Posted on 06/23/2016 2:04:08 PM PDT by ColdOne
In fact, as we've reviewed at length before (i.e., post #510), far from all of those exports were Southern made.
Indisputably, cotton was and in 1860 it accounted for $192 million = about 50% of the $400 million in total US exports.
This chart does not include specie, which would reduce cotton to about 50% of total US exports:
Of course it was "extremely significant", roughly 50% of all US exports cannot be other than "extremely significant".
Plus, Deep South states were then the Saudi Arabia of world cotton producers, nobody else came even close.
But, as it turned out, cotton was not nearly as vital to either the US Northern economy or to global cotton markets as Confederate leaders had imagined.
Seems during the Civil War all quickly figured out how to do without.
And that's my only point here.
Not that cotton wasn't important -- it was.
Just not as important as some Southerners imagined.
Finally, US cotton was not produced by "1/4" of the US population.
It was almost entirely produced by about three million slaves who were 10% of total US population in 1860.
Because "at pleasure" is the term of art used by Founders themselves, notably the Father of the Constitution, James Madison.
As we have discussed at length before, Madison spelled out his views on this here.
Thanks. I had started to work up a reply to woodenhead but then asked myself, “Why bother”? Since woodenhead the anarchist believes that anyone can dissolve the compact at any time and for any reason (or no reason at all) then it was boo-bait for him to even be asking the question.
See my post #1,140 above.
It notes that your number of $200 million represents the total New York investment in Southern slaves, which was at risk of forfeiture from secession.
And that's a big number, but remember the total value of all slaves in 1860 was put around $4 billion of which New Yorkers' $200 million was only 5%.
Also, your $200 million number represent roughly all cotton exports in 1860, but of those no more than 20% went through the port of New York.
The rest shipped directly from Gulf Coast ports like New Orleans, Mobile and Galveston.
For over 70 years, from 1788 through 1860 Washington DC had groaned under subjugation to the Southern slavocracy.
Then miraculously in 1860 the first openly anti-slavery majority ever was elected, but before they even took office Slavocrats began declaring secession.
Secessionists then soon provoked, started, declared and waged war on the United States months before a single Confederate soldier was killed in battle and before any Union Army invaded a single Confederate states.
Those are facts which make your pro-Confederate propaganda just cockamamie nonsense.
Deny it until you're blue in the face, but the fact remains that in terms of their effects on United States public opinion and leadership actions events like Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor and September 11, 2001 are identical.
Sure, you can argue that Fort Sumter was "minor", but it was certainly not "minor" compared to total US Army strength in early 1861 nor "minor" in its effect, after many previous provocations, on US public opinion.
Total cockamamie nonsense.
A nice twist of history, but irrelevant to the fact that over 99% of slaves were owned by whites and fewer than one tenth of one percent of blacks owned any slaves.
So black slave-holders are irrelevant in the bigger picture.
BS to all your personal opinions touted as facts. Far more than 1% of slave owners were black.
First off, the colonies got their black slaves from blacks in Africa that sold their fellow blacks into slavery, thereby making those blacks the original “owners” of those black slaves.
Chew on that fact.
Chew on this while you’re chocking on the last fact:
“According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states.
Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. Black Duke University professor John Hope Franklin recorded that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation.
Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000.
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings. In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners.
The figures show conclusively that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters in pre-Civil War America. The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves—as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern whites, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all white Americans who owned slaves.”
In other words, blacks loved dem da slaves!
By definition slave-holding is the ultimate corruption, so it's impossible to say that New Yorkers in 1860 were more corrupt than slave-holders of the same period.
Nor is there evidence demonstrating that relative to others at different times New Yorkers were then more or less corrupt.
Indeed, the essence of economic prosperity requires that people treat each other at a minimum of lawfully and correctly.
That's because corruption is far from a "victimless crime" and so wherever it is truly rampant, economic prosperity is impossible.
Such was not generally the case in New York or anywhere else in the US.
No, the Confederacy provoked, launched and declared war on the United States to defeat the Union's potential threat to its own now Confederate-Constitution mandated slavery.
No, slavery was not Confederates' first motive in starting war, but it was easily their second.
Northerners in 1860 were willing to tolerate slavery in the South for sake of Union.
But they were certainly not willing to allow Confederate aggressions against Union troops to go unanswered.
DiogenesLamp: "Even Seward thought it was a cynical ploy to placate the rubes who were foolish enough to believe it justified the murders they committed in stopping Southern Independence."
In fact, Seward had been Lincoln's rival but became his strongest supporter, considering Lincoln "the best among us".
Seward was a New York abolitionist whose only concerns about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation came from tactical considerations on how best to defeat the Confederacy.
Seward supported the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865.
DiogenesLamp: "That the war was fought to end slavery is just a Liberal Con-Job lie to justify the bloodshed they caused, AFTER THE FACT.
It was a propaganda, and that is all."
Civil War began to destroy or preserve the Union and became also an effort to protect or abolish slavery which most Northerners considered morally wrong and many Southerners would rather die than give up.
Those are facts of history, FRiend, not propaganda.
No problem, just hoping to tie up some loose ends.
