Sunday, July 20, 2014

You Can't Be Fearful if You're Already Dead

This guy was aiming a gun at me and just before he pulled the trigger I ducked. I then got up and ran away and the fellow started yelling at me, "Hey, what are you so freaked out about, man? I didn't hit you." I relate this story (which is obviously fictitious) to underscore just how ridiculous it is for the Lincoln supporters to still claim that the Morrill Tariff couldn't have been a major cause of the Civil War in that the South had seceded only a month or so after its passage and never really had to have to pay the damn thing (supplementing of course the fact that a) the tariff issue was easily one of the most controversial topics during the hotly contested ballot for Speaker of the House in 1858 - the vote was deadlocked for over two months, b) the tariff itself was passed on a strictly North-South party-line-vote in which only one southern Congressman voted for it, and c) Lincoln owed pretty much the entirety of his Republican nomination to the fact that the dude ran a full-bore protectionism campaign all throughout the North with Pennsylvania obviously being one of critical states).

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