issue in the Civil War was not slavery in the Southern slave states.

It was the extension of slavery into Federal territories and the violation of free state statutes that precipitated the Confederate attack on the Union which began the war.

[Sherman Logan]

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Or definitions.

A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government.

civil war n 1. (Military) war between parties, factions, or inhabitants of different regions within the same nation

The definition he is using in just inaccurate. I looked at about a dozen dictionaries. All had the same basic meaning as #1.

[WildHighlander57]

Many thanks for this info!

[Sherman Logan]

Why didn't Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession? Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our nation's history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs.

Inaccurate. For most of the nation's history prior to 1860, considerable funding was provided by sale of public lands.

During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue.

Not sure whether this is accurate or not.

Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859.

Wildly inaccurate.

Tariffs were charged only on imports and were paid where the importation occurred.

"New Orleans was the southern port that collected the most in the tariff, and it was only $3.1 million. The total south only collected $4.0 million in tariff revenues, whereas New York City collected $34.9 million in tariff revenues and the total for northern ports was $48.3 million."

https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/the-georgia-scv-lies-about-history-morrill-tariff-edition/

IOW, northern ports paid well over 90% of tariffs.

If you're going to post stuff about "forgotten facts," don't you think it might be a good idea to make sure the facts are actually facts first?

[EternalVigilance]

Lincoln was a pretty standard Whig politician that God in His providence forced into a moral corner. He did the same thing with the whole country, in His good time.

Reading Lincoln’s speeches carefully you can discern the slow but steady transformation, from the pre-war quotes - quite egregious to our modern ear - laid out in the article above, into this, from his second inaugural adddress:

“One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Those are the wise words of a changed, much more mature, much deeper, man. War is hell, and those who go through it are not the same when they come out as when they went in.

And of course, his refined-by-fire eloquence finally reached its zenith in his immortal address at Gettysburg.

By the way, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the bitter fruit of the compromise of the founders on the matter of chattel slavery that would have to be eaten by their grandchildren, and he issued the stern warning that today is inscribed on his memorial in the national capital:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

What will be the destructive fruit of our generation’s surrender of equal protection for innocent babies, and the abandonment of marriage and the natural family?

Time will tell, but it ain’t gonna be pretty or fun.

[DiogenesLamp]

Gem of an article. It is the exact same stuff I have been saying, and the exact same stuff my debating opponents have been vehemently denying. It is good to see Dr. Williams schooling the naive and willfully ignorant on this matter.

You lot out there, I hope you are listening. Dr. Williams is no fool.

[rockrr]

Poor Walter - lost cause foolishness just taints everything else he says.

[iowamark]

Amazingly full of factual errors. Confederates did in fact attack Washington. Slave masters were fighting a war of independence? Independence for who?

[Sherman Logan]

Walter, Walter, Walter. Selective quoting does not become you. Lincoln at the debate at Ottawa: "I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. ... I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. ... But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

This simply cannot be extrapolated to Lincoln not opposing slavery. All it shows is that, in common with most white men of his time, he opposed (at the time he spoke) giving blacks full civil rights.

Saying otherwise verges on a lie.

[iowamark]

http://deadconfederates.com/tag/southern-ports-paid-75-percent-of-tariffs-in-1859/
Walter E. Williams Polishes the Turd on Tariffs

"The other day, George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams published an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner, asking in the title, “was the Civil War about tariff revenue?” Like many of his columns that deal with that conflict, he tosses in all sorts of obfuscatory boilerplate about Lincoln not liking black folks much, how the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t actually free all the slaves, and how Lincoln, more than a decade before the war began, had made some general comments about the inherent right of revolution. Williams doesn’t get around to discussing, you know, tariff revenue, until the very end, more than nine-tenths of the way through the 657-word piece, when he says (my emphasis),

 

Following the money might help with an answer. Throughout most of our history, the only sources of federal revenue were excise taxes and tariffs. During the 1850s, tariffs amounted to 90 percent of federal revenue. Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859. What “responsible” politician would let that much revenue go?

 

I want to focus on that line about Southern ports paying 75% of import tariffs, because it’s the core of his entire argument. He’s playing an classic trick, throwing out some impressive factoid, and then asking a rhetorical question based on it, that seemingly has an obvious answer. The problem is that, in this case, his devastating “fact” — “Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859″ — isn’t even close to being true.

