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I never argued that there weren't primitive, expensive, impractical steam tractors in the mid-19th Century. They weren't labor saving devices, though, because they required more men and more horses to supply them with fuel than they replaced. You keep trying to make the point that the south would have used these if only the mean ol' yankees hadn't looted massa's house, but you still can't explaIn why those steam tractors weren't used in the north to any great extent in that period. And you can't explain why, when the internal combustion tractor came along in the 1910s, both the north and the south adopted them at the same time. You concoct an elaborate conspiracy to support your delusional worldview and deny the obvious--steam tractors weren't particularly useful.

As for the cotton pickers, I similarly don't deny that there were early experiments in producing such a machine. However I do recognize, along with every single source in the world (except you and this mythical evidence that you refuse to show), that those early experiments didn't work well enough to be adopted and that it was the Rust brothers, after years of development, who produced the first practical mechanical cotton picker in the late 1930s. I've presented a dozen different academic sources that say as much while you've presented none (except to tell me to take it up with the agricultural curator at the Smithsonian, and we've all seen how that worked out for you).

I assume that this 1850s cotton picker you've talked about is the Rembert-Prescott machine. Why wasn't this machine immediately adopted by the south? Could it be because it didn't work? In the period between 1850s and the 1930s, literally hundreds of patents were issued to mechanical cotton pickers. Why weren't they adopted? You want to claim it's because the south was still too poor, but you can't explain why cotton farmers in California didn't adopt them either. You can't explain why both California and the south adopted mechanical picking at the same time. Again you concoct ludicrous theories to deny the obvious--cotton mechanized when the machines to do it efficiently appeared on the scene, at which time it mechanized in both the south and California.

The fact is, you don't even try to reconcile these problems with your theory. If you were an honest debater, I might have a shred of respect for you. But your sole technique is to assert something, then, when questioned about it, to begin spouting these tedious, predictable rants. You don't present evidence, only invective. Doesn't it tell you anything that none of the other neo-rebs, with their vast libraries of information, have ever chimed in in your defense on this subject?