The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Historical Analogies and the Current Crisis

Posted on | January 22, 2026 | No Comments

John Adams (left); John Quincy Adams (right)

Here’s a question most people have never pondered: Why did the North fight the Civil War? The way history is taught, the focus is on slavery and the South, and the motives of the Confederacy are subjected to critical scrutiny in a way that the Union side of the controversy is not. If you start digging around, examining contemporary accounts as I have done, you might begin questioning some of your fundamental beliefs. Sen. Robert Toombs, declaring the causes of Georgia’s secession, pointed to the 1846 Walker Tariff as the underlying grievance that led eventually to the formation of the Republican Party. After decades of protectionist policy advocated by New England interests, the 1846 tariff signaled that “free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people. The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all.” It should not need to be said that Toombs’ argument was tendentious — he was in the position analogous to an attorney pleading a client’s case. But the point is that the basic economic and fiscal policy of the nation were involved in the regional contest and, as Toombs said, by the mid-1840s, the South and the West were in a de facto alliance against the Northeast. But the controversy long predated that.

Think of John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams. The elder Adams, having served as George Washington’s vice president, was elected president in 1796. Twenty-eight years later, the younger Adams was elected president in 1824. Both of them served only one term, proving unpopular in office, and the interregnum between their two terms in the White House was filled by an unbroken tenure of Virginians, followed by the presidency of Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. For the first 48 years under the Constitution (1788 to 1836), then, New England had held the office for just eight years. and there was little prospect of them regaining that office because of the changing arithmetic of the Electoral College:

In 1792, there were 132 Electoral College votes; 38 of those votes (28.8 percent of the total) belonged to the New England states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. Massachusetts alone wielded 16 electoral votes (12.1 percent of the total) in 1792. Forty years later, however, when Jackson was reelected to a second term in the White House in 1832, the Electoral College had increased to 288 voters, and the New England states (now including Maine) possessed just 50 — a mere 17.4 percent of the total. That total was exactly matched by six new states in the South and West — Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri — each of which permitted slavery. Kentucky and Tennessee, each with 15 Electoral College votes in 1832, now had more representation than Massachusetts, with just 14 votes. . . .

You can read the rest of my latest American Spectator column.



 

Category: Constitution, History

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