Barbados
The following excerpt comes from Matthew Parker’s The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies and describes the emergence of White racial consciousness and the evolution of the culture of the Lower South in 17th century Barbados:
“The aim was to persuade the poor whites to ally themselves with the planter class, in effect to choose race over class as their defining characteristic. In the ‘Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes’, the Africans were described as a ‘heathenish, brutish and uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people’. The white servants, though still heavily policed in their behaviour, were carefully given better rights than the blacks – to food, clothing, general treatment and legal protection. Slaves who assaulted a white person of whatever status were to be whipped, then, on a second offence whipped some more and have their nose slit and forehead branded. While on paper the Act aimed to protect the slaves from ‘the Arbitrary, cruell and outrageous will of every evill disposed person’, masters could punish slaves in any way they liked, even to death, the only penalty being a fine, and this was easily evaded. Whites’ rights to trial by jury (a fundamental right of English law) were confirmed, while blacks faced a kangaroo court of the master’s local cronies. For whites, differences between men and women were legally recognised, but not for blacks. Black men were to be severely punished if they had sex with a white woman, even if it was consensual, although white men could rape black women with impunity.
This racism was a new departure, as planters, who had recently lumped together African slaves and ‘dissolute English, Scotch and [particularly] Irish’, came to realise the usefulness to their security of ‘whiteness’. A pamphleteer writing at the time felt it necessary to explain to his readers in England that ‘white’ was ‘the general name for Europeans’. And just as the 1661 Acts were copied throughout the English West Indies and in South Carolina, so this new ideology of whiteness was spread from Barbados and carried around the empire.”
Parker elaborates in a footnote:
“Emigrants to South Carolina were not just poor whites, many of whom still held on in Barbados. A number were younger sons of the island’s big planter families, such as the Sandifords and Halls. With no more room to expand there, lesser offspring were sent off with whatever members of the household could be spared. From the Caribbean they brought with them slaves, the plantation system and ‘mentality’, a slave code, speech patterns and architectural styles. In all, Barbadians had a decisive role in shaping the new colony, creating a slave-based plantation society more similar to the islands than to the rest of North America.
Lowland Carolina would soon have a population ratio of four blacks to every white, similar to the ratio in Barbados. Parts of Charleston’s ‘brittle, gay and showy society’ of the eighteenth century would echo the Barbados atmosphere of a century before, and between 1669 and 1737, nearly half of the governors of South Carolina had lived in the West Indies or were sons of islanders. Seven of the early Carolina governors had Barbados backgrounds.
Significantly, the plantation system generated the wealth that made this group of settlers who valued ‘”whiteness” culturally dominant in South Carolina, and the cotton gin later facilitated the spread of the plantation system and its racialist and conservative culture across the rim of the Gulf of Mexico to Texas.
In the 1850s, visionaries such as Robert Barnwell Rhett would advocate the dissolution of the Union and the creation of Lower South nation-state to give institutional form to this culture.
We enter interesting territory here, as this does seem to feed into the left wing idea of whiteness as a social construct, rather than a biological reality. My take on it is similar to that of gender — it’s a bit of both. Certainly, a casual glance at different societies and cultures show that ideas about masculine and feminine identity have changed over time. Nonetheless, only a fanatic would take this and extend it to the reductio ad absurdum that gender doesn’t exist. Of course, many leftists today are arguing just that. The “race doesn’t exist!!!11!” crowd works the same way.
Race exists. Race exists as a biological reality. Blood tells. It matters. However, the idea of “whiteness” has a social input, as well as a biological input.
It is even more than that. We could also look to Yockey and Evola for the idea of race as a “spiritual” category — something to be aspired to, not just claim by membership. The idea of race as a governing principle for a society (as white nationalists claim) or as a necessary component of an already existing nationalism (racially conscious Southern nationalism) is something that needs to be explored.
Unfortunately, that will happen on the Internet, and not at the universities.
I don’t see it as saying that whiteness was created by the plantation system.
