Posted on 12/24/2003 10:30:18 AM PST by Grand Old Partisan
Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around Richmond, Virginia, one day 138 years ago, and if you try to retrace their steps today you won't see much that they saw, which shouldn't be a surprise, of course. The street grid is the same, though, and if you're in the right mood and know what to look for, the lineaments of the earlier city begin to surface, like the outline of a scuttled old scow rising through the shallows of a pond. Among the tangle of freeway interchanges and office buildings you'll come across an overgrown park or a line of red-brick townhouses, an unlikely old belltower or a few churches scattered from block to block, dating to the decades before the Civil War and still giving off vibrations from long ago.
Not really. I need only show that the overwhelming majority of Wal-Mart goods are trafficked through a distribution center network rather than being shipped directly from point of origin to point of sale. That fact is pretty much undisputed considering how their business model operates, thus my burden of proof is met.
That said, I am willing to indulge your requests for the point of argument and for the reason that you will not admit your mistaken "rule" by any other means. First, I will make a simple correction in your statistic. If we are to play by your rules and if the comparison is to be New York City, I need not prove that Bentonville takes in 95% but rather somewhere in the 60 to 70% range - a rough estimate of NYC's dealings in imports for a mid 19th century year.
That discrepency aside, I can indeed prove that at a time from its 1969 IPO to roughly a decade later, Bentonville was the company's SOLE general distribution center and therefore handled 100% of Wal-Mart's distribution to about a dozen regional subcenters in 11 states and from them a total of 276 stores in 1979. I can also prove that by no reasonable measure does the Wal-Mart of today use a direct shipping approach to its distribution. That occurs from a small numer of sectional distribution sites, of which Bentonville is the main one, to 103 regional distribution centers around the country to approximately 3,000 stores.
You claim over and again that it's the largest distributorship of all the hundreds of Wal-Mart's distribution centers.
There are only 103 regional distribution centers in the U.S. so there cannot be "hundreds of Wal-Mart distribution centers" as you claim. The number of general distribution centers is significantly smaller and allocates by section of the country (i.e. there is one for the mid-atlantic states somewhere in Virginia and so forth) though I cannot find a precise stat on how many of those there are.
Yeah, OK. You have ports capable of handling almost all your cotton exports but can't handle any more than 3% or 4% of your imports.
Who ever said they can't handle them? I'm sure if it was economically more efficient to ship direct to those cities rather than distribute over land, they could have handled a large capacity and certainly would have accomodated that demanded in the long run.
All those ships coming to load cotton come empty after having dropped all their southern-bound imports in New York.
Not necessarily. First, it is no certainty that an English ship in NYC will next go down to Charleston to pick up cotton. They may instead pick up exports that have already made it to NYC and go back to England, or, conversely, pick up other foreign imports stored for reexportation in NYC warehouses and head to South America. Second, for the same reason it is no certainty that a ship that arrives in Charleston, SC will have come from a NYC. It could just as easily have been engaged in the carribean trade or be a domestic shipper working its way down the coast. Your model is simplistic, naive, and wholly mistaken in its key assumptions, non-seq. That is why it fails you so frequently.
By your reasoning it would make more sense to send the cotton to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for export.
How so?
How?
The east coast is geographically closer to Europe than is New Orleans. That's how.
Hub implies a central location.
Really? Then why are so many airport hubs are located not in the geographic center of America (i.e. Kansas) but rather along its east and west coasts (i.e. NYC, Boston, Los Angeles)? The answer is simple. A hub need not be centrally located. It need only be located at a geographically advantageous point, of which the eastern coast is perfect for flights to Europe, the west coast for flights to Hawaii, Texas for flights to Mexico and so forth.
Why not Mobile or Charleston as a hub?
Mobile is on the gulf coast like New Orleans. Charleston was every bit as much of an export hub in the cotton trade with Europe as NYC was an import hub in the manufactures trade with Europe.
They are more centrally located for the area consuming 80% of all imports than New York was.