The first red flag here is that annual tariff data was not collected and reported by the Treasury Department based on calendar years, but by fiscal years that ran from July 1 to June 30. So when Williams says “in 1859,” it’s unclear whether he’s talking about the reporting year that ended in 1859 (FY 1859), or the reporting year that began in 1859 (FY 1860). That’s a revealing slip-up, but it’s also one that doesn’t matter, because the claim is demonstrably untrue for both fiscal years, and so for the calendar year of 1859, as well.

Data for imports and tariffs collected for the year just prior to secession (July 1, 1859 to June 30, 1860, inclusive) is provided in the Annual Report of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York, for the Year 1860-61 (New York: John Amerman, 1861), 57-66. I’ve uploaded a PDF copy of the relevant pages here. The first two pages include imports that were not tariffed; in case anyone was wondering, manures and guano were duty-free.

In summary, during that year the Port of New York took in $233.7M, of which $203.4M were subject to tariffs ranging from 4 to 30%. During that same period, all other U.S. ports combined received $128.5M in imports, of which $76.5M was subject to tariff. So the Port of New York, by itself, handled almost two-thirds (64.5%) of the value of all U.S. imports, and almost three-quarters (72.7%) of the value of all tariffed imports:

What about earlier years? The previous year’s report from the New York State Chamber of Commerce carries a table (p. 2) that breaks out imports clearing customs in all of New York State for the previous four fiscal years:

A glance at these numbers makes clear that in spite of some year-to-year variation in import volumes — there was an economic crash in 1857 — the share of imports coming into New York remained remarkably stable, at around two-thirds of all imports coming into the United States. (And this isn’t even including other major ports like Boston and Philadelphia.)

What about customs revenues, specifically? The Chamber of Commerce from 1860 reports — on the very first page — customs revenue for Port of New York for 1859 at $38,834,212, or about 63.5% of the $61.1M in federal revenue that year. The Port of New York, alone, accounted for nearly two-thirds of U.S. Government revenue in 1859. Williams’ assertion that “Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs in 1859″ isn’t a case of “lying with statistics,” because the statistics don’t actually say anything remotely like that. It’s a case of lying, period.

So where does this made-up-from-whole-cloth assertion come from? Williams’ column has been splattered all over the Internet in the last few days, no doubt because it seemingly affirms modern cultural/political fears about big gubmint avarice. But the idea that Lincoln refused to accede to the Southern states’ secession because they represented the large majority of federal government’s revenue has been percolating around for a while. Thomas DiLorenzo — who Williams cites in the first graf of the piece — made a related and equally implausible claim in his 2002 book, (The Real Lincoln, pp. 125-26) that “in 1860 the Southern states were paying in excess of 80 percent of all tariffs. . . .” People who’d looked at the actual numbers, including friend-of-this-blog Jim Epperson, called him out on that claim, which DiLorenzo eventually (and quietly) revised in his most recent edition to a somewhat more vague “were paying the Lion’s share of all tariffs.” DiLorenzo, not surprisingly, provides no citation to back this claim. But it’s and old turd of a notion that’s been around a long time, that Walter Williams has pulled out, polished off, and given new life on the interwebs.

(DiLorenzo’s wording is a little different, saying that the “Southern states” were paying tariffs. It’s a strange construction, given that the states weren’t paying tariffs at all, and the tariffs were paid by the merchants doing the importing — who were generally Northerners. Even if DiLorenzo were to argue that it was the end-of-the-line consumer who “paid” the tarfiff through higher costs for goods, it’s a claim that defies credulity, as it would require the eleven states that ultimately seceded, with less than a third of the nation’s population, to be consuming more than four-fifths of all the tariffed good brought into the entire county. It’s a ludicrous notion, which is probably why DiLorenzo doesn’t even pretend to offer a source for it.)

