Forgive me in advance for expressing my doubts of that, as I know for a fact based on overwhelming historical evidence that the marxist track record on portraying an accurate or balanced picture of any economy is about as strong as your track record of portraying an accurate or balanced picture of the south - that is to say, both are non-existant.
Turning to marxist McPherson's "analysis," it is easily rebutted for the nonsense that it is:
Population? "Three times as many people born in slave states had migrated to free states as vice versa...seven-eighths of the immigrants from abroad settled in the North
So what? Urban cesspools are always draw higher populations than agricultural regions and I defy you to show me any country anywhere in history where the rural regions are more densely packed than the cities. In fact it is truly laughable that McPherson would note northern cities to be more populated than southern farms as if doing so were some profound and insightful observation of the unexpected.
Infrastructure? "In 1840, the South had possessed 44 percent of the country's railroad mileage, but by 1850 the more rapid pace of Northern construction had dropped the South's share to 26 percent." McPherson, p. 91.
McPherson's fallacy here is to apply a "one-size fits all" approach to understanding an economy. As is indisputably evident in the economic statistics for 1860, the southern economy was oriented toward ocean-going shipping and, unlike the north, its railroad lines were almost all designed to carry goods to seaports to facilitate that shipping. Almost all of the south's major population centers were coastal ports built for high capacity exporting, where sea-based transport is the best and only means of shipping goods, not railroads. That is because the south was an export based economy - it provided some 75% of the entire nation's exports in 1860.
Industrial capacity? By 1850, "With 42 percent of the population, slave states possessed only 18 percent of the country's manufacturing capacity, a decline of twenty percent from 1840. Most alarming, nearly half this industrial capacity was located in four border states, whose commitment to southern rights was shaky." McPherson p. 91
Again, McPherson's applying a "one-size fits all" approach to economic evaluation - the same type of approach that doomed his ideological comrades in the soviet union to inefficiency and utter ruin. The fact that manufacturing works well for one region does not make it an inherent good that also works well everywhere else. Much to the contrary, markets are naturally inclined (under the free capitalist conditions McPherson despises so much) to produce and develop in markets where they posess comparative advantages in production. Pennsylvania, for example, was better at producing steel than most of the rest of the nation so it did what made sense - it produced steel! That also means that its economy developed around steel production, including steel manufacturing capabilities. But the fact that Pennsylvania's good at steel does not mean everywhere else must also be good, or that everywhere else has to build a giant steel plant for no other reason than to have one. In a similar fashion, the south learned that its comparative advantages were in warm climate agriculture (if anyone doubts this, go build a farm for cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane in Minnesota and get back to me with your tales of wild success around harvest time next year). So just as Pennsylvania oriented its economy to what it was good at the south built theirs to support what they were good at - agriculture. Its economic "infrastructure" was accordingly designed to get that agricultural produce to the ports and ship it out in high volumes.
"The per capita output of the principal southern food crops actually declined in the 1850's, and this agricultural society was headed toward the status of a food deficit region." McPherson p. 100
Though McPherson's obvious intention here is to imply that southern agriculture was on the decline, his line of reasoning is about what one could expect from a marxist - in other words, it is absurd. The southern economy's strength was not food crops but cash crops such as cotton, and with cotton 1860 was one of the strongest years they had ever had. In other words, McPherson's "analysis" here makes about as much sense as declaring Idaho an economic disaster because its sales in the theme park industry are on the decline.
The South's decades--long struggle to recover from its colonial economic status as an exporter of commodity raw materials and an importer of capital manufactured goods is a consequence of the severe distortions of a slave based economy and society."
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. In other words, McPherson is wrong on two counts. First, he assumes that the south needed to "recover" from the fact that it was not a sweatshop-filled urban manufacturing wasteland and instead, by capitalist means, opted to produce what it was best at - agriculture. Contrary to Mr. McPherson's command style marxist utopia of five year plans and great leaps forward to industrialization, there is absolutely nothing inherently inferior of having a well developed, financially strong, market oriented economy of agriculuture. Second, he automatically assumes that this economy, which mind you he has not sufficiently demonstrated to be a bad thing in and of itself, is "bad" because slavery caused it to be "bad" - in other words, since slavery was there, it must have in itself caused the southern economy that followed it. This is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy as he does not establish any causal connection - it is simply assumed! It is also of note that this tendency toward labor-reductionism is strong among marxists, but economically bunk in itself. In reality, most who view the southern economy through a legitimate non-marxian economic eye will observe that slavery, rather than being a cause of an economy, was a labor attribute of that economy. As an attribute, slavery was problematic both morally and economically for the south. But that is a separate issue from what McPherson is claiming. Insofar as his "analysis" is concerned, it makes no more sense to say that "slavery caused southern agriculture" than it does to say that "sweatshops caused northern industry" or, for that matter, that "flies cause garbage."