Suppose you are a ship captain coming from France and want to take the shortest route possible to arrive in the United States. You have two ports to choose from: New Orleans and New York. Based on geography alone and no other consideration, which would you choose? Would you sail south around the tip of Florida, northwest to the mouth of the Mississippi, and up the river to NO? Or would you sail to NYC on a relatively direct route?
They had rail lines built to get the cotton to the ports, why not use those lines to get the imports to the consumers?
And why not use those same lines to get imports from NYC to consumers? After all, isn't a train travelling at 50 mph moving faster than a ship at 12, 15, or 20, or even the unrealistic 40 knots?
What inland waterways and/or rail lines provided direct and easy connection between New York and Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana?
In 1860, well...practically any railroad line that connected NYC with the Ohio or Mississippi rivers, of which there were dozens, made it to an inland waterway that could reach both LA and MS.
If you wanted to go the whole way by rail there were a couple of different options. First, you could take any of the east coast lines to the famous Baltimore and Ohio railroad, which moved south from Maryland through Harpers Ferry up to Wheeling, VA and into Ohio. From Ohio a connection could be made to the Louisville and Nashville RR or Memphis and Ohio RR at the Kentucky border. From either of the two TN cities you could reach the deep south by any number of routes. The Memphis and Ohio line became the Mississippi and Tennessee RR from Memphis to Jackson, where it then became the New Orleans-Jackson and Great Northern RR, which went to the Mississippi delta south of NO. Or you could go from Nashville to Chattanooga, catch the Western and Atlantic RR there through west Georgia to Atlanta. There it switched to the Atlanta and West Point RR, which ran southwest across the AL border, where it became the Montgomery and West Point RR to Montgomery. From Montgomery it was the Alabama and Florida RR, which extended to Pensacola and Mobile.
Alternatively, one could take any of the east-west lines across PA, OH, IN, and IL to the Kentucky border, then south to either Memphis or Nashville where to catch the same lines into MS, AL, and LA.
The third choice was an appalachian route, first taking the coastal RR's south to Richmond, then onto the Virginia and Tennessee RR through Knoxville to Chattanooga, and then follow the same routes further south.
A fourth choice was the east coast. Take the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac RR from Washington to where it became the Petersburg RR south of Richmond and then became the Wilmington and Weldon RR at the NC border. It turned west there as the Wilmington and Manchester RR through SC, forking at Florence South Carolina. From there you could either go south through Charleston into GA and AL or west through Manchester into GA and AL.
Delta Airlines used to have a lock on air travel in the south. Everything flowed through their Atlanta hub. The old joke was that if you died in Alabama you would have to change in Atlanta on your way to heaven. But for your analogy to be applicable, Delta would have built it's first hub in New York.
Not necessarily. The issue at hand is that they use a hub, not if that hub is NYC. Heck, they could put a hub at an abandoned military base in the middle of Nevada if they wanted to and the analogy would stand so long as all the flights from east to west or west to east had to stop in Nevada.
After all, three large air ports already existed. It was centrally located to Europe. Why build or expand an airport in Atlanta when New York was already there?
First, Atlanta's airport was already there when Delta moved in. It was first built in 1925 and previously known as Candler Field. The military took it over during WWII and doubled the size with military hangers. In the late 1940's the hangers were converted into terminals and by 1948 it was the nation's largest airport in daily traffic. It's been continuously expanded ever since into the aviation complex that it is today.
Second, the NYC airports are indeed hubs for different airlines, each of whom took advantage of a preexisting location when the hub system emerged. Continental has a hub at Newark, which they basically moved in and renovated from being one of the dumpiest airports in the nation. United and Jet Blue both established hubs at JFK, which was built back in the 40's.
I'll grant you that. It would be much more efficient to send imports to Mobile or Charleston or New Orleans for distribution than directly to individual towns and villages in Alabama, South Carolina, or Louisiana.
Perhaps, or by contrast they could be shipped inland to non-coastal cities like Memphis and Nashville and Jackson and Atlanta for distribution to towns and farms.
But if 80% of your goods are destined for consumers in one area then it makes no sense to send them a thousand miles away first.
