[combat_boots]

Grant’s Tea Pot dome comes to mind.

Look at Lincoln’s cabinet. Oligarchs with pure lust for power, competition with Lincoln, and eyes on Western development.

Chase
Seward
Stanton

http://www.mrlincolnandfriends.org/inside.asp?pageID=7&subjectID=7

This is why I look at the Civil War as THE power play for federal-and oligarchical-control of US development. Steel magnates, rail magnates, the lot of them, came out winners. If you look, you see that the transportation-canals and rail lines-went their way only. Small farmers and resource-rich land that had been settled were almost entirely ignored.

Yes, slavery was involved. I look, however, to the Missouri Compromise as the bellweather. That vote had to foretell which way the country would go from then on, and that there would be NO MORE COMPROMISE.

New England and its magnates won, and so we have that ethos in American politics to this day.

[DiogenesLamp]

Your argument is very insightful. I too have been noticing that today is a lot like it was in 1861. We still have the Northeastern portion of the Nation trying to impose their latest moral fad on the rest of us, and they always seem to have the money and power to do it.

Often US Policy appears to be just whatever helps this power block get richer.