Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas probably summed up the Southern attitude toward manufacturing and industrialization the best.
“We are a peculiar people, sir! You dont understand us, and you cant understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no citieswe dont want them, have no literaturewe dont need any yet. We have no presswe are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marineno navywe dont want them. We are better without 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 rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides.”
Thank-You Bull Snipe for your response to the question of no manufacturing in the southern states. Looking back at what you printed about the southern attitude: maybe the south goofed on the side of aristocratic arrogance. Manufacturing and shipping would have produced a middle class segment to the southern economy which would have created a new group of wealthy men who would have been equal or more powerful than the traditional plantation owners. A fully functioning economy would have more that one productive segment.
Great reply. Reminded me of something my father recalled as a kid in the 30’s in rural Louisiana. The prosperous farmers will still called Planters, which is a term that goes back generations before.