If rail is more efficient than sea at shipping, sure it does. There is more than one way to get something to Memphis from Northern Europe. I could sail across the atlantic, down the coast, around florida, into the gulf, and up the mississippi. Or, by contrast, I could sail across the Atlantic to New York, put it on a train and take one of many far more direct railroads to Memphis from there. One would probably take about a month longer than the other. I'll let you guess which one that is.
In the first half of the 19th century that fact was still true.
Prove it.
Not always true but not really relevant. Still, given prevailing winds and currents, sailing to the southern and central U.S. was often an easier trip than to New York or Boston.
Not true. The major east coast ports are close enough to each other to render these differences of little substance. The main central US port on the east coast, Philadelphia, is but a few hundred miles south of NYC. Washington and Baltimore are only a few hundred miles south of that. Richmond is a hundred miles south of Washington. Wilmington is a few hundred miles south of Richmond and so forth. The real substantial difference in sailing occurs between a Europe-to-east coast route versus a Europe-to-gulf of mexico route. The latter of those two will almost always take longer for the simple reason that one must navigate from the east coast south around Florida then backtrack north again to get to any of the ports.
It is also true that since the early 19th century the transatlantic voyage from Britain to NYC has consistently been the dominant route to North America from Europe. Steam minimized sail dependency and further solidified this route. Boston is also irrelevant to the picture along side NYC's trade volume.
I haven't a clue how you managed to stumble onto that conclusion.
Your entire premise is that New York's status as the largest consumer is demonstrated by the fact that it was the largest collector of tariffs. If that is true, it is impossible for any non-port city to achieve a consumer status of any substantial ammount since tariffs collected at inland cities are, by necessity, zero.
They have to whitewash slavery completely.
They attack Lincoln on supposed constitutional grounds, or in other ways, not because they are outraged, but because they don't have the nerve to get to what galls them -- that President Lincoln did much to advance human rights.
After all, it was perfectly alright for the rebels to "peacefully" keep four milion people as slaves.
Walt
This is the same babe who gave us McCain-Feingold and affirmative action for university admissions (but only for 20 years because any longer would be a violation of the Constitution). I think you would be well served in finding another source.
I'd think you'd be well served in looking at the record and not making personal attacks.
Walt
Utter nonsense. For your analogy to be correct you needed to show that almost all of Wal-Marts goods were funneled through a single distribution center, located at a point thousands of miles away from their ultimate customers. For your analogy to be correct, Charleston and Mobile and New Orleans were just as logical distribution centers as New York.
Who ever said they can't handle them? I'm sure if it was economically more efficient to ship direct to those cities rather than distribute over land, they could have handled a large capacity and certainly would have accomodated that demanded in the long run.
Yet you would have us believe that it was economically more efficient for those ships to show up empty to pick up their cotton rather than arrive loaded to the gunwales with the imports you claim that the south was clamoring for. And it was more efficient to land those imports in Northern ports and ship those imports overland while sending the exports directly from southern ports to their overseas customers. Good plan.
Your model is simplistic, naive, and wholly mistaken in its key assumptions, non-seq. That is why it fails you so frequently.
But you consistently claim that the bulk of the exports were southern agricultural products. How could the North produce enough exports to load those ships that landed all those southern-bound imports? By your model a significant portion had to head home empty. Or, equally likely by your model, land all those imports destined for southern consumers in New York, head empty for Charleston, and the load cotton. Because, after all, we have to agree that those ships arrived in southern ports to load cotton at some time. They either arrived full or empty. Based on the tariffs collected then it's pretty apparent that they didn't arrive full. If they arrived empty then that means that they either left Europe empty or they dropped off their in-bound cargo in the Northnern ports. And you would have us believe that it made more sense, because of the Warehousing Act of 1846 1854 to leave all those goods in the North, sail to the south to load cotton, and then send those goods south later. Your model is simplistic, illogical, and totally asinine. That is why it's so funny.
If rail is more efficient than sea at shipping, sure it does.
Prove it.