Williams and DiLorenzo have both made a good living writing books and essays and giving speeches that are full of half-truths, selective quotes, and (as in this case) outright fabrications, all directed to a narrow but extremely-loyal audience of people who are primed to believe anything bad about the federal government (then or now). Both men hold endowed academic appointments, which means they cost their respective institutions relatively little, and in return are free of heavy teaching loads and the imperative of generating peer-reviewed publications that stalk most faculty members through much of their careers. Fair enough, but Williams’ assertion that “Southern ports paid 75 percent of tariffs” is surely in a league by itself. On its face it strains credulity; one needs only a basic understanding of American history to know how overwhelmingly the Northern Atlantic states and New England dominated this country’s maritime trade through the end of the 19th century. True Southrons™ often cite the heavy involvement of Northern shipping interests in the transatlantic slave trade, but that’s a selective and self-serving focus; that same region overwhelmingly dominated every other aspect of American maritime enterprise, from shipbuilding to whaling to the China trade to the nascent practice of marine engineering.

Williams surely knows this, and knows his assertion about the share of import tariffs paid through Southern ports is preposterous. If he doesn’t know it, he’s unworthy of his credentials, and if he does and asserts it anyway because that’s what his audience wants to hear, then he’s a charlatan on the order of someone like David Barton. I really can’t imagine what’s worse — the idea that he doesn’t actually know he’s wrong, or the idea that he doesn’t give a damn.

____________

UPDATE, February 25: In the comments, Craig Swain points out that he covered this same ground two years ago, over at Robert Moore’s place. I owe Craig an apology, because I not only read that post of his at the time, I also commented on it. I’d completely forgotten about that, at least consciously. Craig does a particularly good job of showing how those same tariff laws, which supposedly were so beneficial to Northern industries, also protected Southerners’ production of things like cotton, tobacco and sugar from competition from overseas.

Given the way spurious claims about tariffs are made over and over again by folks like Williams, naturally they’ve been exposed by others before. But it’s hard to use evidence to counter a belief that’s not based on evidence to begin with."

[DoodleDawg]

Why is it that the only people who believe that the Union cause was over slavery are the Confederate supporters?

[Boogieman]

“Why didn’t Lincoln share the same feelings about Southern secession?”

Because he was a hypocrite.

[Robert DeLong]

True dat.

[HamiltonJay]

I have pointed out the fact the Emancipation Proclamation was a political tool to keep Europe from entering the war on the side of the south and nothing more for decades, as does any true student of history.

Whenever I have anyone argue me this point, I ask them to read the document, and tell me what it says. When they finish reading the second paragraph I stop them, and ask them to read it again.

I ask them do you understand what you just read? This instantly separates someone who has had just a remote amount of true history about the Civil War, from the mindless drones who graduated form US Public High Schools. Because anyone who has just an inkling of true exposure to this period of our history will know that that both MD and WV were both states where slavery was legal and were part of the Union during the civil war, in fact its how WV became a state to begin with.. as it did not want to leave the Union with the rest of Virginia.

The second paragraph makes it quite clear that it does not free all slaves, it only freed slaves in territories currently in rebellion, of which at the time the US government had no active authority over. Had Lincoln truly desired to free the slaves, all slaves, he could have not conditionalized this document to only cover those in the CSA.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a political step, that made it impossible for Europe to enter the war, which they were debating and quite likely going to do, on the side of the CSA. This document instantly made it politically impossible for the nations of Europe to do so, but also made sure that no slave owners or their interests in WV and MD would be wronged and risk political fallout up to and including further secession of states into the CSA.

However, facts don’t matter, as we have a nation of idiots today that are truly becoming dumber and less informed with every passing day.

[Pelham]

ping!

[HandyDandy]

One way to look at it is that the South saw an immediate and imminent threat to their way of life merely by the election of Lincoln. The writing was on the wall. The "peculiar institution" was unsustainable. The Civil War was fought by the South to preserve their way of life. The Civil War was fought by the North to preserve the Union.

Another thing to consider is that Lincoln, while maintaining his belief in the inferiority of the negro to the white man, Freed Them, "because no man should earn his bread by the sweat of another man's face". Indeed, a remarkable man. To this day we see a very large population of the people freed by Father Abraham (as they called him) surrounding Washington DC, because they flocked to be near him when the War Between The States ended.

And finally, I think that all debates in this thread would be moot, if only Honest Abe had been able to complete his second term.

IMHO

[PaulZe]

The official name of the war is The War of the Rebellion, not the Civil War, not War between the states, or the War of Northern Aggression for that matter.

[Sherman Logan]

You always know you’re in trouble when the first paragraph contains a glaring untruth, something that can be immediately shown by consulting any dictionary.