Just as the Earth revolves on its axis each day and travels around the Sun in an equally regular pattern, so has world history tended to be cyclical in nature throughout the centuries, with many episodes seemingly being repeated countless times over. In many cases the basic cause behind such recurring cataclysmic events as war, radical changes in political systems or the fall of nations and empires has involved economics. A current example of the latter is the financial dilemma which now threatens to bring about the economic, if not the total, collapse of the European Union . . . namely where to find the more than eighty billion dollars in revenue that will be lost due to the United Kingdom’s secession from the Union. A similar economic situation had faced Great Britain itself almost two and a half centuries earlier on the other side of the Atlantic. At that time, thirteen of its major colonies, with a cry of “no taxation without representation,” declared their independence, seceded from the British Empire and joined together to form the United States of America. Faced with the loss of a vast source of the revenue needed to fill coffers drained by its seemingly endless wars with France, Great Britain opted to wage war on its own colonies.
Less than a century later, seven of the States in the new American nation felt that the weight of long economic oppression by the Federal government was more than they should be forced to bear and opted to secede from the Unites States to form their own more perfect union . . . and once again the action brought forth a war in which the central government attacked its own citizens to prevent their departure. Today, the majority of historians cite only slavery as the central cause of the War Between the States, and while the institution did play an important role in events leading to the South’s secession, it certainly was not the casus belli itself. During the antebellum period there were groups of Americans in both the North and South which were opposed to the concept of human bondage and actively worked to abolish slavery, but with only a very small minority of them advocating total integration following emancipation. However, the majority of Americans, including leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, were willing to allow the status quo to continue in regard to Southern slavery and many of them, like Lincoln, also felt that should the time ever come when the slaves were granted their freedom, they should be shipped out of their home country to some foreign land in Africa or the Caribbean.
Speaking of Lincoln, in his earlier statements he was quite definite in his thoughts about secession, slavery and black Americans. In 1848, when Lincoln was a U. S. congressman from Illinois, he gave a speech in the House of Representatives in which he stated “any people, anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.” In a letter a decade later, Lincoln wrote that “neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave States, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists.” The same year, in an Illinois debate with Senator Stephen Douglass, Lincoln said that he did not understand the Declaration of Independence “to mean that all men were created equal in all respects,” and added that he was not in favor of “making voters or jurors of Negros nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people.” He then went on to say that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” So much for the image of the “Great Emancipator.”
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https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/the-economy-stupid/
