Posted on 04/08/2018 3:39:59 PM PDT by iowamark
A friend recently posed this question: “If you had to recommend one book for a first-time visitor to the U.S. to read, to understand our country, what would it be and why?”...
If the goal is an education, we could recommend Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager’s Growth of the American Republic, a two-volume history that used to be required reading...
Huckleberry Finn may be the greatest American novel... But there is no single novel, no matter how great, that can do the job alone.
Consider instead the great American essayists who invented a new style of writing in the 1920s and founded The New Yorker. E. B. White’s One Man’s Meat is the finest such essay collection... Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel is nearly as great...
Teddy Roosevelt’s short book The Strenuous Life, which opens with his 1899 speech by that name, is an explanation of America’s view of itself — a view that greatly shaped the 20th century. It was the peculiar marriage of power and prosperity together with a sense of moral urgency. Roosevelt demands an active life, a life of struggling for personal and national virtue. He commends a triad of strength in body, intellect, and character — of which character is the most important. America must meet its moral obligations vigorously, he tells us: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”...
The origin of that moral urgency was America’s most important spiritual crisis. It is best expressed in a single speech, rich in Biblical imagery and contemporary prophecy: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, which is the greatest of all American writing. It is a tone-poem or photograph of the American soul. A complete understanding, in just 697 words.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
If you want to bypass the baloney on tariffs, I recommend the book King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South 1800-1925 by Harold D. Woodman.
It appears to be highly detailed and even discusses the infamous tome Southern Wealth and Northern Profits.
“The South’s economic problems arose from “our own supine and lack of energy,” charged another Southerner. Merchants were timid. They would not import merchandise themselves but were content merely to sell goods imported by Northerners. If successful, they did not seek to enlarge and expand their business but instead retired to a plantation.”
“The South lacked a large market and hence goods did not come to it. “If the Charleston merchant wonders why fewer commodities are imported into that market than into Boston, cannot he find ready answer in the fact that commodities go only where they are wanted…Commodities come to us because they are wanted-and we want the because we consume them. Commodities are not carried to South Carolina because they are not consumed there, and of course not wanted there.”
As we explore further, we’ll find more and more that the great burden of tariffs upon the South was way overblown.
I am learning details of the cotton pipeline that adds to your thoughts. Factoring houses acted as agents for the planters and sold the cotton to whoever presented the best price. In many cases this was done on paper, and a specific consignment of cotton was not held for a specific buyer. Instead, cotton was sent by riverboat down to Gulf ports, where it MIGHT be sent directly to England or Spain, but often went to New York first. Why? Because a better price might be had in New York. If not, the ship went on across the Atlantic.
I have yet to find ANY direct correlation between exports and imports. Of course a ship owner would not want to make a return trip home empty, but who paid that freight could be completely different than who paid for the first leg of the voyage.
“Another key fact is that most of this money would have disappeared from their control if the South traded directly with Europe.”
You do know that many Southern factor houses were aligned with, and worked directly with, import houses in England right?
Can't find out anything about Harold D. Woodman. Don't know why I should accept someone as an authority about which I can't find any information. For all I know, "Harold D. Woodman" is BroJoeK, and I would simply be reading the same crap he already posts.
If the guy turns out to be a Boston Liberal arts professor being published in Connecticut, then his credibility gets smaller. It would be like asking Anderson Cooper to give me the straight information on President Trump.
Harold D. Woodman, Professor Emeritus, Purdue University
Author of King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925 and King Cotton and His Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925
I think a lot of what you read on line is "know nothing" stuff. What I mean, is, if you were a well connected citizen of Charleston or New Orleans, you'd know who the heads of the big commercial agencies in town were and which British houses they did business with. If you didn't have much sense of the economic life of the city you'd fall for all the sloganeering.
Strange as it may seem now, globalization was going on back in the 1850s. A firm like Frasier, Trenholm had a hard time knowing if they were a British or a Southern or a Northern form, right down to the point when war made it necessary to decide.
“Strange as it may seem now, globalization was going on back in the 1850s.”
I can see that, and I think the revisionists really don’t understand the reality of what was going on.
