Posted on 09/30/2024 10:03:18 AM PDT by MtnClimber
In the years before the Civil War, slaveholders were the greatest threat to free speech in the United States. White Southerners used state laws, a congressional gag rule, suppression of the mail, and physical violence to silence abolitionist speech because they believed it was dangerous.
In 1830, for example, Louisiana penalized anyone using “language in any public discourse, from the bar, the bench, the stage, the pulpit, or in any place whatsoever,” as well as “in private discourses or conversations,” that had “a tendency to produce discontent among the free colored population of this State, or to incite insubordination among the slaves therein.” In other words, those who spoke out against slavery or racial discrimination would be in violation of this law. The mandated punishment ranged from three to 21 years of hard labor to death.
Other states enacted identical statutes. As one South Carolina newspaper declared, the topic of slavery “shall not be open to discussion.”
Speaking out against slavery in the U.S. took courage. If anti-speech laws were not enough, mobs filled in the gaps. Some abolitionists were brutally beaten while others were murdered.
Abraham Lincoln engaged this issue in a speech he delivered at the Cooper Union in New York City in February 1860. Speaking directly to white Southerners, he said, “You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws.” Lincoln pointed out that Southern Democrats were more likely to “grant a hearing to pirates or murderers” than to Republicans.
Indeed, when white Southerners gathered together, Lincoln said that “an unconditional condemnation” of Republicans was “the first thing to be attended to.”
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearhistory.com ...
You are characterizing my arguments as coming from somewhere else ("Lost cause jargon"), and if it appears that way, it is simply because I have arrived at the same conclusions as others based on the evidence I have seen.
I perceive you as simply regurgitating the same information we have all been taught growing up in the United States. You seemingly dismiss my arguments without due consideration and I have no idea what I have said that you see as "circular reasoning."
I believe money and power motivates people and that all else is lies.
with some contemporary political jibes thrown in.
I try to make people understand the parallels between what we face now, and what people faced then. Political statements are often just lies, as when a political party dedicated to "Abolition" votes to make slavery permanent through a constitutional amendment.
How can anyone not see that as a betrayal?
The hard facts of history are to the contrary though, no matter how effusive the Lost Cause outpouring may be.
The hard facts of history do more damage to the official narrative than they do to the "lost cause" arguments. The money evidence undermines the claims that the war was fought over slavery, as does the fact that Republicans *VOTED* for protecting slavery *BEFORE* the war.
I don't think you allow that "hard fact" to sink in.
What do you think of liberals allowing illegals to vote?
“The North, of course (was fighting to destroy constitutional slavery).
That is an interesting comment.
Contrast this with the fact that President Lincoln took an oath (twice) to protect and defend the pro-slavery United States Constitution. As president you would expect him to defend the constitution.
Now you tell me Lincoln took up arms to violently overthrow the pro-slavery United States Constitution. If he did, you can scarcely say it was the Confederates that were in rebellion.
You have added power to the equation. If you add in pride, fear, and religion, you get much closer to the well springs of history.
Money and power are the same thing.
If you add in pride, fear, and religion, you get much closer to the well springs of history.
All of these are the motivation to obtain money/power.
Let’s say I am a wheat grower, and my world revolves around wheat. I cherish the money I get for my wheat and resent the money that goes into taking it to market and the money I have to pay for agricultural equipment and fuel and living expenses. So I might come to think of the people I buy things from as “parasites” on the wheat trade. They aren’t. They provide me with things I can’t or don’t or won’t produce at home. The world doesn’t revolve wholly around wheat or cotton anymore than it does around plows and hoes or insurance and wearhousing.
Cotton producers relied on brokers to sell their cotton — and to tide them through bad times and often to advance them money for seed. The planters weren’t likely to set up a cooperative and get lower prices in Manchester or Brussels. People on the spot at the cotton markets did a better job estimating and negotiating the prices. Until slavery had heated things up, cotton planters got along well enough with cotton brokers in Charleston or New Orleans or New York, London, and Liverpool.
The Navigation Acts had nothing to do with transatlantic commerce. They applied only to US coastal navigation from US port to US port. Southern slaveowning planters and merchants were able to charter European ships to send cotton directly to Europe.
Economics is about supply and demand. If the supply increases more than the demand does, prices go down and the boom is over. Prices were going to go down as new lands got into cotton manufacturing: India, China, Egypt, Brazil, etc. British merchants, already tired of dealing with slavery were already reaching out to bring new lands into cultivation.
