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Another interesting dynamic to the Civil War is how it played out "behind the lines" of the Union and the Confederacy. Sympathies for slavery and secession varied widely from location to location. Poorer areas, and areas where farming was impractical, had few to no slaves, and thus had little desire to secede. Also, residents in these poorer areas of the south despised being powerless and ignored by their slave-owning aristocrats who dominated state governments. This was most evident in Appalachia, where West Virginia seceded from Virginia, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, and in Western Carolina/North Georgia, where the Confederacy had a hell of a time dealing with passive and active resistance to the war. Likewise, there were significant pro-Confederate sentiments in the north. The most striking was in New York City and New York state in general, where Wall Street and the state's industry was heavily invested in southern cotton. The Mayor of New York City occasionally threatened to secede from the US and join the Confederacy, and the New York Draft Riots saw New Yorkers go on a killing spree in black neighborhoods. Similarly, states like Indiana and to a lesser extent Ohio had powerful rural agrarian interests and strong economic ties to the south, and largely opposed the war. In Indiana, the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, and the Republican governor basically enacted martial law and had militiamen harass legislative meetings in order to keep the legislature from declaring neutrality or outright secession. In Ohio, the state's representatives were split on the war, with one, Clement Vallandigham, writing letters saying the Civil War was being fought by the Union as a secret plot to enslave white people. Lincoln had Vallandigham arrested and essentially held for ransom, promising to release him if Ohio's congressional delegation would support the war effort.
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Nov 1, 2013 20:59
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I like how Lincoln exiled Vallandigham to the Confederacy, and then the latter went to Canada to run a campaign for governor and got buried under a 100,000 vote margin after Gettysburg and Vicksburg 
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Nov 1, 2013 21:16
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Wow, reading up on that Vallandigham guy, he was an awful person. Pro-Confederate, pro-slavery, conspired to fracture the Union even more, anti-equality, calling Lincoln "King Lincoln" and saying it was a bad thing that the Civil War was fought for black people (according to his view), and then acting as if the Civil War had never happened? Good riddance, I guess.
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Nov 1, 2013 23:12
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Emanuel Collective posted:Another interesting dynamic to the Civil War is how it played out "behind the lines" of the Union and the Confederacy. Sympathies for slavery and secession varied widely from location to location. Poorer areas, and areas where farming was impractical, had few to no slaves, and thus had little desire to secede. Also, residents in these poorer areas of the south despised being powerless and ignored by their slave-owning aristocrats who dominated state governments. This was most evident in Appalachia, where West Virginia seceded from Virginia, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, and in Western Carolina/North Georgia, where the Confederacy had a hell of a time dealing with passive and active resistance to the war. Another interesting thing that played out in this theme was Sam Houston, the governor of Texas at the time. He was a slaveowner who opposed abolition but opposed secession and refused to acknowledge that Texas's vote to secede was legitimate, going so far as to be evicted from the governor's mansion for not swearing oath to the Confederacy.
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Nov 1, 2013 23:18
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If you're going to talk about Vallandingam you need to at least mention how he died:quote:Vallandigham died in 1871 in Lebanon, Ohio, at the age of 50, after accidentally shooting himself in the head with a pistol. He was representing a defendant in a murder case for killing a man in a barroom brawl. Vallandigham attempted to prove the victim had in fact killed himself while trying to draw his pistol from a pocket when rising from a kneeling position. As Vallandigham conferred with fellow defense attorneys in his hotel room, he showed them how he would demonstrate this to the jury. Grabbing a pistol he believed to be unloaded, he put it in his pocket and enacted the events as they might have happened, shooting himself in the process. Vallandigham proved his point, and the defendant, Thomas McGehan, was acquitted and released from custody. Clement Vallandigham, however, died of his wound. His last words expressed his faith in "that good old Presbyterian doctrine of predestination".[63] Survived by his wife, Louisa Anna (McMahon) Vallandingham, and his son Charles Vallandigham, he was buried in Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio.
