On the eve of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that would claim upwards of half a million American lives, Czar Alexander II of Russia issued an imperial decree abolishing slavery (serfdom) with a stroke of a pen.
Posted on 03/03/2017 2:26:55 PM PST by NRx
On the eve of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that would claim upwards of half a million American lives, Czar Alexander II of Russia issued an imperial decree abolishing slavery (serfdom) with a stroke of a pen.
Not to mention that Congress was held by a Southern coalition until 1858, not a Northeastern one.
As I’ve said here before the flame in Ol’ “Lampsters’’ light went out a long time ago.
“the right they sought was to continue to treat other human beings as chattel.”
Public school didn’t do you any favors since the north hadn’t abolished slavery at the time of the war.
The war was fought to keep Lincoln’s railroad clients happy since they needed the inion together for their railroad investments to pay off.
Lincoln wasn’t even a candidate until late when his railroad clients put him up to it.
That’s right: Lincoln was perhaps the number one railroad attorney of his day. He wasn’t this humble “honest Abe” who lived in a log cabin. He was a prior US congressman, an Illinois State legislator, a Captain in the Illinois militia, and a powerful railroad attorney.
He was a crooked as any Kennedy.
The South reaping a 40% extra profit (perhaps more due to increased trade as a result of lower tariffs) would have lured that skilled manpower.
For another, the Mississippi River wasn't as useful as a developed rail network. But who's to say the Midwest needed to be "supplied"?
It depends on what you are moving and from where it comes. I've read newspaper accounts where they worried that due to the low tariffs, all the steel would be supplied by Southern sources, and not a bit would come from the North. Yes, the Midwest Needed steel, and it needed cotton, and it probably wanted a lot of metal and textile products.
And wouldn't those imaginary goods sent up from the South have been subject to federal tariffs? Double tariffs if you're talking about products from abroad, but enough of a tariff on Southern goods to make them less competitive than what Midwesterners could produce on their own.
Again, from newspaper accounts at the time, they realized it would be impossible to enforce tariffs along such a wide border. The goods would have been shipped anyway, and the Feds would not have been able to stop the traffic.
If New York had been able to prevail in the cotton trade before and if secession could be accomplished without war, who's to say a largely agrarian Cotton South, which had never shown any desire or much ability to produce industrial goods would all of a sudden start? If the relationship between New York and the cotton states was mutually beneficial, why would that change all of a sudden?
It was heavily beneficial to New York, but not greatly beneficial to the South for New York to cut 40% off of all the trade earnings. Only under conditions of Union was the status quo beneficial to New York, and only because the Federal laws had been jiggered to help create and maintain a monopoly on shipping operating out of New York.
Take away the federally imposed tariffs, the subsidies the Feds gave to Northern Shipping, the fines and penalties imposed from using non American shipping (Navigation act of 1817) and the restrictions on packet shipping, and the Northern Shipping monopoly gets destroyed.
Charleston used to manufacture ships too. Their ship building industry fell apart after the 1820s because they couldn't compete with the Northern ship building industries, because the Northern shippers had frozen them out of the market.
There was a lot more going on in this North/South dispute than people realize. I think you have even tacitly admitted that New York controlled the Cotton market, which it did. They only did so as a result of Union. Get rid of the Union laws favoring the North, and they are suddenly no longer able to do this.
That's your own wackadoodle interpretation. More likely, Lincoln said he wouldn't touch slavery in order to avoid war or disunity that could be exploited by foreign powers.
And this concern evaporated six months later in January of 1863? Why would he be concerned about not interfering with slavery where it existed in august of 1862, but by January decided that he didn't care about the consequences of overturning it?
What I see is a man who realized the South wasn't going to give up, and he just upped the ante. He basically told them "Give up, or I will work to destroy your wealth and economic system."
Or put another way, "If we can't have that vast wealth earned by slaves, we will make sure nobody has it." Again, the issue wasn't slavery, because he still had five slave states in his own union. The issues is not tolerating economic independence from the North.
Tolerate slavery? Yes. Tolerate free Trade outside the control of the Washington/New York axis? No.
Echos of similar things are going on today.
More wackadoodlism. A blockade was an effective way of coercing without resorting to actual violence.
How is it coercing? It certainly didn't stop the South from fighting. Perhaps there were goods and services from Europe that might have helped the South's war effort, but it D@mn sure made certain the Europeans couldn't see the large profits they would have obtained with normalized trade with the South.