“New Orleans was the financial center of the Mississippi Valley. From 1835 to 1842 its banking capital exceeded that of New York City, the financial leader of the United States in most years during the antebellum period. The Crescent City’s twenty-six banking companies in 1855 loaned money for the construction of railroads, expansion of plantations, purchase of goods, and many other enterprises.”
I wonder why the CSA didn’t secede from New Orleans?
BroJoeK Your quote doesn’t tell us who or when this happened, but it does support the idea that Lost Cause mythology began at the top, even during the war itself, with men like Davis.
Important to remember that by the time Davis resigned from the US Congress, January 21, 1861, five Deep South states had already declared secession: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia & Alabama, and Louisiana would soon.
So far as we know, Davis was involved in none of these secession conventions, but had been working in Congress on his own version of the Corwin amendment.
So, while Davis had no personal knowledge of what was going on in those secession conventions, his own efforts were devoted to the one issue they all said was most important: slavery.
A whole bunch of blather trying to claim Davis was saying the exact opposite of what he clearly said. It was not about slavery. Deal with it.
They were prepared to do so and empowered the Confederate ambassador with plenipotiary powers (meaning he could sign a treaty and legally bind the CSA by doing so) which would have abolished slavery in return for European recognition/military aid. This was 1864 just one year after the EP. Thousands of Blacks did serve in the Confederate Army.
Its obviously just too inconvenient for you to admit it. Davis did not want war and did not start a war. Lincoln did.
Your usual BS and tapdancing. Davis says exactly the opposite of what you are claiming. He always did.
You know what it proves?
It proves that Davis was just your typical Democrat eager to blame the gun, not the shooter!!
So just don’t tell me that Democrats today are any different than they’ve always been — utterly insane.
Once again Davis says exactly the opposite of what you claim and you can’t handle it so you resort to your usual spin and BS.
Johnson’s views were consistent with even those of Chase as the quotes of Chase I provided amply demonstrate. His impeachment by the Radical Republicans was a joke. Johnson was a flawed man to be sure but he was a damn sight better than those corrupt lunatics.
Correct. He told the truth about them and they couldn’t stand it.
Except that thousands of Blacks served in the Confederate Army and had for years. So this line of BS falls apart.
No it doesn’t. Its very clear that it says the exact opposite of what you are claiming. That slavery was far from the most important issue....that what they really did not like or want was a sectional party hell bent on high tariffs to benefit one region at the expense of another and of government largesse to corporations. The Confederate Constitution went on at length with measures to control spending and prevent excessive spending.
Regardless, Cleburne’s words did not win him any friends in Confederate leadership, he was passed over for promotion three times and died in battle, in 1864.
There is no question the quote is genuine and has been cited numerous times. Its just inconvenient for you so holding to your usual pattern, you claim any quote that is inconvenient to your PC Revisionism must be fake. Cleburne was promoted to major general from a relatively low rank to begin with. Obviously his talent was recognized.
Unlike FLT-bird, this author admits that 25% of Southerners owned slaves.
And that could easily be correct, overall, because it corresponds to statistics which say almost half of Deep South families owned slaves, about 25% in the Upper South and 15% in Border States, so sure, 25% on average.
My calculations say 26% overall, certainly close enough for this purpose.
Firstly...no it doesn’t. He says AT LEAST 75% DO NOT own slaves. He put no upper limit on how many did not own slaves. He did not say 25% DID own slaves. Read more carefully.
Oh and he also pointed out slavery was not what the Confederates were fighting for and pointed out - once again - that they could have preserved it any time by simply laying down their arms. You seem to have skipped over that part. I wonder why.
LOL! Oh my god the BS! I really am laughing out loud upon reading it. The reason slavery started declining more in the Upper South was the exact same reason it declined in the Northern states, in the British Empire and in much of the rest of the Western world at this time. Its no secret. Its not magic. It was industrialization. Industrialization was steadily moving Southward and it was killing slavery slowly as it did. It wasn’t some previously unmentioned influx of Northerners in these states. Get real.
