The costs of industrialization did not fall on Southerners or farmers in the years before the Civil War. Southern slaveowners made out very well, and no, they didn't pay the lion's share of the tariff.
Few Southerners saw that the cotton bonanza would end. If they thought it would, they wouldn't have said "Cotton is King!" and they wouldn't have been so insistent on secession. For every Southerner leader who saw industry as the way forward there was at least one who thought providing raw materials for foreign industry was the way to wealth.
How much you pay in tariffs depends on how much imported goods you buy. Southerners bought a lot of Northern goods before the Civil War. Those weren't foreign goods. They didn't pay tariffs on them. If the South became an independent country and bought the same amount of Northern goods, they would pay four times the amount of money in tariffs, even at the lower CSA tariff rate.
Subsidies to mail carriers and fishermen were quite minimal. Federal spending on roads and railroads before the Civil War was negligible. The big rail subsidies came after the Civil War. And before the war, Southerners were also angling for the transcontinental railroad money (that wouldn't come through until the war had already started).
Most of the money made off the slave trade came to New England when that trade was still legal. That's when colleges got money from slavery. Afterwards, the slave trade was illegal and clandestine. Harvard, Yale and Brown weren't getting money out of the trade then. And there weren't that many slave ships sailing out of New England ports by that point.
You can search a database of slave ships. It's true that most went to Brazil (or Cuba), especially after 1808. It's also true that the names of most of the ships and captains are Portuguese (or Spanish), especially after 1808. Earlier most of the names were British or Dutch, but they dry up as time goes on. Possibly there were many illegal New England slave ships, but it's unlikely that they could ever match the number of Portuguese, Brazilian and Spanish slave ships running at the time.
If you still want to find a center of illegal slave trading in the North, you'd do better to look to New York. Some of the last slave ships were registered in New York, rather than in any New England port. That makes sense, actually, since New York was the largest port in the country and there were so many ships that none stood out much. But the Clotilda and the Wanderer the last slave ships to reach the US were owned by Southerners, and plenty of the later slavers sailed from New Orleans or Charleston.
But you believe what you want to believe. You've constructed an alternative reality that you feel happy in, and I don't think anybody's going to be able to convince you of anything different.
You disagree. You disagree. You disagree. Because you believe what you want to believe.
I would say precisely the same of you.
You want to assume that Southerners of 1860 were more like people today than they actually were.
You want to believe they were somehow uniquely morally inferior to Northerners then or anybody today. They weren’t.
The costs of industrialization did not fall on Southerners or farmers in the years before the Civil War. Southern slaveowners made out very well, and no, they didn’t pay the lion’s share of the tariff.
False. Just patently false.
Few Southerners saw that the cotton bonanza would end. If they thought it would, they wouldn’t have said “Cotton is King!” and they wouldn’t have been so insistent on secession. For every Southerner leader who saw industry as the way forward there was at least one who thought providing raw materials for foreign industry was the way to wealth.
Again, I disagree with this. Most realized fat profits from cotton would not go on forever. The seceded because they saw themselves being overwhelmed by the larger populations of the North and the very greedy business interests of the North which saw the South as little more than a cash cow.
How much you pay in tariffs depends on how much imported goods you buy. Southerners bought a lot of Northern goods before the Civil War. Those weren’t foreign goods. They didn’t pay tariffs on them.
You fundamentally misunderstand how things worked. Southerners were chartering the ships and paying the insurance and the crews’ salaries for those ships. They were exchanging their cash crops for manufactured goods because having those ships sail back across the Atlantic with their holds empty would have been hugely wasteful. They owned those manufactured goods. As the owners of the goods they were the ones who had to pay those tariffs. This meant they had less money to spend at home. It also meant all the small farmers that surrounded their large plantations whom they were acting as wholesalers for got less money for each bail of cotton because the profitability of the whole trip was lowered with those high tariffs. It also meant they all had to pay more for manufactured goods because with the foreign goods now more expensive, Northern manufacturers could raise their prices too.
If the South became an independent country and bought the same amount of Northern goods, they would pay four times the amount of money in tariffs, even at the lower CSA tariff rate.