In summary, the whole of McPherson's attempt analyze the southern economy reduces to nothing more than a judgement of it through the tinted lenses of the northern economy. His whole system of analysis is a sham consisting of an arbitrary identification the north as a standard of "good," followed by the selecting of strengths within that northern "good" (like railroads and manufacturing). He then weighs the south against those northern strengths, and acts surprised when the south doesn't meet them. And all the while, there seems to be a strong assumption that the south was at fault for failing to steer its economy to mirror the north's even though doing so would have been command style interference with free market capitalism. It is here that McPherson's marxist undercurrent is strongest.
McPherson's thesis having been demolished as a fraudulent one under scrutiny, one thing remains - an account of the south's economic strengths in 1860. Among them are the following.
The south led the nation in exports and, in doing so, almost single-handedly facilitated international trade for the entire country. In 1860 the entire nation's export strength (and with that its capacity to do trade) depended on the south. The southern economy was export oriented and accounted for 75% of the entire nation's exported goods - all of this with a population one third of the north's. The south also enjoyed economic independence from government. In relation to the the north, the southern economy was economically independent from government intervention. As a trade economy, it functioned best under free market and free trade conditions such as the pre-1860 average tariff rate of roughly 18%. The northern economy, by contrast, regularly depended upon government subsidies and redistributionist tariff policies. The north pushed for the Morrill Act, which installed a protectionist tariff of this nature that topped 45% by the end of the war. The act itself redistributed a portion of the consumer surplus, by way of higher prices, to the producer surplus in the protected northern industries. In short, those industries advanced themselves with government handouts on the back of the rest of the nation as a whole.
Too bad there was no place in the rebel states to build ships or railroad engines, huh?
But that would take free labor, industry, forethought, liquid capital, stuff like that.
Here's another BCF quote for you.
"Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman's comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it. Beware of the'endeavor to imitate...Northern civilization" with its 'filthy, crowed, licentious factories,' warned a planter in 1854. 'Let the North enjoy their hireling labor with all its...pauperism, rowdyism, mobism and anti-rentism,' said the collector of customs in Charleston. 'We do not want it. We are satisfied with our slave labor.' " --McPherson p. 99)
Walt
We feed the world - want to see which is the most important? Destroy all food crops, or shut down all manufacturing.
Excellent post, by the way, it's painfully obvious that Little "Red" McPherson never majored or even minored in economics. But he's quite conversant in Socialism.
McPherson's fallacy here is to apply a "one-size fits all" approach to understanding an economy.
Here are a couple more historians who echo Dr. McPherson:
"To buy at home or abroad the the goods the army needed was one thing; to move them to the places where the army wanted them was quite another. Lacking a financial and industrial system equal to the demands of a large war, the South lacked also a proper transportation system. It had many railroads but no real railroad network, because hardly any of its railroads had been built with through traffic in mind.
Most of them had been conceived of as feeder lines, to move cotton to the wharves at river towns or at seaports...this handicap, to be sure, existed also in the north, but there it was not so serious. It had been recognized earlier, and it was being removed; and the significant point was that in the North it -could- be removed, and in the South, it could not.
The South was almost helpless in this respect. Nearly all its locomotives, spikes, car wheels, car bodies annd other items of equipment had come from the north...
As the nation's need for an adequate transportation increased, the system would grow weaker and weaker, and there was no earthly help for it....these problems , indeed, were so grave and pointed so surely towards final defeat that one is faced to wonder how the founding fathers of the Confederacy could possibly have overlooked them. The answer perhaps is that the problems were not so much unseen as uncomprehended. At bottom they were Yankee problems; concerns of the broker, the money changer, the trader, the mechanic, the grasping man of business; they were matters that such people would think of, not matters that would command the attention of aristocrats who who were familiar with valor, the classics and heroric atttitudes. Secession itself had involved a flight from reality rather than an approach to it....Essentially, this was the reliance of a group that knew little of the modern world but which did not know nearly enough and could never understand that it did not know enough. It ran exactly parallel to Mr. Davis's magnificent statement that the duration of the war could be left up to the enemy--the war would go on until the enemy gave up, and it did not matter how far off that day might be.
The trouble was it did matter. It mattered enormously.
--The Coming Fury, p. 438-439, by Bruce Catton
"Alone in the south, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-holding city boosted the Union's powerful advantage....In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops and military equipment, Confederate railroads succumbed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aid to the Confederacy's western commander lamented that, "locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled." The colonel knew "not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed."
--The South vs. The South, p. 63-64 by William W. Freehling
Oh, let's add this:
"As he hears his own lips parroting the sad cliches of 1850 does the Southerner sometimes wonder if the words are his own? Does he ever, for a moment, feel the desperation of being caught in some great time machine, like a tread mill, and doomed to eternal effort without progress? Or feel, like Sisyphus, the doom of pushing a great stone up a hill only to have the weight, like guilt, roll back over him, over and over again? When he lifts his arms to silence protest, does he ever feel, even fleetingly, that he is lifting it against some voice deep in himself?"
-- Robert Penn Warren, The legacy of the Civil War", p.56-57 Walt
So what?
Marching Through Georgia
Bring the good old bugle, boys! We'll sing another song.
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world a long,
Sing is as we used to sing it,fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free!
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia!
That's what.
Walt