Posted on 08/07/2006 8:54:36 AM PDT by Republicanprofessor
perhaps HARRY TURTLEDOVE will write it!
free dixie,sw
Of course, Watie also believes that ex-slaves who fought for the Union were turncoats to the south.
Eventually, probably. The thing to remember was that slaves where a huge part of southern capital.
Nonetheless, capital invested in the South remained overwhelmingly committed to slaves in particular and to land. As late as 1860, according to Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, the value of slaves was almost 60 percent of all agricultural wealth in the cotton states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Land and buildings amounted to less than one-third of the value of agricultural wealth.[32] Gavin Wright summarized the point neatly: "In the antebellum South, wealth and wealth accumulation meant slaves, and land was distinctly secondary. This was not just the perspective of a few giant planters. The owner of as few as three slaves had a larger investment in human beings than the average nonslaveholder had in all other forms of wealth put together."[33]
source
So any move to restrict slavery hit the south hard in the pocketbook. The Lost Causers are always going on about the north being about the almight dollar, while the south's motives were all lily white (pun intended). But clearly the south's economic interests were what were on their mind, not some abstract notion of freedom (for themselves, at least) and certainly not tariff policy or whatever else they've absorbed from DiLorenzo this week.
The other thing to remember is that mechanization didn't really touch cotton farming until around WW2. The end of sharecropping (the agricultural labor system that replaced slavery) clearly shows when cotton mechanized. So anyone claiming that mechanization would have ended slavery has to concede that it might have taken another 100 years.
Thanks for this fascinating article.
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