How so? Don't you bother to read the stuff you post? By your logic it makes no sense to do otherwise. New York, Philadelphia, and Boston were centrally located for the import market, you say. With a fine, large harbors and extensive extensive warehouses. And they were hundreds and hundreds of miles away. Ideal distribution points, by your logic. That is why it made so much sense to land 95% of all imports there, and it would make equal sense in your world to funnel 95% of all exports out there as well. The east coast is geographically closer to Europe than is the Gulf Coast. In your world, where apparently the Gulf Stream doesn't exist and prevailing winds don't prevail, it makes perfect sense to send all imports to New York and Boston as the closest points to Europe, much closer than New Orleans or Mobile way down yonder on that Gulf Coast. That is why you believe it made so much sense to land 95% of all imports, and it stands to reason that it would make equal sense in your world to send all that cotton out through there as well. The U.S. was blessed with an extensive rail network, used to get all those imports from up North to down south. And, in your world, it was so much cheaper to send those imports by rail from New York than to ship them directly to Mobile or New Orleans from Europe. So in GOPcapitalistland it would be so much cheaper to send all that cotton by rail to New York and Boston to export them to Europe. How so? Because you keep saying so! Or don't you actually believe the crap you spout?
Tell me about the draft riots in N.Y. again...
When you can support your fatuous analogies, ping me, until then it's your story, tell it how you want.
I don't believe I've ever said that Boston is centrally located to anything. Of large cities, it is the northeastern-most location in America. It is also coastal and therefore as far away as one can physically get from the center of the nation. The other two cities, NYC and Philadelphia, are similarly coastal ports and therefore as far as one can get from the geographic center. As coastal ports go, however, Philadelphia is located in the mid-atlantic region (the area generally consisting of PA, MD, VA, and DE) and therefore is centrally located among the east coast ports. NYC is north of Philadelphia but south of Boston, thus making it northeastern though not as far to the northeast as Boston.
With a fine, large harbors and extensive extensive warehouses.
NYC had a large harbor and extensive warehouses. I don't believe I've ever given that characterization to Philadelphia or Boston, and in fact circa 1860 neither of those cities had anywhere near the warehousing capacity of NYC.
And they were hundreds and hundreds of miles away. Ideal distribution points, by your logic.
From final destinations of goods, yep. They sure were.
That is why it made so much sense to land 95% of all imports there, and it would make equal sense in your world to funnel 95% of all exports out there as well.
Actually, northern import dominance did not come from either Philadelphia or Boston. Both of those ports took in a tiny fraction of New York City. As previously noted, New York City became the dominant import location for the entire nation by 1860. The reasons for this have already been discussed, namely warehousing capacity, relatively advantageous geography in relation to Europe, and the dominance of the Britain-to-NYC seafaring route.
The east coast is geographically closer to Europe than is the Gulf Coast. In your world, where apparently the Gulf Stream doesn't exist and prevailing winds don't prevail, it makes perfect sense to send all imports to New York and Boston as the closest points to Europe, much closer than New Orleans or Mobile way down yonder on that Gulf Coast.
First and once again, I have not said so much as a word about Boston to suggest that it was the most geographically advantaged location in North America or even close to it. Where you got that notion and why you persist in injecting Boston into this discussion is beyond me. Second, your precious gulf stream and the unidentified "prevailing winds" were not capable, even at their strongest, of lifting a ship out of the ocean, hopping it across the peninsula known as Florida, and landing it at the mouth of the Mississippi. No matter what the winds were, how strong they acted, or what direction they came from it was an inescapable fact of navigation that ANY ship traffic bound for New Orleans from northern Europe had to first sail south around the tip of Florida and then backtrack north again to the get to the gulf coast.
A simple glance at historical voyages from the era reveals the absurdity of your claims. The Liverpool-New Orleans route was a common one of the day. It took about 40 days by sail as of 1843 and longer if delayed by storms. A quick google search reveals a voyage of the bark Yorkshire on March 8, 1843 out of Liverpool. They reached the west Indies on May 2nd, almost two months later due to bad winds and storms. Arrival in New Orleans was not until May 10th.
