Consider all of the major world changes that happened in your lifetime: the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, the rise and stagnation of China, US wars in the Middle East, Al Qaeda, ISIS, feminism, the gay movement, personal computers, i-phones, the Internet, Obama, Trump.
Those things may look inevitable in retrospect, but did you really see them coming? People convince themselves afterwards that what happened was logical and inevitable and they saw it coming, but they usually didn’t. Maybe you thought such things would happen sooner or later, but people are born, live, and die between the sooner and the later.
Now imagine that you were born and lived your whole life in a rural, agrarian environment and hear about far away factories. If you were an American Indian or African or Asian confronted with the full power of the West in the late 19th century, you might see that the White man’s ways would overpower you, but if you were a White Southerner in the early 19th century who had grown up in a very similar agrarian environment to White Northerners, you might not see industrialization as the wave of the future.
The new industrial world would be quite strange to you and you might wonder whether it was really here to stay. Heck, even later in the 19th century, intellectuals and populist farmers weren’t convinced that the future did belong to the factory system. Heck, even in the 1930s Southern intellectuals were convinced that industrialization had been a failure, and even if it wasn’t, it wasn’t something that the South wanted or needed.
As I keep repeating without your acknowledging it, there were a few elite intellectuals who wanted to industrialize (Hamiltonians in a Jeffersonian world) and some industrialists in the Upper South who weren’t keen on secession, but most Southern planters liked their own way of life and felt their plantations were the basis of the wealth of the modern world.
If you don’t believe James Henry Hammond, check out the “Thanksgiving Sermon” of the prominent Presbyterian preacher Benjamin Morgan Palmer, or the letter of secession commissioner Stephen Hale to Kentucky governor Beriah Magoffin, or the Mississippi Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
They all say that cotton was the basis of the world economy, and therefore slavery was the root of the world’s wealth and of civilization itself. None of them say that the South should industrialize or that the reason for secession was that the North wouldn’t let the South become a manufacturing economy. They all thought cotton was king and would save the day for the Confederacy.
Maybe you’re thinking of Rhett Butler telling the crowd that there was no way the agrarian South could defeat the industrial North. But (apart from being fictional) Rhett Butler was just one guy. If there were more of him, the South probably wouldn’t have seceded or started the war, but there weren’t. Most Southerners didn’t think industry would win the war for the North until the war was lost (or close to lost).
Before you go on with too many things, I’ll stop you here to address them. Industrialization really got going in the UK in the early part of the 19th century. With coal and steam, Britain roared ahead and built among other things, railroads and the Lancashire mills that had such a huge appetite for all that Southern cotton. Industrialization was not some alien faraway thing few had heard of. Most knew all too well where their cotton was going and they knew why it was more economical to ship their cotton across the ocean to have it turned into textiles there rather than doing so themselves.
In addition to that, there was the railroad which had revolutionized travel. There was the telegraph which had revolutionized communications. Weapons technology was changing fast at this time (the rifled barrel really came in after the Mexican war in 1846 and before the War for Southern Independence).
Most well understood that industrialization was the way forward. It was only a matter of time before it came to the South. They would continue to invest in cotton production as long as that had the highest margins but as in any market, high profit margins attract competitors. Cotton was not going to be king forever and the Southern states were not going to have a virtual monopoly on its production forever. I think most understood that.
Their expectation of a short war was based on their belief that the Northern states would not have the political will to pay a high cost in blood and treasure to prevent the Southern states from doing exactly the same thing their grandparents had done - secede...throw off the rule of a government they no longer consented to. That had been the principle everybody claimed to believe in up until 1861.
And of course, the two sides of your argument undercut each other. If, as you keep saying, Southern cotton and slaves made the North rich, then it stands to reason that Southerners would think that cotton and slaves were the way to wealth. Then why industrialize? Industrialization wasn’t necessary if cotton was the basis of wealth in the modern world, and it would only introduce discontentment and new problems. So everything you want to say about how cotton and slaves made the North rich would have convinced Southern planters that cotton and slaves were a good thing that would do well for the South.
As I outlined above, they were enjoying a temporary windfall that no matter how lucrative in the short term, was not going to last forever. The process repeated itself with OPEC over a century later. They were warned that high prices for oil would only spur the search for more oil, spur conservation efforts and spur the search for other energy sources.
That is pretty much the reverse of the truth. You dismiss as “wartime propaganda” the reasons people gave for fighting at the time, and embrace the revisionist ideas that Southerners developed after the war and that had great influence in the country as a whole during the segregationist era from the 1910s or so down to the 1960s. That was a revisionist effort to remove slavery from the picture and make the war something about “state’s rights” or tariffs or different economies or civilization. Today, reputable historians reject “Lost Cause” revisionism. While they may not get everything right, they have at least shed some old and pernicious revisionist myths that grew up after the war.