Slaveowners wanted slavery in the territories, so people who pointed that out weren’t lying. Arizona’s and New Mexico’s resources weren’t yet exploited by American settlers. In time they would be. The Spanish had made use of Indian — and African — slaves in mining operations in various colonies. If it were necessary to establish slavery in the territories, slaves would be used in the mines.
The mines would be profitable enough to keep slavery going. Slavery continued in Virginia even after much of the state gave up on tobacco farming, which wasn’t anywhere near as profitable as cotton production. The political will was there to keep it going, so it kept going.
But of course, none of this is going to convince you, you’ve been brainwashed — or you’ve brainwashed yourself — enough that nothing gets through to you.
What the hell does “liberals allowing illegals to vote” have to do with the end of slavery because of the Civil War?
Believe what you wish, but do not ask me to agree with your cramped economic theory of history. And, by the way, money and power are different things.
This is an inaccurate analogy. You need to add a competitive supplier willing to supply everything at much cheaper prices, but the wheat grower being forced by law to pay for the much higher priced "officially approved" supplier of equipment, because the law, passed over the objections of the wheat grower, forces him to pay the higher prices.
The South didn't need anything the North supplied, especially at the gouging prices they charged because they had a monopoly. The South could have carried all their trade through European companies, and it would have been far cheaper for them.
Cotton producers relied on brokers to sell their cotton — and to tide them through bad times and often to advance them money for seed. The planters weren’t likely to set up a cooperative and get lower prices in Manchester or Brussels.
Why would they not? Because it was illegal? Is that why? Well maybe if they seceded, that would cease being a problem?
The Navigation Acts had nothing to do with transatlantic commerce. They applied only to US coastal navigation from US port to US port.
A foreign ship could not take on a load in one port, and travel to another port to take on another load. Unless a ship could load up completely at a single port, (like New Orleans) this was not a workable system.
Economics is about supply and demand. If the supply increases more than the demand does, prices go down and the boom is over. Prices were going to go down as new lands got into cotton manufacturing: India, China, Egypt, Brazil, etc.
Would *NEVER* have developed without the Northern government using military force to cut off all the normal supplies of Southern cotton.
Don't put forth economic ideas that require military force to distort the market, and present them as a normal part of the economics of the period. Without the blockade, no other cotton industry develops in the rest of the world.
Paid labor cannot compete with free labor.
Europe owes a debt of gratitude to the US Navy for shutting down their competition long enough for them to get their own producers going. But don't pretend this is normal economics.
Slaveowners wanted slavery in the territories, so people who pointed that out weren’t lying.
They wanted the territories to recognize slavery as legal, but that isn't the same thing as putting actual slaves in the territories. I doubt anyone in that era was dumb enough to try it, and if they had done that, they would have lost their shirt on the venture.
Theoretical slavery is not actual slavery. Those who were clanging the warning bell of "slavery" in the territories were misrepresenting the reality of the situation, and they were doing it on purpose for their own political gain.
Arizona’s and New Mexico’s resources weren’t yet exploited by American settlers. In time they would be.
At the time, there was little if any knowledge about productive mines in the territories. Your speculation is theoretical and ignores a point I made in a comment earlier in the thread about white miners not tolerating slaves competing with them.
But of course, none of this is going to convince you, you’ve been brainwashed — or you’ve brainwashed yourself — enough that nothing gets through to you.
I feel as if i've been awakened to knowledge I did not previously have, and with it came the realization that the history I had been taught all my life is inaccurate, and intentionally so.
Am I brainwashed for noticing things that do not make sense in the context of what I had been taught all my life?
Well I don't think so, but I do entertain the notion from time to time. Am I missing something? The pattern I see is internally consistent, and explains all the odd bits and pieces that never made sense to me before.
Is it wrong? Is your view of this period of history correct?
I think about this from time to time.
Why? Do you see some sort of connection?
I just wanted to know if you support or oppose liberals handing illegals the right to vote because they know illegals will vote to keep liberals in power?
Am I seeing this wrong or something?
A Disease in the Public Mind:
A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War
by Thomas Fleming
https://www.amazon.com/Disease-Public-Mind-Understanding-Fought/dp/0306822954
“By the time John Brown hung from the gallows for his crimes at Harper’s Ferry, Northern abolitionists had made him a “holy martyr” in their campaign against Southern slave owners. This Northern hatred for Southerners long predated their objections to slavery. They were convinced that New England, whose spokesmen had begun the American Revolution, should have been the leader of the new nation. Instead, they had been displaced by Southern “slavocrats” like Thomas Jefferson. This malevolent envy exacerbated the South’s greatest fear: a race war. Jefferson’s cry, “We are truly to be pitied,” summed up their dread. For decades, extremists in both regions flung insults and threats, creating intractable enmities. By 1861, only a civil war that would kill a million men could save the Union.”