The Swanton left Liverpool on January 16, 1843. It reached New Orleans on February 26th.
The Olympus left Liverpool on March 4, 1851. It arrived in New Orleans on April 27th.
The clipper Tam O'Shanter made the faster reverse voyage from New Orleans to Liverpool in 31 days in 1850.
Contrast that with the Liverpool-New York route. In 1838 the Great Western made it in 15 days out of Bristol and the Royal William made it in 15 days out of Liverpool. In July 1845 the Great Britain sailed from Liverpool in 13 days. These were steam and sail vessles, but improvements in sail and the rise of the merchant clipper in trade soon approached similar speeds.
In 1860 the clipper Young America sailed from NYC to Liverpool in 14 days. In 1864 under rougher conditions it made the reverse voyage in 29 days.
Both sail and steam vessles of the era made it to NYC and from NYC faster than ships to NO and from NO. The two clippers make for a good comparison on the return voyage. NO to England took twice as long as NY to England. The same general rule holds for England to NY and NO, where voyages were often against certain wind patterns. In short the entirity of your geographic premise is flat out wrong.
The U.S. was blessed with an extensive rail network, used to get all those imports from up North to down south. And, in your world, it was so much cheaper to send those imports by rail from New York than to ship them directly to Mobile or New Orleans from Europe. So in GOPcapitalistland it would be so much cheaper to send all that cotton by rail to New York and Boston to export them to Europe.
Not necessarily, but it certainly was cheaper to send it to Charleston from the inland and gulf states, at least when bound for northern Europe. The Charleston to Europe route held no great advantage or disadvantage to any other major east coast port, so shipping by rail from one to the other wouldn't gain anything. By contrast, when cotton was going to the carribean, south america, and in some cases southern Europe New Orleans was the cheapest place to ship from.
Technically not, considering that NYC, though by far the largest import site, was not the only import site. Thus a distribution system suffices. But since you insist, I need only point your attention to Wal-Mart circa 1975 where a single distribution center, Bentonville, served about 100 wal-mart stores hundreds upon hundreds of miles away from it in about a dozen different states.
For your analogy to be correct, Charleston and Mobile and New Orleans were just as logical distribution centers as New York.
Charleston et al did not have large warehousing capacity. New York did. Just the same, in the 1970's your average city in a wal-mart state did not have even a regional wal-mart distribution center. The rural hick town in the middle of nowhere known as Bentonville Arkansas did.
Yet you would have us believe that it was economically more efficient for those ships to show up empty to pick up their cotton rather than arrive loaded to the gunwales with the imports you claim that the south was clamoring for.
Why do you assume that every ship to arrive in Charleston came directly from Europe, making an empty voyage from there? The simple fact is that shipping does not work that way. Ships went where there was business, not on some prearranged two-point route by way of a prearranged schedule. A ship could easily go from Liverpool to New York, drop off a fresh cargo of British imports into NYC warehouses, pick up a domestic load out of other warehouses for Charleston, sail up the coast and pick up a load of Cotton in Charleston, then sail off to Hamburg to unload that cotton and pick up something entirely different bound for Lisbon. Heck, some ships left NYC bound for South America or practically any other place in the world where there was business for shipping something.
And it was more efficient to land those imports in Northern ports and ship those imports overland while sending the exports directly from southern ports to their overseas customers.
So all of the overseas consumers of cotton lived in Liverpool, London, and Hamburg? WRONG. The exact same thing was happening on the other side as well. Britain had the world's first warehousing system decades before the U.S. and similarly served as a warehousing hub for the European end. Cotton from Charleston could end up in a London warehouse, only to be removed and shipped to Hamburg and unloaded on a train for practically anywhere within the continent.
But you consistently claim that the bulk of the exports were southern agricultural products.
They were, non-seq. If you doubt this prove me wrong with the export stats.
How could the North produce enough exports to load those ships that landed all those southern-bound imports?