The blockade makes more economic sense than it ever made any military sense. I remember learning of it in Junior High School, and I thought it peculiar at the time. I didn't see how it had any significant impact on land armies doing battle with each other, and so I figured at the time that Lincoln only did it to give the Navy something to do.
I thought it was make work at the time. It was only in the last couple of years that I have realized that blockade was absolutely essential to winning the war. At all costs, Lincoln could never allow direct European commercial trade to be normalized with the South. Had the Europeans been allowed to become accustomed to the much larger profits they could have made by direct trading with the South, they would have moved to protect this commercial trade with their own militaries.
Again, the economic explanation makes far more sense.
PS Everybody's getting tired of the same graphic every week.
The funny thing about that graphic. It was created by a Pro-Union website to illustrate how the war could not have been fought over tariffs. The argument is that since very little of the tariffs are being collected in the South, and since the vast bulk of tariffs are being collected in New York and Boston, tariffs had nothing to do with the South's desire to be independent.
To an uninformed person, this argument appears pretty reasonable. What threw up a red flag for me is the fact i've seen the import/export data for the nation, and by far, most of the money earned from European trade was produced by the South.
The fact that the South created most of the money simply didn't jive with that chart. The South created 3/4ths the money, yet 90% of it was ending up in New York?
Did not compute. It was the protruding thread, that when you pulled it, it unraveled the larger and more accurate story of what was happening.
Independence for the South represented huge money losses for the North. Not the cost of the tariffs, but the cost of the entire trade system, and the costs of capitalizing competing industries.
Potentially multi-billion dollar losses when the entire GDP was 4.5 billion.
Basically the North's entire economic system was being threatened by Southern independence. And they knew it.
No quite the case. In the 1840 election for House of Representatives, slave holding states elected 87 Representatives. The total number of Representatives in 1840 House was 242. The balance of slave vs free Representatives was 87 to 155. Slave holding states did not control Congress. They had parity in the Senate, as long as for each free state admitted, a slave holding state was admitted. Until 1858 that balance in the Senate was maintained.
That is the most ridiculous theory I have ever read
Go back to original documents before sounding ofg
But as a Federal matter, slavery was not illegal. The Constitution itself said that escaped slaves must be returned to their masters. So how does the Fed Gov make a law against something the opposition could argue is a guaranteed right?
How can Federal law for the Territories be different from Federal law for the States?
There was little chance of territories voting for slavery. Whites had been fleeing the slave states for the free states for years, because they did not want to compete with slave labor.
And this is a point that I wish to elaborate on further. In history I was taught that the Northern people opposed slavery, and we were left to believe that they opposed it because they regarded it as immoral. Now while this was certainly true of some, it misrepresented the reasons why most Northern people opposed slavery.
What I discovered to be the truth is that the Northerners hated the black people even worse than did the Southerners. They passed laws that would prohibit them from settling in their states, Illinois being but one example. They didn't want black people near them, and they did not care at all if they were suffering or forced to labor. What they cared about is the possibility that the free labor represented by slavery would undermine their own labor and wages.
They hated slavery because slaves were "scabs" to their labor market. Because slaves worked for nothing, free men couldn't earn a decent income in a slave dominated market.
But we have been misled by historians into believing that most of the Northern people's objections to slavery were based on morality, instead of economics. No, it was pretty much the economics of it they couldn't stand.
The same areas are heavily unionized today, because those sections of the Nation are very protectionist regarding their labor and wages, and they were also that way in 1860.
Confederate state exports did end in 1861, and results included some economic disruption, both in Union states and among European customers.
But those disruptions were far from crippling, adjustments were quickly made, new sources found and economies adapted such that total Federal revenues fell only 11% in 1861, then rose 22% in 1862, more than doubling in each of 1863 & 1864.
So the economic argument for Lincoln's motivation holds no water.
It may however help explain why Southern Democrats' big-city Northern Democrat allies temporarily switched sides from supporting their secessionist friends to opposing them: in May 1861 Jefferson Davis approved Confederate laws revoking their debts to northern merchants and prohibiting cotton exports from any except Confederate ports.
That was weeks after Davis had started Civil War at Fort Sumter and the Confederacy formally declared war on the United States, May 6, 1861.
