"The task before us is to assess in largely material terms the political-economic system arising during and after the American Civil War. Ideological issues existed, certainly, but much evidence suggests that pure idealism had a rather limited run. Antislavery was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes. Slavery itself was a colossal background fact constituting, as historian James L. Huston states, the biggest single capital investment in the United States—an enormous material interest uniting millions of people (not just in the South) through ties of interest, commerce, and sentiment. This interest stood athwart the political-economic ambitions of powerful interests in the Northeast."
"Powerful interests in the Northeast." Where have I heard that idea before?
"We may think here of large “forces” at work, each with limits and counter-tendencies. Where slavery is concerned, Americans shirked the job of finding a reasonable solution. Offered one—disunion—some rejected it, after which the blunt instrument of war permitted another solution of sorts. As historian Howard Zinn writes: It was not the moral enormity of slavery but “the antitariff, antibank, anticapitalist aspect of slavery which aroused the united opposition of the only groups in the country with power to make war: the national political leaders and the controllers of the national economy.”
Wow. That sounds suspiciously like what I have been saying.
Here's a bit about railroads.
"Political scientist Thomas Ferguson believes that the goals of money-driven coalitions explain the greater part of American political history. During the mid-nineteenth century, railroads represented the biggest new business opportunity, provided large-scale government subsidies (state and federal) were available. Northern railroad promoters and land speculators, many based in New England, worked both to get subsidies and remove obstacles. On the removal side, some of them, like John Murray Forbes, donated money to John Brown’s good works in Kansas apparently to put pressure on southern opponents of internal improvements."
This article seems to be firing on all cylinders.
"The Republican Party platform of May 1860 stated the minimal program of a historical bloc of northeastern financial and manufacturing interests and Midwestern and western farmers. It began on a high note of egalitarian and republican ideology, aired some Free Soil, antislavery grievances, and thudded to rest with some practical matters: protective tariffs, homesteads (good for votes but rather ambiguous), federally funded improvements of rivers and harbors (Great Lakes subsidies), and a Pacific railroad. In addition, the party’s friendliness to central (national) banking was no secret. The Hamiltonian mercantilism of the platform was its central theme, if not quite its only one. Alas for its adherents, they soon found a large bloc of their recent opponents (and potential taxpayers) leaving the Union, beginning with South Carolina in December 1860."
And where was the Federal government getting 74-83% of all it's money?
"It seems clear that key leaders of the northern “developmental coalition” represented by the Republican Party were ready enough for war, provided other people bore most of the costs. As tax historian Charles Adams writes, “The Wall Street boys and the men of commerce and business were determined to preserve the Union for their economic gains”—a calculation made easier for them after the contrasting U.S. and Confederate tariff schedules were released in early 1861.
I swear to God, i've never seen this article before today, and yet it is detailing exactly what i've been saying and what I derived independently from diverse information gleaned from many sources.
"With the highest tariff rates at 47 percent (North) and 12 percent (South), a massive shift of English and European trade to Norfolk, Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans seemed likely. U.S. revenues would plummet, and northern business imagined short-run (or longer) catastrophe. A good many more northern businessmen began to calculate the possible benefits of a war. On cue, hesitating newspapers changed their line. Of course access to the Mississippi River (quite unthreatened in reality), the reluctance of any State apparatus to lose territory, and ideological nationalism played their parts."Aw H3ll, just read the whole thing.
The Republican Party platform of May 1860 stated the minimal program of a historical bloc of northeastern financial and manufacturing interests and Midwestern and western farmers. It began on a high note of egalitarian and republican ideology, aired some Free Soil, antislavery grievances, and thudded to rest with some practical matters: protective tariffs, homesteads (good for votes but rather ambiguous), federally funded improvements of rivers and harbors (Great Lakes subsidies), and a Pacific railroad. In addition, the party’s friendliness to central (national) banking was no secret. The Hamiltonian mercantilism of the platform was its central theme, if not quite its only one. Alas for its adherents, they soon found a large bloc of their recent opponents (and potential taxpayers) leaving the Union, beginning with South Carolina in December 1860.
Your idiot contradicts himself and the facts by saying that the "Hamiltonian mercantilism of the platform was its central theme, if not quite its only one." The bulk of the platform is about freedom, slavery, federalism and civil peace. Only 4 of its 17 points are about economic policy. And the demand for a transcontinental railroad was also found in the Democrat platform (in both of them in fact).
Stromberg is making the same mistake DiLorenzo makes: he ignores or dismisses anything that's not economics and not likely to provide a basis for condemning the Republicans. His conclusions are the result of his biases, not of an objective analysis of the facts.
Stromberg goes on to cite Thomas C. Cochran's and William Miller's Age of Enterprise, which was written in 1942, when sympathy for the antebellum South was at a high point among historians. He doesn't mention this passage from the book:
Northern business took advantage of the Civil War once it began and after it was over, but that does not prove that business wanted the war; it does not prove, certainly, that business started the war. Northern and western businessmen were bound to the South by ties which they deemed strongest — ties of profit. Secession strained these almost to the breaking point ; war would shatter them altogether. New England cotton factories depended upon the South for raw materials; boot and shoe factories found their markets there, northern shippers their cargoes. All but the shippers could hope to preserve these ties with the South In or out of the Union, and the shippers certainly wanted no war. Commerce feeds on peace: no one knew It better than they.
From every section of the industrial North, from many types of industry, had come business spokesmen for peace. On December 19, 1860, August Belmont reported a meeting of “our leading men . . . composed of such names as Astor, Aspinwall, Moses H. Grinnell, Hamilton Fish, R. M. Blatchford, &c. They were unanimous for reconciliation, and that the first steps have to be taken by the North.” From New Jersey came the voice of Abram Hewitt, who had suffered as much as any one from southern tariff and railroad policies but who in November, i860, was “using every effort to induce the public mind to give up the idea of coercion, and to take that of peaceable separation.”
Stromberg's source doesn't quite agree with the argument he's making - and certainly doesn't agree with the one you're making.
Timothy Sandefur makes a compelling rebuttal of Stromberg's Howard Zinn-inspired screed here, continued here