Lincoln said the Civil War was about taxes, not slavery

Abraham Lincoln repeatedly stated his war was caused by taxes only, and not by slavery, at all.

"My policy sought only to collect the Revenue (a 40 percent federal sales tax on imports to Southern States under the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861)." reads paragraph 5 of Lincoln's First Message to the U.S. Congress, penned July 4, 1861.

"I have no purpose, directly or in-directly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so," Lincoln said it his first inaugural on March 4 of the same year.

There is no proof of Lincoln ever declaring the war was fought to abolish slavery, and without such an official statement, the war-over-slavery teaching remains a complete lie and offensive hate speech that divides Americans, as is being done now by the media and politicians regarding the Confederate flag in South Carolina.

Slavery was NOT abolished; just the name was changed to sharecropper with over 5 million Southern whites and 3 million Southern blacks working on land stolen by Wall Street bankers.

White, black, Indian, Hispanic, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish Confederates valiantly stood as one in thousands of battles on land and sea. Afterwards, they attended Confederate Veterans' reunions together and received pensions from Southern States.

Photos of black Confederate veterans may be seen in Alabama's Archives in Scrapbook – 41st Reunion of United Confederate Veterans, Montgomery, June 2,3,4 and 5, 1931."

Lincoln did not claim slavery was a reason even in his Emancipation Proclamations on Sept. 22, 1862, and Jan. 1, 1863. Moreover, Lincoln's proclamations exempted a million slaves under his control from being freed (including General U.S. Grant's four slaves) and offered the South three months to return to the Union (pay 40 percent sales tax) and keep their slaves. None did. Lincoln affirmed his only reason for issuing was: "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said (tax) rebellion."

Mrs. Grant wrote in her personal memoirs: "We rented our pretty little home (in St. Louis) and hired out our four servants to persons whom we knew and who promised to be kind to them. Eliza, Dan, Julia and John belonged to me. When I visited the General during the War, I nearly always had Julia with me as nurse."

Lincoln declared war to collect taxes in his two presidential war proclamations against the Confederate States, on April 15 and 19th, 1861: "Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein."

On Dec. 25, 1860, South Carolina declared unfair taxes to be a cause of secession: "The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three-fourths (75%) of them are expended at the North (to subsidize Wall Street industries that elected Lincoln)." (Paragraphs 5-

It was on April 8, 1861, that Lincoln, alone, started the war by a surprise attack on Charleston Harbor with a fleet of warships, led by the USS Harriet Lane, to occupy Fort Sumter, a Federal tax collection fort in the territorial waters of South Carolina and then invaded Virginia.
http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/06/war-over-slavery_rhetoric_is_i.html

 

Well, there you have it. Straight from the horse's mouth even though this has been discussed ad nauseum. And I would think that Lincoln would know...

 

What were the causes of the war? The seceding states themselves were quite clear about their reasons.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States PRIMARY SOURCES

In their own words:

Georgia

Mississippi

South Carolina

Texas

 

Good job cherry picking.

 

So I gather the OPer won't be voting for Lincoln in the Republican primary, correct?

 

The Civil War was fought to establish Federalism. End of discussion.

 

Great points!!! The revisionists are out in force these days.

Yes folks... the Civil War was about SLAVERY!!!

 

Secession was about slavery. The war was not. Slavery was still legal in the Union even after the war was over.

 

The war was about preventing secession.

That means the war was about slavery.

By the way...the trigger was the fear that Republicans would have the new territories enter the Union as free states tilting the balance toward that condition.

Because of that they seceeded.

 

While many still debate the ultimate causes of the Civil War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that, "The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries."

 

Two questions:

Did the Union declare war to end slavery?

Was slavery legal in the Union during the entire duration of the Civil War?

 

Who cares what it was about? It ultimately freed the slaves. Is there anybody that thinks that was a bad thing?

 

Lincoln waged the war to "preserve the union" and so to say he was some righteous guy whose mission was to free the slaves has caused us to hold him in higher esteem than we should. Frankly, the north would have been better off without the south, so Lincoln waging war on them, causing the most horrendous American casualties in history, is almost as immoral as slavery itself. And being free of the south, social justice on the north would have progressed more quickly and served as a model for the barbaric south.

 

Whatever Lincoln fought the war over the fact that the Southern States seceded in order to continue slavery is beyond dispute. They then started the war to keep the institution of slavery alive. Most of them said so clearly and repeatedly, and it was stated explicitly in the Confederate Constitution

This BS over stated and proximate causes is the same as was done in Hitler's War by the Denialist David Irving, which tried to say WWII was all because Germany was being treated badly and had nothing to do with the Jews or Hitler's view of non Aryans as untermenschen at all. It was an idiot apology for pure evil in that case and is the same in this case too. The South wanted to keep blacks enslaved forever and would never have given it up on their own. They loved slavery because humans make such good domestic animals, no other reason. The jerktards who are proud of their ancestors that did this should own that fact or go the (*)(*)(*)(*) home, nobody's listening to their lying excuses any more.

 

It certainly would have been harder for Hitler to seize power without the frustration from WWI. It's harder to say jews need to be killed if things are going well. Your whole "they were just evil" approach is an oversimplification that does less to prevent a reoccurrence than a more complete view.

