Like Colwell's book, it's short."
Thanks for the references, x, I read good parts of Colwell's book.
Colwell makes some of the same arguments I have posted here.
For example, he demonstrates with actual numbers that while more than half of US cotton shipped from New Orleans and about 75% from Gulf Coast ports, less than 10% shipped to Europe from New York City.
But it is very dense reading, and not all of it of interest to us today.
It reminds me why I'm a "history buff", not a history scholar, since I much prefer the abbreviated Cliff Notes. ;-)
For example, here's a summary which includes some of Kettell's arguments with realistic reporting on what was actually going on.
- "As one Alabama polemicist wrote at the end of the 1840s, 'our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods, have Northern hats and shoes, work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements, are chastised with Northern made whips, and are working for Northern more than Southern profit.'...
"Kettell’s analysis in turn gave Southern politicians confidence that the North, if only from the standpoint of self-interest, would eventually accede to new constitutional protections for slaveholding.
"No group supported such compromises more than the merchants and bankers of New York City.
The early months of 1861 brought unprecedented volatility to the city’s financial markets, with stocks rising and falling on rumors swirling around Virginia’s secession debate.
A delegation of 30 New York businessmen traveled to Washington at the end of January with a petition for compromise with the signatures of some 40,000 merchants, clerks and scriveners.
"At the Congressional peace talks that February, William E. Dodge spoke 'as a plain merchant' sent at the urging of the New York Chamber of Commerce.
'I am a business man, and I take a business view of this subject,' Dodge said.
From his point of view, 'the whole country is upon the eve of such a financial crisis as it has never seen.'
Dodge had voted for Lincoln, but actively supported constitutional amendments to protect slavery.
Told that New Englanders would never brook such overt protection for slavery, he scoffed: 'they are true Yankees; they know how to get the dollars and how to hold on to them when they have got them.'
"Many voices echoed Dodge’s claim that self-interest would prevent the outbreak of violence.
As a New York group calling itself the American Society for Promoting National Unity pointed out, a war might serve the needs of politicians and agitators in both sections, but it would jeopardize the prospects of businessmen everywhere.
Writing in the New York Times, businessman Daniel Lord contended that South Carolinians would not 'any more than Yankeedom, refuse a good bargain because driven with parties of different politics.'
In turn, William Gregg, one of the South’s leading manufacturers, predicted that war 'will be death to every branch of business.'
A few days after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Gregg wrote to a Massachusetts associate, 'I trust that you business men of the North will see the necessity of putting a stop to a war.'
"By that time, however, many of the same Northern business leaders who had earlier argued for concessions to the South now rallied to the Union cause.
Prominent merchants in New York, along with Mayor Fernando Wood, abandoned their own secessionist fantasies of a no-tariff 'free city' at the mouth of the Hudson and instead raised funds to mobilize the Union army.
Some realized that war was now the only way to bring the South back into the Union, and that to let the Confederacy go would have allowed Southerners to default on the $125 million they still owed New York firms.
"Others represented a new class of industrialists, men whose investments were not primarily linked to slavery and whose political demands on the federal government increasingly diverged from those of Southern slaveholders and their Northern allies.
They demanded higher tariffs, not free trade, and they hoped for the expansion of free labor agriculture in the West, not slave plantations.
"Of course, the dire predictions did not come to pass.
The northern economy did not collapse without access to Southern markets, a monopoly on cotton did not make the Confederacy invulnerable and economic self-interest did not forestall a bloody conflict.
Yet by reminding us of slavery’s importance to the nation as a whole, these prognostications suggest that the Civil War was hardly the result of the inherent hostility of capitalism to slavery.
The intertwining of those two economies over the previous decades yielded a Civil War more surprising and singular than our histories have yet recovered."
So, to the degree that DiogenesLamp and PeaRidge's assertions reflect this reporting, we have to concede it.
But I think they go far beyond historical facts into the realm of pro-Confederate mythology when they claim that Democrat New York businessmen were somehow in the driver's seat, forcing "Ape" Lincoln's Black Republicans to "start a war" when they would otherwise have compromised for peace.
In fact, Lincoln in 1861 was not focused on Democrat New York businessmen, but on his Oath of Office to preserve, protect and defend the US Constitution.
So, what DiogenesLamp & PeaRidge here post about is not Lincoln's motivation, but rather the question of why Democrat New York businessmen, erstwhile allies of the Southern Slave Power suddenly switched sides from demanding compromise to supporting military action against secessionists.