;-)
By definition, "the South" begins (or ends, depending on your POV) at the Mason Dixon line separating Pennsylvania from Maryland & Western Virginia, then west along the Ohio River north of Kentucky and finally slave-state Missouri.
Since nearby Delaware was also a slave state in 1860 it was considered "Southern".
At the time these were considered Southern Border States and all supplied significant numbers of troops to the Confederacy.
Kentucky & Missouri were also claimed as states by the Confederacy, despite having decisively voted against secession.
DiogenesLamp: "Also you ignore the game playing they did while "abolishing" slavery.
Northerners would take their slaves south and sell them so as to get their money back."
Some did, others allowed their "slaves" to grow old and die naturally at home.
Regardless, by 1840 slavery was almost eliminated North of the Mason Dixon line:
DiogenesLamp: "You also ignore the fact that the need for unskilled labor was waning in the North, and slaves were becoming increasingly worthless there anyways.
It isn't such a hard moral decision to let go of something that was no longer valuable to you anyways. "
No the opposite is true.
In fact the Northern Industrial Revolution was just getting under way, generating unskilled jobs for millions of low-wage immigrants.
Such jobs were also found in the South, though far fewer, and were easily filled by slaves.
And with the Supreme Court's Dred-Scott decision, Northerners began to fear that slaves could not be prevented from being brought North to take over their jobs.
That's one reason why the North voted solidly Republican in 1860.
DiogenesLamp: "Well first of all, the Constitution pretty much makes it impossible to ban slavery without a constitutional amendment, and all those states that declared themselves "Free" states, were instantly in contradiction to an article of the constitution which said slaves would be returned to the person to whom their labor was due.
If states pass laws preventing this, they are DEFYING THE CONSTITUTION AND ARE THEREFORE IN REBELLION!"
Total cockamamie nonsense, and you should well know it!
In fact, by 1787's Constitution Convention, most Northern states had already begun to abolish slavery and would in no way, shape or form allow their new Constitution to re-impose it, period.
Even President Washington in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, acknowledged Pennsylvania abolition laws and, in compliance, rotated his slaves occupancy there to keep them legal.
It's one reason Southerners insisted on a new capital city, in the South.
So there was no possibility -- none, zero, nada possibility -- that our Founders' Constitution intended to make slavery lawful in states which didn't want it.
And nobody claimed it did before the Supreme Court's 1857 Dred-Scott decision.
DiogenesLamp: "Try to spin it, but it still comes back to meaning that the constitution protected slavery in *ALL* the states. "
Only acknowledged to the extent of returning runaway slaves as specified.
Nobody at the time asserted that states had no right to abolish slavery if they so chose.
So your analysis, along with Chief Justice Taney in 1857 is pure cockamamie bovine excrement.
DiogenesLamp: "Secondly, I have recently read of a new way of looking at northern opposition to slavery in the territories.
It is an idea I hadn't previously considered, but dovetails quite nicely..."
So now we are back to that "unimpeachable expert" on everything American: British socialist author Charles Dickens.
So now here I am yet again defending Americans against socialists!
The fact is that Dickens was no expert and certainly looked only for the most crass motives in Americans he himself despised -- with good reason, some Americans cheated and stole from Dickens and naturally he did not feel kindly about us.
Regardless, if you look only for bad motives and ignore any of higher moral substance, then you can make even the saints themselves look bad, and that's what Dickens did.
DiogenesLamp quoting Dickens on the North: "...unless it advocated the laying down of a geographical line beyond which slavery should not extend, the South would necessarily to recover it's old political power, and be able to help itself a little in the adjustment of the commercial affairs."
What Dickens and DiogenesLamp don't "get" is that before the election of 1860 the South never lost its "old political power".
Before 1860 pro-slavery Southerners almost always dominated not only the Presidency, but also Congress, Supreme Court and military.
That means nothing important happened which Southerners strongly opposed, including tariffs and navigation laws.
So no law of Washington, DC, prevented any Southerners from engaging in all the commercial activities they wished, from shipping to banking and manufacturing.
And some did, indeed many did, just not as many as in the North.
And why was that?
Well, for one reason, the majority of Southerners idealized their plantation life-style and really didn't want the crass fast-moving commercialism they associated with Northerners.
Many Southerners were just not eager to become the kinds of people they so heartily disliked.
But some Southerners were eager and did become, because Southerners insured US laws allowed such things.
But there's no real problem, it's all only in your wacked-out imagination, FRiend.
That's because the Constitution clearly required return of fugitive slaves, period.
It did not prevent some states from outlawing slavery in their own borders, and that's just what most Northern states had already done by 1787, and the rest would do soon after.
Nobody at the time suggested Northerners could not abolish their own slavery, indeed the issue then as afterwards was, what would it take to get Southerners to abolish slavery?
As it turned out, the answer was: only war, death & destruction and that is precisely why our Founders put the question aside for some future generation to deal with.
No, not Gulf of Tonkin, or even "Remember the Maine".
Pearl Harbor or 9/11 are roughly equivalent to Fort Sumter in their effects on US public and leadership opinions.
DiogenesLamp: "A *WAR* was not started until someone crossed the border with 35,000 men intent on killing people in a land that wanted to be independent from their masters."
