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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (33414)	3/27/1999 1:38:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 108807

The tariff issue, as you say, is largely a hoax dreamed up by Southern apologists to overcome the stigma of destroying the union to preserve slavery, which as I have shown above, was never even threatened if the old 13th amendment compromise had been ratified in 1860. Your economic analysis of the trade questions are accurate. Southerners has earlier (1832) resented tariffs bitterly. Calhoun resigned Jackson's vice-presidency and returned to the Senate to fight. S.C. tried to nullify the tariff. All this was after the Missouri compromise. A reading of the detailed history of the late 1850's will prove to anyone that the impossibility of extension of slavery, and the eventual decline of relative Southern power was the principal cause of Secession (which proximally caused the war). The hotheads of the South were almost totally irrational, even insane. Huge numbers of otherwise rational planters and small-holders acted like Serbians today -- expecting terrible things to happen while, objectively, safe against any attack unless they brought it on themselves. But the South was in the grip of a lemming-like self-destructive drive. One great-grandfather of mine, a physician, rather rich and not a slave owner of any size, knew the war was doomed but still marched off to serve his people -- after selling almost everything he owned for gold and hiding that so after the war he survived he could send his sons to be educated in Europe. He was apparently willing to sacrifice his life for something he didn't believe in, but not his children's future. Another great grandfather -- a coastal planter -- became a blockade runner -- of military goods, not consumer goods he could have gotten rich on. A third great-grandfather -- in his '50's owned 400 slaves and had "miles and miles" of land. He equipped his local militia company (B) of the 21st South Carolina Volunteers, and was elected captain (later Lt. Col,) and was captured after Fort Fisher and imprisoned in Fortress Monroe where he sickened and later died after liberation by the peace. His estate was ravaged by crooked executors and scallywags. None of these men were fools. They were economically successful, educated, and cruelly misled by political fantasy. They were loyal South Carolinians. They never learned, except from experience, and then it was too late. They risked -- and lost -- everything -- their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor -- on a cause that none of their descendants could or do respect. We learned from their experience. You can find today few people more loyal to the United States, despite their disagreement with much of what it stands for, than Southerners descended from Confederates. Societies can learn a better way, but sometimes hecatombs must be sacrificed and the blood of many men must run into the red dirt of the battlefield before anything worth learning can be learned.