This post has nothing to do with the earlier essay of the same title: I just decided to recycle the title for this "short history of events leading to the Civil War" that I wrote on a political forum.
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The topic (of the Civil War) is not finished because of the inaccurate narrative of the event. From your previous posts I'm sure you don't have any more to say about the topic that any of the one-sentence wonders here, but since you wrote more than one sentence here, your post makes a convenient launchpad to review what the non-ideologues out there could discover on this thread.
(1) The Constitution, ratified in 1788, does not mention the topic of secession. Given that the whole purpose of establishing this new rule of law was to empower the federal government that had been ineffective during the Articles of Confederation period, why not say that this is one of the powers that should be expressly delegated to the Fed? Why not clear that up from the first? Because, in all likelihood, many of the States would not have signed the Constitution if they knew they were signing away their potential for independence for all time. The politicians who favored a strong Fed were playing a shell game: once the stronger government was in place, then they could bring any dissenters back into the fold by force. One online essay wrote of Madison: " despite his reservations about the new system, he wanted to see it in operation before thinking about how it might be reformed."
(2) The Tenth Amendment was passed in 1791, just three years later. By stating that all powers not delegated to the Fed devolve to the states, the amendment is clearly intended to limit the power of the Fed. However, it too worked as a shell game, given that throughout the ensuing years proponents of Federalism simply talked around the Tenth, claiming that its statement of limitations did not matter when faced with anything that actually threatened the Republic.
(3) Though anti-slavery abolitionists campaigned for the end of the institution even before the signing of the Constitution, Northern politicians did not become highly invested in anti-slavery rhetoric until the 1830s-- which just happens to coincide with the establishment of the "Tariff of Abominations," whose purpose was to make Northern goods more appealing than the lower-priced European goods, all of which led to the Nullification Crisis.
(4) The Nullification Crisis, of course, had nothing to do with slavery, though any number of people have tried to link slavery and tariff resistance. South Caroline threatened to secede from the Union over the tariff, and this prompted Andrew Jackson to mount the first legislation that ignored the Tenth Amendment and proposed to answer secession with force through the appropriately named "Force Bill" of 1833. At the same time, Jackson modified the tariff so that South Carolina dropped the idea of secession.
(5) The growing controversy over slavery in the 1850s coalesced around the struggle for power between North and South. The 1820 Missouri Compromise, which offered the fig-leaf of parity on the theory that both slave and free states would be admitted from then on, was repealed in 1854. While politicians did begin utilizing more abolitionist-style rhetoric, at base their concern was to have more free than slave states in the Union in order to nullify the Congressional power of the South. Modern liberals assume that had the Union become dominated by free states, they would have soon banished slavery out of hand. There is no conclusive evidence that the Northern politicians would have taken that step, given that the South's use of slaves made a lot of money for the Fed.
(6) When the CSA seceded in April 1861, in response to the 1860 election of Lincoln, outgoing President Buchanan clearly diverged from the position of Andrew Jackson, stating that the Fed did not have the power to compel states to return to the fold. Lincoln said little about slavery when he entered the Presidential office, but he did talk about money:
Lincoln takes office March 4th, 1861 and on his way offered in several speeches, his solution to the Number One Issue - Lost Revenue. Lincoln Offered on Day One that he was going to Collect Revenue in Southern Ports, or more commonly known as Impost Duties on Foreign Goods arriving in this Country. We know them as tariffs. From March 4th to April 12th - LINCOLN day by day focused on Collecting Tariffs in the Seceded Ports. He was most concerned that any day, England and France would 'Recognize' the new Confederacy, and that meant War, if he tried to Coerce the Seceded States back into the Union.
After roughly a year and a half of fighting, Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which in theory settled for all time the question of Federal power over State power. By so doing, Lincoln contravened the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution
(7) Finally, after roughly a year and a half of fighting, Lincoln signed the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which would eventually put the controversy about "slave states" to rest, but also extending the authority of the Fed government as never before. But the liberation of slaves was never more important than the hegemony of the North's power to control the flow of money.
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