Posted on 04/24/2017 5:49:29 AM PDT by rktman
New Orleans officials removed the first of four prominent Confederate monuments early Monday, the latest Southern institution to sever itself from symbols viewed by many as a representation racism and white supremacy.
The first memorial to come down was the Liberty Monument, an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League.
Workers arrived to begin removing the statue, which commemorates whites who tried to topple a biracial post-Civil War government in New Orleans, around 1:25 a.m. in an attempt to avoid disruption from supporters who want the monuments to stay, some of whom city officials said have made death threats.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
The U.S. has been running a trade deficit for how many years now?
"Demand" for import can be in Timbuktu, but if they don't have the money to pay for it the "Supply" won't come to them.
How did the U.S. pay for their exports during the rebellion with cotton exports cut off?
You really need to get this money thing worked out so that you can understand it. You see, you have to pay *MONEY* to get back products. Your "Demand" is irrelevant without the financial capital to purchase it, and New York didn't produce the Financial capital necessary to purchase those European products coming into it's harbor.
I really doubt I'll get it straightened out by you.
The South did. *THAT* is where the money was coming from. It went out as Southern Products, and came back as European products in exchange.
So you're claiming it was a barter economy?
THEY DIDN'T HAVE THE MONEY.
No need to shout. It doesn't magically change your claims from BS to God's own truth.
Of course New York and the North "had the money". It was the industrial, financial, insurance, transportation, and business center of the country. They South grew crops. It depended on the North for everything else. You don't think they paid money for it?
Even obvious stuff, like how did New Yorkers pay the Europeans for their imports? Yes, there was gold coming out of California and Silver coming out of Nevada, but you can't sustain a trade balance on specie and borrowing indefinitely.
But you could do so for four years or so.
Perhaps you should; you're not very good at it.
Even obvious stuff, like how did New Yorkers pay the Europeans for their imports? Yes, there was gold coming out of California and Silver coming out of Nevada, but you can't sustain a trade balance on specie and borrowing indefinitely.
Money, I assume. The U.S. ran a trade deficit for 12 of the 15 years prior to the rebellion. The U.S. didn't collapse. They paid for those imports with something.
If New Yorkers didn’t have money, how did they pay for the imports?
I honestly don’t know if your illiteracy here is economic, historical or both.
If - as you argue - the basis of the Civil War was purely economic, than the Southern planters were the worst businessman in the history of the universe. They were among the richest men in the world with a product (cotton) where the demand was seemingly limitless.
If you have read as much as you claim, you would know that cotton was so valuable by the 1860s that it was actually throwing the Southern economy out of whack. The Upper South (Virginia)was realizing that their greatest commodity was their slaves and were selling them for great profit to the Lower South - where the demand for their labor was endless. If things had continued as is, the US was going to end up with three economies - the industrial north, the agrarian deep south, and an upper south that was essentially a breeder’s economy.
Anyway, the point is, your argument is that the South risked this war because the richest men in America believed they could be 40 percent richer by somehow eliminating the middleman that was the northern shipbuilding industry.
(I can’t even begin to figure out your math regarding New Yorkers buying Southern Cotton from England with Southern money).
The main reason that the north had a shipbuilding industry and the south did not was that if you had capital in the south, you would be crazy to invest in anything other than a cotton plantation.
I guess the fundamental question I have is: How did the North survive and thrive during the war without all the money that the South took from them? Who paid for the factories?
And how did the North survive after the war after crippling the economy of the South?
You can lead a Dawg to water but you can't make her drink. The Dawg will have to go the rest of the way herself.
Money, I assume. The U.S. ran a trade deficit for 12 of the 15 years prior to the rebellion. The U.S. didn't collapse. They paid for those imports with something.
Southern products. Europe didn't want very much that the North East produced. They had better machines, better textiles, and so forth.
Indeed, the whole point of the protectionist laws favoring the North were to protect the North from European competition, but of course the brunt of this was paid by the Southern states.
Because of the protectionist law jiggering, the South bought stuff from the North which would have been better quality and cheaper had they been able to buy it from Europe without markup.
This is where the North got it's capital with which to purchase European goods.
Why should I engage in discussion with you?
It seems like the reciprocal response should be to just trade insults back and forth with you.
That is your teenage cynicism talking. Maybe you'll outgrow it. Maybe you won't.
I used to think the same way when I was in high school. Eventually, I learned that while other people may not conform to some ideal conception of morality, yet they may have scruples and sympathies of their own, and aren't always wholly self-interested.
Until you grow up a little and figure out something like that on your own, what's the point of talking to you?
Cynicism is an attitude which one develops after years of discovering that people constantly work at deceiving you. It is generally not a characteristic of Teenage years, where people are generally gullible.
Eventually, I learned that while other people may not conform to some ideal conception of morality, yet they may have scruples and sympathies of their own, and aren't always wholly self-interested.
This only applies to some of the people. There is that component of mankind that is wholly interested in their own self interest, and as often as not, these sorts can be found chasing their ambitions at the pinnacles of power.
Just because you yourself may not have this fault does not mean that your perspective is universal. I assure you there are a lot of people in power who pursue more wealth and power relentlessly.
Until you grow up a little and figure out something like that on your own, what's the point of talking to you?
Well I completely reject your premise that I am the immature one here, and the point of talking to me is that you might learn some truth of which you had been previously unaware.
That is what happened to me. I used to think as you do, that the US fought a holy war against the forces of evil, and through the power of God and Faith, they conquered those evil people and made them see the true morality.
And then I learned of the facts which contradicted this dogma.
I love the all-caps shouting. It says that he has exhausted his litany of foolishness and is having another tantrum ;’}
“Why won’t anybody LISTEN TO ME?!!!”
