Maggie's Farm

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Adding further confusion are the numerous accounts from contemporary newspapers from the North, South, and Europe — all of which tell the tale of a “tariff war,” not the popularly-held notion that the Civil War was a “war against slavery.”

The conditions and the development of the Spanish American world invite, as already mentioned, certain parallels with the American South. These two slave societies have interpreted their history in a similar way; or rather, they have required the same self-justification. In 1816, the fledgling North American republic imposed tariffs to protect the development of its budding industry against the massive influx of English manufactured imports, The most ardent among the protectionists were the Virginians and the North and South Carolinians, who felt that with their inexpensive cotton and cheaper manpower, the Southern states would become textile producers able to rival Manchester.

Barely fifteen years after Southern Congressmen such as Calhoun and Lowndes of South Carolina had established themselves as effective spokesmen for tariffs on goods bought from Great Britain, the South began its subsequent failure [to industrialize] by charging that protectionism had been invented by the North as a means of enriching itself at the expense of the South. Southern leaders stirred up their audiences by claiming that of every hundred bales of cotton sold in Boston or New York, forty had been stolen from the South. The argument became more heated, and the North found itself charged with having accumulated capital in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth by defrauding the South through financial trickery. One contemporary writer says "When they (the Southerners)see the flourishing villages of New England, they cry, 'We pay for all this.' "A myth was manufactured that attributed Northern prosperity to the South's paralysis, and vice versa. Southerners went to war in 1860 quite convinced that if they succeeded in breaking their dependence on the North, not only would they prosper miraculously; the abhorred Yankees, deprived of raw materials and the southern market for their manufactured goods, would be condemned to an economic crisis as well.

Thus, well before the birth of Hobson, Hilferdig, and Lenin, the 'Third World' arguments had been invented by Southern slaveholders.