James Raymond Reese

Much like what is happening in America right now, the struggle in the 1860s was over the power in government. The south was rich in agriculture and traded with Europe, the north was manufacturing and had no trading partner whatsoever. The market for the north's manufactured goods was primarily the existing states.

So, when Lincoln was elected president he taxed all southern goods heading for Europe and bankrupted a lot of people in the south.

Slavery was not particularly an issue other than a symptom of what the south felt was an unconstitutional exercise of Federal power.

If you think slavery was the issue, you'll want to check this fact out: President Lincoln, in a discussion with President Davis, offered to maintain slavery as an institution if only the Confederate States would return to the Union. Davis' response was, "Slavery is not the struggle we fight in this war."

In fact, the whole way through the war a number of northern states (Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, etc.) were slave states. And, if you check the census forms for 1860, you'll find that a number of very northern states, like Pennsylvania, actually had a column to indicate whether a person was a slave.

The issue was federal power. The north had 20 million residents, the population of the south was only 5 million at the time. That resulted in the northern states being predominate in the House of Representatives. There were fewer southern states than northern, so the north also owned the Senate.

The south and the north were different in just about every category you can imagine. The end result was the north trying to force the south to do a lot of things, independent of the slavery issue, that didn't conform to the 10th amendment of the Constitution.

And, when the tax situation developed, that was the end of the union as far as the south was concerned. The northern-dominated congress put taxes on agricultural exports, which hurt the south, and taxed imports of manufactured good, which had no impact at all on the north.

The south saw this as a form of "taxation without representation." That, coupled with other federal muscle-flexing led to the breakup of the union.

South Carolina was the first to go to battle. It is instructive to note that even the South Carolina declaration of secession recognizes that slavery is an economically unsustainable institution. Slavery and non-slavery were mentioned a lot in the declaration but mostly used as synonyms for south and north, respectively.

You have to ask yourself why they're rewriting history.

If we are ignorant of history, we are doomed to repeat it. Not a good thought.