(10-30-2023 01:54 PM)miko33 Wrote: (10-30-2023 01:42 PM)VA49er Wrote: (10-30-2023 11:34 AM)miko33 Wrote: (10-30-2023 10:18 AM)JRsec Wrote: (10-30-2023 10:00 AM)miko33 Wrote: Slavery wasn't a sideline of the war. Without it, the southern plantation owners couldn't grow and harvest crops on the scale they were able to. How that would have affected the cash crops is difficult to say, but the cost of inputs to plant, grow and harvest crops would have been higher. It could have forced the south to pursue other economic growth opportunities - maybe even industrializing.
Let's fight about it! I'm about ready. Seriously Miko you can't be obtuse to the fact that Northern Textile plants wanted that cotton. They were just pissed the South was selling it to England and using cheap labor which was what the Northern mills couldn't overcome. You say slavery was central, I say economics were. Yankees just adopted the free the slaves' position, which by the way many Northerners didn't want to do, because it was a better moral high ground to take than profits and raw materials. The Abolitionists are the ones who should take the bow for freeing the slaves. They married the war to the cause and put their actions to their words. The North used Irish immigrants and then Freedmen to fill the ranks for the war. It was plenty ugly on both sides and none uglier than Lincoln's assassination and the unresolved cloud that hung in the air over that. Andersonville and Elmyra were both disgraces. My great grandmother lost her uncle at Elmyra. I read some of his letters to his family. They were saved and passed down. The vast majority of Southern soldiers didn't own slaves and the South had a share of Irish immigrants as well. Then the whole Kansas / Missouri border war was essentially gang warfare. No slaves there either.
All I'll say is that the abolitionists were the only moral high ground in the war and how our country could claim to be a Republic with all rights held in common and condone slavery was a policy in conflict with practice. It had to go and I'm glad it did.
But my friend slavery in 2023 is only a issue with children who are trafficked and that needs to be abolished, and the rise of antisemitism in the form of a new fascism is the issue we need to deal with now. This country should not abide fascism among us anymore than it should have ever been able to abide slavery.
I tend to find that people want to dig up past sins when they don't want to admit current ones.
I agree that economics are the ultimate root cause of virtually all wars. The issue with economics within this context is without slavery, would cotton, tobacco, etc become the cash crops they were at that time? Also consider the voting power of the 2 primary blocks represented in congress and the WH: Northern Industrialists and Southern Plantation Farmers. The SPF had the representatives in the slave states who would vote their interests while the NI had their interests voted in the affirmative by the free states. Slave states had a labor advantage over the free states wrt costs. Aside from being the literal labor force that made plantation life possible for the landed elite in the south, slavery provided political clout to the states who could use the senate to thwart any laws enacted that would otherwise be passed by the house due to the higher population centers in the north.
Slavery made the southern economies possible. Slavery helped keep political power largely equal to minimize northern states growing power thru population growth. I stated in an earlier comment that while there were more than one cause, those causes were NOT mutually exclusive. Ultimately everything springboards off of slavery because it's what gave power to the southern elites - literally in the Federal gov't thru the senators and representatives of the states whose economies were focused on agriculture.
The bold is only a half truth. Northern and European demand for southern goods really made southern economies possible. I'll let you draw the parallel.
Without slavery, would the southern economies produce to the same level? Would the southern landed elite be incentivized enough to produce at the same levels but with significantly higher labor costs yet still sell at the same prices? If yes but only at significantly higher prices, would Europe and the North have simply looked for alternative sources of raw materials? Would they have still bought the southern products at the higher prices?
I don't know honestly. However, I do know that with slavery the south was able to produce a lot of product and sell at price points attractive enough to keep the whole economic system humming for decades.
Without slavery, the Mississippi delta, Southern Alabama and much of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida would have been basically uninhabited. The Africans could survive the malarial mosquitos. The Europeans could not. So a lot of productive agricultural land would have remained unused. Output would have been significantly less. There would have been an economy as there was in the 1600s and 1700s before the slave population exploded after the invention of the Cotton gin. But it would have been a smaller, slower growing economy.
Its no coincidence that 6 of the 7 states who seceded first were the 6 with the highest % of slaves, 43.7% or higher. And the slave states that stayed in the Union had the 4 lowest %.
https://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/ac...on-in-1860
Rank State free/slave/total population
1 South Carolina 301,271 402,541 703,812 57.2
2 Mississippi 354,700 436,696 791,396 55.2
3 Louisiana 376,280 333,010 709,290 47.0
4 Alabama 529,164 435,132 964,296 45.1
5 Florida 78,686 61,753 140,439 43.9
6 Georgia 595,097 462,232 1,057,329 43.7
7 North Carolina 661,586 331,081 992,667 33.4
8 Virginia 1,105,192 490,887 1,596,079 30.7
9 Texas 421,750 180,682 602,432 30.0
10 Arkansas 324,323 111,104 435,427 25.5
11 Tennessee 834,063 275,784 1,109,847 24.8
12 Kentucky 930,223 225,490 1,155,713 19.5
13 Maryland 599,846 87,188 687,034 12.7
14 Missouri 1,067,352 114,965 1,182,317 9.7
15 Delaware 110,420 1,798 112,218 1.6
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Robert E. Lee statue melted in secret, 'symbolic' ceremony, to be remade into 'inclus
