The Confederacy was About Slavery

Please try to learn reading - you're not also claiming to be a victim of ebonics, by any chance? The quote "obfuscated twaddle about state's rights" is clearly 1. linked to Snood's original post (blue-colored link on top of form), 2. headed by "Snood wrote" in bold, and 3. placed in a quotation box. Still I'm happy to supply this reading comprehension aid, as 4. If that's still not enough, come back and try to explain your problem, maybe there's a 5.


P.S. someone just IM'd me with #5 which I'm happy to post: a link to the original post, last one on the previous page:
http://able2know.org/topic/145429-4#post-4005408

There's no number 6 reading aid, far as I know, so try and manage with these 5.

actually the cause of the civil war was the price of cotton dropping into the cellar on the london market.

As an insight into the workings of dementia, I'd be interested to hear how you interpret "twaddle about state's rights" to be a statement supporting state's rights.

Cotton was already mentioned as an economic factor. Napoleon had opened up Egypt as a top-quality, cheap source. Naturally prices collapsed. Btw, Dys, since you're also following the other thread on the nuclear option for the Gulf disaster, do you happen to know if the pilot of the USAF plane who inadvertently dropped an armed nuclear weapon a few miles offshore Savannah, Georgia, was any kind of friend of Snood here?

The device is still missing, presumed buried by alluvial sludge. Unless Snood, D-Dad, or Panzade already found it and are keeping quiet about it

You're cute when you're confused

Another illiterate has joined the fray - this is the last time I'll repeat this: there's NO such thing as "state's rights".

States' rights, on the other hand, is in the Constitution - a document neither you nor any of your cohorts ever heard of.

You're never cute when you prove yourself to be a victim of ebonics, or bilingual education, or illiteracy. Go back and read - any confusion is yours.

That was a result, not a cause. I'm not going to argue with the insane (D-dad), the ebonics-victims (Snood et al), or the bilingual-education-victims (Panzade et al) but I hope you come back to the Gulf oil spill thread soon. These other clowns go into ignore where they belong. See you; best to Diane.

I do remember when the USAF pilot dropped his nuclear armed jet into the lake on New York Mountain in Colorado. It was (they say) a suicide because he had been outed for being gay. I quit fishing that lake which is sad because that was my favorite fishing lake in colorado.

If I say "its" instead of "it's", does your brain explode?

Those weapons were all recovered, as were the ones left unattented on a runway in Louisiana for nine hours >

> but the one offshore Savannah is still missing. You can safely go back and start fishing in any Colorado lake

the only safety issues I was ever concerned about were the US military quarantine protocols surrounding the lake. well that and it's a 3 1/2 hike up the side of New York Mountain and since I had my hip replaced I just can't manage the trek.

Actually, it is material. Slaves were not used solely in the cotton fields. The three main cash crops in the south where slaves were widely used were cotton, tobacco, and rice. A mechanical harvester for cotton had been invented in 1850, but a commercially feasible harvester wasn't widely available until the 1920s, so it's misleading to say that slaves could have been replaced by machines in the 1860s. They couldn't. The story with rice is pretty much the same. As for tobacco, much of the harvesting is still done by hand. Indeed, the fact that slavery was simply replaced with share-cropping in the aftermath of the war is a pretty good indication that mechanization wasn't ready to supplant slavery.


Quite incorrect. Much of the profit from slavery came from selling slaves, not from working them. Southerners were all in favor of ending the international slave trade, which acted as a protectionist measure that favored domestic "producers" of slaves. The question of opening the western territories to slavery was, in large part, due to the fact that slave owners had enormous amounts of capital tied up in their slaves, and they needed new markets in order to maintain prices.


Manifestly untrue. Paraguay, for instance, suffered far higher casualty rates during the War of the Triple Alliance.


Not if it's a private individual who is doing the decrying.

Yep, DD - all things considered, I suppose that having traversed 4 pages before the first slur should be taken as a positive. Small victories, and all that.

Well, even is she is as wrong as wrong can be, at least HoT is someone intelligent to address, which is a change from the apologists in this thread. Snood can decry anything he pleases--he's not interfering in anyone's activities, and the first amendment protects his right to decry whatever he pleases.



The states which seceded and formed confederacy (forming a confederacy is a violation of an explicit prohibition of the constitution) did not do so to defend a code of honor, nor to defend crinolines, and cotton is germane only insofar as it relates to slavery. They did secede and form a confederacy in order to defend the institution of slavery.

You are hilariously naive about 19th century agricultural machines and the monocultures of tobacco and cotton. Cyrus McCormick invented his reaper in the 1830s, but it had no application to tobacco or cotton. Daniel Massey set up a business in Ontario (you know, as in Massey Ferguson?) in the late 1840s, but the threshers he manufactured had no application to tobacco or cotton. Not only was cotton picked by hand, it continued to be picked by hand well into the 20th century, and is still picked by hand in many places, including the United States, right up to the present. The tobacco monoculture requires, much like seed corn and field corn, that a central "bull row" fertilize the rows of plants on either side, and in the case of tobacco, this was also done by hand well into the 20th century. Agricultural machinery had absolutely no impact on the cotton and tobacco monocultures. Do you believe that slaver owners were prescient, and would foresee that machinery would one day (almost a century later) replace their human labor? Please . . .

