The Confederacy was About Slavery

Bullshit.

LA, that joker just popped into this thread recently as a staunch Confederate apoplotist. I have no idea what motivates him. Money and power in the old South were inextricably tied to slavery, but he seems to think he can separate them.

Of course, i don't understand any of the Confederate apologists.

"Bullshit" is spot on! It had to do with the Northern Tariff that would cost the southern states more for manufactured products. This tariff also limited the south from international trade.

The "Texas secession" in effect is a fraud, because they gain more by staying in the US. It would cause undue extra costs for Texas to become a separate country - for health care, social security, defense, education, infrastructure, and trade with the US>.

Just another "bullshit."

lessee, the South produced about 90% of the worlds short staple cotton (which was a basis for industrialization of so much of the world). ALmot all the tobaco was produced in the rea from Connecticut to north Carolina.

What does the culture and harvest and processing of these crops have in common

Well, fm, they are obviously labor-intensive crops to raise and harvest. If the South's major concern was about money and power (which I think is so obvious that it doesn't need reiteration), then the continuation of a slave-driven economy was an obvious advantage.

That's what I like about you Chicago Joe...you are always (at least as far as I can tell) honest.

No strawman bullshit.

Oh . . . you mean he's not like you.

No...I mean he's not like you Pootch

You apparently don't know what a straw man is, then Moose Breath. It's like when you come in here and tell people what they think and say, without having the honesty to name them, nor the courage to quote them. But that's the thing, you can't quote someone to support a straw man, because a straw man is made-up bullshit--your only rhetorical tool.

I seem to hear the yelping of a little dog.

Where are those two lists I asked you to make?

Joe(tap,tap, tap, tap, tap,tap)Nation

You'll never get any lists from him. He's only here to start **** with people, and propping up straw men is his only rhetorical technique. More than anything else, he just wants to puke his bile on people and threads.

Thanks.

As much as any historical fact can be "proven," I think it is proven that southern secession was solely the result of the slave issue.

You call it "interpret" - historians would "read the sources".

War on the Water is a good read that I just finished Walter. Its about the opposing navies (Or whatever there was of a Confederate navy). Its amazing how much the Confederacy accomplished with invention and tactics . The Uniuon discovered that (With Farragut and Grant) that navies and armies can support each other rather than just go off on their own all the time.

There were a number of different motives that significantly affected the people (and governments) of the confederate states, and I believe it is a serious error to categorically wave all but one of them away. The obvious adverse result here is the interest of some to categorize all sympathy for the culture of the former south as a covert approval of slavery.

That said, I believe it is very clear that the Secession, and resulting civil war, would not have occurred were it not for slavery and all that came with it.

It is noteworthy that South Carolina was the first Southern State to seceed, and during the tensions leading up to the civil war, the most intransigent of the Southern states on this issue. A few notes on its history will help our understanding. The first major application of large-scale plantation agriculture based on slavery occurred in the British & French colonies in the West Indies and was based on the then very lucrative production of sugar and sugar cane for European Markets. The slavery culture there was perhaps the worst and most unjust manifestation of an already bad thing. There were no limiting cultural factors such as existed in much of the Spanish & Portuguese colonial worlds: the system was inhuman and highly profitable. Interestingly, from an economic perspective, the British rightly regarded Barbados alone as much more important than all of the North American continental colonies.

As competition and production in Barbados grew, a fairly large number of Barbadian Plantation owners migrated to South Carolina in the early 18th century, bringing their methods with them, including mass use of slaves and production of sugar cane. Later as sugar prices fell and the British textile industry grew, cotton became a very profitable crop using the same plantation methods. This cadre of former Barbadian settlers came to dominate early South Carolinean economic & political life and the cotton plantation culture spread from there across increasing areas of the South. This economic interest became the driving force behind Southern intransigence and all the distorted rationalizations used to justify its continuance. It was certainly a stark and anomolous contradiction to the core ideas that sparked the American Revolution. That too added to the force behind the ever-more tortured rationalizations needed to "justify" its continuance.

Without all this (easy to say) we may have seen an earlier and more peaceful transition to the end of slavery, more or less in parallel with the end to the indentured labor (and servitude) that was a contemporaneous norm in the North for new immigrants.

Jesus wept, here we go again. The other issues have been canvassed. The southern states did not make war on the United States and secede over the tariff. The southern states did not make war on the United States and secede over nullification. No other issue was significant enough to the elites of the southern states to lead them to make war on the United States and secede--other than a perceived threat to the institution of slavery.

Why is that so hard to understand? A more interesting question, though, is why political conservatives are so eager to serve up apologetics for the Confederacy.

Thanks for that info on the Barbadian Planation seeds that established what became the agriculatural industry in the south. That makes a lot of sense; especially the use of slavery to keep cost to a minimum. I had thought that the Northern Tariff was another good reason for secession, because it would have made it difficult for the south to purchase machinery at lower cost, and handicap their international trade. Learn something new on a2k all the time.

The goods which southerners purchased from Europe were not necessarily cheaper nor of a better quality. I refer you to the biographies of Washington by Freeman and Flexner. In the 1750s, Washington became aware that tobacco planters were being robbed consistently by their factors in London, who paid them a small fraction of what the tobacco sold for in London, and then deducted from that the cost of shoddy goods delivered at inflated prices. Washington was able to clear his debts and completely change his production in about a decade. He grew crops for which he could find a colonial market. Cotton is also a good example. Large scale cotton production became economically feasible with the invention of the cotton gin. An American, Eli Whitney, patented the cotton gin in the 1790s. It had nothing to do with European manufacture. It is equally true that the textile industries in England and France switched to cotton in response to the availability of large quantities of relatively cheap cotton from the United States. Southerners opposed the the tariff because they preferred to purchase from European sources, who would handle all the aspects of marketing and sale, and provide the goods which were ordered when European ships picked up the tobacco or cotton from them, often at the river wharves on their very doorsteps. A great myth of American history is that our economic success was founded on slavery. It wasn't. The foreign exchange which southern planters generated did not circulate in the American economy as capital liquidity because it went right back to Europe for the goods the planters ordered. America was and still is an agricultural economy. But the foreign exchange upon which our economic growth was founded came from sales of grain, livestock, hides, leather and lumber, and came chiefly from the Mid-Atlantic states and the New England states. Later, of course, it also came from the states of the Midwest.

While were at it, South Carolina's export economy was originally based on rice and indigo. The rice was sold in the West Indies where the planters used it to feed their own slaves.

By 1860 a slave was not an inexpensive item. I thought they had to be purchased with the help of a bank loan oftentimes. So, how could slavery end peacefully, since there was not going to be any recompense, to the plantation owner, for his "investment"? Turn slaves into indentured servants, that would be free at the end of the indenture (equaling the original cost of the slave)? In my opinion, there was too much alienation towards the North for such a paradigm to be accepted by the South. Plus, the Southern plantation owner understood the concept of profit, and would not likely care for just getting back one's initial investment.

But, slavery is really just an outgrowth of "white superiority," in my opinion. So, while slavery of African-Americans is in the past, "white superiority" is not necessarily out of the minds of all Caucasoidal folk, in my opinion. In effect, slavery in a psychological view can be thought of as "acting out" white superiority. And, if that be correct, then many whites in the North may have subscribed to white superiority, but just didn't "act out." In other words, Northerners may not have had the moral high ground in the Civil War, just the more mannerly approach to their beliefs?