Nonsense. I think they were very much like anyone else would be in their situation. They promoted what they thought was their interest. Where I differ from you is that I don’t believe that they had all the knowledge and foresight that we would have if we suddenly transported back then.
I don’t either but it was pretty obvious what direction the world was going in by the mid 19th century. One didn’t have to have a crystal ball to see industrialization was coming in and slavery was going out.
Read what they were saying at the time. Read James Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech. He was wrong about the tariffs, but his speech clearly reflects the delusions of his day.
I’ve read it and much more. Hammond did overestimate how much leverage the Southern states would have with cotton. He was right about the tariffs though. He was also right in his calculations about how much more the South was paying for the tariff than the North and he was right about how unequal federal expenditures were.
You are obsessed with victim thinking that developed after the war. Southerners had grievances before the war - real or imagined - but the secessionists were very assertive about the importance of cotton to the world economy and very confident about their future.
No, I’m realistic about both sides. Both were motivated by economic concerns as people almost always are. It was never some grand moral crusade against slavery or some grand immoral crusade to preserve slavery as Yankee propagandists at the time and as today’s PC Revisionists would have it.
If they bought the same quantities of goods from overseas as they did from the North, there wouldn’t be all that much of a savings either in their spending or in the tariffs paid. Remember, the 1857 tariff wasn’t that far from what the Confederates would impose. Include shipping costs and the difference would be nominal.
Yes it was. It was still 17% under the Walker Tariff. The CSA was going to set their rate under and probably well under 10%. Of course the tariff rate in the US was set to double right away under the Morill tariff and everybody knew it wouldn’t stop there. The difference would be huge.
Not at all. There were large transatlantic trading firms with offices in New York, London or Liverpool, and Charleston or New Orleans, who bought the cotton and shipped it across the Atlantic. Some of the cotton was shipped from Charleston or New Orleans, but much of it was shipped to New York and then from there across the Atlantic.
When the ships came back, they brought manufactured goods, most often to New York, where there was a large population and access to a much larger population by rail or canal or steamboat. If they shipped the goods to a smaller Southern port it could be hard to sell the goods or the ships might be mostly empty.
The tariffs were not paid by the cotton growers, but by the merchants, who ultimately passed the cost on to the consumers of imported goods. There were more free, employed people in the North and more industry there as well, so Northerners bought more imports and paid most of the tariff. Alexander Stephens, who became Vice President of the Confederacy, even admitted that Northerners paid most of the tariff, but Southern firebrands ignored that.
No. You have it wrong. Whether Southern planters kept ownership of the cotton and exchanged it for manufactured goods OR merchants bought the cotton and exchanged it for manufactured goods, the profit those manufactured goods could earn was directly reflected in the price the cotton (or other cash crop) could be sold for. In other words if the profitability of the return journey was slashed, then more of the cost of the shipping would have to be borne by the outward journey....which meant lower cotton prices. Either way, it was the supplier of the cash crop (ie Southerners) who bore the costs. It certainly was not the end consumer who bought the goods. Northern manufacturers could simply undercut them on price (as was intended) so the importer had to eat a lot of the cost.
There were federal land grants to railroads before the Civil War. Railroads had to have a right of way to be built and if the land was owned by the federal government, the railroads sometimes received the land. That happened in the South as well as in the North. There was no reason for Southerners to complain. And the land grants didn’t compare in size to what came after the Civil War.
You think all the infrastructure spending was just land grants? It definitely wasn’t. The federal government paid a lot of money for railroads, roads, canals, waterworks, etc etc.
I don’t have the time to look into all the quotes you’ve cut and pasted into your post. Somebody somewhere did a very good job cherry-picking quotes to prove some very questionable arguments.
LOL! This is what PC Revisionists always claim. Present them with some damning quotes from Northern sources and they try to claim “cherrypicking”.
I do notice that the North American Review article could make the secessionists look worse than one might have thought. If - as they say when you read more of the article - it was a war fought purely for the political and economic ambitions of a small group of powerful secessionist radicals, it didn’t make the Confederacy look much better, but arguably, worse. The Chicago Times was a Doughface, Copperhead paper that could be counted on to mouth pro-Southern, pro-slavery sentiments.
I dispute the first paper’s claim that it was just a small group of Southerners but I have never denied that the South’s real motivation was financial concerns. They were in it for the money just as the North was in it for the money. As for the Chicago Times, they did not say anything lots of other Northern newspapers did not say so your attempt to smear them rather than address what they had to say fails miserably.
