What Should a First-Time Visitor to America Read?

National Review ^ | April 7 2018 | Daniel Gerelnter

[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.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "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."

That's a lot of "ifs", so here's what actually happened.
1860 a large cargo ship docks in New Orleans to load up on cotton.
Merchants on board will inspect, buy & load cotton they approve of.
Price of cotton in New Orleans is $.10 per pound, so planter with 50 bales of 500 lbs. each receives $2,500 roughly equivalent to $1 million today.
Planter goes home & pays his bills, orders more land cleared for next year.

Delivered cotton price in 1860 about $.135 per pound, meaning our cotton ship merchants carrying, say, 5,000 tons of cotton gross $1,350,000 of which $350,000 less freight is margin.
For the return trip they load up with a mixed cargo of woolens, silk, iron products and wine, all dutiable.

Their ship returns first to New York where merchants off-load some of their imports to a bonded warehouse, then continue on the return trip to New Orleans.
Imports remain in bonded warehouses (NY or NO) until buyers are found at which point tariffs are paid and products ship to end customers.

In the mean time, our cotton planter purchased imported silk for his wife & daughters, a new iron stove for the kitchen and some nice French wine.
So he paid directly for some of the import tariffs.
He also invested in a company building Southern railroads and they imported huge volumes of iron products from the North.
Northerners "exported" $200 million per year to the South and with their earnings also purchased imports from bonded NY warehouses.
So who paid the import tariffs?
Cotton's $200 million exports would cover about half, but there was another $200 million in "exports" from North to South which helped pay for imports.
If we figure that $200 million "exported" South plus the remaining $200 million (including specie) of non-cotton foreign exports, the total is $600 million of which cotton was 1/3 of 33%.

FLT-bird: "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."

Except, "slavery, slavery, slavery" is what Deep South Fire Eaters said in late 1860 & early 1861.
It's what Senator Davis proposed in December 1860 in his version of Corwin's amendment.
It's what Confederate VP Stephens said was the "cornerstone" of their new government.
So the notion there were really more important "other reasons" was simply concocted after the fact to put a prettier face on an otherwise very ugly business, FRiend.

He said it.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird re: Wigfall quote "We are an agricultural people; we a primitive but civilized people...":
"This Wigfall whom I had never heard of is one man with one man’s perspective."

Texas Fire Eater Wigfall is often quoted by our Lost Causers to show how mistreated Southerners were.
There are no quotes from 1860 Southerners saying something different.

Wigfall is to the right of the word "Fire-Eaters"

FLT-bird "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."

Fire Eater Rhett said nothing of the sort:

"If they [Northerners] prefer a system of industry in which capital and labor are in perpetual conflict -- and chronic starvation keeps down the natural increase of population -- and a man is worked out in eight years -- and the law ordains that children shall be worked only ten hours a day -- and the sabre and bayonet are the instruments of order -- be it so.
It is their affair, not ours.
We prefer, however, our system of industry:
• by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor;
  
• by which our population doubles every twenty years;
• by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land;
• by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world where the Caucasian cannot labor are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our own productions. "

Rhett sounds like "slavery, slavery, slavery" to me.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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 source'.) "

Here is that link.
Pretty sure I copied it from a pro-Confederate post, since the article itself is an apology for economics-based secession.
Yes, it begins with some interesting data, which I've not seen elsewhere, but ends with a long unattributed quote from the January 1861 Georgia "Reasons for secession" document.

In response we should note what I said in the original post immediately following what DL quoted here:

"...it appears to me they and you exaggerate the importance of Northern shipping to Southern cotton exports.
Other facts should also be considered..."

Then I listed seven other factors and could add more today.

Consider: as Southern opposition to protective tariffs increased, tariffs themselves fell from 35% overall in 1828 to 15% in 1860, while exports rose from $72 million to $400 million including specie and Federal revenues rose from roughly $24 million in 1828 to $72 million in 1860 .
Most would call that a "virtuous cycle" of increasing prosperity.

But pro-Secessionists wish us to believe it wasn't virtuous because "the South" paid too much and didn't receive enough Federal spending or Northern industry.
This despite Southern whites at the time being statistically the most prosperous people in history.
So what's their beef?

Well, they claim Southerners were victimized by "unequal rules", but they made those rules and could change them anytime.
Consider John C. Calhoun who entered Congress in 1811 and finally left 39 years later, in 1850.
During those 39 years Calhoun's Southern Jefferson/Jackson Democrat party ruled all three branches in Washington, DC, in all but 12 years and only two years were the minority in all three (1841-1843).

Before 1861 Southern Democrats were the majority of the majority the majority of the time and so could make Washington, DC, do their bidding.
And like Demnocrats today, they were happy as clams so long as they ruled, but went berserk once out of power.
In 1856 Southern Democrats threatened to secede over Republican candidate Fremont's possible election, but he lost to the Democrat, so they didn't secede.
Again in 1860 Democrats threatened secession over Republican Lincoln and this time he won so they did.

