re: History Topic: Did R.E. Lee Betray His Countrymen?

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Give them hell.

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It accepts the shallow but unchallenged premise that the Civil War occurred because slavery was practiced in the South, and that righteous resolve to abolish the institution left the U.S. with no option other than a resort to arms. This is a myopic view with which many historical facts simply cannot be reconciled.

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Both Lincoln and the slaveholders well knew in 1860 that a constitutional amendment ending slavery would never be mathematically feasible. But Lincoln further understood that the South was gravitating toward secession as the remedy for a different grievance altogether: The egregiously inequitable effects of a U. S. protective tariff that provided 90 percent of federal revenue.

Foreign governments retaliated for it with tariffs of their own, and payment of those overseas levies represented the cost to Americans of their U. S. government. Southerners were generating two-thirds of U. S. exports, and also bearing two-thirds of the retaliatory tariffs abroad.

The result was that that the 18.5 percent of America's citizens who lived in the South were saddled with three times their proportionate share of the federal government's costs.

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The notion that slave labor for cotton fields caused the Civil War has been reinforced by textbooks and fictional narratives for more than a century. Historians, however, argue for a more nuanced, complex understanding. The Civil War was fought for many reasons, not solely or even primarily because of the growing importance of cotton on southern farms. Moving away from economic differences and cotton as simplistic causes leads to a more complex and far more interesting story.

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