The entire premise of slavery is that slaves do not have any rights, least of all to make their opinions on slave policy known. You are judging the man's point by contemporary mores. I am judging the man's point by the mores of that era. By the mores of that era, J.S. Mill is a liberal kook.
But this brings up another point that I often encounter in these discussions. It is this constant effort to judge the past by today's beliefs and attitudes. It seems as if many of you have no ability to put yourselves into the zeitgeist of that period, and see things as the people of that time saw them.
By the mentality of that time, it is axiomatic that a slave owner would not concern himself with the opinions of a slave about slavery. It is a virtual certainty that the slave will be opposed to it, and if the slave's opinion had any weight in the first place, there would be no slaves. Do you think any would volunteer?
Mill was something of a philosopher, and if we paid philosophers, we'd be paying them to ask difficult questions like that, questions that those who believe that some people are born slaves by nature and have no rights don't want asked.
It was at the time a matter of serious economic interest, and nobody was going to indulge philosophical questions on the matter. I'm pretty sure their attitude was "There is too much money to be made, and philosophy be D@mned."
But for what it's worth, as a philosophical matter, Thomas Prentice Kettell puts forth some very interesting philosophical arguments in his book "Southern Wealth and Northern Profits." You should read in that book where he describes the history of Slavery in Europe, (feudalism) and how it gave way to free agency. He put forth some ideas that I had never really considered before, and as a matter of philosophy, I still can't put my finger on how his argument is wrong, though I feel it is.
Speaks volumes about who you are and where you're coming from and how seriously anybody should take you, DL.
Don't make this into an ad hominem. Yes, i'm a horrible person because I note that there is more to the story than we have been led to believe. I should just accept the official narrative of the forces of good conquering the forces of evil, and call it a done deal.
A good place to start is A Patriots History of the US by Freeper Larry Schweikart.
No. One. Except. Leftist. Lost. Causers. Claim. That. Lincoln. Went. To. War. To. Stop. Slavery. I wish you would quit floating that turd. Lincoln went to war because the south went to war against him.
I have become cynical enough to believe....
Yea, we noticed.
Slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1834.
Slavery was illegal in Britain from an even earlier time, the 1770s or so.
There was nothing anachronistic about Mill's questions.
Moreover, you really miss the point here. There are differences between present and past attitudes to be sure. But the differences within an epoch can be quite great indeed.
What is "our age's" attitude towards your beloved question of transsexuality? The answer is that there isn't any one attitude characteristic of our age. There is a multiplicity of opinions.
So it was with slavery. We can say that expecting 19th century people to take 20th century attitudes to racial equality is anachronistic. Very few people believed in racial equality in those days.
But that doesn't mean that when it comes to slavery we make the slaveholders' view the only characteristic view, normative of its day. Not everybody was a slaveowner. Not everybody believed slavery was right.
Very many people believed that slavery was wrong (in various ways and with varying degrees of conviction). The way people thought in Kensington or Westminster wasn't any less characteristic of the age than the way they thought in Georgia or Alabama.
Mill certain was "ahead of his time" when it came to expressing a believe that colored peoples should have a say in the government that they lived under. I wonder if he'd have shown such consideration to the Indians (or the Irish), but the fact that he could ask the question about the consent of the slaves and publish it meant that the question was conceivable and "askable" in his day.
When people start to justify the Confederacy sooner or later, they often end up minimizing and dismissing the issue of slavery. Sooner or later, you put yourself into the position of the slavemaster. When I was in high school and thought like you did, it was much the same with me. I got over that in time. I hope you will too. It's really too much to be locked into such a way of thinking (or not thinking).
We are a peculiar people, sir! We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities – we don’t want them. We have no literature – we don’t need any yet … We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes … As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want from those nations with which we are in amity, and to lay up money besides.”
The governing class didn't want to industrialize. They feared industrialization as a threat to their control. What they wanted from society -- security for the slave system -- was difficult to combine with industrialization.
Southerners who did want to industrialize often weren't keen on secession. They weren't crazy about free trade or the plantation system. They weren't looking to get back at the United States or tear down its tariffs but to profit under the American flag and laws. Cutting up the domestic market wasn't likely to help Southern producers.
You've somehow convinced yourself that opposition to tariffs meant support for industrialization when in fact the opposite was more likely to be true. Support for tariffs, like support for a national bank and public works, was likely to coincide with support for industry and opposition to such policies with an agrarian distrust of cities and factories
I think you started out with the theory that foreign goods could be imported from Europe by the low tariff CSA and then reimported to the US thus undercutting US industry. You haven't kept that theory up since it was pointed out to you that the goods would be taxed twice --once by the Confederate tariff and once by the US tariff.