The South was still a horrible place after the civil war, and for the next 100+ years, they were a drag on American progress that caused conditions to still be relatively horrible for black people. The Civil War wasn't mission accomplished for human rights in regard to black people. So its primary accomplishment was the loss of many American lives and the destruction of the South. We should have let them be another country so that America could move on from their baggage and they can learn their own basic morality lessons

 

This is the post I was looking for

The purpose for the civil war was to maintain the union, it is in fact a statement from Lincoln himself that his top priority was to save the union. He even stated he would have no slaves freed at all IF he believed it was better for the union

However, why was there a fight to maintain the union to begin with? because southern states were seceding form the union, and why were they seceding?.. well, according to the southern states themselves

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth."

As for the notion that the states seceded for tax related purposes, that is a highly preposterous notion. For one there was no federal taxes before the civil war other than those used for tariffs. The problem with the notion that southern states' reason for secession was over tarrifs is 1. Before seceding the US's tariffs were written by the southern states themselves (this was yielded AFTER the southern states seceded from the union), and 2. After seceding, the confederate states applied their own tariffs, much more than this, these tariffs included goods coming from Northern states.. if the southern states were looking to avoid tariffs, they did a pretty lousy job

 

The Union declared war because the traitors in the Confederacy attacked a Union military instillation (Ft. Sumter). The confederate traitors attacked because the Union wouldn't recognize their secession, and their secession was over slavery.

You can tap dance around the question until your feet bleed, but the traitors gave their reasons in their own words and in their constitution. It was all about slavery and white supremacy for the traitors, and the traitors started the shooting. Therefore, the war was about slavery. Federal dominance was simply the end product after the traitors were crushed.

 

Cherry picking?

That's what the OP did.

All the states in the CSA had seceeded long before Lincoln made remarkes.

And Lincoln's words can easily be interpreted to mean that he did not recognize the soverignty of the CSA, and expected the states to forward their lawfully collected Tarriff revenue (which had dropped to near zero by that point because of the blockade). The Confederacy imported practically nothing because its ports were blockaded and they had no hard cash to pay for anything.

EVERY secession document specifically mentioned preserving the institution of slavery.

Why the far right persists in these dishonest attempts to rewrite history is beyond me.

 

Really. IS this just one more thing they feel the need to be wrong about?

 

The republican party has always been about protecting the profits of corporations. Lincoln knew that if the south seceded it would have destroyed the corporations in the north that were getting the raw materials from the south. The south felt that they were getting screwed by the corporations that were keeping all the profits. The republicans gladly sacrificed the lives of 750,000 Americans for the profits of the corporations. The more things change, the more they stay the same....That's why the military contractors made a trillion dollar profit on the Iraq war, sacrificing the lives and arms and legs of 100,000 Americans for their profit. The U.S. has a war based economy....without war, there is recession.

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything."
by:

Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source:

Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
(The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.)

 

Despite differing interpretations of the war, maybe we can agree that it simply involved the elites of each side pitting their poor against each other, as it is with most wars.

The average Southerner couldn't afford slaves, and the average Northerner had more personal concerns than whether or not the Union was preserved.

 

No state that seceded from the union claimed their reasons for secession were related to union corporations, all seceding states however did mention slavery as one of their primary reasons for seceding from the union. Though I will agree with you that the union did not go to war because they wanted to free slaves in the south, they went to war to maintain the union

 

Cherry picking? Name one other specific issue that the primary sources agree upon as a primary motivating source. The Southern states repeatedly referred to themselves as "the slaveholding states" and the North as "the non-slaveholding states." And it's not like I need to quote the cornerstone speech again.

 

More or less, shortly after this Woodrow Wilson would create the Federal Reserve and FDR would institutionalize the SCOTUS. From that point forward, we were a kleptocracy.

 

Protective Tariffs: The Primary Cause of the Civil War


You are here: Home / Articles / Protective Tariffs: The Primary Cause of the Civil War
Protective Tariffs: The Primary Cause of the Civil War
June 23, 2013 by David John Marotta and Megan Russell

Civil War cannon fire

Although they opposed permanent tariffs, political expedience in spite of sound economics prompted the Founding Fathers to pass the first U.S. tariff act. For 72 years, Northern special interest groups used these protective tariffs to exploit the South for their own benefit. Finally in 1861, the oppression of those import duties started the Civil War.

Thus the domestic manufacturing industries of the North benefited twice, once as the producers enjoying the protection of high manufacturing tariffs and once as consumers with a free raw materials market. The raw materials industries of the South were left to struggle against foreign competition.

Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.

Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track was laid. At its best, these tracks benefited the North. Much of it had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.

With most of the tariff revenue collected in the South and then spent in the North, the South rightly felt exploited. At the time, 90% of the federal government’s annual revenue came from these taxes on imports.

Historians Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffer found that a few common factors increase the likelihood of secession in a region: lower wages, an economy based on raw materials and external exploitation. Although popular movies emphasize slavery as a cause of the Civil War, the war best fits a psycho-historical model of the South rebelling against Northern exploitation.

Many Americans do not understand this fact. A non-slave-owning Southern merchant angered over yet another proposed tariff act does not make a compelling scene in a movie. However, that would be closer to the original cause of the Civil War than any scene of slaves picking cotton.

Read the whole story hear....
http://www.marottaonmoney.com/protective-tariffs-the-primary-cause-of-the-civil-war/