we should go back to 1828, hell we should go back to 1789 when slaves were only counted as 2/3s.
OMG.. you're not really serious, are you? The southern slave owners treated their slaves as property, not voting constituencies. They received more proportional representation than they actually deserved by counting those slaves as 2/3rds of a person for proportional representation in the Congress. And they did it because the population in the South was far smaller than in the Northern states.
And I haven't forgotten the "Ft. Sumter invasion" that you refer to.. The original point was that Fort was primarily built with Federal Funds (that being the responsibility of the Federal Gov't then, and now to protect from outside aggression). You asserted that most of those funds (to the Federal Gov't) came from the South, which I clearly demonstrated was not the case based upon Ad Valorum revenue changes between 1860 and 1861, as well as the existing Ad Valorum revenues from 1827 until 1860.
You can't invade something that you already have a right to use, being that Ft. Sumter was FEDERAL military property built to protect the national security of the entire nation (as per the responsibility of the Federal Govt)
The reality is that a lot of Federal money was going South in order to protect Southern ports from foreign threats, disproportionate to their contributions to the Federal budget. And contrary to your assertions, the majority of it came from Ad Valorum sources derived from NON-Southern states.
I think I've made my case pretty well, based upon the available data of Federal Revenue streams. I know you have you opinion and that's fine. But the truth of the matter is that S. Carolina wanted that Fort and they were willing to fire the first shots at evicting the Federal garrison, and backing up their secession through the use of force against Federal property.
Had I been a S. Carolina politician, hell-bent upon secession, I probably would have done the same thing, making the feeble, and untruthful, argument that Southern Ad Valorum revenues provided the majority of the finances for building it in the first place. But that ignoring the reality that Federal money built it, and it was manned by Federal troops, not S. Caroline militia.
Hawk |
