To collect the recently-doubled federal tariff on imports, and to avoid the subsequent destruction of the Republican Party, as John Denson explains. (Contrast Denson’s careful scholarship with the incredibly asinine OFFICIAL EXPLANATION that has been written up in the NY Times, Washington Post, and elsewhere in recent weeks that Abe Lincoln was just about to free all the slaves with a “stroke of a pen” in early 1861 when Southerners “kidnapped” the slaves by seceding. This is the clear implication of all the statist apologists who keep insisting that secession necessitates war (tell that to the former Soviet republics, all of which seceded peacefully).

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo