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Entry: The Limits of Lincoln Bashing Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_limits_of_lincoln_bashing#24434 Post contents: Now I'm sorry to have to go over this again, but Miss Marie and Mr. Piatak's lust for tariffs obliges me. Learned at Dr. DiLoreno's knee: What does ANY tariff do. Let's say shoes in Gringoland cost $50 a pair. An English manufacturer comes in and sells at $40. The Marie-Claires and Piataks of the Gringo shoe industry demand a tariff at $100, and after they pay off politicians, they get it. Do American shoe manufacturers keep their shoes at $50? NO! They raise raise their prices, competition missing, to $95 Dollars! The blue collar worker suddenly faces the cost of everything almost doubled. What does he do but go to his boss and demand more money, money that the manufacturer has because of higher prices. Now apply this to Dixie in 1828 and 1861. Southerners as all Gringos were faced with the prospect of everything, from blankets to shoes to frying pans, doubling in cost. Yet here's the difference from the Yankee worker. Southerners could not demand more pay, because Southerners had to sell their chief product, cotton, on an INTERNATIONAL market, and thus couldn't raise their prices to meet the corresponding rise cost of living. They would have been undersold in the international market, so say nothing of retaliation from foreign states. So Deep Dixie revolted against her being despoiled are reduced to destitution. Note that the northern states of Dixie not only did not at first secede, but VA and NC actually voted against secession in the early spring of 1861. After all they were not cotton states. Only when Dishonest Abe called up the troops to enforce the Morrill tariff did these state realized that the principle of states' rights would be gone for good. And Ft Sumpter, Lincoln's excuse for calling up the troops, wasn't a fort; it was a tax office. In the shelling of the "fort", there was only one death: a mule. Some reason to start Gringoland's bloodiest war! Bottom line: Abe's Corwin Amendment would have guaranteed slavery in Dixie for perpetuity. His issue was tariffs. Another thought: Had Dishonest Abe really wanted to end slavery, there would have been an costless and bloodless way to do it. Let Dixie go and then refuse to enforce the Fugative Slave Act (from the Compromise of 1850). Blacks could then quite easily have escaped north, the cost of slavery would have become too onerous, and slavery would have ended, as it ended everywhere else in the 19th Century: bloodlessly. Sent at: 2008 07 20