A couple of years ago, I wrote a blogpost questioning the reasons for the American Civil War. I stated that there was more to the North’s naked aggression than just slavery. Historians, for the most part, have neglected northern complacency and the financial repercussions had the South left the union.
Today, California radicals are proposing a referendum to leave the union. Many people, such as myself, are just fine with that. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass!
I’m sure this is the same attitude many Northerners had at the time the South seceded. My suspicions were correct. Here is an excerpt from an article published in the Abbeville Institute by Philip Leigh about an interview on PBS:
She fails to consider that Northerners could have let the cotton states leave in peace, thereby avoiding a Civil War altogether. The original seven-state Confederacy was so weak that many believed her component states might end up humbly asking to be readmitted to the Federal Union. According to historian David Potter: “No one was much impressed with the Gulf Coast Confederacy. No one was convinced that it would be economically or politically viable.”[1]
Moreover, many Northern leaders were prepared to “Let the erring sisters go in peace.” Among them was abolitionist Horace Greeley, then editor of The New York Tribune, which was America’s largest newspaper. Greeley wrote, “We have repeatedly said . . . that if the slave states choose to form an independent nation, they have the right to do so.” President James Buchanan added that many Republicans shared Greeley’s opinion when he wrote: “Leading Republicans everywhere scornfully exclaimed ‘Let them go;’ ‘We can do better without them;’ ‘Let the Union slide,’ and other language of the same import.” Ohio lawyer and future Republican President Rutherford Hayes was satisfied to let the free states remain alone as his January 4, 1861 diary entry reveals: “The [twenty] free states alone . . . will make a glorious nation . . . scarcely inferior in real power to the thirty-three states we had on the first of November.”[2] Similarly, President Lincoln’s future War Secretary, Edwin Stanton, said, “Oh, I would let the South go; they will be clamoring to get back in three years.”
Interesting. How about the economic consequences of the South leaving the union? There are a couple of possibilities the North would have to confront. Mr. Leigh continues:
First, it could not hope to maintain a favorable balance of payments. The South accounted for about 80% of America’s exports on the eve of the Civil War. Thus, without the South’s export economy, America would become a perpetual debtor nation forever at the mercy of its stronger trading partners that would deplete her gold supply in order to settle the persistent trade imbalances.
Second, since the Confederate constitution outlawed protective tariffs, her lower tariffs would confront the remaining states of the abridged Union with two consequences. First, since ninety percent of Federal taxes came from tariffs, the government’s revenue loss would be sizable. Articles imported into the Confederacy from Europe would divert tariff revenue from the North to the South. Second, and even more importantly, a low Confederate tariff would induce Southerners to buy manufactured goods from Europe as opposed to the Northern states where prices were inflated by protective tariffs.
In other words, the North couldn’t afford to let the South go. I wasn’t taught that in school and no doubt neither was the rest of the country, not even Southerners. What’s that saying? To the victor belongs the spoils. And that goes for history as well.
Source:
https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/causes-of-the-civil-war/?mc_cid=abd07423aa&mc_eid=3fe7d9c1ad
https://costonscomplaint.blogspot.com/2016/01/have-progressive-historians-bastardized.html
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