As for the rest, you are just indulging yourself and practicing misdirection. No one doubts that the slave trade was important in New England in the Eighteenth Century, or that colleges founded then benefited from the profits of slavery. Why would the North be any different from the South? But you are using that to support a claim that the illegal slave trade was more important to 19th century New England than it actually was, and also letting loose a lot of overheated emotionality. How things were in 1750 and how they were in 1850 weren’t necessarily the same.
You’re just being defensive and desperately trying to obfuscate here. You PC Revisionists will cling to the myth of the virtuous North at all costs and in the face of all evidence. The facts are these:
- New England was involved in the slave trade up to their eyeballs. They were from the start and they continued to engage in the slave trade illegally on a large scale right up until 1861.
- the Northeast was involved in servicing goods produced in substantial part by slave labor right up until 1861.
- They derived enormous profits from both
- They were fully prepared to protect slavery effectively forever by constitutional amendment.
- Once their cash cow ie the Southern States made a bid to go independent THEN they magically discovered it was really all about slavery AND discovered that they were oh so morally superior for being opposed to slavery. They didn’t make this discovery until 2 years into the war, but they’ve clung to it doggedly as an article of faith ever since then.
Those things may look inevitable in retrospect, but did you really see them coming? People convince themselves afterwards that what happened was logical and inevitable and they saw it coming, but they usually didn't. Maybe you thought such things would happen sooner or later, but people are born, live, and die between the sooner and the later.
Now imagine that you were born and lived your whole life in a rural, agrarian environment and hear about far away factories. If you were an American Indian or African or Asian confronted with the full power of the West in the late 19th century, you might see that the White man's ways would overpower you, but if you were a White Southerner in the early 19th century who had grown up in a very similar agrarian environment to White Northerners, you might not see industrialization as the wave of the future.
The new industrial world would be quite strange to you and you might wonder whether it was really here to stay. Heck, even later in the 19th century, intellectuals and populist farmers weren't convinced that the future did belong to the factory system. Heck, even in the 1930s Southern intellectuals were convinced that industrialization had been a failure, and even if it wasn't, it wasn't something that the South wanted or needed.
As I keep repeating without your acknowledging it, there were a few elite intellectuals who wanted to industrialize (Hamiltonians in a Jeffersonian world) and some industrialists in the Upper South who weren't keen on secession, but most Southern planters liked their own way of life and felt their plantations were the basis of the wealth of the modern world.
If you don't believe James Henry Hammond, check out the "Thanksgiving Sermon" of the prominent Presbyterian preacher Benjamin Morgan Palmer, or the letter of secession commissioner Stephen Hale to Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin, or the Mississippi Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
They all say that cotton was the basis of the world economy, and therefore slavery was the root of the world's wealth and of civilization itself. None of them say that the South should industrialize or that the reason for secession was that the North wouldn't let the South become a manufacturing economy. They all thought cotton was king and would save the day for the Confederacy.
Maybe you're thinking of Rhett Butler telling the crowd that there was no way the agrarian South could defeat the industrial North. But (apart from being fictional) Rhett Butler was just one guy. If there were more of him, the South probably wouldn't have seceded or started the war, but there weren't. Most Southerners didn't think industry would win the war for the North until the war was lost (or close to lost).
And of course, the two sides of your argument undercut each other. If, as you keep saying, Southern cotton and slaves made the North rich, then it stands to reason that Southerners would think that cotton and slaves were the way to wealth. Then why industrialize? Industrialization wasn't necessary if cotton was the basis of wealth in the modern world, and it would only introduce discontentment and new problems. So everything you want to say about how cotton and slaves made the North rich would have convinced Southern planters that cotton and slaves were a good thing that would do well for the South.
The fact is that virtually everything under the category of PC Revisionist Myth is supsect challenged and often dismissed by serious historians. Most of it was wartime propaganda and its immediate aftermath which was not “rediscovered” until the current crop of 60’s Leftists started the long march through the institutions. It emerged when they started to be tenured professors in the 1980s.
That is pretty much the reverse of the truth. You dismiss as "wartime propaganda" the reasons people gave for fighting at the time, and embrace the revisionist ideas that Southerners developed after the war and that had great influence in the country as a whole during the segregationist era from the 1910s or so down to the 1960s. That was a revisionist effort to remove slavery from the picture and make the war something about "state's rights" or tariffs or different economies or civilization. Today, reputable historians reject "Lost Cause" revisionism. While they may not get everything right, they have at least shed some old and pernicious revisionist myths that grew up after the war.
Only about 6% of the population of the Southern states owned slaves.
Over 45% of South Carolina and Mississippi families owned slaves in 1860. Over 30% of families in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Those are US census figures.
Either way, it was the supplier of the cash crop (ie Southerners) who bore the costs. It certainly was not the end consumer who bought the goods.
Dude, you need to take an economics class - and better sooner than later.