Firstly I would need to see the data to back up that claim. Secondly, why would they buy the same amount of Northern goods with foreign goods now considerably cheaper by virtue of not having to pay such a high import tariff?
Subsidies to mail carriers and fishermen were quite minimal. Federal spending on roads and railroads before the Civil War was negligible. The big rail subsidies came after the Civil War. And before the war, Southerners were also angling for the transcontinental railroad money (that wouldn’t come through until the war had already started).
All of this is debatable. What you call minimal, the people at the time certainly didn’t consider minimal. There were plenty of big rail subsidies before the war. Here is a sampling of what some Northern newspapers were saying about this:
On 18 March 1861, the Boston Transcript noted that while the Southern states had claimed to secede over the slavery issue, now “the mask has been thrown off and it is apparent that the people of the principal seceding states are now for commercial independence. They dream that the centres of traffic can be changed from Northern to Southern ports....by a revenue system verging on free trade....”
“Slavery is not the cause of the rebellion ....Slavery is the pretext on which the leaders of the rebellion rely, ‘to fire the Southern Heart’ and through which the greatest degree of unanimity can be produced....Mr. Calhoun, after finding that the South could not be brought into sufficient unanimity by a clamor about the tariff, selected slavery as the better subject for agitation North American Review (Boston October 1862)
The predicament in which both the government and the commerce of the country are placed, through the non-enforcement of our revenue laws, is now thoroughly understood the world over....If the manufacturer at Manchester (England) can send his goods into the Western States through New Orleans at less cost than through New York, he is a fool for not availing himself of his advantage....if the importations of the country are made through Southern ports, its exports will go through the same channel. The produce of the West, instead of coming to our own port by millions of tons to be transported abroad by the same ships through which we received our importations, will seek other routes and other outlets. With the loss of our foreign trade, what is to become of our public works, conducted at the cost of many hundred millions of dollars, to turn into our harbor the products of the interior? They share in the common ruin. So do our manufacturers. Once at New Orleans, goods may be distributed over the whole country duty free. The process is perfectly simple. The commercial bearing of the question has acted upon the North. We now see whither our tending, and the policy we must adopt. With us it is no longer an abstract question of Constitutional construction, or of the reserved or delegated power of the State or Federal Government, but of material existence and moral position both at home and abroad. WE WERE DIVIDED AND CONFUSED UNTIL OUR POCKETS WERE TOUCHED.” New York Times March 30, 1861
“The Southern Confederacy will not employ our ships or buy our goods. What is our shipping without it? Literally nothing. The transportation of cotton and its fabrics employs more than all other trade. It is very clear the South gains by this process and we lose. No, we must not let the South go.” The Manchester, New Hampshire Union Democrat Feb 19 1861
That either revenue from these duties must be collected in the ports of the rebel states, or the ports must be closed to importations from abroad. If neither of these things be done, our revenue laws are substantially repealed, the sources which supply our treasury will be dried up. We shall have no money to carry on the government, the nation will become bankrupt before the next crop of corn is ripe....allow railroad iron to be entered at Savannah with the low duty of ten percent which is all that the Southern Confederacy think of laying on imported goods, and not an ounce more would be imported at New York. The Railways would be supplied from the southern ports.” New York Evening Post March 12, 1861 article “What Shall be Done for a Revenue?”
On the very eve of war, March 18, 1861, the Boston Transcript wrote: If the Southern Confederation is allowed to carry out a policy by which only a nominal duty is laid upon the imports, no doubt the business of the chief Northern cities will be seriously injured thereby. The difference is so great between the tariff of the Union and that of the Confederated States, that the entire Northwest must find it to their advantage to purchase their imported goods at New Orleans rather than New York. In addition to this, the manufacturing interest of the country will suffer from the increased importations resulting from low duties….The…[government] would be false to all its obligations, if this state of things were not provided against.”