Instead, the plantation system gave whiteness a practical social and economic value that had not existed before in Europe and which had only slowly evolved in the New World. In Barbados, whiteness became much more important after thousands of blacks were imported between 1640 and 1680.
In any case, it is clear that South Carolina was the cultural spawn of the West Indies: slavery, the plantation system, the slave code, the importance of whiteness, speech patterns, architecture and many other things were all copies of the Barbadian model which were also brought to Jamaica after 1655.
“Significantly, the plantation system generated the wealth that made this group of settlers who valued ‘whiteness’ culturally dominant in South Carolina ….”
What wealth? It would be more accurate, I suspect, to say that the slave-based plantations were a kind of radioactive death, which were not only feeble in themselves, as compared to agricultural and non-agricultural industry in the North, but made any other sort of economic activity in the South all but impossible.
The plantation system and negro slavery created an elite that had a practical economic stake in valuing whiteness and racial solidarity in both the colonies and the metropoles.
If you read the latest Greg essay, the first thing I noticed is the absence of any practical economic reason for Greg’s WN Knights Templar to value their racial identity or to value racial solidarity.
South Carolina was by far the richest North American colony and it was relatively poor compared to the British West Indies.
The Yankee colonies were not nearly as important to Britain as the South and the British West Indies which is why the recovery of New England was prioritized as the lowest military objective and defense of Jamaica as the highest.
The British abandoned Philadelphia to invade French-held St. Lucia in the Windward Islands.
“South Carolina was by far the richest North American colony and it was relatively poor compared to the British West Indies.”
It doesn’t matter how “rich” the British West Indies were in the period when plantations were the only sort of economic enterprises whites could establish there; and it doesn’t matter how “rich” South Carolina, as an offshoot of the Indies, was at some starting point in America’s colonial history. By the time the Civil War was approaching, the South was a backwater — economically, mechanically, educationally, literarily, in the arts and sciences. Watching the way Calhoun and his ilk talked their fellow whites into flinging themselves to death against the might of the North to defend wretched Dixie is like watching Charles Manson talk his followers into instigating Helter Skelter.
John Calhoun died in 1850. He didn’t advocate anything more violent than Nullification.
“John Calhoun died in 1850. He didn’t advocate anything more violent than Nullification.”
I’m aware that Calhoun didn’t live up to the time of the Civil War. I didn’t mean to suggest that he was literally urging the war at the time of Fort Sumter.
Manson believed he would lead the nigger to a victory over the white man.
If anything he modelled himself on John Brown.
It’s not the case that whiteness had not existed conceptually in Old World Europe. Under the pressure of the Muslim invasions of Spain, southern France, Sicily, the Balkans and Byzantium, whiteness as a visible and important expression of racial, cultural and religious solidarity was very much in existence. (The old saw about the importance of “blue blood” in northern Spain is a cliche because it was true.) It’s also true that the Muslims recognized it themselves, as illustrated by their endless insane and highly consistent obsession with capturing white women, and specifically white women, as slaves.
During eras when the Muslim menace was successfully (if only temporarily) put to bed, this racial awareness presumably waned; and in Britain it would be less strong than in Spain, because Britain had never borne the full brunt of Muslim hostilities. (Though I imagine Richard Couer de Lion would have had a few thoughts about it during the Crusades.)
For a long time, the borders of the white homelands were coterminous with the bounds of Christendom, and thus “Christian” was effectively a synonym for “white”, just as all Muslims, whether Arab, Berber or whatever, were for quite a long while known collectively as Turks.
“Manson believed he would lead the nigger to a victory over the white man. If anything he modelled himself on John Brown.”
In the first place, what you’ve said about Manson is not quite accurate. In the second place, you’ve missed my point, which, maybe, wasn’t clear. My point was that the champions of Dixie were like Manson in that what they were preaching had nothing to do with reality.
And call them “niggers” all you want; you’re losing to them.
You should look at how heavily integrated the Spanish (Castilian, Leonese, Portuguese houses) were with the English artistocrats. Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon were essentially brother and sister through their common ancestors. They looked very very similar too.