No this is exactly the reverse of the truth. It was wartime propaganda......propaganda the North did not discover until 2 years into the war. Before that they had repeatedly and fervently denied the war was about slavery or that they had any intention to ban slavery. Only once it became an expensive bloodbath and they needed to keep the British and French out of the war did they all of a sudden discover “it was all about slavery”.
For their part, Southerners denied it was about slavery all along. Once the war and its immediate aftermath had passed, people rightly rejected the obvious lie that it was “all about slavery”. It is ONLY the 1960s Leftists who came along over a century after the fact who revived this BS claiming that they somehow and not previous generations of historians knew the “real” reason. Their basis for this was....well....nothing really. Its not like they had any new information. Its not like they had access to people who were alive at the time as earlier generations of historians had had.
Its particularly pathetic to see some who claim to be conservatives repeating these ridiculous Leftist Revisionist lies yet here we are.
Over 45% of South Carolina and Mississippi families owned slaves in 1860. Over 30% of families in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Those are US census figures.
I’ve posted the figures from the US census in the past. The only way those percentages of families are reached is estimating the average family size and ASSUMING that there was only one slave owner per family. Because if you don’t make that assumption, if you recognize the reality that there were often multiple slave owners in one family, then the percentage of families who owned slaves falls dramatically.
Dude, you need to take an economics class - and better sooner than later.
Dude, I will put my economics education and experience up against yours any day.
Moreover, you've gotten far from what you originally said, which is that Southerners seceded because the North wasn't letting them industrialize. It's one thing to say that the Confederates recognized that they needed industry to win the war and become a viable country and something quite different to say that the reason for secession was to industrialize the South. There is no evidence for that.
You "think" most Southerners understood that cotton wouldn't be king forever. It looks like you don't have much grasp of psychology. Oil isn't going to be king for ever, but for most people the day when it isn't is far in the future, not something we think about or concern ourselves with. I suppose in 1860 many Southerners thought slavery wouldn't be around forever either, but ending it wasn't something that most thought about or wanted to do, or could contemplate without shivers.
And you mention oil, saying that OPEC was warned that it wouldn't last forever. If they didn't listen or understand, why are you so convinced that the cotton kings were anything different? That's another contradiction in your argument.
And no, Southerners did not deny that the war was about slavery from the beginning. Look at what they were actually saying at the time. Many of them clearly stated that their cause - the cause of civilization as they saw it - was intimately tied up with slavery. To deny that is to be a revisionist.
Because if you don’t make that assumption, if you recognize the reality that there were often multiple slave owners in one family, then the percentage of families who owned slaves falls dramatically.
If a man and woman who owned slaves married, the slaves become the property of the head of the household, right? And if a father gives a plantation and slaves to his son, his place becomes a new household and he becomes a head of family. I guess if your maiden aunt lived with you and owned a slave it might skew the results a bit, but not much.
Anyway, you are probably not going to be convinced by anything anybody says to you. And you probably aren't going to learn better formatting skills to make your posts readable, so I don't really need to keep pursuing this subject with you.
This post is a bit dizzying.
Of course, by law you're allowed to "think" whatever you wish, but the fact remains there's no historical evidence to support such "thinking".
The evidence we have points very differently, beginning with the famous quote from Fire Eater Senator Wigfall.
I emphasize Fire Eater because those were the people who lead the charge for secession, so their opinions matter here more than most.
Are there any Fire Eaters who talked about industrializing the South?
That was certainly not what Fire Eater Robert Rhett (not to be confused with the fictional Rhett Butler) said in December 1860.
Yes, Rhett did complain (falsely) that:
"We prefer, however, our system of industry, by which labor and capital are identified in interest, and capital, therefore, protects labor; by which our population doubles every twenty years; by which starvation is unknown, and abundance crowns the land; by which order is preserved by unpaid police, and the most fertile regions of the world where the Caucasian cannot labor are brought into usefulness by the labor of the African, and the whole world is blessed by our own productions.
All we demand of other peoples is to be let alone to work out our own high destinies."
FLT-bird: "Their expectation of a short war was based on their belief that the Northern states would not have the political will to pay a high cost in blood and treasure to prevent the Southern states from doing exactly the same thing their grandparents had done - secede...throw off the rule of a government they no longer consented to.
That had been the principle everybody claimed to believe in up until 1861."
But it was not the principle anybody believed in 1776 or 1787.
Our Founders believed something quite different.
They believed disunion required " a long train of abuses and usurpations" which they detailed in 1776 or as in 1788 mutual consent to a new constitution.
Neither condition existed in 1860.