December 1860, before any secession, the Chicago Daily Times foretold the disaster that Southern free ports would bring to Northern commerce: “In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwide trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow.”Chicago Daily Times Dec 1860
“The South has furnished near three-fourths of the entire exports of the country. Last year she furnished seventy-two percent of the whole...we have a tariff that protects our manufacturers from thirty to fifty percent, and enables us to consume large quantities of Southern cotton, and to compete in our whole home market with the skilled labor of Europe. This operates to compel the South to pay an indirect bounty to our skilled labor, of millions annually.” - Daily Chicago Times, December 10, 1860
Most of the money made off the slave trade came to New England when that trade was still legal. That’s when colleges got money from slavery. Afterwards, the slave trade was illegal and clandestine. Harvard, Yale and Brown weren’t getting money out of the trade then. And there weren’t that many slave ships sailing out of New England ports by that point.
LOL! False. Again, you need to do some reading here. I’ve already named the NY Times Best seller Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery. It was written by 3 New England journalists. Its OK really. You can actually believe it since it was not said by Southerners (even though Southerners had been saying the same thing for over 150 years).
If you still want to find a center of illegal slave trading in the North, you’d do better to look to New York. Some of the last slave ships were registered in New York, rather than in any New England port. That makes sense, actually, since New York was the largest port in the country and there were so many ships that none stood out much. But the Clotilda and the Wanderer the last slave ships to reach the US were owned by Southerners, and plenty of the later slavers sailed from New Orleans or Charleston.
Yes New York was estimated to be outfitting 2 slave ships per month in the 19th century - long after the ban but it certainly was not limited to New York. Rhode Island and Connecticut were major slave trading bases as well. It was not unknown in Philadelphia either.
You want another source? OK. The following is a rather long passage but is directly on point:
“On the eve of the Revolution, the slave trade “formed the very basis of the economic life of New England.”[2] It wove itself into the entire regional economy of New England. The Massachusetts slave trade gave work to coopers, tanners, sailmakers, and ropemakers. Countless agents, insurers, lawyers, clerks, and scriveners handled the paperwork for slave merchants. Upper New England loggers, Grand Banks fishermen, and livestock farmers provided the raw materials shipped to the West Indies on that leg of the slave trade. Colonial newspapers drew much of their income from advertisements of slaves for sale or hire. New England-made rum, trinkets, and bar iron were exchanged for slaves. When the British in 1763 proposed a tax on sugar and molasses, Massachusetts merchants pointed out that these were staples of the slave trade, and the loss of that would throw 5,000 seamen out of work in the colony and idle almost 700 ships.
The connection between molasses and the slave trade was rum. Millions of gallons of cheap rum, manufactured in New England, went to Africa and bought black people. Tiny Rhode Island had more than 30 distilleries, 22 of them in Newport. In Massachusetts, 63 distilleries produced 2.7 million gallons of rum in 1774. Some was for local use: rum was ubiquitous in lumber camps and on fishing ships. “But primarily rum was linked with the Negro trade, and immense quantities of the raw liquor were sent to Africa and exchanged for slaves. So important was rum on the Guinea Coast that by 1723 it had surpassed French and Holland brandy, English gin, trinkets and dry goods as a medium of barter.”[3] Slaves costing the equivalent of £4 or £5 in rum or bar iron in West Africa were sold in the West Indies in 1746 for £30 to £80. New England thrift made the rum cheaply — production cost was as low as 5½ pence a gallon — and the same spirit of Yankee thrift discovered that the slave ships were most economical with only 3 feet 3 inches of vertical space to a deck and 13 inches of surface area per slave, the human cargo laid in carefully like spoons in a silverware case.
A list of the leading slave merchants is almost identical with a list of the region’s prominent families: the Fanueils, Royalls, and Cabots of Massachusetts; the Wantons, Browns, and Champlins of Rhode Island; the Whipples of New Hampshire; the Eastons of Connecticut; Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. To this day, it’s difficult to find an old North institution of any antiquity that isn’t tainted by slavery. Ezra Stiles imported slaves while president of Yale. Six slave merchants served as mayor of Philadelphia. Even a liberal bastion like Brown University has the shameful blot on its escutcheon. It is named for the Brown brothers, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses, manufacturers and traders who shipped salt, lumber, meat — and slaves. And like many business families of the time, the Browns had indirect connections to slavery via rum distilling. John Brown, who paid half the cost of the college’s first library, became the first Rhode Islander prosecuted under the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794 and had to forfeit his slave ship. Historical evidence also indicates that slaves were used at the family’s candle factory in Providence, its ironworks in Scituate, and to build Brown’s University Hall.[4]
Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England’s antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.
Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans.
Long after the U.S. slave trade officially ended, the more extensive movement of Africans to Brazil and Cuba continued. The U.S. Navy never was assiduous in hunting down slave traders. The much larger British Navy was more aggressive, and it attempted a blockade of the slave coast of Africa, but the U.S. was one of the few nations that did not permit British patrols to search its vessels, so slave traders continuing to bring human cargo to Brazil and Cuba generally did so under the U.S. flag. They also did so in ships built for the purpose by Northern shipyards, in ventures financed by Northern manufacturers.”
http://slavenorth.com/profits.htm
By the way....let’s not think this is limited to Brown University. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, etc etc. Name one. They’re ALL buried up to their eyeballs in slave trading profits right from their very beginnings.
But let’s talk about that bastion of SJW Leftists Hahhhhvahd because...well hell, because its just so delicious. It seems the Leftist Yankees in Ivy League Academia have made a shocking discovery lately. Those things Southerners had been telling them about how their hands were dirty, about how they themselves were founded with blood money from Slavery and how they had never disgorged any of that unjust enrichment were all true! Who would have ever guessed that the people who were long condemned for buying and owning slaves correctly remembered the people doing the finger pointing were the very ones who sold them the slaves in the first place?
“At least two of Harvard’s early presidents brought slaves to live and work on campus, historians said. Some of the school’s major donors made their fortunes through slave labor or the slave trade. The university invested in merchant voyages trading crops produced by slaves. The 19th century Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz promoted theories about race that were used to justify slavery.”
“Some of our most esteemed educational institutions are also the product of some of the most horrific violence that has ever descended on any group of people,” said Sven Beckert, a Harvard history professor who has studied the school’s slavery ties.”
At Harvard, the topic reached a crescendo last year after students demanded the law school abandon its coat of arms, which was taken from the family crest of a slave-owner who helped found the school.
The law school eventually agreed to drop the shield, and weeks later Faust called on further exploration of the school’s past relationship with slavery.
But there’s still debate at Harvard about how to reconcile for past wrongdoings. At the conference, writer and keynote speaker Ta-Nehisi Coates drew applause when he suggested colleges make some sort of financial reparations for their role in slavery.
“I don’t know how you conduct research that shows that your very existence is rooted in a great crime, and you just, well, shrug, and maybe at best say I’m sorry,” said Coates, who writes for The Atlantic magazine. “You have to do the right thing and try to make some amends.”
https://www.apnews.com/6b25d83deacd4133ba6a723442958916
Shocking stuff....if you’ve been refusing to listen when Southerners told you all of this over and over again for 175 years or so.
There’s more:
“The release last week of a Brown University report detailing the school’s historical ties to slavery has brought to light slave money that other elite universities, including Harvard, took centuries ago.”
“Another major Ivy League recipient of slave money was Yale University.”
“Deadria C. Farmer-Paellmann, a reparations activist who filed suit in 2002 against companies she alleges profited from slavery, claims in her suit that “money from the slave trade financed Yale University’s first endowed professorship, its first endowed scholarship, and its first endowed library fund.”
“A frequently cited case of Harvard’s slavery ties is that of the original benefactor of Harvard Law School (HLS).
The school was formed in 1817 “with the money left to Harvard by an Antiguan slave owner and planter, Isaac Royall,” Boston College law professor Daniel R. Coquillette said in a 2001 speech at HLS.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/10/27/beneath-the-ivy-a-legacy-of/
It goes on and on. New England especially was at the heart of the slave trade and then derived enormous profits again by servicing Southern cash crops produced at least in part from slave labor.
THEN they tried to cast off all blame for slavery by projecting it exclusively onto Southerners while of course never parting with so much as a nickel of the all the enormous profits they made from it.