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To: BroJoeK

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.****

No it doesn’t. The laws of economics have not changed in the last 150 years. High margins attract competitors which drive down those margins. Always has been the case, always will be the case. Everybody could see the enormous power of industrialization by the mid 19th century.


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:

“The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected three-fourths of them are expended at the North.”****

No, he was correct about that.


But even Rhett nowhere claims the problem is the South needs more industrialization. In fact, he says, not surprisingly, just the opposite, words that Senator Wigfall would certainly approve:

Robert Rhett’s address to slaveholding states, December 1860:

“We rejoice that other nations should be satisfied with their institutions.

Self-complacency is a great element of happiness, with nations as with individuals. We are satisfied with ours. If they prefer a system of industry in which capital and labor are in perpetual conflict — and chronic starvation keeps down the natural increase of population — and a man is worked out in eight years — and the law ordains that children shall be worked only ten hours a day — and the sabre and bayonet are the instruments of order — be it so. It is their affair, not ours.

“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.”

Nothing in Rhett’s words suggest he wanted to industrialize the South.****

He did not say industrialization no, but others could see what was coming. It wasn’t some far off mystery. The Upper South was rapidly industrializing by 1861...and slavery was starting to die out just as it had in other places that industrialized

Rhett was also correctly pointing out just how miserable things were for people at the bottom of the social order up North....and he was right about that. The complete lack of tort law, OSHA, child labor laws, workmen’s comp, etc etc led to horrible abuses - the backlash against with spawned the labor unions which still plague much of the North.


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.

The Southerners could cite a long train of abuses and usurpations which they detailed at great length in 1861 and which they had been detailing for quite some time. The Founders believed that government derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. That was THE central point of the Declaration of Secession....err...Independence (same thing).

So did this guy:

“Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit.” Abraham Lincoln January 12, 1848

Yes Yes I know. Here is where you’ll come up with some desperate excuses as to why the plain words Lincoln spoke then did not mean what they actually meant and there were all kinds of conditions - which he errrr....forgot to name - that rendered the Southern states doing EXACTLY what he himself advocated a dozen years prior somehow not legitimate. Go ahead. I’m waiting for it with baited breath.


508 posted on 01/17/2019 11:14:57 AM PST by FLT-bird
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To: FLT-bird; x; DoodleDawg; rockrr
quoting BJK: "I emphasize Fire Eater because those were the people who lead the charge for secession, so their opinions matter here more than most.****"

FLT-bird: "No it doesn’t.
The laws of economics have not changed in the last 150 years.
High margins attract competitors which drive down those margins.
Always has been the case, always will be the case.
Everybody could see the enormous power of industrialization by the mid 19th century."

You'd think, right?
But in fact, that's not what Confederates said at the time, which means you've let your sympathies and overactive imagination overrule basic historical facts.

quoting BJK: "Yes, Rhett did complain (falsely) that:

FLT-bird: "No, he was correct about that."

Rhett's and other similar complaints (i.e., Calhoun's) are only possibly valid if by "the North" they meant every state North of South Carolina.

Otherwise, the facts show that Federal spending was pretty well distributed whenever it didn't outright favor the South.

FLT-bird on Rhett's address: "He did not say industrialization no, but others could see what was coming.
It wasn’t some far off mystery."

But those "others" were not political leaders or newspaper editorialists, they were industrialists themselves and most likely Unionists.

FLT-bird: "The Upper South was rapidly industrializing by 1861...and slavery was starting to die out just as it had in other places that industrialized"

Sure, and even more so in Border States like Maryland & Missouri.
But the cause for slavery's decline in Border States was not "industrialization", but rather precisely the prosperity and huge demand for slaves in Deep South cotton states.
Cotton almost literally sucked slaves out of Border States where slavery was less profitable and into cotton states where it was hugely profitable.
At the same time many Northern immigrants moved into states like Maryland and Missouri, thus tilting the pro-slavery electorate more & more towards abolition.

That's why those states refused to join the Confederacy, even in the face of declared war on the United States.

FLT-bird: "Rhett was also correctly pointing out just how miserable things were for people at the bottom of the social order up North....and he was right about that.
The complete lack of tort law, OSHA, child labor laws, workmen’s comp, etc etc led to horrible abuses - the backlash against with spawned the labor unions which still plague much of the North."

True enough and an active debate at the time -- whether Northern factory workers or Southern slaves were worse treated?
A case could be made for either, but the key fact remained that Northern workers always could, and often did, pick up and move on to better lives elsewhere, out West for example.

FLT-bird: "The Southerners could cite a long train of abuses and usurpations which they detailed at great length in 1861 and which they had been detailing for quite some time."

But it was totally bogus because nothing, noooooothing in 1860 remotely resembled conditions in 1776.
What those alleged "abuses" really amounted to was Democrats being voted out of power in 1860.
Just as today, loss of power drove Democrats berserk.

FLT-bird: "The Founders believed that government derived its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
That was THE central point of the Declaration of Secession....err...Independence (same thing)."

"Consent of the governed" means constitutional elections, which were held in 1860 just as they had been in every election year for the past 72 years.
No Founder ever proposed or supported unilateral unapproved declaration of secession at pleasure, but that is just what Fire Eaters did in 1860-1.

FLT-bird: "So did this guy:

In fact, of the four living former Presidents -- Van Buren, Tyler, Fillmore & Pierce, only Virginian Tyler thought there was an unrestricted "right of secession".
Neither Democrat President Buchanan nor Republican Lincoln believed Fire Eaters had legitimate cause to secede, but both believed the Union could not stop them militarily, until, unless, except when... secessionists started war and that would make it a rebellion which the Union could constitutionally defeat.

FLT-bird: "Yes Yes I know.
Here is where you’ll come up with some desperate excuses as to why the plain words Lincoln spoke then did not mean what they actually meant and there were all kinds of conditions - which he errrr....forgot to name - that rendered the Southern states doing EXACTLY what he himself advocated a dozen years prior somehow not legitimate.
Go ahead.
I’m waiting for it with baited breath."

Sorry, FRiend, but facts are facts, regardless of whether you like them.
Even the young, naïve Congressman Lincoln in 1848 added a restrainer, "having the power", implying he did not expect every declaration of independence to go peacefully.

But in his March 1861 Inaugural President Lincoln did promise to remain peaceful with secessionists, saying they could only have a war if they themselves started it.

Confederate editorials of the time called that a "declaration of war".

558 posted on 01/18/2019 8:14:14 AM PST by BroJoeK ((a little historical perspective...))
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