As at Pearl Harbor and 9/11, *WAR* started when the United States was attacked and severely defeated by an enemy which intended it severe existential harm.
Indeed the existential threat from the Confederacy in 1861 was far greater than Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan OR Muslim terrorists ever even dreamed of being.
In fact Thomas Jefferson himself proposed the Federal government buy-out and free slaves, returning them to Santo Domingo.
His proposal went nowhere because Southern slave-holders refused to consider it.
Government buy-outs and return of slaves were also proposed by others before 1860, always rejected by slave-holders.
But over the years many thousands of slaves were freed and some did return to Africa, Liberia especially, often with Northern abolitionists help.
DiogenesLamp: "But the Union did not go to war with the South [only] to end slavery.
The Union went to war with the South because an independent highly aggressive South represented a dire financial military threat to the monied interests of the Washington D.C./ Boston corridor the existence of the United States."
There, I fixed your pesky typos for you.
Sure, no problem, you're welcome.
There, I fixed your pesky typos for you.
Sure, no problem, you're welcome.
Since the US Constitution recognized slavery in states which wanted it, Northerners understood that only Constitutional Amendment could free slaves in Southern states which remained loyal to Union.
The US Army could, however, offer freedom to "contraband" slaves in Confederate territory.
So that's just what they did, and after the war passed the necessary 13th Amendment.
DiogenesLamp "That bit of hypocrisy lingered awhile longer until Lincoln could threaten, bribe and cajole enough people into supporting that Amendment.
Oh, and he put a gun to the head of all the Southern states and *FORCED THEM AT THE POINT OF A GUN* to pass that amendment."
No, as with everything else, you misunderstand what actually happened.
In fact Lincoln used no guns to force anybody to ratify any amendments.
But they did forbid former Confederates from voting or holding office for several years.
That meant Southern Unionists -- of whom there were many, many -- got elected to state legislatures which then ratified the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
So nobody was "forced", except former Confederates forced to stay out of politics for several years.
DiogenesLamp: "But it's all Legitimate, and 'consent of the governed' and all that ethical stuff.
It wasn't Dictatorial at all."
It certainly was consent of those non-Confederates now allowed to vote.
DiogenesLamp: "The Evil people won that war.
They murdered 750,000 people to do it, but what are human lives to Dictators?"
No, as usual you have it backwards:
Evil Southern Fire Eaters & slave-master politicians first started Civil War, then refused to end it until they had murdered 750,000 people -- for no sane purpose!
Those morally wicked politicians cared nothing about the lives of not just black slaves, but also of hundreds of thousands of poor white Southerners killed to preserve a "peculiar institution" they had no part in.
And now your efforts to defend such historical monstrosities puts you in a category nearly as insane as their own, FRiend.
Here are some notable Fire Eaters:
Edmund Ruffin (Virginia), Robert Rhett (South Carolina), Louis Wigfall (Texas), William Yancey (Alabama), JDB DeBow (New Orleans)
And of course the politicians who ran the Confederacy:
Confederate cabinet, 1861, Attorney General Judah Benjamin (Louisiana), VP Alexander Stephens (Georgia), Jefferson Davis (Mississippi), Secretary of State Robert Toombs:
Naw, you don't understand Greeley, who was a... ah, complicated man.
Before the war, Greeley was a staunch abolitionist who wanted no compromises over slavery in the western territories.
During the Civil War Greely was a Radical Republican highly critical of Lincoln and opposed to Lincoln's renomination in 1864.
So after the election, in late 1860, Greeley's "let them go" position was intended to stiffen-up weak Republicans who were over-eager to compromise with Southern slaveocrats in order to preserve the Union.
Greeley was saying: don't compromise, if need be, let them go.
Once they did go, then Greeley's views changed to maintain a hard line against the Confederacy, including after Fort Sumter, Civil War.
Here is a brief review of this topic:
Similar editorials appeared through January 1861, after which Tribune editorials took a hard line on the South, opposing concessions.[62]
Williams concludes that 'for a brief moment, Horace Greeley had believed that peaceful secession might be a form of freedom preferable to civil war'.[63]
This brief flirtation with disunion would have consequences for Greeley—it was used by his opponents against him when he ran for president in 1872.[63]
In the days leading up to Lincoln's inauguration, the Tribune headed its editorial columns each day, in large capital letters: 'No compromise!/No concession to traitors!/The Constitution as it is!'[64]
Greeley attended the inauguration, sitting close to Senator Douglas, as the Tribune hailed the beginning of Lincoln's presidency.
When southern forces attacked Fort Sumter, the Tribune regretted the loss of the fort, but applauded the fact that war to subdue the rebels, who formed the Confederate States of America, would now take place.
The paper criticized Lincoln for not being quick to use force.[65]
Through the spring and early summer of 1861, Greeley and the Tribune beat the drum for a Union attack.
'On to Richmond', a phrase coined by a Tribune stringer, became the watchword of the newspaper..."
So Horace Greeley and his New York Tribune were, ah, "complicated", but there's no evidence he was ever afraid of Lincoln, or afraid to put his thoughts in print.
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