The blacks will probably get wiped out is a spasm of ethnic cleansing.
The Hispanics? Well they are formidable.
In 1861, the South was the richest section of the Union. The North was the poorer section. The average per capita income in the South was almost twice as high as that of the North.
Southern plantations grew the most valuable industrial commodity in the world at the time. The South’s investment in slaves was worth more than all the banks, factories, and railroads in the North whose own industrialization and commerce was made possible by retailing and processing Southern cotton.
The South didn’t need the North. We could have bought superior manufactures from Britain and invested in British banks when London was the financial center of the world. The Union was an economic burden for the development of the South which is why we seceded from it.
Are you really comparing 4,000,000 people to a hippie cult that sought to lead a black revolt? Ejjit.
HW, you are getting better and better.
John Bonaccorsi, Philadelphia , your input is also valuable.
“And call them “niggers” all you want; you’re losing to them.”
No. We have already lost to them, thanks to white-hating Yankees like you.
That is why many of us are committed to “unrealistic” ideas like getting away from a government hell bent on destroying us. Anti-whites like yourself like to do everything you can to “discourage” such ideas. You will never succeed. Additionally, your government won’t be all powerful for much longer, so don’t get too smug about it.
Begone, Yankee troll. No one cares about your worthless opinions. The difference between you and HW is that he actually knows what he is talking about. You are just repeating your mommy professor indoctrination.
The dhimmi, who also shares your fascination with “dark meat,” evidently approves your inane and idiotic remarks. Two anti-white birds of a feather.
Deo Vindice
“In 1861, the South was the richest section of the Union. The North was the poorer section. The average per capita income in the South was almost twice as high as that of the North.”
I’m not going to discuss per capita income, whatever it might mean. The North was thriving; the South was not. The two sections were probably little different from each other at the time of the Revolutionary War. By the time of the Civil War, the North was in a position to crush the South, as everyone except the leaders of the South recognized.
“Southern plantations grew the most valuable industrial commodity in the world at the time. The South’s investment in slaves was worth more than all the banks, factories, and railroads in the North whose own industrialization and commerce was made possible by retailing and processing Southern cotton.”
The most valuable industrial commodity in the world? I think that’s what the planters were telling Johnny Reb when they sent him off to get his head blown to pieces. I’m not going to discuss “investment” in slaves, which strikes me as another meaningless concept.
Northern industrialization and commerce were “made possible” by retailing and processing Southern cotton? I guess that’s why the North died economically after the South was destroyed. Oh, wait–the North went on to become the world’s number one power, almost before the century was out.
“The South didn’t need the North. We could have bought superior manufactures from Britain and invested in British banks when London was the financial center of the world. The Union was an economic burden for the development of the South which is why we seceded from it.”
Lay off the King Cotton Kool-Aid.
You have no business telling me to be gone, Apuleius. Mr. Wallace controls this blog and is able to block me at any time he sees fit. You’re the one who’s a menace to the white race.
“In 1861, the South was the richest section of the Union. The North was the poorer section.”
I’m not buying it. ‘Twas the Industrial Revolution that did in the South. The South wasn’t “richer” than the North.
The North had more steel, more guns, more factories, more mines, more canals, more ironclads, more artillery, more ammunition, more railroads, more troops, more everything. They had so much more they even had enough surplus to finance the Transcontinental Railroad and the steady stream of settlers moving West to California and the Oregon Territory even as they were simultaneously defeating the Confederacy by brute force.
Here is a link to a study published that estimates the per capita income of the South to be only three quarters to four fifths that of the North on the eve of the War and only half at the conclusion.
http://tinyurl.com/d5xzkan
(1) It means that the South was the richer section of the Union. It was significantly wealthier when you consider that Yankees worked for their income in the North whereas niggers worked in the South for the White man.
(2) This except comes from Starving The South: How the North Won the Civil War:
“Local economies shape regional lifestyles, affecting, among other things, what people ate. As a result of the cotton-slavery connection, Souhern per capita income rose steadily during the first decades of the nineteenth century; by 1860 it was almost twice that of the North.”
