Posted on 04/15/2010 1:16:02 PM PDT by wolfcreek
Ten years ago, I received an e-mail from a reader who signed him or herself "J.D." "I am a white racist," wrote J.D., "a white supremacist and I do not deny it."
From that, you'd suspect J.D. had nothing of value to say. You'd be mistaken. J.D. wrote in response to a column documenting the fact that preservation of slavery was the prime directive of the Confederacy. "I was most pleased to see you write what we both know to be the truth," the e-mail said. "I never cease to be amazed at the Sons of Confederate Veterans and similar 'heritage not hate' groups who are constantly whining that the Confederacy was not a white, racist government ..."
That argument, noted J.D. with wry amusement, plays well with "white people who want to be Confederates without any controversy."
(Excerpt) Read more at news-record.com ...
The claim that "only about 5% of whites owned slaves in the South," is true, in a sense, but also a canard.
According to the 1860 census, there were about 8 million whites in slave owning states. Of those, 385,000 owned slaves -- or about 5%. But these were all relatively wealthy heads-of-households, meaning they also had large families.
If the average immediate family size was, say, six (a wife and four children), now we see that about 30% of southern whites lived in the homes of slave holding families.
And consider a typical young white farming family in the Deep South. If they did not themselves own slaves, their parents did, and the young family would too -- as soon as they could afford them. So they were in no sense "anti-slave."
And that is just "average" for the entire South, where the slave population ranged from well over 50% in Deep South states like South Carolina and Mississippi, to about 25% in Upper South states like Virginia and Tennessee, to barely 10% in Border States like Maryland and Missouri.
So, while the average of slave-owning white families may have been 30% overall, the range was from well over 50% in the Deep South to under 10% in Border States.
Indeed, in states like (western) Virginia, (eastern) Tennessee and (western) North Carolina, many counties of the state had relatively few slave owning households and so refused to seceed, or resisted secession. Some of these also supplied soldiers for the Union army.
Good bye.
I see that you've been reduced to making crap up as you go along.
Even when appropriate?
I have seen your logic on the blockade from other sources, but the point was not your opinion but the stated decision of the Supreme Court on the apprehension of the date of the beginning of the war. The Court fixed that issue on the date of Lincoln's ordering the blockade. It can be found in the Court's proceedings in 1872.
Cite the case please.
"The documents you referred to were publications of the same value as newspaper accounts, not official statements of governance."
This web site claims, for example:
Copied by Justin Sanders from the Official Records, Ser IV, vol 1, pp. 81-85.
For another example, at the end of the South Carolina Declaration we see the following:
"Adopted December 24, 1860
"[Committee signatures]"
So, how is this not "official"?
I'd be curious to learn in what sense these are not "official records," or how they do not reflect the "real reasons" of those officials at that time.
In other words, if these were not the "real reasons," then where are the documents which tell what are?
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Your denying the quotation? If proven, will you leave FR?
No. If shown to be inaccurate will you?
Post the date and context and let's see what you've got.
Really?
DomainMaster: "It is essentially a wasted exercise to chose to focus on selected secession documents rather than the whole of the history of early 1861. That is quite limiting and does little to inform yourself or others on the magnitude of the subject."
Is that so?
DomainMaster: "It is your prerogative to limit the information, but do not expect others to agree with you on your conclusions. You should familiarize yourself with all the other secession declarations and commentaries that you can easily find, and then reach your conclusion. At this point, your reservoir of knowledge seems low."
You don't say!
DomainMaster: "With regard to the official documents of secession, none of the original 7 and eventual 11 ordinances mentioned slavery as a cause of their decision to leave the Union."
Well, I'll be... finally a testable claim.
Here is the list of all secession resolutions.
And here are four "Declarations of Causes of Seceding States".
Let's review them one-by-one:
So, up to this point, seven Deep South states have seceded and with the one exception of Texas complaining about Robert E. Lee's inadequate defense of its borders, ONLY slavery has been mentioned as a cause for secession.
Now comes the Battle of Fort Sumter, on April 12, as a result of which now-President Lincoln declares a state of insurrection and calls for raising an army to defeat it.
Now the language of secession begins to change.
Upper South
Border States
Secession conventions also met in Missouri and Kentucky in October and November 1861, producing documents which complained about the violence and oppressions of the Civil War.
Clearly, for these Border States, slavery was a secondary issue.
So here is the bottom line:
You might be interested to learn that many defenders of the Southern Cause argue here that the South was actually very prosperous and wealthy -- on average far more wealthy than poor Northern farmers or factory workers.
How can that be? The answer is that slaves not only produced wealth, they WERE wealth, and so the South on average was quite wealthy.
