On March 12, 1861, a week after Lincoln’s inauguration and a month before Fort Sumter, the New York Evening Post, another Republican Party mouthpiece, advocated a preemptive strike against the Southern free traders with a naval attack that would “abolish all ports of entry” into the Southern states.
The Newark Daily Advertiser, meanwhile, expressed its disgust that Southerners had apparently “taken to their bosoms the liberal and popular doctrine of free trade,” and that they “may be willing to go . . . toward free trade with the European powers.”
“The chief instigator of the present troubles—South Carolina—have all along for years been preparing the way for the adoption of free trade,” and must therefore be stopped “by the closing of the ports” by military force.
http://mises.org/daily/1168
Yeah. The tyrant and his party were generally ambivalent about slavery. Slavery in the north didn’t end until after the war.