“For instance,...he separates the West from the North but combines the entire South, as a way of making the South’s contribution to the economy loom larger".
Combining the data for West and North does not change any of the facts on import/export data or productions affected by tariffs. It does allow for a more incisive analysis of relative economic positions by being much more specific than any of his peers or subsequent historians.
Your characterizations of him and his work are not supported by facts, but merely your effort to call him a racist...modern tactic of the left...and to try to reduce his work because it is the antithesis of your world view and biases.
He produces a thorough work which proves that practically all northern industry was dependent on the productions of the South. He also demonstrates that the political system favored the North, and enabled its manufacturing to progress at the expense of other regions. He very clearly estabishes the facts surrounding the massive growth of the Southern economy just as the tariff system of the North was about to become an albatross around its own neck.
That is, of course, why the South grew constantly stronger as the war progressed, while the Northern economy gradually shriveled up and died as it was cut off from the South.
Your characterizations of him and his work are not supported by facts, but merely your effort to call him a racist...modern tactic of the left...and to try to reduce his work because it is the antithesis of your world view and biases.
It is quite true that calling anyone who disagrees is a tactic of the Left, and often an illegitimate one.
However, calling someone a racist who is a racist is not a tactic, it is telling the truth.
Kettel was a proud racist. That is just a fact. If you insist I can dig up some passages that prove it quite beyond doubt.
He did not view slavery of blacks, or slavery in general for that matter, as a necessary evil to be eventually overcome, but rather as a wonderful positive good to be expanded in both space and time.
Reading him I find it very difficult to avoid thinking the word "evil." While he may have been an admirable and honorable man in many ways, his belief system was irretrievably evil and un- even anti-American, at least as I understand what America means.
The is not to say that HE and others who believed as he did were necessarily evil people, simply that they had been seduced into belief in an evil ideology. As many others before and since have been.
his work ... is the antithesis of your (my) world view and biases.
Got that right. And damn proud of it.