Then I believe you had the idea that British and European goods could be imported by the Confederacy and smuggled across the border, crippling American industry. I don't think you understood the real difficulties with this view. Transportation costs across the Atlantic wouldn't be less. The goods would have to be broken up to be smuggled across the border -- thus losing the advantages of bulk transport and sale. And there would be added risks involved in smuggling (i.e. getting caught and imprisoned with confiscation of the goods). By the time the products got to market in the North, they wouldn't be any cheaper than what was produced locally.
Moreover, smuggling works with items that are small and light and easily concealed. There also has to be a great differential between the cost to you and the price the product commands in the country where you take it. It's best if the product is illegal in the country you smuggle it into. Smuggling works with illegal drugs, with overtaxed cigarettes, with alcohol during prohibition, maybe with cell phones or fake designer clothes or overpriced medicines.
You wouldn't get very far smuggling anvils or axles or ploughs across a national border, especially in an age where there weren't any trucks. And smuggling socks at a time when most people knitted their own also would be problematic. If you were smuggling nails or pins or hammers or fabric or pants, you could probably do it, but could you and others get away with it often enough and on a large enough scale to really put local businesses out of competition? Doubtful.
It's been said that secession would make slave escapes to freedom that much easier, thus dooming slavery. I'm skeptical about that view. But consider: if it's easy to smuggle goods across the Ohio and hurt the North, isn't it also easy to smuggle slaves across the river and hurt the South? If on the other hand, the Confederacy could check the outflow of its labor force, who's to say that the United States couldn't curb the flow of goods across the border? A tight and secure border or a loose and porous border would apply to each region and have advantages or disadvantages for both countries.
So now you've refined the argument to say that the rich South would be producing its own manufactured goods and smuggling them across the border. All the above arguments about smuggling still apply. In addition, those factories would have to be built. Personnel would have to be hired and trained. You'd have to overcome the unwillingness of slaves to do things that they weren't being compensated for and/or the unwillingness of free workers to sign on for the low wages that went along with the existence of a large pool of unpaid laborers.
People with capital would have to want to put it into manufacturing. Southern plantation owners weren't much interested in manufacturing. And if the cotton and slave economy was so profitable, that's what ambitious Southerners would go in to. The fabulously wealthy sugar planters of the West Indies didn't establish new industries. Sugar and slaves were too profitable. The gold rush didn't make California or Australia industrial powers -- not for a long time anyway. People who had jobs left them for a chance at the gold fields. It was similar during the cotton boom.
You're also apparently under the impression that protective tariffs meant that US manufacturers had to charge more than British or continental manufacturers. Of course not. Protected by the tariff war they could charge more, but they didn't have to. A highly efficient producer could charge less and undercut the completion. And those who weren't efficient, those who needed the tariff barrier? What makes you think that new Southern start-ups wouldn't fit into that category? What makes you think that a new factory in the South wouldn't face the same problems cutting its costs that marginal Northern manufacturers did? Some great infusion of money produced by cutting New York out of the loop would suddenly make all things possible? Not likely.
Charleston used to manufacture ships too. Their ship building industry fell apart after the 1820s because they couldn't compete with the Northern ship building industries, because the Northern shippers had frozen them out of the market.
Of course, it just had to be something the eeevil Yankees did. Maybe it just wasn't profitable. Maybe they had trouble getting the labor they needed at the price they wanted to pay for it. Maybe Southerners could make more money with cotton and slaves (the thing that you praise so much). Maybe plantation shipyards went out of business because cotton was so profitable. Or maybe shipbuilding was regarded as noisy and less respectable than agriculture. Maybe the Northerners were more industrious or more efficient. But no, it just had to be the eeevil Yankees freezing hem out of the market.
When I started coming here, responding to cockamamie theories like yours wasn't without its compensations. I learned things along the way. By this point, though, there's no pleasure in putting in the effort to rebut your nonsense. Please consider not wasting people's time with your ridiculous outpourings.
Good post but pearls before swine and all that. He’s invested far too much in his elaborate house of cards to dismiss it now. He epitomizes “Lost Causer” with an emphasis on lost.
An even better place to find the Souths defense of slavery is it’s own constitution.
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