In both elections the reasons were not "tariffs" or "unequal spending", much less "Northeastern power brokers", but the more basic & obvious threat Black Republicans represented to slavery.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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."

First notice DiogenesLamp here wishes to draw our attention away from not just "slavery, slavery, slavery" but also "tariffs, tariffs, tariffs", towards what?
Well, towards those super-secret real reasons that nobody ever heard of before: the 1817 Navigation Act, the 1846 Warehousing Act, mail subsidies to a small number of high-tech steamers and oh yeah, "biased" tariffs.

But the real problem was none of those, DiogenesLamp tells us, rather was those evil, wicked, power hungry, oppressive, every-name-in-the-book, Northeastern "Industrial interests", previously called "power brokers" and "financial interests", but for today they are "Industrial interests".
And they are the "real reasons", regardless of what every Fire Eating secessionist ever wrote or said about it, DiogenesLamp just knows what was really behind it all.

How dos he know?
Well... he's just special, that's how.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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?"

Depends on the material & methods used, and especially if ownership changes hands before transport & warehousing, then sure, distributor markups can easily be 40% or more on sale to end users.

But in this case: 40% is a ridiculous number, because 40% of what?
You don't know, can only speculate.

It looks to me like 1860 cotton sold in New Orleans for $.10 per pound and in the Northeast for $.135 per pound, meaning 40% is roughly the difference -- for freight etc.
That 40% would be the same regardless of who carried it, so if Southerners wanted to dabble in shipping, insurance or banking, they were perfectly free to do so -- and who says that some didn't?

[DiogenesLamp]

Except for the Confederates, like the ones who wrote the secession documents, who clearly said it was about slavery.

Because 4 states obviously have the authority to put words in the mouths of the other 7.

[DiogenesLamp]

He said it.

And virtually everyone in the North also believed that, including Abraham Lincoln.

[DiogenesLamp]

First notice DiogenesLamp here wishes to draw our attention away from not just "slavery, slavery, slavery" but also "tariffs, tariffs, tariffs", towards what?

The real issue. The money from European trade that would be lost if the South began direct trade with Europe. It is the reason the North had to stop them. If they did not, there was about to be a major power shift to the South.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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."

Of the first seven seceding states, four issued "Reasons for secession" documents.

1. 1st out, South Carolina (12/20/1860): mentioned no reasons other than slavery.
   "On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government.
   It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States."

2. 2nd Mississippi (1/9/1981) mentioned no reasons other than slavery.
   "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."

3. Florida (1/10/1861) listed no reasons period.
4. Alabama (1/11/1861) Ordnance of Secession mentions only slavery.
   "Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions..."

5. Georgia (1/19/1861) Reasons for Secession focuses primarily on slavery and does not mention either tariffs or taxes, but does complain about bounties for fishing smacks and other such Northern "aggrandizements".
   "A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia.
   The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin.
   It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party."

6. Louisiana (1/26/1861) listed no reasons period.
7. Texas (2/18/1861) focused primarily on slavery but does also complain, saying Secretary of war Jefferson Davis' new army brigades (1856 -- R.E. Lee 2nd in command) sent to protect Texans against "Indian savages" and Mexican "banditti" did a lousy job of it.
   Texans said nothing about taxes, tariffs or bounties to northern industries.
   "In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color -- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law.
   They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States. "

Two other "reasons for secession" documents are worth mention:

• South Carolina -- Fire Eater Robert Rhett's December 1861 address says more about slavery than any other reason, but does go on about Britain's 1776 taxes, comparing them to 1861 US taxes.
  Rhett says nothing specific about tariffs or "bounties".
  "The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue -- to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures."

  Of course, those duties would also promote "mines and manufactures" in the South, had Southerners been interested.

• Georgia, CSA VP Alexander Stephen's "Cornerstone Speech" March 21, 1861 puts the case as clear & simple as can be imagained:

  "Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition.
  This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.[1]"

So yes, it was all about "slavery, slavery, slavery" with some other miscellaneous complaints mixed in, more or less as seasoning.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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."

But of course they didn't.
Instead they did business with their political allies, economic partners and social friends, Northern Democrats.

Northern Democrats had no problem with slavery and together with Southern Democrats they ruled in Washington, DC, almost continuously from 1800 until secession in 1861.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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."

Naw, that's just DiogenesLamp's little inner Democrat squeaking out from his hidey-hole -- having first falsely claimed that Deep South secession was not really "about slavery", but instead about important economic matters like "bounties" to fishing smacks, next he must convince us that Northerners too were acting not on noble principles like "preserving the Union" or "freeing the slaves", but only for equally base -- no strike that, not "equally base" but vastly more-base economic & political reasons.

