Posted on 12/02/2008 6:57:32 AM PST by prplhze2000
came across an article from an old issue of U.S. News & World Report commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. What was interesting was that it compared the treatment of the South for decades after the war's end to the millions of dollars and additional support given to Germany and other European countries through the Marshall plan and concluded the South's fate was a drag on the rest of the country as it remained the poorest section of America by far.....
U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."
The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."
Such policies created a region so poor and under-educated that FDR called the South the "nations number one economic problem" in 1938...
(Excerpt) Read more at kingfish1935.blogspot.com ...
great post
I do wonder when I hear the word traitor is they also apply that to those who wanted to fight the English and at the time they were called traitors of others
That was a monumental threat to the shipping interests in New York and Boston.
Right up until the point in 1859 when the state of South Carolina refused to keep spending money on it
At least one poster on these threads called freed slaves who enlisted in the US army "turncoats."
The annual Auburn/Alabama football game is called the Iron Bowl because it is played in Birmingham next door to an old steel mill.
civil war ..my favorite subject...just keep this in mind
as with all wars...history is written by the victorious.
(with that said) I am a northerner by birth...I found out something here called a “county library” It was amazing what I found out when I took the time to do my own Research
before I formed an opinion! The south was screwed over
by the north during and after the war. I don’t think PEOPLE KNOW THE TRUE REASONS FOR THE WAR...Slavery was an afterthought NOT the cause...Don’t believe me?
Research Abraham Lincoln.. Heard of him? He was quoted as saying “If I could hold the union together without freeing one slave he would do it”
How about General/ President Grant?.
“If people think this was is about slavery..I will surely give my sword to the other side”
None of this is taught in the history books in the north..You have to take the time and effort and dig deep to find this.
I have not been on one in an age. Where is stand watie? Did he get banned?
Watie announced that he was taking care of a sick relative about four months ago. Hasn’t been heard from since.
"At that time (decades following civil war), the South was trying to educate a third of the nation's children in a dual school system, but it only had a sixth of the nation's school revenues."
That "dual" school system is a nice touch. But as I understand it, the Reconstruction-era governments were the ones who introduced public schools into some states, or at least they expanded the public school system. That's a major reason why taxes went up so much. Probably not the only one, but give credit where credit is due.
Of course, such an area rich in resources and poverty was irresistible to the robber barons and their government allies. It's no wonder Huey Long burst upon the scene as Standard Oil and others raped the South for its resources, while giving almost nothing in return: "Northern capitalists took command of many Southern resources. A cottonseed-oil firm owned in the North controlled 88% of the production of that product. the entire supply of American bauxite, found in four Southern States, went to ONE Northern company. Control of 80% of America's sulphur was picked up by another firm....
Northerners had the capital and the know how, so it's only natural that they'd lead the way. Before he war, Southern planters didn't think much of cottonseed processing, just like they didn't take much interest in other industries.
But what happened was part of the movement to monopoly in the 1880s. Cottonseed millers got together to form a trust, the American Cotton Oil Company, that would control production like Standard Oil or US Steel or American Sugar Refining and other trusts did in their own fields.
I don't know if it actually was a Northern company or if it was just incorporated in the North. Some of the companies that came together to form the monopoly were Southern, but Huey Long, as we all know, was something of a rabble rouser, and relished playing the victim card. If Texans controlled Louisiana cottonseed production, it would still have been insufferable to him.
The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."
Again, this may have been a phase in the development of monopolies, with much the same thing also occuring in the North. But I'm not sure how much truth there is in this. US Steel bought out the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and the new company did a lot to build up Birmingham. Maybe your source is right and the budding monopoly USS didn't play fair, but I get the feeling your magazine is talking more in general, even mythic terms, than in real historical ones.
We all know things were worse in the South a century ago. And now they aren't. I don't know what the point of reviving the whole thing as a tale of villains and victims is. If you're looking for villains, or for reasons for underdevelopment that go beyond villains and victims, you'll find some in the South as well as in the North.
Do you think US News really wanted to encourage Southern complaining, handwringing, and finger-pointing? More likely they were encouraging their mostly Northern readers not to be too hard on your part of the country.
And went to California, which was also a Union state during the rebellion. You make it sound like he went South.
EGGS ACKLEY !
The war started when the commander of the first rebel battery said, "Fire". Jefferson Davis would say otherwise, as would you. But it's the Southron way to blame everyone else for their own idiotic mistakes.
Wonder if the book arrived yet?
I believe I predicted back then that Watie would disappear for a while, then come back and claim that he presented the book, that it proved everything that he said, but that the thread had been pulled.
He also said, "And if I could preserve the Union by freeing all the slaves I would do that."
But hey, why should we have all the fun with research? Research Robert Hunter, confederate Senator from Virginia who said, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our [slave] property?" Or how about Henry Benning, representative from Georgia to the Virginia secession convention who said, "What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North-was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery." Or Alexander Stephens, vice president of the confederacy, who said, "The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists amongst us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." How about that for research?
my wife is a Boston girl born and bred but she too has done what you did and is shocked that so many people where she comes form does not know their history.
She too came to the conclusion that the south was royally screwed over
look obama’s BC ......(as I run away with tale between legs)
I know, I just didn’t want to go too far into the debate,
the civil war is still and always will be a touchy subject
just been talking to an historian about this and he mentioned that Lincoln never did want to fire first but he wanted to antagonise the south into firing .
H e told the south that he would not resupply the fort but he lied and sent warships to Charleston and when the south saw and learned of this .
well we all know what happened then
he also said that he was not going to free the slaves and he does not think he has the right to do so either.
Lets not fall into the liberal PC version of how the north came thundering down south to free the blacks and that was it.
Funny how the biggest race riots in the country happened in the north after the war by union troops and how slave ship building was the biggest industry.
Why do the liberals fail to mention that plus fail to mention that blacks were slave owners too.
mmmmmmmmmmmmm
Yes it makes good ole liberal feel good but it is not true, still when did the truth ever get in the way of a good little myth to them.
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