You no doubt recall the unfortunate Lord Dunmore, bullied by Patrick Henry then surprised by outright revolt of colonists. Dunmore issued the first Emancipation proclamation as a contingent quid-pro-quo. All a slave had to do was bear arms against the insurgents and for King and Country to become a freedman for life under British rule. Now, would you argue from that precedent that the Revolutionary war was fought by abolitionists the like of Benjamin Franklin, solely in order to strike off the come-alongs fastened as man’cles to limbs by th’ crool hand iv England?
Yet the recycling of a tailored version of Dunmore’s proclamation was issued by Lincoln, after which the Union gained not a square inch of ground until Westerners eager for a slice of Protective Tariff windfalls to finance Improvements sailed down the Mississippi and Marched to The Sea. Lincoln’s post-deadline emancipation eliminated the colony part of the Metropole-Colony mechanism of Mercantilism, causing Yankee traders to lose all interest in prosecuting the war. Why invest in war if there’s no more brass ring?
The key to the mystery is the Nullification Crisis. A protective tariff enacted by promising Western States money for internal improvements was promptly dubbed the Tariff of Abominations by southerners. The Southern plantations were all that remained of the rump economic engine of mercantilism after the Revolutionary war. Before the revolt, England bought from and sold to the American colonies at prices that pleased His Majesty. The Acts of Navigation, which promised violent retaliation against foreign interlopers, were replaced by a for-revenue tariff to pay for a small navy and federal government expenses. As far as the Southern colonial-style States were concerned, the protective tariff amounted to bringing back the Acts of Navigation, handing yankee manufacturers a similar monopoly on farm implements sold to plantation owners. They reacted by passing laws prohibiting collection of the tariff, an President Jackson was obliged to explain how that left him no choice but to hang as many legislators as it took to repeal those ordinances.
Slavery was what made colonial cotton and tobacco plantations such a profitable possession. After Lincoln was elected, the heavily protective Morrill Tariff introduced by Morrill of Vermont amounted to another Tariff of Abominations, was replaced by another, similar bill by John Sherman of Ohio, brother of William Tecumseh Sherman, which was voted in on May 10, 1860–six days before Lincoln was even nominated. Texans seized federal armories, forts and a revenue vessel even before Lincoln’s inauguration, and the War between The States soon raged.
Interestingly enough, British and French opium sellers were at that time bombarding China to overcome residual prohibition of such imports. Declarations of sovereign immunity in the Civil War precluded a repeat of the British liquidation of American State bonds to expatriate the money and finance another opium war. That second Opium War was complicated by an ongoing religious civil war within China–with a chemically-induced form of slavery one of the issues at stake. Some Americans participated as mercenaries in that Chinese war. In fact, both Congressmen pushing the divisive tariff represented States bordering British Canada.
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, like Lord Dunmore’s, came in two parts. But since no confederate States were willing to surrender by the deadline in order to keep slavery on their plantations, Lincoln declared all slaves freed after 01JAN1863. Southerners reacted just as they had to Dunsmore’s proclamation, and refused to surrender until John Sherman’s brother William’s army destroyed and devoured practically everything on its march to Savannah, where the tariff was collected in gold as it always had been since before the Nullification crisis.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
Brazilian blog…
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