Most Americans believe that the U.S. “Civil War” was just about slavery. They have to an enormous degree been misinformed. Since the early 1960s, powerful academic and political interests have been straining every nerve to sustain the myth that the war was a glorious moral crusade against slavery.
How to handle the multi-faceted problem of slavery was often a divisive issue but not in the overly-simplified moral sense that lives in postwar and modern propaganda. Had there been no Morrill Tariff, the major cotton-exporting states would not have been so strongly compelled to secede, and there might never have been a war. Recent scholarship now estimates that the total of military deaths during the Civil War was over 750,000 and that
130,000 civilian deaths, including 80,000 displaced Southern slaves who died of malnutrition and disease following Emancipation and the collapse of the Southern economy, brought the total loss of lives to over 880,000. In addition, over 40 percent of Southern property was destroyed, and many millions were impoverished for generations. Without the Morrill Tariff, this terrible bloodshed and calamity might never have been.
Two days before Lincoln’s election in November of 1860, the Charleston Mercury editorialized:
More @ Times Examiner
An excellent and fascinating, link. Thanks for posting.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Nov 1860 newspaper article at link:
“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has effected in this government, from a confederated republic, to a national sectional despotism.”
Certainly and the world is at our finger tips in the computer age.
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