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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for another great post!
Too bad DiogenesLamp literally can't see what doesn't support his opinions.