He is guesstimating obviously. He says 80% the previous one says at least 75%. Whatever the exact percentage the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY did not own slaves or have the slightest interest in slavery. As to 5.63% those are the percentages of the total free populations in those states which owned slaves as of the 1860 US Census. If you don’t like the numbers take it up with the US Census bureau. Obviously there were families in which just one person - usually the father - would be listed as the sole owner of slaves. Obviously this comprised some % of the families. I doubt it was as much as 25% and the previous author said at least 75% WERE NOT...not that 25% were.....this guy says 80$ WERE NOT....not that 20% were. It remains an estimate. What we do know is that the overwhelming majority DID NOT.
Firstly this is simply false. 3 of the 4 states that listed reasons listed several including the economic grievances. Secondly, it was a democracy. Those who did not own slaves would not have willingly sacrificed their lives for something they did not own and/or had no interest in owning.
“As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on...”
But you don’t find any which say, in effect, “let’s fight to preserve the Union” or “let’s fight to protect slavery”.
Soldiers’ feelings were more basic.
It was a different time. People did not view slavery the same way we do today - that holds for the overwhelming majority. Racism was the norm throughout the world. It horrifies us today but it was a different world. The vast majority on both sides were not fighting over slavery and didn’t really care very much about slavery. No matter how much people would get worked into a lather today, they just didn’t then.
BroJoeK What actual data do Adams’ books cite?
A wide array of sources from US trade data to British and French trade information.
BroJoeK LT-bird’s version of the Lost Cause myth is somewhat unique, for example, I’ve never seen another make such a big deal of the Corwin amendment and lie so bald-facedly about it being “offered” and “rejected”.
I’d say anyone who can concoct such a claim is a serious propagandist and could find ready employment with the Democrat National Committee.
BroJoeK’s PC Revisionism is pretty much the standard nationalist dogma. Deny quotes that are inconvenient. Claim scholars whose opinions they do not agree with are not scholars and/or are not credible. Refuse to read Lincoln’s inaugural address and just lie about it repeatedly instead. and above all just repeat the word “slavery slavery slavery” no matter how obviously ridiculous that is while at the same time try to deny people then were motivated by pocketbook issues just like they are today and have been throughout history.
BroJoeK But how much of America’s imports in, say, 1860 were owned by the very cotton planters who exported their produce to Europe?
My guess is: very little.
And the reason is, when planters harvested & prepared their crops, they moved the bales to a rail siding or steamboat landing.
Merchants riding the train or steamboat would offer the planter a price for his cotton bales, which the planter may accept or wait for the next train-steamboat in hopes of a better price.
The merchants then move the cotton to port, export it and, on return fill the ships’ cargo holds with European products.
So who were these merchants, New Yorkers? Maybe.
Southerners? Maybe
Foreigners? Very likely, representatives of European importers there to make certain their companies get the quantities & qualities needed.
Point is: once the cotton leaves the rail siding or steamboat landing, our Southern planter has his money — that’s his payday — and ownership transfers to agents representing ultimate customers, agents who then also refill the ships’ cargo holds with European imports for their return trip.
So I’m thinking DiogenesLamp stumbled slightly closer to truth on this, though both Lost Causers are distorting actual history for their own propaganda purposes.
Agree? Disagree?
It will depend on the the Seller of the Cotton. Some were large Planters who acted as wholesalers buying up the cotton produced by yeoman farmers around them for a percentage and putting it together with their own, some were strictly wholesalers (”Factors” as they were called then).
Whether the Southern owned the cotton all the way through direct sale to say Lancashire mills OR whether he sold on to a Factor at the docks, the end result of the tariffs would be the same.
If the voyage of the ship and the costs associated with it could not be defrayed nearly as well by imported manufactured goods due to the tariffs, then the price he is going to be paid per bail of cotton is going to go down. That is money directly out of his pocket.
In addition to that, thanks to those high tariffs, domestic manufacturers can increase their prices so whether he buys an imported manufactured good that has been tariffed or whether he buys a domestic manufactured good, he is going to have to pay a higher price one way or the other - more money out of his pocket.