LOL
Right? And I always wonder why a bunch of Dixecrats and latter day Fire Eaters, who are really Democrats keep coming to a conservative website.
It seceded peacefully, and it only turned violent when Lincoln refused to leave them in peace.
And lookie what I found. From the National Republican (Lincoln's organ) March 11, 1861.
THE EVACUATION OF FORT SUMTERLate last evening we learned that in a Cabinet meeting, on Saturday, it was determined to evacuate Fort Sumter. If the news is authentic, of which we have no reason to doubt, this measure has been taken as one of conciliation to the border States. The fort has no strategic importance, and it may have been supposed that yielding a point of pride to South Carolina could very well be afforded by a great Government, would satisfy the country generally of the pacific policy of the Administration, and enable it, without the appearance of coercion, to be more stringent in the enforcement of the revenue laws.
Obviously Lincoln changed his mind.
You need help. Seek it.
She made her novel's villain a Northerner who moved South, Simon Legree, and made her Southern whites generally admirable, if weak and flawed, figures.
Of course, slaveowners bent on secession would take Stowe for a South-hater and a villain, but they'd say that about anybody who didn't whole-heartedly support slavery.
Anyone who said or wrote a critical word about slavery was assumed to be an enemy and a devil.
That in this, as in so many other things, you automatically take the slavers' side, is yet another reason why conversations with you tend not to be worth the time.
I repeat my suggestion: read some history.
The Lincoln you hate might have been more than willing to give the slave states their independence after 3 years (like Cuba) or 47 years (like the Philippines) or 118 years+ (like Puerto Rico) -- but not when they wanted it just because they wanted it.
One might get that impression as a consequence of her works. It certainly had damaging consequences for the South.
Anyone who said or wrote a critical word about slavery was assumed to be an enemy and a devil.
Well, focusing on the whippings and the beatings and the murders and the chains and the separations of families and so forth is probably intended to make readers believe this is a widespread and common practice.
I may be mistaken, but it doesn't strike me as rational for people who were making money off of slaves to whip, beat, or murder them. I have no doubt that it happened, but I would be shocked to discover that it happened to the degree it is always portrayed in movies or literature. That treating people this way should be common place simply doesn't make any sense, and therefore I believe it is inaccurate. I believe they took what examples of abuse they could find and spread word of them as far as they possibly could. This is the sort of thing that political activists do, and I do not doubt they did it.
That in this, as in so many other things, you automatically take the slavers' side, is yet another reason why conversations with you tend not to be worth the time.
Stop trying to put words in my mouth. I don't take the slavers side, I merely recognize the legal conditions that existed at the time. With Harriet Beecher Stowe whom Lincoln said (In Jest, I think) caused the war, he is not far wrong. It was this sort of agitation that exacerbated the tensions between the Puritan abolitionists and the people who's economics depended upon this "peculiar institution." It helped bring about an ugly and probably unnecessary war.
But pray tell, why didn't this abolitionist fervor extend to the Caribbean where slavery was far worse than in the Southern states, and where the Navy Gun ships could easily reach it? Why did their abolitionist zeal cool so quickly after they had subdued the financial threat?
Was this not a moral crusade? Why, pray tell, was it so important to the North to stamp out slavery in the South, (But not in the North) but to leave it unharmed in the Caribbean? Could it be because the Caribbean Islands were no financial threat to the power brokers in the North Eastern part of the Union?
Could it be that those North Eastern power brokers were making profits off the Caribbean plantations?
But he couldn't give them their independence after "four score and seven years"?
Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in the 1830s. France, after an earlier attempt, in the 1840s. Denmark at the same time.
So were we going to go to war with Spain or Holland to free their slaves? Well, no. For one thing, that wasn't going on in our country. It was easy for Americans to ignore. But also, to do so would have required a support for imperialist interventionism that mid-19th century America wasn't willing to rise to (or sink to).
You go from objecting to the US government throwing its weight around to demanding that it do just that (or wondering why it doesn't). A lot of people are like that, I guess, but the glaring contradiction doesn't say much for your position or your arguments.
__________
That you can say this:
I may be mistaken, but it doesn't strike me as rational for people who were making money off of slaves to whip, beat, or murder them. I have no doubt that it happened, but I would be shocked to discover that it happened to the degree it is always portrayed in movies or literature. That treating people this way should be common place simply doesn't make any sense, and therefore I believe it is inaccurate.
And then deny that you take the slavers' side is pretty typical. I'm hard pressed to remember a time when you don't use your simplistic notions of economics to buttress the pro-slavery position.
The answer to your quandary, though, is that punishing one slave severely discouraged rebelliousness or insubordination in the others, so slave owners could readily justify it in economic terms and impose drastic punishments to keep their slaves in line.
Seriously, do a little reading on the Philippine Insurrection before you make daft off-the-cuff pronouncements.
I am a huge history buff, though my degrees are not in history. When you read about the changes in thought about slavery in the south from the founding of the country until 1860 it is really disheartening. Most of the founding fathers north and south did not think of slavery as a positive good. Thomas Jefferson went so far as to call it “a moral depravity” and a “hideous blot” on the country. In fact they were so embarrassed by it that they did not even use the word slavery in the constitution. Most of them were hoping it would eventually be abolished.
Fast forward to the 1830’s and the slaveocracy is now saying that slavery is a positive good and the natural state for the slaves. By 1860 the south was almost united in their belief that slavery was a positive good. In fact in violation of many of their state constitutions, they passed laws limiting free speech (abolitionist speech). Then when the rest of the states had the audacity to elect a party to the presidency that was against slavery,(and it would not have mattered which republican was the candidate, they would have reacted the same way) they decided to not accept the outcome of a free and fair election and instead rebel.
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