Antecedents of the Civil War Part III

"I presume you all know who I am. I am humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been solicited by many friends to become a candidate for the legislature. My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance. I am in favor of a national bank...in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff."
--Abraham Lincoln 1832

Previously we observed the influence of the American System, particularly its protectionist plank, in weakening the South's allegience toward the union of states. The American System was a product of Henry Clay and the Whig party in the 1810s.

From the time he entered politics, Abraham Lincoln was a disciple of Henry Clay and the Whig agenda. In his near 30 yr political career leading up to the 1860 presidential election, Lincoln was frequently on the record as supporting all three planks of the American System: a national bank, government sponsored 'internal improvements,' and protectionist tariffs. Lincoln subsequently nailed those planks into his own presidential campaign platform in 1860.

By this time, many Southerners believed that the federal government had been acting unconstitutionally for years, particularly w.r.t. fiscal and trade policies. In the South's view, these policies were imposing disportionate harm on the South.

With Lincoln gaining support among influential Northern voting blocs, the South saw an individual who threatened to consolidate federal power into the creation of a centralized state or empire. The effect of this consolidation was feared to be massive economic plunder at the South's expense.

Many Southern states thus commenced secessesion proceedings during the 1860 presidential campaign year. The Morrill Tariff bill of 1860, which proposed raising tariffs 100% or more on some items, added fuel to the secession fire.

By spring 1861, newspapers in the North and South had been noting that economic issues were the primary driver behind the secession movement. In March 1861, for example, the Boston Transcript wrote:

"It does not require extraordinary sagacity to perceive that trade is perhaps the controlling motive operating to prevent the return of the seceding States to the Union...The mask has been thrown off, and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence."

The Confederate Constitution largely mirrored the US Constitution with the exception that is removed language that did not support free trade. Thus, the Confederate Constitution outlawed protectionist tariffs altogether in support of a free market environment.

Newspapers began connecting the dots, warning that if free trade were permitted to exist in the Southern states, then merchants in New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah would take most trade from Northern ports. Consequently, wrote the Boston Transcript, "the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than at New York."

Herein lies the primary driver of the Civil War. The federal government had been intervening in markets for years, with the cost of these interventions being disproportionately borne by the South. Lincoln threatened to take this intervention to new heights. Southern states thus opted to secede, and build an economic system around free markets. Influential Northerners soon realized that free markets in the South would hammer the protected markets of the North.

Fear of economic loss motivated those influential Northerners, people with the means to do so, to see to it that a man was elected president who would use lethal force if necessary to keep the South from realizing economic freedom--an economic freedom that, if left unchecked, would destroy the North's profit center.

The Civil War, like most if not all wars that the US has subsequently engaged in, was a war enacted by the federal government to protect the interests of those who preferred to acquire wealth by political rather than economic means.