(3) Utter nonsense.
Slave prices reached an all time high in 1860 and the South was exporting more cotton than ever before.
(4) The South has always been different from the North. The American Revolution was a civil war in the South.
(5) The North had industries, plenty of food, a decisive population advantage, virtually all the shipping and even then barely won the war while losing almost twice as many troops as the Confederacy.
(6) Obviously, in a wartime situation, industries and farms and manpower are more vital than cotton, but that only proves the North had a greater capacity to inflict destruction on the South than vice versa.
(7) Yes, New England’s textile mills depended on Southern cotton, and New York emerged as America’s financial center due to the cotton trade.
(8) Britain was “the world’s number one power” until well into the twentieth century.
(9) In 1860, the South grew all of America’s cotton, rice, and sugar, and just as much corn as the Midwest, and it funded the whole federal government through its export trade with Britain which sold manufactured goods to the South, shipped and processed our cotton to European markets, and provided financial services to keep the plantation system going.
The South could dispense with the North and emerge better off as a result because tariffs made superior British manufactured goods more expensive in the South while Southern taxes were appropriated by Congress to be spent on internal improvements in the North.
The Union was an economic loser for the South. The North needed the Union because it depended on the South as a source of cotton for its textile mills, tariff revenue to fund the federal government, and as a captive market for its inferior manufactures.
Time on the Cross appears worth reading, and yes, Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, are Jewish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_on_the_Cross:_The_Economics_of_American_Negro_Slavery
The South hasn’t always been different from the North. That’s just what you tell yourself to justify the disaster you brought upon yourself–and upon the whole white race.
My sense, Mr. Wallace, is that you’re presenting statements that mean nothing.
“(1) It [higher per capita income] means that the South was the richer section of the Union. It was significantly wealthier when you consider that Yankees worked for their income in the North whereas niggers worked in the South for the White man.”
I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean. Are we counting the per capita income of the slaves–or do they not count, because they’re “investments”? I see: the slave-owners aren’t “working”; they just wake up each morning and enjoy the riches that they derive from the exertions of the “niggers,” whom they don’t have to feed, clothe, house, monitor, discipline, or provide with any sort of medical attention whatsoever. What are you talking about?
“(2) This except comes from Starving The South: How the North Won the Civil War:
‘Local economies shape regional lifestyles, affecting, among other things, what people ate. As a result of the cotton-slavery connection, Southern per capita income rose steadily during the first decades of the nineteenth century; by 1860 it was almost twice that of the North.’”
So one book presents a number whose meaning is indeterminable.
“(3) Utter nonsense.
Slave prices reached an all time high in 1860 and the South was exporting more cotton than ever before.”
So, what?
“(4) The South has always been different from the North. The American Revolution was a civil war in the South.”
This statement–which, really, is the core of your delusional Southron mentality–I have addressed, in my post above. Take another look at the statement I posted here the other day. As we noted at that time, it’s Reason 5, from the petition that the inhabitants of what is now Darien, Georgia, presented to James Oglethorpe in an effort to keep slavery outlawed in the colony:
“It is shocking to human Nature, that any Race of Mankind and their Posterity should be sentanc’d to perpetual Slavery; nor in Justice can we think otherwise of it, that they are thrown amongst us to be our Scourge one Day or other for our Sins: And as Freedom must be as dear to them as it is to us, what a Scene of Horror must it bring about! And the longer it is unexecuted, the bloody Scene must be the greater.”
You know as well as I do that every one of the Southrons who routinely prattle about abolitionist “fanatics” and alien Yankees would take those for the words of a New Englander. In truth, they’re just the words of decent, far-seeing Englishmen, whom their fellow Southerners should have listened to, in place of the likes of John Calhoun.
“(5) The North had industries, plenty of food, a decisive population advantage, virtually all the shipping and even then barely won the war while losing almost twice as many troops as the Confederacy.”
