It is clearly the case that secession was going to take a big heap of money away from the North and it would then be distributed through the South. Yes, the facts clearly support that this would have happened.
If it was, why complain about it every day? And if you are just going to keep repeating the same thing over and over and over again, what is to be gained from conversing with you?
Well I don't know. I presume you and others must see some merit in it, for you persist. :)
But if war was inevitable that had more to do with people's mindset, not material factors. A generation that was more politically and diplomatically skilled would have been able to effect a peaceful solution.
I don't see any reasonable suggestions as to how that could have worked. The Northern coalition had gotten the government to tax the Southerners for their benefit, and passed other laws to keep them from getting a competitive leg up. The Northerners (especially the wealthy captains of industry) liked the situation they had the South in, and they probably felt the South deserved it because slavery was evil, and so they were doing their part to make the world a better place by getting a big cut of the Wealth that would otherwise go to those slave owners.
What bone could have or would have been thrown to the South? Apart from the financial issues involved, i've read quite a few accounts where people were utterly fed up with being portrayed as the incarnation of evil on the earth, and so they just wanted to tell their moral superiors to go f*** themselves.
(Kinda the way we feel about Liberals today preaching their "transgender" this and "girl-power" that.)
The flaw in your theory is that the North was richer than you think and economically developed enough to do without the cotton states.
That is*Not* a flaw in my theory. It is what happens when you use gunships to forceably prevent trade among people who would be kicking your @$$ in trade if they were allowed to trade freely with Europe. You cannot point to Europe's continued patronage of Northern trade as if it would have happened anyways without those gunboats.
This is like shooting someone in the leg and saying you would have won the race anyways because the other guy can't run very well. Well no he can't, with a gunshot in his leg. The South couldn't win a trade war in which they were forceably kept from trading, but without interference, they would have stomped the North in European trade, and would have eventually competed with them in Industry.
There was no need to crack down on them if that would mean further secessions and fissures in the republic. The Confederates, by contrast, wanted those secessions and fissures. They wanted a weaker United States, and they were willing to risk war to get what they wanted.
The fissures already existed, and I think a large part of it was both a consequence of the climate and of the demographic that settled the different areas. The South tended more Scottish, and the North tended more English and German. I've seen several writers contend that the Civil War was just a continuation of the English Civil War, and there are reasons to think this is probably correct.
And No, I don't think the South wanted a weaker United States, they just wanted a United States that would protect their interests, and not make them foot the bill for people in the North who hated them and constantly maligned them.
But discussing anything with you is pointless because you just keep repeating the same hackneyed theory over and over again, as though you had some Marxist crystal ball that tells you exactly what was going to happen even if people acted differently.
Yeah, it's called "Math" and "Economics."
What would take a crystal ball to see is how the South, producing 73-84% of all European trade would lose economic growth by getting back the 40% of their profit being absorbed by New York.
More money is going to make things worse for them economically? How does that work?
On the flip side, how is less money for New York going to make things better for New York? How is the trade that was ordinarily pushed into that city going to benefit New York if it went instead to the South?
We are all capitalists here. Capitalization fuels growth and economic activity. I can think of no circumstances in which more money and profit will not create more economic activity and jobs, and I doubt you can either, but you insist on believing it in the case of the South taking away the European trade from New York.
And yet in real life the north economically recovered rather quickly.
That's nonsense. Southern Democrats had largely controlled Congress before the Civil War. Many plantation owners were rich. That was "the situation the South was in" during the 1840s and 1850s -- at least for the slave owners. The rest is speculation.
The country had been through a depression (the Panic of 1857) and there was a feeling that a modest increase in the tariff could get industry back and running again. And while debate about slavery was heated in the 1850s, I doubt budding industrialists saw the tariff and trade questions as North vs. South, freedom vs. slavery terms.
If anybody's paying attention, they'll note how you deny moral values and portray everything in materialistic terms, but in the tariff debate, which largely was based on economics, you want to make it moralistic -- and how you make the anti-slavery moralism that you claim to find there a bad thing.
What bone could have or would have been thrown to the South? Apart from the financial issues involved, i've read quite a few accounts where people were utterly fed up with being portrayed as the incarnation of evil on the earth, and so they just wanted to tell their moral superiors to go f*** themselves.
What bone? Plantation owners were doing just fine economically. They weren't being oppressed. They weren't losing out to Yankees.
And that business about "moral superiors" is wildly exaggerated. You tell us over and over again that Northerners didn't care about slavery. But now you tell us that they despised the plantation owners as morally inferior for owning slaves.
Aside from the moral complications involved in your view, it should be obvious to anybody who's paying attention that you are no authority on what America was like 150 years ago. You just project your own ideas and resentments about the present back on to the past.
(Kinda the way we feel about Liberals today preaching their "transgender" this and "girl-power" that.)
You ought to realize that equating opposition to transgender or feminists agendas with support for slavery weakens whatever case you think you're making about modern-day politics.
I'm talking about 1861. Secessionists already wanted their own country. They wanted out of the US and they wanted the US to be as weak as possible. Whatever they might have wanted years before, is there really any room for argument about that?
I can think of no circumstances in which more money and profit will not create more economic activity and jobs, and I doubt you can either, but you insist on believing it in the case of the South taking away the European trade from New York.
There was a relatively efficient economic system going at the time -- whatever one's moral judgment of it. Tear it apart and you don't necessarily get anything better. Thinking you can cut out the "middleman" and automatically grow rich is a mistake. Look at how many countries threw off the rule of foreign imperialists and actually ended up worse economically, and you'll see that your argument here is wrong.