LOL. You're starting to sound like Stand Watie or Twodees --- anyone who shoots at your Lost Cause Myth and self-pity is a Marxist. That's ironic as hell since my post extolled the virtues of the northern capitalists who built America into the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. If your neo-confederate dictionary defines that as Marxist, we must live on different planets.
BTW. New York City had no need for coal from Alabama. Pennsylvania is right next store and to this day can provide enough coal every week to bury New York 100 feet deep. As to your mythical geographic advantage of the north, explain to me what advantage New England had in textile manufacture. Their raw material had to travel 1000 miles! Why did the south wait until the early 1900s before they started to build their own textile mills to process the cotton grown right there? Why did Pittsburgh that had coal just like Tennessee but no iron ore become the steel capital? It would be as easy to ship iron ore from Minnesota to Nashville, Chattanooga, or Memphis as it was to Pittsburgh --- maybe even cheaper since you could take the Mississippi the whole way. Where were the southern Carnegies to take advantage of those opportunities? There was no geographic reason why the south could not have joined the industrial age. It was their culture that prevented it. The reason is that southern culture until the last few decades was always about looking backward, not looking forward. And 100 years later, ironically, the regions have somewhat changed positions. Now it is people in the rust-belt who cling to outdated institutions and pine for the “good old days” of heavy industry and refuse to embrace the future as the sun belt has done.
Actually he appears to be referencing a disturbingly strong trend of the class/labor reductionism brand of economics throughout your argument about the southern economy. You see slavery, labor, class, and very little else.
The marxist movement saw the same thing. Surely you know where that got them.
No, the irony is that Marxists like McPherson and some of the Declarationists who've bought a Marxist argument would use as their vehicle the party of the Gilded Age.
As I described it to you in the post you scoffed at, the Marxist use for the Civil War is to present it as a Marxian "second revolution" against the planter "bourgeoisie", a "liberation movement" that they can cite as validating their historical model.
The argument is Marxist or it isn't, not just because I say so. In this case, it appears to be, and I've been persuaded of its essential content by perusing the McPherson thread, and GOPcapitalist's post-up on McPherson at the top of that thread.
Oh, and by the way, nothing says a Marxist can't be right. It's just that you need to know whose bat and ball you're playing with. It's just that when you mess with those people, you know how they'll want things to come out.
As it was explained to me once in a geography or history class long ago, the presence of plentiful hydro power in New England was decisive in starting the industry there. Other Fall Line towns in the Piedmont had mills, too, but not as big as New England.
The presence of the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal was decisive for Northern versus Southern locations. Plus, the big ports were in the north since late colonial times. New York ran away from the rest of the country after the Erie Canal was opened.
Sure, there was coal in the South, but it was the combination: proximity to water transport AND raw materials AND population centers AND ports AND finance AND markets.
It all added up in favor of the Northeast. It wasn't "cultural" -- that's a political construction, as I said before.