The belief that the North was draining money off from the South was not necessarily connected with a desire to industrialize, nor were most Southerners convinced that industrialization was the way to wealth. In his inaugural address Jefferson Davis referred to the South as “An agricultural people, whose chief interest is the export of a commodity required in every manufacturing country …” How much clearer could he be?
Here’s what Davis said in the US Senate in 1860
“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South AND THEIR INDUSTRY.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
Here is another Speech by Davis after becoming CSA president. As in the speech you reference he describes the Southern economy as being overwhelmingly agricultural but of course does not express any desire not to industrialize.
“The people of the Southern States, whose almost exclusive occupation was agriculture, early perceived a tendency in the Northern States to render the common government subservient to their own purposes by imposing burdens on commerce as a protection to their manufacturing and shipping interests. Long and angry controversies grew out of these attempts, often successful, to benefit one section of the country at the expense of the other. And the danger of disruption arising from this cause was enhanced by the fact that the Northern population was increasing, by immigration and other causes, in a greater ratio than the population of the South. By degrees, as the Northern States gained preponderance in the National Congress, self-interest taught their people to yield ready assent to any plausible advocacy of their right as a majority to govern the minority without control.” Jefferson Davis Address to the Confederate Congress April 29, 1861
There was a small elite in Charleston or New Orleans that dreamed of the South as an industrial power. They were the Hamiltonians of what was a very Jeffersonian (agrarian) region, and more intellectual than effective. There were also actual industrialists in Virginia and Tennessee, but they weren’t for secession in the beginning. Before Sumter, they were willing to take their chances in the US.
Further South, people wanted to rely on cotton. Think about it for a minute: all those books and pamphlets about King Cotton and how valuable it was and how the world couldn’t live without it. And all those books and articles about how horrible and cold and miserable Northern urban life and factory work were. People who write and think that way usually aren’t thinking first and foremost about industrializing their region.
There were people who noted - correctly - that investments in cotton production did yield the highest ROI to that point in time. Thus the Southern states specialized in its production. But Southerns did not fail to notice that since returns on cotton production were good, it was attracting others - most notably the British Empire - to follow suit and indeed Britain’s empire ramped up cotton production considerably thus driving down the margins. Southerners well understood from observing their chief customer Britain and others that industrialization was the way forward. The Upper South was industrializing at a pretty rapid rate by 1860.
Hint: compensated emancipation was not seen as a threat by the vast majority of slave owners. Indeed it was how the British Empire and others had gotten rid of slavery and if slavery were to go - which many realized it would eventually - a compensated emancipation scheme was the most equitable way to do it.
I said loss of the Senate was seen as a threat in terms of the federal government passing sectional partisan economic legislation that was very harmful to the South. I’ve also said there was no threat to slavery and that would hold true even if the Northern states held a clear majority in the Senate. It takes 3/4s of the states to pass a constitutional amendment and that was the only means of ending slavery. What Southerners really felt was that they could do much better for themselves economically if they could set a low tariff, severely limit crony capitalism and keep expenditures low. All of this would only be possible by getting away from the Northern states.
By contrast, Southerners could usually count on the support of Northern Democrats to keep the tariff from rising too high. If it were all about tariffs and economics, the new Western agricultural states would be seen as allies by the South, rather than as a threat. Western farmers didn’t want to pay high import taxes either.
They - the western farmers - were usually seen as political allies by the Southern states. It took lots of promises and federal expenditures in those western states to buy them off so that they could form a united front against the South.
The US tariff rate in the 1840s was about 20%. That’s not “far higher” than 10%.
uhhh yes it is. Its TWICE the MAXIMUM the South wanted.
The rate reflected a country where agricultural interests had to be balanced against the interests of infant industries. The tariff had to pay for the costs of collecting the tax as well as the revenue it generated and 10% wouldn’t go very far in paying for customs houses, warehouses, and clerks.
Baloney. The collection costs were miniscule and would have been easily covered by a low single digit rate. As for “infant” industries...Northern industrialists had been claiming that for generations. The Georgia declaration of causes goes on at length about this.
“They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.”
The 1846 tariff was written by Democrats with considerable Southern input. And what “massive corporate welfare and infrastructure spending” before the Civil War? Just what are you talking about that fits that description?
Just because the rate was lower than the ruinous 54% of the Morill Tariff or the equally ruinously high Tariff of Abominations does not mean it was low. Just because the South had some input into setting the tariff rate does not mean it was not quite harmful to the Southern economy. They were able to keep it from being even more harmful but once independent, they set a maximum 10% tariff rate. The Northern newspapers were filled with horror at the prospect of a CSA that had a tariff rate so low it “verged on free trade”.
As for infrastructure spending that had massively skewed toward the Northern states as had corporate subsidies. There are any of a number of sources for this ranging from the Pennsylvanian Buchanan to Thomas Jefferson to John C Calhoun to various Newspapers including Northern ones to the Georgia declaration of causes to Rhett’s address attached to South Carolina’s declaration of causes and issued along with it.
If there was an epicenter it was more likely to be Liverpool or Bristol or Glasgow than Boston or Salem or New Haven. But if you consider the transatlantic slave trade as a whole there was no center. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Danish, British and US slave traders competed with each other in a network that extended across four continents.