And why did the North have all those things? Because, as I said, it was thriving. And it doesn’t matter how many men the North had to lose to “barely” win the war; when it was over, you were crushed, as everyone knew you would be.
“(6) Obviously, in a wartime situation, industries and farms and manpower are more vital than cotton, but that only proves the North had a greater capacity to inflict destruction on the South than vice versa.”
Yes–because in territory without slave labor, industries and farms and manpower flourished. That’s what I said.
“(7) Yes, New England’s textile mills depended on Southern cotton, and New York emerged as America’s financial center due to the cotton trade.”
Right–and that’s why the North was economically finished after the South’s secession, which is why the North lost the war.
“(8) Britain was ‘the world’s number one power’ until well into the twentieth century.
Yes–I thought of that after I posted my statement. Okay–the North was only number one-and-a-half.
“(9) In 1860, the South grew all of America’s cotton, rice, and sugar, and just as much corn as the Midwest, and it funded the whole federal government through its export trade with Britain which sold manufactured goods to the South, shipped and processed our cotton to European markets, and provided financial services to keep the plantation system going.”
So, what? The South is where cotton, rice, and sugar were grown. And so what if it grew as much corn as the Midwest? That statement, I suspect, could just as easily be reversed: The Midwest grew as much corn as the South, while also developing mining and manufacture. As for the South’s funding of “the whole federal government,” let’s say “nearly whole”; evidently, the North was able to fund the Union Army on its own.
“The South could dispense with the North and emerge better off as a result because tariffs made superior British manufactured goods more expensive in the South while Southern taxes were appropriated by Congress to be spent on internal improvements in the North.”
What makes you think the South could have carried on trouble-free economic intercourse with Britain, which was the major world force in opposition to slavery?
“The Union was an economic loser for the South. The North needed the Union because it depended on the South as a source of cotton for its textile mills, tariff revenue to fund the federal government, and as a captive market for its inferior manufactures.”
The South could have dropped into the center of the Earth at the war’s end. In fact, it pretty much did. The North didn’t even notice.
The usual semi-coherent ravings of the White trash community.
“niggers worked in the South for the White man.”
Only for 25% of them. Not a very convincing argument on your part, especially considering how the planter class looked down their noses on poor ie. non-slave holding whites and treated them with utter ante-bellum contempt.
“Starving The South: How the North Won the Civil War”
Yes, a great testament to the brilliance of Winfield Scott’s grand strategy. And by the by, I’ll take my figures for per capita wealth from the economists I cited over any book by a gourmet food critic. LOL
“Slave prices reached an all time high in 1860 and the South was exporting more cotton than ever before.”
Farm automation with machines built by German immigrants in Illinois killed slavery for agricultural production deader than a doornail worldwide. Combines are more efficient than niggers. Only two percent of the workforce is now employed in agricultural production. Whatever are you going to do with all those niggers you’ve got spread throughout every nook and cranny in the South?
“The South has always been different from the North.”
True enough. Like the music, can’t stand the fetid sub-tropical climate. Other than the relatively nigger-free highlands of Appalachia it’s no healthy place for a white man. We didn’t evolve in such disease ridden climes.
“The North had industries, plenty of food, a decisive population advantage, virtually all the shipping”
I thought you said the South was “richer?” What do you think richer means?
“Britain was “the world’s number one power” until well into the twentieth century.”
Yeah like until about 1901.
“The North needed the Union because it depended on the South as a source of cotton for its textile mills, tariff revenue to fund the federal government, and as a captive market for its inferior manufactures.”
The North didn’t need the South at all which is why it should have let it secede. The country flourished after the War based on British and Dutch capital investments and superior agricultural, mining, and machine tools which were the equal of and often surpassed anything built elsewhere. Germany led in chemical production and pharmaceuticals. The South sank into defeat, resentment, and poverty.
Too bad your stubbornness to not accede defeat on extending slavery Westward doomed you to ruin and a fate of an economic backwater. Your elites should have compromised and received compensation for your obsolete slaves. Combine harvesters and free labor are simply more efficient.
