i'm willing to bet the ranch that many of you have never heard of or considered the info provided in this pcr post about the other cause of the war of succession;
When Charles Adams published his book For Good and Evil, a world history of taxation, the most controversial chapter by far was the one on whether or not tariffs caused the American War between the States. That chapter generated so much discussion and debate that Adams’s publisher urged him to turn it into an entire book, which he did, in the form of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession.
Many of the reviewers of this second book, so confident were they that slavery was the one and only possible reason for both Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency and the war itself, excoriated Adams for his analysis that the tariff issue was a major cause of the war. (Adams recently told me in an email that after one presentation to a New York City audience, he felt lucky that “no one brought a rope.”)
My book, The Real Lincoln, has received much the same response with regard to the tariff issue. But there is overwhelming evidence that: 1) Lincoln, a failed one-term congressman, would never have been elected had it not been for his career-long devotion to protectionism; and 2) the 1861 Morrill tariff, which Lincoln was expected to enforce, was the event that triggered Lincoln’s invasion, which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
A very important article that documents in great detail the role of protectionism in Lincoln’s ascendancy to the presidency is Columbia University historian Reinhard H. Luthin’s “Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff,” published in the July 1944 issue of The American Historical Review. As I document in The Real Lincoln, the sixteenth president was one of the most ardent protectionists in American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century and had established a long record of supporting protectionism and protectionist candidates in the Whig Party.
In 1860, Pennsylvania was the acknowledged key to success in the presidential election. It had the second highest number of electoral votes, and Pennsylvania Republicans let it be known that any candidate who wanted the state’s electoral votes must sign on to a high protectionist tariff to benefit the state’s steel and other manufacturing industries. As Luthin writes, the Morrill tariff bill itself “was sponsored by the Republicans in order to attract votes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.”.......more........