If you were talking about the mid 18th century you’d be right. If you were talking about the late 18th century up to 1860, you’d be dead wrong. New England was THE hub of the slave trade industry for the entire western hemisphere from that point on.
The US and Britain abolished the slave trade at about the same time, 1807-1808. Most of the slaves sent to the US did not arrive in American ships or under the US flag. Most likely their ancestors arrived in colonial times or shortly afterwards.
Yes the US did officially ban the slave trade from 1808 but it was carried out illicitly on a very large scale by New England right up until 1860 with the appropriate bribes and winks and nods.
After the ban, the US fleet was active in trying to stop slave ships. There were always illegal traders after the ban from a variety of countries - some were Southerners - but the notion that the trade was turning in massive profits for New Englanders or that foreign traders weren’t doing the same thing looks shaky.
There was no serious effort by the US to stop the slave trade and efforts to do so were rightly seen as nothing more than a fig leaf. The VAST MAJORITY of illicit slave trading was carried out by those who had always carried it out - Yankees. What really looks shaky is any attempt to deny that New England was in it up to their eyeballs or that they did not make huge profits from slave trading. I’ve already listed a source though there are plenty more confirming this.
The US did refuse to make a treaty granting the British the right to board and search US ships. That had as much to do with national pride and the wishes of the Southern states as anything to do with the Northern states.
As I said, Yankee slave traders and their lackeys did all they could to cite national pride as a means of preventing the Royal Navy from stopping their lucrative slave trading. They hardly wanted the very profitable gravy train to stop when it was lining their pockets year after year.
There were people who noted - correctly - that investments in cotton production did yield the highest ROI to that point in time. Thus the Southern states specialized in its production. But Southerns did not fail to notice that since returns on cotton production were good, it was attracting others - most notably the British Empire - to follow suit and indeed Britain’s empire ramped up cotton production considerably thus driving down the margins. Southerners well understood from observing their chief customer Britain and others that industrialization was the way forward. The Upper South was industrializing at a pretty rapid rate by 1860.
That perception was confined to an elite part of the elite, a few wealthy and educated people who closely followed economics and shared a minority opinion about the future of the economy. For the rest - even or especially the rest of the elite - cotton was king, and the idea that Britain could replace the South as its main supply of cotton was unheard of. That's why the secessionists were so confident that they would win. If they really thought cotton would eventually go bust, why secede at all? Why not share in the increasing wealth of a united America?
And as I said before, those industrialists of the Upper South that you mention were not driving the secession movement. Once the new country was formed, they were determined to serve it, but most of them had been more than happy in the good old United States.
Hint: compensated emancipation was not seen as a threat by the vast majority of slave owners. Indeed it was how the British Empire and others had gotten rid of slavery and if slavery were to go - which many realized it would eventually - a compensated emancipation scheme was the most equitable way to do it.
Most educated Southerners in 1780 thought slavery would go away eventually. Many still thought so in 1830. By 1860, there was so much pressure to unify behind the "peculiar institution" that it was hard to maintain such a position in public, or even in private. The Fire-eaters, the fire-brands of the secessionist revolution, did not even want to consider the idea of gradual compensated emancipation. It was seen as a weakening of the united front of the South. Every slaveowner who sold out was one less supporter of the existing Southern Way of Life. The CSA might have initiated its own program of gradual compensated emancipation sooner or later, but that wasn't apparent in 1861.
Baloney. The collection costs were miniscule and would have been easily covered by a low single digit rate.
You said 10% would be an acceptable tariff rate. Add to that a low single digit rate necessary to pay for the collection of the tariff and you get about 17%, which was the overall tariff rate adopted in 1857. On some goods it was as low as 15%. On others it was higher. Still, tariffs in the late 1850s weren't much to complain about.
Someone who's done the math says the average free American resident paid $1.94 in tariffs in 1860. If the Confederacy had been able to collect its own tariffs, including those on goods from the Northern states, free Confederate citizens would have had to pay $4.46 annually in tariffs. That certainly could have gotten Southern industry going, but how would the large agricultural interest have liked paying more in tariffs?
As for infrastructure spending that had massively skewed toward the Northern states as had corporate subsidies. There are any of a number of sources for this ranging from the Pennsylvanian Buchanan to Thomas Jefferson to John C Calhoun to various Newspapers including Northern ones to the Georgia declaration of causes to Rhett’s address attached to South Carolina’s declaration of causes and issued along with it.
Once again, you cite the fiery, ignorant rhetoric, but don't name the actual laws and measures that constituted "massive corporate subsidies." Which laws constituted massive corporate subsidies? And bear in mind, you said “corporate.” Anything that might have benefited a poor fisherman probably doesn’t qualify as massive or corporate.
New England was THE hub of the slave trade industry for the entire western hemisphere from that point on.
New England ships ran slaves to Cuba and Brazil. Spanish and Portuguese ships ran slaves to the American South. The British and the other powers were also still involved. Many of the foreign ships that carried slaves used the American flag because they knew that the ships would not be searched by the British. As the trade was illegal, marginal, and frowned upon, and slavers spent little time in their original home waters, talk about a hub or epicenter is probably out of place.
The VAST MAJORITY of illicit slave trading was carried out by those who had always carried it out - Yankees.
“Yankees” alone, no. Throw in the Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilians with them and you would be right. What you’re not saying is that in the last years, ships taking slaves illegally to the Southern states tended to be owned by Southerners.