Notice how this affects the yeoman farmer who devoted say 10 of his 40 acres to cotton in order to raise money to buy the things he could not produce as well as Plantations like Tara in GWTW. Money out of their pockets two ways. They all feel it. Slavery only concerns that plantation owner. The tariff concerns everybody.
But of course its not surprising to see the PC Revisionists try to just scream “slavery slavery slavery” at every turn while denying how the Northern states were voting themselves other people’s money....how corporate fatcats had politicians in their pocket and manipulated government policy to increase their profits.
BroJoeK The cotton South overall was already hugely wealthy.
So the issue here is, who owned the transportation, banking, warehousing & insurance needed to get product into customers’ hands?
No doubt some of that was already owned by Southerners, and I’d argue it certainly didn’t require independence for Southerners to own more of it.
It only really required that more devote themselves to such enterprises, but here we run into the Wigfall rules:
“We are an agricultural people; we a primitive but civilized people.
We have no cities-we don’t want them.
We have no literature-we don’t need any yet.
We have no press-we are glad of it.
We have no commercial marine-no navy-we don’t want them.
Your ships carry our produce and you can protect your own vessels.
We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes.
As long as we have our cotton, our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from these nations with which we are in amity.”
Wigfall’s words do not suggest a people chomping at the bit and raring to go towards modern industrialization and finance centered economies.
This Wigfall whom I had never heard of is one man with one man’s perspective. No doubt had the Southern states been independent, there would have arisen industries to service those valuable exports. Servicing exports was lucrative. Rhett talked about this in his Address.
You might want to educate yourself on Confederate leadership if you're going to be carrying their water with such enthusiasm.
Wigfall was a Senator of no great importance. Pfffffffft. Big deal.
Well, not if you put a blockade around all their ports it wouldn't.
If the demand wasn't there before the rebellion why would that change?
I'm constantly astonished that so many conservatives don't seem to understand basic economics. What point is "demand" (In the North) if the money to fill your demand does not belong to you? The people who are actually owed the money may have different demands, and the people who owe the money (The Europeans) would be obligated to figure out what they wanted in exchange. Demand in the North without the money to pay for it is meaningless. "Demand" in the South would have been created if that is where the money was destined. It would just possibly be different imports to balance those trades.
You would have us believe that the Southerners would simply heap their European currency up into piles and just look at it. No, they would redeem it on products that the Europeans could supply that they would want.
And you accuse me of not being creative?
I'm constantly astonished that so many conservatives don't seem to understand basic economics.
I'm not really sure I'm the one with the problem. You seem to be making this stuff up as you go along.
What did he have for breakfast? I mean come on, this is ridiculous. Why would any of those things matter? Where are you from? Where did you go to school?
Geez!
I haven't found all the information I recall about this, but I have found this, and it came from a link that BroJoeK gave me in support of one of his arguments, so it's *HIS* link, and he should have to own what it says. (And he referred to it as "possibly the best sources.)
The July 4, 1789, tariff was the first substantive legislation passed by the new American government. But in addition to the new duties, it reduced by 10 percent or more the tariff paid for goods arriving in American craft. It also required domestic construction for American ship registry. Navigation acts in the same decade stipulated that foreign-built and foreign-owned vessels were taxed 50 cents per ton when entering U.S. ports, while U.S.-built and -owned ones paid only six cents per ton. Furthermore, the U.S. ones paid annually, while foreign ones paid upon every entry.This effectively blocked off U.S. coastal trade to all but vessels built and owned in the United States. The navigation act of 1817 made it official, providing "that no goods, wares, or merchandise shall be imported under penalty of forfeiture thereof, from one port in the United States to another port in the United States, in a vessel belonging wholly or in part to a subject of any foreign power."
The point of all this was to protect and grow the shipping industry of New England, and it worked. By 1795, the combination of foreign complication and American protection put 92 percent of all imports and 86 percent of all exports in American-flag vessels.American shipowners' annual earnings shot up between 1790 and 1807, from $5.9 million to $42.1 million.