It's pathetic really, but what can we do?

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "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."

Rubbish, they've always been Democrats.
The Jefferson/Jackson Democrats began before 1800 centered on the Southern slave-power, allied with Northern Big City immigrant bosses around 1832.
They ruled Washington DC until secession in 1861 and became powerful again soon after the Civil War.
With Wilson and especially FDR they again took power long term.
Sure, roughly 1964 they swapped out white Southerners for black Southerners, but otherwise they're the same people, with the same agendas & tactics they've always been.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "The political and economic ties over time would start to look like this, which is it's natural affinity."

Your problem is US political ties could never look like this so long as the Confederacy remained the world's last best hope for slavery.
Also your "let them go in peace" scenario, where the Confederacy somehow consumes 1/3 more of the Union without war assumes, in effect, a President Buchanan type victor in 1860, but then there would be no need for secession.

Possible map of slave-power victory in Civil War:

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "So that 230 million dollars per year of Trade produced by the South just disappeared into thin air?
You aren't getting this.
I guess it's too complicated for you to understand that without the blockade, that 230 million trade with Europe would have continued and it would have steered the trade traffic to the South."

Well... there was that matter of the 1861 Confederate embargo on cotton exports, intended to persuade Europeans to recognize the Confederacy.
If Europeans had remained slow to respond then, yes, trade "just disappeared into thin air."

Also, except for cotton, almost everything classified as "Southern products" was also produced outside the Confederacy and so would have no particular reason to be "steered" south.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp on President Buchanan: "He was from Pennsylvania, wasn't he?
If he had been from the South, he would have probably ordered Anderson back to Washington."

Doughfaced Democrat Buchanan was the best friend the slave-power ever had, witness his behind-the-scenes work on Dred Scott.
Had Buchanan been from the South, or had he been reelected in 1860 there would be no secession period, so Fort Sumter would be unknown to history outside Charleston, and Major Anderson likely never sent there.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "BroJoeK is constantly grasping for straws to beat back the inconvenient truth.
This assertion is just another one of those straws.
But thankfully he has a lot of true believers who really really want to believe, and they don't notice any problems with his spiel.
Now you have demonstrated yourself to be a dishonest debater.
You do not address the point put forth to you, and instead run off into the weeds at every opportunity."

More cockamamie nonsense from DiogenesLamp.
Brave talk, "whistling past the graveyard" I'd say.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: " It's about money.
It's always about money.
The "It's about slavery!" dodge is just an attempt to cover up the fact that it was about money. "

I suspect we can "get" DiogenesLamp if we realize "it's about money" for the Confederacy is a huge step up towards the light of high moral ground, from the gutter mud of "secession & war for slavery".

But in exchange he wants to insist that Union motives were also "about money".
See? Now everybody is the same, everybody is equally guilty of "war for money"... well except that Confederates weren't really fighting for "money", were they, but for freedom, justice and the American way, right?

So having pulled up Confederate motives from dirty "slavery" to at least sane "money", he next wants to leap-frog over Union "grubby money" concerns to assert Confederate higher values of freedom, etc...

So it seems, DiogenesLamp wants to metaphorically accomplish what 15th Alabama's Col. Oats couldn't at Little Round Top -- grab the moral high ground and turn the Union flank to pour his moral fire down on us hapless money-grubbing Northerners!

Not buying it.
Fix bayonets!

;-)

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Against a flood of sources on both sides as well as foreign at the time....against a guy considered to be the pre-eminent historian in the first half of the 20th century in Charles Beard, against a well known expert on historical tax in Charles Adams..."

Actually there's been no data posted here from Charles Beard and the only apparently random numbers alleged from Charles Adams came from DiogenesLamp's post #157.

Sorry, not impressed.

FLT-bird: "The desperation to deny reality is palpable."

I got your "palpable" right here, pal.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "To acknowledge the truth, is to tear down their idols, and they cannot bring themselves to do that.
They hold Lincoln and company in the same esteem as do the Communists in Russia regarding Lenin and Stalin."

And yet more Lost Cause cockamamie nonsense, nothing more than our pro-Confederates' wet dream.

[BroJoeK]

DiogenesLamp: "And then there are people like me, who had no dog in the fight, grew up believing that the North did the right thing and that Lincoln was a great man, and then they are either shown the truth, or stumble upon it themselves, and become aghast at how they had been misled about what happened for so long."

But you never "stumbled on the truth", you fell into a huge stinking crock of nonsense and just swallowed it all, hook, line & sinker, for reasons that likely nobody but a shrink could figure out.

If I were a betting man I'd guess a romantic interest, or maybe a new job, who knows, but it's all stinking nonsense and you love it, so what can I say?