They all believed that cotton was essential to the wealth of the world and that civilization itself was based on cotton and slavery. None of them thought that cotton prices would go down. Few of them had much interest in industrialization. Jefferson Davis said as much in his Boston speech, just as Wigfall did in the interview.
Most Southern secessionists liked living in an agrarian society and thought they would make out well as a plantation economy that provided raw material for foreign industries. They did not like the factory system of the North. They had contempt for Northern society, See Hammond's "Mudsill" speech or the Muscogee Herald newspaper which wrote:
Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.
Once the war started and things went badly for the Confederacy, they realized the importance of industrialization, but apart from a few latter-day Hamiltonians, like Trescott, few secessionists thought that way before the war. If you want to believe that secessionists thought the Cotton Kingdom would come to an end and wanted to industrialize, you have to ignore what most prominent secessionists said. You have to assume that they had knowledge and opinions that they didn't express. And if you focus on those very few secessionists who really did want to industrialize, you get people who wanted the Confederacy to have high tariffs, government subsidies, high taxes, and government-funded factories and public works - all the things that Confederates and neo-Confederates claim to be against.
But I don't think you will convince Birdman. He's working from the top down, starting from general beliefs and assuming that the facts and historical texts will support the way he thinks the world works, rather than from the bottom up, starting from the historical record and working up to the generalizations. And the Northern economy was based on slavery while Southerners barely thought about slavery at all. It's hard to know what to do with that, but people have to believe what they want to believe.
The funny thing is, we spend years trying to convince Diogenes that eventually cotton prices would come down as more countries and colonies got involved and now we have FLT-Bird saying that of course everybody knew that all along. Funny world.
You ignore my point that the blockade boosted the world wide competition to a level it would not have achieved without the blockade.
Foreign cotton farms could not match the production advantage of slave plantations unless they too were slave plantations.
The Slave plantations would have always been able to sell cheaper product, and so they could always undercut any foreign competition so long as they wished to do so.
Sure, eventually foreign cotton producers could get market share, but it would have been a long hard slough without the blockade giving them an instant market.
This seems like simple economics to me. Why can you seemingly not see it?
;-)
Great post #523, thanks!