“The South could have dropped into the center of the Earth at the war’s end. In fact, it pretty much did. The North didn’t even notice.”
Well said. Too bad the North didn’t let them go peacefully in the first place.
@John Bonaccorsi, Philadelphia
Why do you care? From your name, I seriously doubt any of your forefathers were here in the New World to fight in TWBTS, let alone to found the colonies in the Caribbean.
“And why did the North have all those things? Because, as I said, it was thriving. ” – It was thriving because the North has a climate favorable to manufacturing and to whites. the south did not, and would not until the advent of the airconditioner(a century of abject poverty after the fact), when industry promptly moved to the sunbelt.
Even with such a juggernaught advantage though, it took the north 5 years, and an unlimited flood of immigrants to bring the south to heel.
As to what happened after the war, the what the north lost in revenue, it made up for in dirt cheap commodities, both from forcing the entire south into share cropping, and from european investors opening up even more wretched parts of planet earth to exploitation.
The Confederacy lacked a navy at the outset. That’s the main problem. Had they been able to build a fleet or borrow one the result would have been a draw.
Rudel says:
Hunter Wallace says: “In 1861, the South was the richest section of the Union. The North was the poorer section.”
Rudel says: ‘I’m not buying it. ‘Twas the Industrial Revolution that did in the South. The South wasn’t “richer” than the North.
The North had more steel, more guns, more factories, more mines, more canals, more ironclads, more artillery, more ammunition, more railroads, more troops, more everything.’
Farmers in the North also grew wheat and other crops which kept the population well fed, especially during the war. Outside the planter class most Southerners were not well off by any stretch. Malnutrition, illness and disease were much more prevalent than in the North. Tobacco and cotton crops do not fill empty bellies.
“Why do you care? From your name, I seriously doubt any of your forefathers were here in the New World to fight in TWBTS, let alone to found the colonies in the Caribbean.”
I care about the well-being and, indeed, the flourishing of the white race, of which I am, at least, a marginal member.
Sure you are bubbatoni.
“Had they been able to build a fleet or borrow one the result would have been a draw.”
Not that it matters, but in a civil war based on a secession movement there can’t be a draw. If the Union just stopped fighting and let the south secede, then the south wins by definition, even if Grant doesn’t formally hand over his sword to Lee. The south never intended to conquer or annex the north, so there was no real impetus for an actual northern “surrender” — a de facto surrender would have been to just stop fighting and give up. Only the south could possibly “lose” — which of course, they did.
In a war like WWI it was possible for there to be a draw b/c all sides could have just called it quits at any moment and retreated to their former boundaries. In fact, despite having studied it years ago, I still am not sure what the goal of WWI ever really was, except maybe to test out all the fancy new Machine Age fightin’ equipment.
Re: Philly John
(1) The South has always been different from the North – the Southern colonies were slave societies whereas Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were founded as utopian religious experiments.
The North is 100 percent responsible for imposing black citizenship and nigger equality and other crazy experiments like feminism, civil rights, and open borders on America.
(2) The worst mistake in Southern history was joining the Union. If we hadn’t joined, we could have become an independent country like Canada in 1867 without two destructive wars.
(3) It means the South was the wealthier section of the Union from 1789 until 1861 – Yankees worked as wage slaves for Northern capitalists in ant heaps like Philadelphia and New York City while Southerners lived on small farms or plantations in the countryside while the niggers worked in the fields for White men could enjoy their leisure time with friends and family.
(4) In 1860, the average slave was worth the equivalent of $135K in 2009 dollars.
Think about that. How much is the average White household worth in 2012? What is value of the typical house in America? How much more of their time do Whites spend working as wage slaves compared to their Antebellum counterpart?
(5) My family is from Georgia so I know the story: Georgia became a slave state a short time later due to the demand of its own citizens to become as wealthy as South Carolina.
(6) We could have easily dealt with any problems relating to slavery – so long as we were the ones, as Robert Toombs said, who were allowed to deal with slavery and answer that question on our own terms.
