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 ...
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 peoples 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.
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:
Rhett sounds like "slavery, slavery, slavery" to me.
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:
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.
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.
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?
Because 4 states obviously have the authority to put words in the mouths of the other 7.
And virtually everyone in the North also believed that, including Abraham Lincoln.
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.
Of the first seven seceding states, four issued "Reasons for secession" documents.
Of course, those duties would also promote "mines and manufactures" in the South, had Southerners been interested.
"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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
More cockamamie nonsense from DiogenesLamp.
Brave talk, "whistling past the graveyard" I'd say.
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!
;-)
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.
And yet more Lost Cause cockamamie nonsense, nothing more than our pro-Confederates' wet dream.
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?
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