The seven clauses underscored the fact that for all of the South’s efforts to blame the crisis on Northern tyranny in imposing tariffs, collecting revenue, and ordaining “internal improvements,” the crux of the crisis was in fact slavery. This was obvious to all at the time, if not to members of a certain school of twentieth-century historiography who sought to cast the conflict in the bloodless terms of states’ rights. As famed historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “I wish that some of our evasive historians, our mufflers of great passionate issues, who are trying to persuade the American
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