The South’s tragedy was that we foolishly joined the Union with a people who have always had a notorious inability to mind their own business who felt compelled to impose their own ludicrous schemes on the South through the federal government.
(7) Yes, it was “thriving” because Midwestern food and Northern manufactures were sold to a captive market in the South, whose exports generated the revenue that funded the federal government and subsidized internal improvements in the North.
New England’s textile mills depended on the input of Southern cotton and its shipping similarky depended on Southern cotton. It’s industries depended on a captive domestic market because it could not compete with British competiton abroad.
That’s why Lincoln would send hundreds of thousands of Yankees to their deaths to “preserve the Union” while the South seceded from the Union because it was an economic burden and a threat to our social order.
The presence of a Confederate or Allied navy would have forced the Union to stop,
(8) No, it was because the Union was an internal free market, in which each region followed its “comparative advantage” for decades: the South grew food and export crops like cotton and tobacco, the Midwest grew food and raised cattle, and the Northeast specialized in shipping, banking, and producing manufactured goods for the other two sections.
The South didn’t need a navy, banks, or large cities to produce manufactured goods. While the South was part of the Union, it grew cotton which bought all those things from Britain and the North.
Disunion was a radical change and naturally stimulated industrialization and the construction of a navy.
(9) That’s actually why the North resisted secession. It’s own prosperity was derived from the Union which OS why it had originally yielded on slavery to get the Union.
(10) You know, the North funded the war by going into debt and printing greenbacks.
(11) Because, the British may have made noises about slavery, but that didn’t stop them from buying and processing Southern cotton in their textile mills.
(12) Nope.
The South was crushed after the war because of even higher tariffs, Union Army pensions which systematically redistributed wealth to the North, the rape of the capital poor South after the war by carpetbags, the consequences of the free negro, as well as being exploited as a captive market for decades to fuel the North’s industrialization.
Re-iterating claims that have been refuted is a lame response. There is really no ability to directly compare dollar values prior to 1913 to present ones but equating an “average slaves” worth to $139,000 is absurd. Most of the non-slaveholding South were dirt poor subsistence farmers and in many instances had a lower standard of living than some slaves.
It has already been done here:
http://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
There were dirt poor subsistence farmers in Appalachia before, during, and long after the demise of slavery.
Unlike the Caribbean, where coffee plantations flourished in the mountains of Saint-Domingue, Cuba, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe, the plantation system was non-existent in Appalachia, and consequently, that area was poorer than the lowlands and river valleys due to the lack of slavery.
Every slave must have been worth a car or a horse.
“Every slave must have been worth a car or a horse.”
More when you consider that they are humans who are able to think and solve problems, especially the skilled craftsmen among them. (This would be hysterically disputed by many on this site, many of whom have never actually lived among or directed the work of Negroes.) Nevertheless as the article states: “How much would that be in today’s dollars? Answers to such questions are not simple.”
Is the South and the north the same? Clearly not if you’ve spent time in both. Heck you hear military folks from up north comment on it all the time. And same for the transplants who come here fired up to turn the South into the place they left. If we were the same we would have those things going on.
The north could not afford to lose the South.
#1 Tariffs paid for the federal govt and the South paid the tariffs. They would have had to figure out a new way to fund the govt in a time where the idea of direct taxation was out of favor. Also the tariff money was mostly spent up north on internal improvements. The loss of which would have negatively impacted their economy. Also the awarding the contracts to do the work was a popular form of patronage that the Whigs then GOP wanted to dominate. They would have lost political power.
