“Slavery – the one cause of the Civil War.” – John Stuart Mill,
1862 Can there be any doubt about it? Certainly the American
Civil War was about the slavery issue… was it not? Well
actually, one of the greatest popular myths in American history
is that the Civil War was started because of the slavery issue
and that Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, used a bloody struggle
to sever the claims of bonding that shackled over 3 million
black Americans. Right before the war, the South had all it
could have wanted. In 1860, Southerners controlled the Supreme
Court and Lincoln and Congress were approving a constitutional
amendment to keep slavery forever! So what happened? We should
rewind the clock back to the year 1832. By that year the
national debt left from the War of 1812 had been re-paid and the
South saw no need to keep up the high import taxes which
appeared to only raise price tags for Southern consumers. Either
the South had to pay high import taxes on imported goods or it
purchased Northern manufactured good