Why did not the South just build their own factories and be done with shipping their raw materials off to England to be processed into exports back to the south. ? !
Senator Louis T. Wigfall of Texas probably summed up the Southern attitude toward manufacturing and industrialization the best.
“We are a peculiar people, sir! You don’t understand us, and you can’t understand us, because we are known to you only by Northern writers and Northern papers, who know nothing of us themselves, or misrepresent what they do know. We are an agricultural people; we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them, have no literature—we don’t need any yet. We have no press—we are glad of it. We do not require a press, because we go out and discuss all public questions from the stump with our people. We have no commercial marine—no navy—we don’t want them. We are better without them. Your ships carry our produce, and you can protect your own vessels. 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.”