#2 The north would have lost a large portion of their domestic market. northern manufactured goods where of low quality and high priced compared to European goods. The tariff ensured a domestic market for northern manufactures goods. The South would have switched to cheaper and better quality European goods and the north would have lost money and market share
#3 The north could not afford to lose cheaply produced Southron raw materials. The north would have had to buy Southron raw materials at the global market rate plus their high tariff instead of getting those raw materials at a discount because of the tariff system
#4 The north’s sipping industry would have taken a big hit. Federal laws keep coastal shipping a local affair which the yankees dominated. Without the union the South would have been free to use lower cost European shippers. Because of federal law, yankee shippers had a good lock on the transatlantic cotton shipping. Without those laws the South and Europe would have been free to use cheaper European shipping
The transatlantic slave trade was over for some time and Europe bought plenty of slave labor produced cotton. There is no reason to think they would have stopped buying it because we were no longer part of the union. It is likely our political ties with Europe would have strengthen when our economic ties improved. Economic ties which were hampered by the usa tariff system.
“Malnutrition, illness and disease were much more prevalent than in the North.”
Seems to me that is false and prove so simply by the war, since ill men don’t fight as well as the Southron men did. Those things became an issue as the war went on, but the South produced a lot of food. Which is why sheridan wanted to and burned the valley.
Stonelifter says:
Sam: “Malnutrition, illness and disease were much more prevalent than in the North.”
Stonelifter says: ‘Seems to me that is false and prove so simply by the war, since ill men don’t fight as well as the Southron men did. Those things became an issue as the war went on, but the South produced a lot of food. Which is why sheridan wanted to and burned the valley.’
Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War
Snips from book reviews.
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011)
Did hunger defeat the Confederacy? In April 1861, Lincoln ordered a blockade of Southern ports used by the Confederacy for cotton and tobacco exporting as well as for the importation of food staples like flour and salt. Southern cooks became resourceful; but, it wasn’t quite enough and the Army of the Confederacy grew thin. Union dinner tables, conversely, groaned with plenty and Northern canning operations grew allowing Grant to keep his troops strong.
(snip)
“Smith, author of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, makes a plausible case that food — enough of it among the Unionists, a lack of it among the Confederates — played a critical role in determining winners and losers in the Civil War.
Before the battles began in 1861, the American South could claim unmatched farm productivity because of slaves. Much of the agricultural land, however, produced tobacco and cotton, more profitable commodities than edibles.
If Southerners had devoted more acreage to growing food, the Confederacy perhaps could have fed troops adequately during four years of battlefield deaths. Instead, the slave states had become increasingly dependent on Midwestern farmers, most of whom supplied food to the Union troops after the outbreak of war.
(snip)
“Southern stomachs were even more valuable military targets than Southern armies, according to this absorbing history of the fight for food during the Civil War. Food historian Smith chronicles the devastation wrought by the Union blockade and the cutoff of Northern agricultural trade on the South, whose farm economy was based on cotton and tobacco. (The curtailment of salt imports alone, he notes, made meat preservation almost impossible.) The resulting shortages, abetted by the Confederate government’s misguided confiscations from its citizens, hobbled the Southern war effort, Smith contends (surrenders at Vicksburg and Appomattox were dictated by starvation; rioting women chanted “Bread or Blood!” and plaintive letters from hungry families prompted mass desertions). Meanwhile, the North’s booming industrialized agricultural system kept Yankees fat, Smith notes.
(snip)
In these pages, Union blockades curtail Confederate foodstuff shipments, hungry soldiers desert their posts to return to family farms, and the ‘salt famine’ of 1862 compels a clutch of Greenville, Alabama, women to march on the local railroad station, shouting ‘Salt or Blood’.”and plaintive letters from hungry families prompted mass desertions). Meanwhile, the North’s booming industrialized agricultural system kept Yankees fat.
(snip)
“‘An army travels on its stomach,‘ wrote Napoleon Bonaparte in one of his most astute maxims. That truth certainly applied to Union and Confederate armies in the Civil War, giving a weighty advantage to the normally well-fed Federals in their campaigns against enemy armies weakened by hunger. Malnutrition on the home front also sapped the will of Southern people to sustain the war effort, as Andrew Smith demonstrates in this important and readable study.”
There was a naval blockade. Which was the main factor That decided the whole war.
The US navy starved people. It’s own people.
@John
The South made it clear that they were a separate people, and then declared and initiated war against America.
Lesson? Don’t start a fight if you can’t take a punch.