New England shipping took a severe hit during the War of 1812 and the embargo. After the war ended, the British flooded America with manufactured goods to try to drive out the nascent American industries. They chose the port of New York for their dumping ground, in part because the British had been feeding cargoes to Boston all through the war to encourage anti-war sentiment in New England. New York was the more starved, therefore it became the port of choice. And the dumping bankrupted many towns, but it assured New York of its sea-trading supremacy. In the decades to come. New Yorkers made the most of the chance.
Four Northern and Mid-Atlantic ports still had the lion's share of the shipping. But Boston and Baltimore mainly served regional markets (though Boston sucked up a lot of Southern cotton and shipped out a lot of fish). Philadelphia's shipping interest had built up trade with the major seaports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, especially as Pennsylvania's coal regions opened up in the 1820s. But New York was king. Its merchants had the ready money, it had a superior harbor, it kept freight rates down, and by 1825 some 4,000 coastal trade vessels per year arrived there. In 1828 it was estimated that the clearances from New York to ports on the Delaware Bay alone were 16,508 tons, and to the Chesapeake Bay 51,000 tons.
Early and mid-19th century Atlantic trade was based on "packet lines" -- groups of vessels offering scheduled services. It was a coastal trade at first, but when the Black Ball Line started running between New York and Liverpool in 1817, it became the way to do business across the pond.
The trick was to have a good cargo going each way. The New York packet lines succeeded because they sucked in all the eastbound cotton cargoes from the U.S. The northeast didn't have enough volume of paying freight on its own. So American vessels, usually owned in the Northeast, sailed off to a cotton port, carrying goods for the southern market. There they loaded cotton (or occasionally naval stores or timber) for Europe. They steamed back from Europe loaded with manufactured goods, raw materials like hemp or coal, and occasionally immigrants.
Since this "triangle trade" involved a domestic leg, foreign vessels were excluded from it (under the 1817 law), except a few English ones that could substitute a Canadian port for a Northern U.S. one. And since it was subsidized by the U.S. government, it was going to continue to be the only game in town.
Robert Greenhalgh Albion, in his laudatory history of the Port of New York, openly boasts of this selfish monopoly. "By creating a three-cornered trade in the 'cotton triangle,' New York dragged the commerce between the southern ports and Europe out of its normal course some two hundred miles to collect a heavy toll upon it. This trade might perfectly well have taken the form of direct shuttles between Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans on the one hand and Liverpool or Havre on the other, leaving New York far to one side had it not interfered in this way. To clinch this abnormal arrangement, moreover, New York developed the coastal packet lines without which it would have been extremely difficult to make the east-bound trips of the ocean packets profitable."[2]
Even when the Southern cotton bound for Europe didn't put in at the wharves of Sandy Hook or the East River, unloading and reloading, the combined income from interests, commissions, freight, insurance, and other profits took perhaps 40 cents into New York of every dollar paid for southern cotton.
The record shows that ports with moderate quantities of outbound freight couldn't keep up with the New York competition. Remember, this is a triangle trade. Boston started a packet line in 1833 that, to secure outbound cargo, detoured to Charleston for cotton. But about the only other local commodity it could find to move to Europe was Bostonians. Since most passengers en route to England found little attraction in a layover in South Carolina, the lines failed.[3]
As for the cotton ports themselves, they did not crave enough imports to justify packet lines until 1851, when New Orleans hosted one sailing to Liverpool. Yet New York by the mid-1850s could claim sixteen lines to Liverpool, three to London, three to Havre, two to Antwerp, and one each to Glasgow, Rotterdam, and Marseilles. Subsidized, it must be remembered, by the federal post office patronage boondogle.
U.S. foreign trade rose in value from $134 million in 1830 to $318 million in 1850. It would triple again in the 1850s. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of those imports entered through the port of New York. Which meant that any trading the South did, had to go through New York. Trade from Charleston and Savannah during this period was stagnant. The total shipping entered from foriegn countries in 1851 in the port of Charleston was 92,000 tons, in the port of New York, 1,448,000. You'd find relatively little tariff money coming in from Charleston. According to a Treasury report, the net revenue of all the ports of South Carolina during 1859 was a mere $234,237; during 1860 it was $309,222.[4]
There is also a whole lot of other stuff at the other end of that link that you are *NOT* going to like.
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