This is the prime aspect of what I believe to be the real cause of the war. With the Southern Tariff being so much lower, and European demand for Cotton and Tobacco very high, a huge chunk of trade that would ordinarily go through New York and New England, would then go through Charleston, Savanna and New Orleans.
And independent South cuts the financial throats of very powerful men in the New England states.
Lincoln came to power through the support of these men and these areas, and his political philosophy which he acquired from his mentor Henry Clay was "mercantilism."
I take that to mean money and business interests decide his inclination in weighty national matters.
Thanks for posting those newspaper excerpts. They indeed conform to what I have only been recently suspecting about the real cause of the Civil War; The Loss of huge sums of money to the New England states because of a freer trade with the south in the absence of governmental interference with the market.
I shall have no government -- no resources." It is no wonder that Lincoln instigated war with the South and blockaded Southern ports.
Yes, this perspective explains a great deal of things that I never understood. When I was learning about the Civil war in High School, one of the things the teacher mentioned quite a lot was the Union blockade of the Confederacy.
The argument was that it was necessary for the Union to win, but I couldn't comprehend this point. My thinking was that pretty much everyone who was going to fight for the Confederacy was already there, and so what did a blockade have to do with winning the war?
The South had guns, they had men, they had horses, they had the tools to make more guns and weapons, so how is the Blockade crucial to winning the war?
Looking at things from an economical perspective, it becomes very obvious why they needed to blockade southern ports and why it was essential to winning the war.
If the European powers were allowed to get acclimated to making much greater profits from dealing with the Confederacy, it would reach a point where European support for their independence would become too powerful to oppose.
Let the Europeans become accustomed to making far greater profits in trade directly with the South, and it would cause them to have a very strong interest in making certain the South remain independent.
For the Union, it would have lost the war. Allowing European shipping into the Confederacy would have simply lost the war. Not from anything the Europeans might ship over to the South, but from the realization that European financial interests were very much enhanced by trade directly with the South.
And this makes sense. The war wasn't about slavery, it was about money. Who gains it and who loses it. That's what the war was fought about.
"Slavery" was just a propaganda tool.
The economic argument explains Lincoln's motives in instigating a war.
He sent an armed expedition down to Fort Sumter that his cabinet had warned would cause a shooting war.
He started the official planning for the Fort Sumter expedition immediately after the Senate adjourned its special session on March 28. At that point in time, it was widely circulated that Fort Sumter was to be evacuated. That's what the Confederate Commissioners had been told by Seward. That's what Lincoln's personal messenger Ward Lamon had intimated to South Carolina's Governor Pickens.
The special session's very last act on March 28 was to check with the President to see whether he had anything to tell them. From the Congressional Globe:
Mr. Powell, from the committee appointed to wait on the President of the United States and notify him that unless he has some further communication to make, the Senate is ready to adjourn, reported that the committee had waited on the President, and been informed by him that he had no further communication to make to the Senate.
On March 29, Lincoln officially ordered Welles and Cameron to prepare the secret relief expedition to Sumter. Actually however, if I remember correctly, a draft plan document was started on the 28th. Wasn't an expedition that would likely or possibly result in a shooting war important enough to inform the Senate?
Lincoln did not call for Congress to reconvene until July 4. In contrast, Jefferson Davis reconvened his Congress in a little more than two weeks. Shouldn't Lincoln's Congress have been involved in questions of war and peace? By keeping his Congress out of session, Lincoln was able to do various things without checks and balances (redirecting authorized budget money to things which had not been approved by Congress, changing the enrollment period for troops from what Congress had authorized, assuming legislative and judicial powers that were not his under the Constitution, starting a blockade of Southern ports).
A blockade was a recognized act of war. Open hostilities between sides may or may not be. The US Supreme Court later ruled that the war started on April 19th when Lincoln issued his proclamation of the blockade. [Link].
Lincoln succeeded in manipulating the country into war. However, that was not what I was taught in high school American history class.