Dragoons July 2014 Camp Meeting - A Comparison Between North and South Leading to the WBTS, Part 2

Sam Reid's presentation continued:
Another example of corrupt government spending leading to debt accumulation is to examine Georgia which in 1865 had a balanced budget but only 6 months later after Reconstruction was $50 million in debt.

After Texas gained their independence from Mexico following the Texas Revolution in 1836 and the U.S. annexation of Texas culminating in the Mexican-American War between 1845 and 1847, Texas wanted to join the Union but the New England states opposed this seeing again a shift in power to the South and West, especially geographically with the huge land mass that is Texas and some proposed that Texas be divided into smaller states of comparable size to those in the east.

Fear was flamed in the North by claims that the South would conquer the North and implement their system of slave labor resulting in Northern factory workers losing their jobs.  Most immigrants in the mid-1800s were poor Irish and Germans who had been mistreated by their own governments and feared for their newfound livelihoods.  Wealthy Northerners bought thousands of copies of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and sent them to libraries and churches throughout the North.  Kansas was seeking statehood and Northerns led by John Brown armed militia to terrorize and kill Southern settlers to drive them out of the territory but newspapers reported that Southerners were burning Northerner's homes, an example of the corruption in the media which endures to this day.

Republicans came into being as the political party of the North with the goal of taking over Congress in order to raise tariffs for Northern industrialization and economic protectionism.  A census of 1860 showed 80% of the money coming into the U.S. Treasury was from the Southern states but 93% of the spending went to the Northern states and their infrastructure projects.  The richest states were Mississippi and South Carolina; Connecticut was the richest Northern state behind thirteen Southern states.  When the Republicans took control of Congress they passed the Morrill Tariff  which hiked import tariffs from 15% to 37% and then to 47%.  Lincoln campaigned not on abolishing slavery but on the promise that he would deliver the money from these tariffs collected throughout the Southern ports and, expectedly, Lincoln carried all the Northern states.

The Confederate Constitution actually stated that they would be a tariff free country.  The North knew they would be crippled with the secession of the Southern states and loss of their tariff income to the Treasury. The 1860 Democrat convention was held in Charleston but Douglas refused to support the idea of slavery moving westward so Southern delegates walked out of the convention. But in their absence, the Massachusetts delegates to the Democrat convention cast every vote for Jefferson Davis as their Presidential nominee.  A Davis-Lincoln campaign was possible but Davis did not run for office.  Davis was well liked throughout the North and was requested to make speeches from Boston to Maine in 1860 when he vacationed there.  William Lowndes Yancey pushed for secession with the spectre of Republican power but the Southern states waited until Lincoln was elected before they acted.  The Southern states waited to secede in 1860 and 1861, decades too late to avert war.  The War Between the States was inevitable when Lincoln said, "Who is going to pay the bills?" and vowed to collect the tariffs one way or another even in his inaugural address.