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 Commagers 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. Whites One Mans Meat is the finest such essay collection... Joseph Mitchells Up in the Old Hotel is nearly as great...
Teddy Roosevelts short book The Strenuous Life, which opens with his 1899 speech by that name, is an explanation of Americas 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 Americas most important spiritual crisis. It is best expressed in a single speech, rich in Biblical imagery and contemporary prophecy: Lincolns 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 ...
Yes, it is quite fantastical to believe that the people who have the money will create a demand for what they want instead of what other people without money want.
Why wouldnt I like it? I see nothing new in what you posted in 540, and nothing to put a burr in m6bsaddle. Southerners were getting 60% of the gross, and New York firms 40%. Wheres the outrage?
I notice that in every discussion about the civil war there are people who like to head straight for the well worn ruts of the propaganda they have been told.
Tariffs were only one part of it, and a focus on "tariffs" simply has the effect of causing people to ignore what would happen to New York's trade once the South got out from under the anti-competitive laws such as the Navigation Act of 1817, The Warehousing Act, Subsidies for Northern Shipping and other industries, and the Biased tariff system which heavily favored the North.
Just as people leap to make the war about "slavery", so too do they want to gravitate toward the "tariff" argument, because it is a distractor from the "Trade" threat that the South posed to those Industrial interests holding the reins of Washington DC.
Anything to ignore the real motives for why powerful people (Who are still F***ing running the nation today, but whom we now call the "establishment." ) would want to attack and destroy an independence movement.
You zero in on that "40%" thing, and completely ignore how New York had sewn up the entire market. Though why you think 40% of the entire profit is reasonable for people who just moved the material, I don't know. Do Shippers nowadays get 40% of the Net?
That article clearly demonstrates that New York would have taken a massive economic hit if the South had established normalized European trade.
But what is truth to people bent on dogma?
I found this line interesting.
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.
Do Shippers nowadays get 40% of the Net?
Now your reading comprehension is in question!
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.
It wasnt net, and it wasnt just shipping.
What made you think that I wasnt going to read it? I especially liked this part:
So how, in 25 years or so, did this national conflict shift to Southern slavery — which was the same thing it had been in 1820 and ‘30 — so much so that the declarations of independence of the various Southern states in 1860 and ‘61 seem to make it their chief reason for secession?
I knew you would, but I don't omit things that I recognize as suiting the arguments of others. I don't try to manipulate information so that it just shows what I want to be shown. I highlight what I want people to look at, but I don't censor things that would be seen as damaging to my argument.
New Orleans, under the conditions that held sway at the time, did not crave enough imports to justify a packet line. When the prices of things they might want is effectively doubled by protectionist taxes, it tends to discourage people from wanting it.
I cannot say with any confidence that in absence of the additional costs of the taxes, there would be no higher demand.
Indeed, common sense would dictate that if the prices were lowered substantially, demand would likely increase. Therefore conditions as they were would not likely hold in light of the economic changes that would have occurred if the South had established normalized trade with Europe free of interference from New York and Washington.
Slavery was just an excuse, and it was really about political, and consequentially economic power.
Also there were only four states (out of 11) that cited slavery as a reason for leaving, and in some of those, it wasn't even the most important reason for doing so.
I did read further. Those excuses were the words of Robert Toombs, not the author, whoever that is.
You are referring to things like "banking", "Insurance", "warehousing", and such.
Were these things not profitable? If so, couldn't the Southerners have done them for themselves at profit, especially when they would be getting an additional 40% of the cotton profits to provide capitalization?
They would have the added benefit of not having to do business with people calling them the worst scum on earth, as Liberals do to all of us nowadays.
The Author distinguishes between what Tombs wrote and what he and others wrote.
That's why the revisionists keep trying to convince people that the war was about "slavery" or "Preserving the Union". They dare not admit it was about political and economic power to control Global trade, same as it is today.
FLT-bird: "The parties today are nothing like the parties of 150 years ago.
Its ridiculous to even try to compare them."
Oh, they are more like historical parties than you want to admit.
Consider this quote talking about 1830s era Whigs & Democrats:
Sounds to me like today's Democrats & Republicans.
In those days the Democrat center of gravity was the Southern slave-power, allied with Northern Big City immigrants & commerce, while Whig - Republican center of gravity was small town, rural & manufacturing Northerners allied to similar Southerners & Westerners.
White Southerners allied with Big City immigrants & commerce voted for Jefferson-Jackson Democrats until roughly 1964 while Northerners & manufacturing generally voted for Federalists-Whigs-Republicans.
By 1964 Southern whites were flipping Republican while blacks had flipped from Republicans to Democrats.
But Big City immigrants remain Democrats to this day, just as small town & rural Americans remain Republicans.
And I say that Southern blacks today want the same thing from the Democrat party that Southern whites wanted in years past -- special laws granting special privileges & free stuff for Democrats at the expense of non-Democrats.
So parties today are more similar to the past that you'd like to admit.
And it's still going on today. The Democrat Coalition (Led by Wealthy Coastal Urban Liberals) is made up of people with excessive influence on the government stoking astro-turf about the latest politically correct issues of the day like "Global Warming", and "Transgenderism" and "Sanctuary Cities" as well as "Gun Control" and "Choice".
A tiny wealthy minority leading a coalition of the stupid and the insane who they keep worked up into a frenzy about whatever is their kooky cause du jour, to keep them voting to put "establishment" agents back into power.
This is why they own the media. The media is an investment in electing Democrats to keep the government policies that send money into their pockets, such as excessive borrowing and spending.
And it has been going on since just before 1861.
I sometimes think we are having difficulty in communicating. Yes, there are quotes from Robert Toombs in that piece, but they are not the focus of the piece. They are incidental to it.
What was stopping them from starting their own shipping companies, banks, insurance companies, warehouses and such, beyond what they already had in 1861?
Who is the author? Where is he from? Where did he go to school? What was his major? Who are his friends and associates?
"I was born in 1960 and have lived all of it in southeastern Pennsylvania, in Chester County and on the Main Line, though I live in neither place now. I was raised among and in part educated by Quakers, but have no faith personally. I respect and encourage any religion that makes people generally better than I suspect they'd be without it. I could say I've lived my whole life in the compass of ground that has the Philadelphia Quakers on one end and the Lancaster Amish on the other. From nearness to them I learned the virtue of knowing more than one way to do a thing. I find it suits me to be rooted here, in one landscape, for long enough to know not just the sights but the names of the stars that go over at night and the weeds and spiders and the family history of the ruined houses in the woods and the rocks in the road cuts. One life is hardly enough."
https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/bio?ref=etymonline_footer
I guess you have to grasp for whatever straws you can find, because the objective and mathematical truth offers you precious little support for what you wish to believe.
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