Abraham Lincoln said war was over taxes, not slavery

By Guest Voices

Confederate flag

In a Friday, June 19, 2015 file photo, the Confederate flag flies near the South Carolina Statehouse, in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/Rainier Ehrhardt, File)

(Rainier Ehrhardt)

By Roger K. Broxton of Andalusia, president of the Confederate Heritage Fund

Abraham Lincoln repeatedly stated his war was caused by taxes only, and not by slavery, at all.

"My policy sought only to collect the Revenue (a 40 percent federal sales tax on imports to Southern States under the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861)." reads paragraph 5 of Lincoln's First Message to the U.S. Congress, penned July 4, 1861.

"I have no purpose, directly or in-directly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.  I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so,"  Lincoln said it his first inaugural on March 4 of the same year.

There is no proof of Lincoln ever declaring the war was fought to abolish slavery, and without such an official statement, the war-over-slavery teaching remains a complete lie and offensive hate speech that divides Americans, as is being done now by the media and politicians regarding the Confederate flag in South Carolina.

Slavery was NOT abolished; just the name was changed to sharecropper with over 5 million Southern whites and 3 million Southern blacks working on land stolen by Wall Street bankers.

White, black, Indian, Hispanic, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish Confederates valiantly stood as one in thousands of battles on land and sea.  Afterwards, they attended Confederate Veterans' reunions together and received pensions from Southern States.

Photos of black Confederate veterans may be seen in Alabama's Archives in Scrapbook - 41st Reunion of United Confederate Veterans, Montgomery,  June 2,3,4 and 5, 1931."

Lincoln did not claim slavery was a reason even in his Emancipation Proclamations on Sept. 22, 1862, and Jan. 1, 1863.  Moreover, Lincoln's proclamations exempted a million slaves under his control from being freed (including General U.S. Grant's four slaves) and offered the South three months to return to the Union (pay 40 percent sales tax) and keep their slaves.  None did.  Lincoln affirmed his only reason for issuing was:  "as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said (tax) rebellion."

Mrs. Grant wrote in her personal memoirs: "We rented our pretty little home (in St. Louis) and hired out our four servants to persons whom we knew and who promised to be kind to them.  Eliza, Dan, Julia and John belonged to me.  When I visited the General during the War, I nearly always had Julia with me as nurse."

Lincoln declared war to collect taxes in his two presidential war proclamations against the Confederate States, on April 15 and 19th, 1861: "Whereas an insurrection against the Government of the United States has broken out and the laws of the United States for the collection of the revenue cannot be effectually executed therein."

On Dec. 25, 1860, South Carolina declared unfair taxes to be a cause of secession: "The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected, three-fourths (75%) of them are expended at the North (to subsidize Wall Street industries that elected Lincoln)."  (Paragraphs 5-8)

It was on April 8, 1861, that Lincoln, alone, started the war by a surprise attack on Charleston Harbor with a fleet of warships, led by the USS Harriet Lane, to occupy Fort Sumter, a Federal tax collection fort in the territorial waters of South Carolina and then invaded Virginia.

On April 29, 1861, President Jefferson Davis described the South's response of self-defense in his Message To the Confederate States Congress: "I directed a proposal to be made to the commander of Fort Sumter that we would abstain from directing our fire on Fort Sumter if he would promise not to open fire on our forces unless first attacked.  This proposal was refused."  (Paragraphs 8-9)

The only reason the South ever gave for fighting was in self-defense of the voluntary Union of independent States, as symbolized then by the U.S. Flag.

Secession (withdrawal from a voluntary union) and war are two very different events.