Of course many Southern counties had few or no slaves. This was especially true in western Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. These areas remained hot-beds of Union sympathizers throughout the war.
And in Border States such as Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri, where slave populations were barely 10% of the total, and slave owners correspondingly few, sympathy for the Southern Cause never grew strong enough to vote for secession.
But in the Deep South, where slave populations were 50% and more of the total, and slave ownership a matter of necessity and social status, then any perceived threat against slavery -- whether real or just imagined -- was both intolerable and a matter of life and death.
As to whether slavery would have died of its own accord in the decades after the Civil War -- that's very hard to say.
Yes, possibly in Border States and the Upper South, where slavery was never so strong.
But the Deep South is a very different story, and I don't see how they would ever have changed voluntarily.
Of course I agree, but am merely telling you what some defenders of the Southern Cause have argued to me here on Free Republic.
They say that in the 1850s, the South was both wealthy and prosperous, and in a sense they are right.
If you count the income produced by slaves, and the value of those slaves, then the average Deep South slave owning family was considerably more prosperous than their northern farmer and factory-worker cousins.
As to the eventual effect of modern farm machinery, you have to be circumspect here.
Remember, machinery is only designed and produced to supply a perceived need, and where there is no need, no machines will be built or used.
So as long as the South considered itself to be prospering under its slave economics, where is the motivation to change?
Indeed, we have modern-day examples of how this works.
Even in hi-tech California, where low-cost Mexican workers are available to harvest crops, there is relatively little farm mechanization going on.
Why should a farmer buy a million dollar harvester, when he can hire a few Mexicans dirt cheap?
As for the cost of caring for slaves -- didn't they pretty much take care of themselves, grow their own food, etc.?
I doubt if the cost of caring was all that high.
What was high was the cost to purchase slaves, but that was strictly a function of the market place of supply and demand.
Slaves were expensive because they were worth a lot -- so they were much in demand.
That's like saying factory owners are more prosperous than someone running a cottage industry. Slaves represented a considerable investment, so of course a slave-owning family was more prosperous--they had to be to own slaves.
Even in hi-tech California, where low-cost Mexican workers are available to harvest crops, there is relatively little farm mechanization going on. Why should a farmer buy a million dollar harvester, when he can hire a few Mexicans dirt cheap?
It is sometimes not a question of buying a harvester. Some crops do not lend themselves to mechanical harvesting. I grew up on a tobacco farm, and to my knowledge, there has been no successful mechanical harvester ever developed for the crop, even though the crop is labor intensive and labor costs were the greatest expense.
Many produce crops cannot be successfully harvested without destroying the plant, and because the crop does not ripen all at once.
Agreed.
What's being debated here are two questions:
A) How important was slavery to the South? and
B) Would slavery have "withered away" and died out on its own, peacefully, had there been no Civil War?
Some of those who defend the Southern Cause wish to minimize slavery's importance for the Civil War, and assert slavery would have naturally died out on its own, even had there been no war.
And there are factual arguments to be made, as you may have read on this thread.
For two examples, it is a fact that:
From facts such as these they build a case that the Civil War was not all about slavery, but really was about States Rights against Federal power -- a War of Northern Aggression in which the South was defending the US Constitution!
Well, the truth is, it was all about slavery, indeed, for those states who began the secessions, it was only about slavery.
There was no "northern aggression" then for them to point to, only the insult and potential threat to slavery represented by the election of Abraham Lincoln.
And Lincoln had not even taken office yet.
We can see this more clearly if we look closer at the two "facts" cited above.
Next we consider that slave populations ranged from barely 10% of the total in Border States like Maryland and Missouri, to over 50% in Deep South states like South Carolina and Mississippi. For the average to be say 35%, then some states and counties must have been in the range of 2/3 -- 67% of white households owning slaves.
For such people, slavery was not just an option or luxury, it was a necessity -- and any perceived challenge to slavery would be met with violence.
Smokin' Joe: "Many produce crops cannot be successfully harvested without destroying the plant, and because the crop does not ripen all at once."
Again agreed, but only up to a point.
In this day and age technology can do amazing things, including distinguish between ripe-enough and not-yet-ripe-enough produce.
But the question is: at what cost?
If it takes a million dollars to purchase an automatic harvester for delicate produce -- plus tens of thousands per year to operate and repair it -- what farmer would spend such sums if he could hire workers for a few thousand dollars per season?
So, considering that the Deep South was willing to bet everything on a War for Independence to protect slavery in 1860, I see no reason to suppose they would have abolished slavery peacefully on their own just a few decades later.
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