You really don't understand how King Cotton worked in the 19th century. The father and brothers of Jefferson Davis were a perfect example of a peregrinating family that moved on as the land was exhausted. Men like David Crockett would claim land, clear it, sell it dirt cheap (pun intended) and move on, because they weren't interested in farming. Many of the veterans of Jackson's Creek War, which opened up Alabama and Mississippi, and of which Crockett is a prime example, moved right across Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, claiming land, clearing it in a desultory fashion, selling it quickly and moving on. People like Davis' family would buy the land, and work it with hundreds of slaves until the soil was exhausted, and then move on themselves. The one agricultural implement which matters in any of this is the cotton gin, which made King Cotton possible.

These men didn't care about the land, and they didn't care about the slaves, other than that they intended to preserve the institution. Not only were there no agricultural implements available for use in either the tobacco or the cotton monocultures, they wouldn't have bought them it there were. Slaves breed, and thanks to the constitution, that was the only way to produce more slaves for the market. Jefferson and Congress had duly passed the legislation to end the importation of "Persons" effective January 1, 1808, before Alabama and Mississippi had even been opened for settlement.

The worst abuses of slavery occurred due to the cotton monoculture, and largely in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The rice and indigo plantations of South Carolina continued to thrive long after tobacco had exhausted the soil of the hill country, and the slaves continued to produce little slaves for sale. Cotton became king in the new territories, and East Texas produced rice just as did South Carolina. Those rice operations were geared to slavery for more than simply the employment of slaves--from the 17th century onward, South Carolina made a handsome profit selling rice in the West Indies to feed the slaves there--who needed to be fed even after Parliament had ended slavery in that part of the empire. (Great howling hypocrites, the Brits sneered at Americans for slavery, but continued the institution even after it was ended in the West Indies through the use of coolie labor in India.)

Knowing in hindsight that slavery was eventually doomed is not sort of argument to offer to suggest that the states of the South did not form their confederacy and levy war on the Federal government in order to preserve slavery. George Washington realized in the 1750s that slavery was inefficient and that the tobacco monoculture was destroying the soil--there is documentary evidence of this. He diversified, and first George himself and afterward his estate paid pensions to the more than 500 slaves which were a part of his inheritance and that of Martha Dandridge Custis. As far as he was concerned, he was obliged to preserve the property of Daniel Parke Custis for his son and daughter by Martha, and after they both had died, he preserved it for Martha's grandson, George Washington Parke Custis (whose daugher Mary wed Robert Lee).

Washington wanted to educate his slaves, if they were willing and would work, so the House of Burgesses rushed to outlaw the education of slaves. He paid wages to any slave who would actually work, and he hired local white men. He was no more impressed by the labor of the whites than he was by that of the blacks. Slaves with skills, such a ferrier, carpenter, etc. he allowed to keep the wages they earned off the plantation, and he paid them for their labor on the plantation--once again, so long as they actually worked.

But he was swimming against the tide, and most slave owners didn't really care if their slaves were efficient--they were virtually free, as they even grew what they were fed. It is foolish to think that rational economic considerations motivated the slave owners of the South. They weren't interested in economics. They either wanted to preserve their pseudo-aristocratic life style, or they wanted to squeeze as much profit out of their slaves as quickly as they could. They weren't agriculturalists--they were slave drivers. Duh . . .

I see Joe has already dispensed with the silly mechanization argument. I had no intent to step on his toes.

I note also that i wrote that the slaves were "virtually free." This could easily be misconstrued. By that, i meant that they were with almost without cost--it wasn't a comment about the nature of their servitude.

We were still picking cotton by hand in California when I was a boy. I say, 'we,' because I was out there doing it.

I was always intrigued that as a slave Frederick Douglas was a ship's caulker and that he went on his own to seek his work.

Plantation owners commonly let slaves who were skilled workers go out to seek work. The wages would be paid to the slave owner, and the slave was on his own to get a little something extra to put in his pocket. This, by the way, was a part of the whole corrupt system which worked to create and maintain the "white trash." Skilled white workers could not really compete with skilled slaves, who could be sent out to work for less and still be considered profitable by the slave owner. The skilled white man had the narrow community of other whites who did not own slaves, and often when they had real skills and even a modicum of ambition, they moved out of the old South to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Both corn and tobacco are planted in a "three rows and a bull row" pattern, which is to say only one row in seven is allowed to produce a flowering top, with the six rows in between being shorn of their flowering top. When i was a boy in the 50s and 60s, we got paid to go out with a machete and cut the tops off the rows between the bull row (which was from a different variety seed, that being the method of producing the hybrid). When i briefly lived in North Carolina in the 1980s, they were trimming the flowering top off the rows between the bull rows by hand then, too.