Posted on 01/13/2004 9:01:35 AM PST by Aurelius
Dust jackets for most books about the American Civil War depict generals, politicians, battle scenes, cavalry charges, cannons[sic] firing, photographs or fields of dead soldiers, or perhaps a battle between ironclads. In contrast our book {[url=http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=2XGHOEK4JT&isbn=0842029613&itm=7]Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War Mark Thornton, Steven E. Woodworth (Editor), Robert B. Ekelund[/url]features a painting by Edgar Degas entitled the "Cotton Exchange" which depicts several calm businessmen and clerks, some of them Degas’s relatives, going about the business of buying and selling cotton at the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. The focus of this book is thus on the economic rationality of seemingly senseless events of the Civil War – a critical period in American history.
What caused the war? Why did the Union defeat the Confederacy? What were the consequences of the War? The premise of the book is that historians have a comparative advantage in describing such events, but economists have the tools to help explain these events.
We use traditional economic analysis, some of it of the Austrian and Public Choice variety, to address these principal questions and our conclusions generally run counter to the interpretations of historians. In contrast to historians who emphasize the land war and military strategy, we show that the most important battle took place at sea. One side, the blockade runners, did not wear uniforms or fire weapons at their opponents. The other side, the blockading fleet, was composed of sailors who had weapons and guns but they rarely fired their cannons in hopes of damaging their opponents. Their pay was based on the valued of captured ships. Historians often have argued that the Confederacy lost because it was overly reluctant to use government power and economic controls, but we show the exact opposite. Big Confederate government brought the Confederacy to its knees.
Some now teach that slavery was the sole cause of the Civil War – an explanation that historians have developed in the twentieth century. However, this analysis does not explain why the war started in 1861 (rather than 1851 or 1841) and it fails to explain why slavery was abolished elsewhere without such horrendous carnage.
We emphasize economics and politics as major factors leading to war. The Republicans who came to power in 1860 supported a mercantilist economic agenda of protectionism, inflation, public works, and big government. High tariffs would have been a boon to manufacturing and mining in the north, but would have been paid largely by those in the export-oriented agriculture economy.
Southern economic interests understood the effects of these policies and decided to leave the union. The war was clearly related to slavery, but mainly in the sense that Republican tariffs would have squeezed the profitability out of the slave-based cotton plantation economy to the benefit of Northern industry (especially Yankee textiles and iron manufacturing). Southerners would also have lost out in terms of public works projects, government land giveaways, and inflation.
The real truth about wars is that they are not started over principle, but over power. Wars however, are not won by power on the battlefield, but by the workings and incentives of men who go to work in fields and factories, to those who transport, store and sell consumer goods, and most especially to the entrepreneurs and middlemen who make markets work and adapt to change. This emphasis and this economic account of tariffs, blockade and inflation, like the focus of Degas’s "Cotton Exchange" reveals the most important and least understood aspect of war.
The insurgent armies mostly melted away, riven with desertion.
Walt
Semper Fi.
Walt
So you think it is okay to intentionally provoke and permit another Pearl Harbor if that is what it takes to get us into a desired war?
Obviously not, or there wouldn't have been a war over union.
Walt
A number of the leading rebels -were- indicted for treason.
President Lincoln, on the last day of his life, strongly opposed any trials.
But it is easy to imagine Lee and Davis and the other leading traitors with canvas hoods over their heads and shackled the way the Lincoln assasination conspirators were.
But even shortly after the war, people didn't want that. Even the orchestrator of the assasination trials, Stanton, didn't want it. It was he with whom the president took issue at the 14 April '65 meeting where treason trials were discussed.
Walt
President Lincoln said clearly in his inaugural address that he would maintain federal property. It was no big surprise.
Walt
So you think it is okay to intentionally provoke and permit another Pearl Harbor if that is what it takes to get us into a desired war?
You surely are capable of better reasoning that this.
President Lincoln didn't expect such, and nothing like the attack on PH occured. No one was even killed in the Fort Sumter bombardment.
Despite what you and others say, President Lincoln expected the rebellion to collapse.
Walt
The USS Harriet Lane - one of the ships in Lincoln's fleet.
The Lane had no orders to fire on the Nashville.
The rebel government defintely sent orders to reduce Fort Sumter.
As Non-Sequitur points out, the insurgent government needed a provocation to galvanize the upper south.
They sowed the wind, and they reaped the whirlwind.
Walt
And discuss what, informally or otherwise? Did the instructions given to the so-called negotiators allow for a possible end of the rebellion? No. They called for recognition of the confederacy as a sovereign nation. Nothing more and nothing less. So any discussions held would have accepted as fact the legitimacy of the southern rebellion. And Lincoln was not about to do that so early in his term. But given the lack of support in the North for forcing the south to remain, who knows what might have happened in a few weeks or a few months. Had the resupply effort at Sumter been allowed to proceed unmolested then Lincoln may have been forced to accept southern independence by default. But we'll never know that, because such a course would have left the Davis regime with a smaller nation than they were prepared to accept.
Can you support that in the record?
Few expected a long war. There was the one southern senator who, in this time frame, said he would wipe up all the spilled blood with a hankerchief.
President Lincoln expected really no war at all. He expected the rebellion to collapse. Later he admitted that he had not controlled events, but had been controlled by them.
Walt
Nonsense. The first shot had been fired months before at the Star of the West. The most recent ones had been fired at the Rhoda Shannon, a peaceful merchantship whose only crime was flying the Stars and Stripes. In between there had been dozens of hostile actions, seizure of federal property and facilities, threatened armed action on the part of the Davis regime. The Harriet Lane was, if anything, the revenue service doing its job of identifying unknown merchantmen.
So you believe that Pearl Harbor was the United State's fault?
That would be nice, but is no where close to the truth.
Northern whites could care less about blacks, and didn't want to face the prospect of competing with free black labor either.
Walt
That's a good point. A call for volunteers, just flat-footed, so to speak, might have met with a tepid response.
President Lincoln was a canny player, and what he did in regards to Fort Sumter was pretty clever. But he badly understimated the sentiment for Union in the south. Of course he was new in the job. Later in the war, he steered the national course safely amid many rocks and shoals.
Walt
And Lincoln obligingly gave it to them.
Not exactly the way a statesman is supposed to behave. And Lincoln was getting advice from Seward not to force a showdown. Advice that he rejected.
And Lincoln obligingly gave it to them.
He had an oath to uphold.
Walt
Why not? Because you don't like the outcome?
President Lincoln wasn't afraid to say he made a mistake.
Walt
[You, replying] The USS Harriet Lane - one of the ships in Lincoln's fleet.
According to my sources, in Charleston harbor it was on April 3rd, 1861, when Confederate batteries opened on the schooner Rhoda H. Shannon. In Virginia waters, it was on May 9, when the U.S.S. Yankee fired on Virginia militia batteries located on Gloucester Point, blows between Virginia and the United States having not yet been exchanged.
Sorry to see you having to revisit this thoroughly refuted and discredited claptrap and buncombe. I see the militia statutes are being invoked again to revoke the reserved powers of the States (the exercise of which was protected by the Tenth Amendment, which being later than and an amendment to the Constitution, alters the same from its Federalist conception and carves the States' rights in stone).
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