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.
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.