About All That Disdain for the Old South: How Dishonor of America's Founding Documents Wrought Catastrophe

As a retrospection of America’s tumultuous antebellum era, About All That Disdain for the Old South avails its reader truly disturbing revelations. It affirms that 1860 presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln well knew the Old South’s slaveholders to be completely secure in their constitutional authority to practice slavery: and therefore further understood that secession, if undertaken, would in fact be an act intended by Southerners as the remedy for a grievance unrelated to any threat of abolition. Identified as the bonafide grievance is. U.S. fiscal policy that imposed egregious economic imparity upon citizens in the slave states, in part by effectively burdening them with a share in funding of the federal budget that was twice, and arguably three times, their proportionate obligation. Also revealed are the reasons why Republicans declined to dignify the Old South’s real grievance and why, as a consequence, America forfeited the potential to avert the Southern secessions by means of a quid-pro-quo implementing a repeal of the U. S. protective tariff reciprocated by an emancipation of the Old South’s slaves. Drawing upon the oratory of Lincoln and fellow Republican William Seward, along with other heavily documented antebellum his-tory, the author orders developments of the era in their proper sequence and reasons from this delineation valid observations that plainly contradict traditional accounts of America’s descent into sectional warfare. Indeed, the author’s examination finds that the Republican presidential campaign of 1860 responded to a leadership far more interested in control of Southern cotton than in freedom for the slaves. Further disclosed is the fact that Lincoln himself publicly cited, from his own research into the nation’s birth, information with which secession can be proven a lawful act. And indeed, an honorable one. All of which observations, as additionally supported by the author with relevant facts of history as to which there is broad consensus, compel the reader to sober conclusions: that the war undertaken by the U. S. in 1861 cannot be justified by the specious presumption that force was the only means of achieving freedom for the slaves; that any military act to defeat an exit from the Union by any state would in fact be an illegal one; that Lincoln’s stature as an icon is plainly unwarranted; and that the real heroes of antebellum America were the undauntable Southerners whose courageous acts of secession were undertaken in complete accord with both the colonial precedent articulated by the Declaration of Independence and the intent manifested by America’s Founding Fathers in the Constitution of the United States. In short, this essay discredits everything you think you know about the reasons why the Civil War occurred in America.