They don't have to produce any exports to load ships. ALl they need is something to remove from warehousing, of which NYC had an abundance. That could be some domestic product bound for elsewhere in the country. It could be some previous import bound for reexportation. It could be some previous import bound for somewhere else down the coast. There is no rule saying that a ship dropping off imports must necessarily pick up exports and exports alone as its next cargo.
By your model a significant portion had to head home empty.
No it didn't. It could easily pick up a domestic load and ship it up the coast.
Or, equally likely by your model, land all those imports destined for southern consumers in New York, head empty for Charleston, and the load cotton.
Not likely at all. The entire point of warehousing is to provide time for a buyer to be located in order to finance the tariff. In that case, it would be stupid for an importer to go to a non-warehouse port first. The smart thing to do would be to drop off the new imports, for which there is no immediate buyer yet, in a warehouse then pick up previous imports out of the warehouse for which buyers existed and ship them domestically up the coast to those buyers.
Because, after all, we have to agree that those ships arrived in southern ports to load cotton at some time. They either arrived full or empty.
Yeah, and they arrived full of all sorts of products. Those products were either domestic or had been imported already via a warehousing system.
Based on the tariffs collected then it's pretty apparent that they didn't arrive full.
How so? Tariff payments make absolutely no record of at least three significant types of cargo: domestic goods shipped domestically for consumption at another location, domestic goods shipped domestically for exportation from another location, and imported goods for which the tariff has already been paid from warehousing.
Your model fails to account for ANY of these events. That is why I called it simplistic and that is why, in all accuracy, it persists in being exactly that.
Fair enough. In many circumstances rail will be more efficient that shipping for at least three reasons:
1. Rail moves at a faster rate across the same distance. Railroad shipping averages about 45 mph and ranges between about 30 and 55 mph. Given those speeds, a ship would have to average the unrealistic level of 40 knots to move faster than a railroad.
2. Rail cuts significantly off of distance travelled over continents, making the route more direct. A trip by railroad from New York to New Orleans is more direct and significantly faster than any trip by sea due to the Florida peninsula. A railroad trip across isthmus of darien in pre-canal days to ships on the pacific side cut out the voyage around the entire continent of South America, meaning a day's rail journey cut out a month or more from a journey by sea.
3. Rail is less susceptible to natural disasters. Storms and hurricanes at sea, as well as simpler danger such as reefs, running aground, and collision make the possibility of losing a ship and its cargo a relatively high one. Rail, by comparison, travels on a fixed guideway over land. Though susceptible to derailings, the opportunity for disasters of this sort is by its very nature smaller than that of losing a ship.
Sorry about your team. I turned on my Hawks at halftime and watched long enough to realize they were playing the Gator's Cheerleading squad (10 minutes, one blocked punt recovered for touchdown, touchdown drive, etc) then napped my way through the rest of the game.
We seem to once again be at an impasse where a simple response has been displaced by an immaterial factoid.
1. The Southern economy was heavily dependent on international trade.
2. Protectionist tarriffs are intended to stifle international trade.
One must be false for your argument to be effective. Which is it?
As with all things political, widespread apathy will be the majority response to almost any event. A handful of partisans will tie the issue to something that people care about, or at least pretend to care about, and then things become heated. Probably so with the case of Southern secession, wherein both sides of the split sought an event which would bring their respective nation into a rash of patriotic fervor whether war came or not. You can point to commerce raiders or confiscation of property, but I could point to refusal by Union leaders to even attempt working a peaceful solution.
Northerner's may well have preferred that the Southern states showed more respect for the Union and tradition which the left behind, but what more humiliating thing can one ask of a free man than to bend to political power and beg for his freedom from the very hand of tyrrany which he views as such a threat? In this respect, I've always found Lincoln's penchant for graciousness after destroying the South one of the great ironies of American history.
Income taxes go up, and my gross annual income stays the same... Income taxes go down and my gross annual income stays the same... Income taxes remain the same and my gross annual income stays the same... Damn right "Damn those Income taxes"
Do you understand how money works at all?
Seriosly, Partisan, is this the kind of "Strict contstuction" which GWB spoke of during the 2000 campaign?
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