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God save us all from your type of Liberty.

I would say the same for the "type of liberty" that characterized the antebellum or post-Reconstruction South.

We know from archived records that even before his election, Lincoln wanted to implement a neo-Hamiltonian Whig-Republican economic system. It irked him that he was blocked by the Constitution and particularly, by the South, who staunchly favored states rights and free trade. Punitive taxes and tariffs had already been imposed that weakened the South's position, before Lincoln was elected.

In what sense was "a neo-Hamiltonian Whig-Republican economic system" "blocked by the Constitution"? It was constitutional in Hamilton's day. It was constitutional when later Jeffersonian Republicans like Madison and Monroe established a national bank and a protective tariff. Such policies were not the fashion in Jacksonian days and might be bad economics or politics, but in no way were they unconstitutional.

Tariff readjustment was in the cards even during the administration of Southern-oriented Democrat James Buchanan. When depression struck, the government thought it needed the money, and the tariff was the primary source of revenue. Tariff rates had been quite low for a generation.

So an upward adjustment was coming. It did not have to be so high. That was a result of the Democrats splitting, the Southerners leaving Congress and the need for financing the war. Had Southernern political leaders really cared about free trade most, any increase in the tariff would have been far more modest. But slavery and the dream of a Southern nation obsessed them to the point where they no longer cared so much about tariffs.

What arguments like Tom DiLorenzo's ignore is the centrality of slavery in the debates of the 1850s. Sure, Lincoln had been a Whig in the 1830s and 1840s and still accepted many Whig principles, but to argue that he was above all motivated by the Whig agenda is to neglect the bitter disputes of the years leading up to his election. DiLorenzo even had to lie about the Lincoln-Douglas debates to put economic questions at the center of the 1858 Senate campaign.

While the states retained powers under the 10th Amendment, secession, which contradicts the supremacy clause of the Constitution was not among those rights. Washington, Madison, Marshall, Jackson, and other prominent leaders of the Republic agreed with Lincoln about this.

I don't think that the Civil War is so relevant to discussion of today's politics. But if you want to drag it into the forefront, I'll always be ready with counter-arguments.

[Tokhtamish]

If slavery was not central to the Confederate cause, then why did they not emancipate and recruit black slaves ? Why was the South's price for reconciliation the blood drenched imposition of Jim Crow ?

Demidog, you maintain the ludicrous libertarian fiction that America somehow can exempt itself from world history, from patterns of force. Only a libertarian or an idiot would choose to fight without allies. Only a libertarian or an idiot could not see in 1939 that the Axis Powers would someday come after us. In fact, a Gallup Poll taken in 1939 found 60% of the American people understood that if the Axis won this war, we're next. So I should think that basic common sense should make it clear that their winning the war would be a very, very bad thing and something that basic survival self interest (funny how libertarians have this incredible sense of entitlement, as if survival were a given) should dictate against.

Libertarianism is a totally American ideology. Only a country with an ocean on either side and weak continental neighbors could be that geopolitically pampered. The rest of the world, nations which know what it is to have dangerous neighbors, cannot be so frivolous.