👊
More and more nonsense from you. A tariff of 15% or 20% percent didn’t necessarily lead to gouging monopoly prices, especially when you consider the difficulties in getting goods to market in those days. It would cost a lot of money goods across the Atlantic, and foreign goods weren’t always cheaper to begin with. Also, consider that American producers would also be competing with one another, and that would bring down prices as well. On top of that, in those days many goods in everyday use would be produced locally.
If the cotton planters were inclined to set up cooperatives they would have done so. For the most part they were “rugged individualists” who’d built their empires themselves. They liked their leisured, agrarian way of life. If they wanted to become bookeepers or merchants they would do that, but organizing together to form a cooperative was something they didn’t do.
There was no problem shipping between Charleston and Liverpool or New Orleans and France (other than the greater distance and consquently greater expense than shipping from New York or other Northern cities). You weren’t going to have large-ocean going vessels pulling into every city with a small cargo. It made more sense to deliver the goods to some larger port and put them on the transatlantic ships there. That larger port could have been Charleston or Atlanta as easily as New York. The problem was that the population and purchasing power were less in the South. Ships going both ways had more to load and unload in New York.
Cotton had been grown in India since the 5th millennium BC, and since the 3rd millennium in Mexico. Millowners liked the strain grown in Mississippi and Alabama because of its long fibers, but suitable varieties of cotton were grown elsewhere in the world. Assuming that the US cotton belt was going to be the go to place for cotton forever would have been a bad bet.
True, slaves were cheaper than paid labor, but many Mexican, Indian, and Egyptian peasants were little better than slaves and got by on little. Exchange rates would also have an effect. The peso or rupee or piastre were worth less than the dollar, so it’s possible that cotton from those countries would be cheaper than American cotton if ways could be found to get large quantities to markets in Britain and Europe. Given British hostility to slavery, change would come, not as fast without a war, perhaps, but the cotton boom wasn’t likely to last forever.
Many of the questions discussed require more data, more equations, and more calculations that either of us can do - or than most 19th century Americans did. The real effect of the tariff on Southern consumers’ behavior and their wallets, or the price of Egyptian or Indian vs. Mississippi or Alabama cotton, is a question like that, so until somebody does the research, maybe we admit that we can’t be sure of the answer (and no, a partisan pamphlet from 1856 isn’t the research that’s required). A little skepticism all around is a good policy.
Oh, for crying out loud, I fiercely oppose allowing illegals to vote and want them swiftly deported. That is a matter of principle. On the facts, slavery was at the heart of why the Civil War was fought.
Sectional rivalry was part what led to the Civil War, but it was slavery that made the South profoundly different than the North and animated sectional antagonisms. Jefferson's lament was that the South's slaveholders should be pitied due to the menace of slave resistance and rebellion. In the view of Jefferson and many other Southerners, they did not invent slavery but were stuck with it and its evils.
Notably, although the North mostly wanted the slaves freed, they did not want them moving to the North in large numbers when freed. Thus the South was not just stuck with slavery, but in the view of the North, was also after emancipation was to be stuck with the problems of race, poverty, and lack of skills, and with the lack among many slaves of the habits and character needed to make freedom work.
Slavery was a great evil, but it seemed clear to Southerners that emancipation would bring another set of problems that Southerners and Americans were unable to see solutions for. Indeed, in the long view of history, we are still vexed with the problems of emancipation and the legacy of slavery.
My reading of Southern history and of slavery has evolved over the decades. I think that what Americans missed before the Civil War in thinking about slavery and continue to miss on many contemporary issues is that just as the South was stuck with slavery and its evils, we are committed to being a free and self-governing nation. That gives us the glory and the benefits of liberty, but also the problems.
This underpins every issue that Americans deal with. We do best when we recognize that the "blessings of liberty" also come with burdens and problems in American life that require remedies consistent with liberty. To the degree that we fail in that effort, freedom and self-government are also in jeopardy.
“Notably, although the North mostly wanted the slaves freed, they did not want them moving to the North in large numbers when freed.”
Many northern states had enacted Black Codes designed to keep blacks from living there. Lincoln’s own Illinois had them. This site has some fascinating history about slavery in the North:
http://slavenorth.com/exclusion.htm
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