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Nov 1, 2013 23:36
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Does anyone have labor stats (unemployment rate, average + median wages, etc) from the Gilded Age? I was reading the minimum wage thread and I got to thinking about the argument that no regulations on labor would mean full or near full employment. Obviously the Gilded Age had no wage controls or anything so I think it might be useful to look at.
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Nov 1, 2013 23:41
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DynamicSloth posted:But you're also falling into the assumption that the view of a paranoic sectional class was shared by their neighbours in the North. Northern leaders were happy to cede power to the South, they weren't laying in wait to hold a slim majority in the Senate before passing a law banning slavery in the South. Federal troops were being marched into Northern cities to enforce the Fugitive Slave Acts, the only impact the Federal government had on the South was when their army was used to expand territory for future slave states. I agree that the South was paranoid about something that most Northerners at the time had little interest in doing, and that the South was far more successful at forcing pro-slavery law in the North through Congress and the Supreme Court than the North was likely to be in enforcing abolition in the South. But the South was losing influence, and I was explaining that the secession was a direct response to that given their goal to control the government, and that it wasn't just a stupid rash decision. 1860 was really just the last time that a military victory over the north would even have been a possibility. It's hard to say what might have happened if the South had not seceded because that's a pretty big counterfactual, but in my opinion it's reasonable to believe that the Civil Rights movement was inevitable and that eventually abolitionists would succeed in amending the Constitution to outlaw slavery, so in a sense the Southerners weren't unjustified in their paranoia, just wrong about how quickly the abolitionists would reasonably be successful.
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Nov 2, 2013 00:07
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Emanuel Collective posted:Another interesting dynamic to the Civil War is how it played out "behind the lines" of the Union and the Confederacy. Sympathies for slavery and secession varied widely from location to location. Poorer areas, and areas where farming was impractical, had few to no slaves, and thus had little desire to secede. Also, residents in these poorer areas of the south despised being powerless and ignored by their slave-owning aristocrats who dominated state governments. This was most evident in Appalachia, where West Virginia seceded from Virginia, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, and in Western Carolina/North Georgia, where the Confederacy had a hell of a time dealing with passive and active resistance to the war. I hear this a lot and find it fascinating, because it goes against the "vicious evil Southerner" stereotype I'm used to, and because looking from the outside, the South seems so unified. Do this divide still exist, and we just don't hear about it? Or if it's gone, what happened to it?
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Nov 2, 2013 00:37
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Rockopolis posted:I hear this a lot and find it fascinating, because it goes against the "vicious evil Southerner" stereotype I'm used to, and because looking from the outside, the South seems so unified. I have seen people describe themselves as conservative support everything that a progressive supports (obviously not all at once, but some don't mind gays, some believe we need to increase safety nets, some believe abortion is a woman's right, etc). e: You also have to keep in mind the other side of that - the "average" conservative who supports all of the positions doesn't exist, or at the very least *don't care* about all of the issues. They'll have a pet issue that will keep them voting Republican but there aren't people who support all of the issues, because that's not how the GOP or the Democrats are set up - they're both set up as big tent parties. computer parts fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 00:41
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I'll second the hell out of The Mothers of Invention. The Southern home front doesn't really seem to be emphasized particularly in a lot of histories, and Faust's description of it, particularly in the later years of the war, is almost apocalyptic. Since we're approaching the end of the Civil War, and because MonsieurChoc mentioned historical markers, I'll also mention LeeAnna Keith's The Colfax Massacre, which covers Reconstruction in Louisiana before and following the titular event. Not only is it an amazing story on its own (I'm amazed nobody's tried to film it, it's very cinematic), Colfax serves as a very nice everytown undergoing Reconstruction. EDIT: Emanuel Collective posted:Sympathies for slavery and secession varied widely from location to location. Poorer areas, and areas where farming was impractical, had few to no slaves, and thus had little desire to secede. Also, residents in these poorer areas of the south despised being powerless and ignored by their slave-owning aristocrats who dominated state governments. This was most evident in Appalachia, where West Virginia seceded from Virginia, East Tennessee tried to secede from Tennessee, and in Western Carolina/North Georgia, where the Confederacy had a hell of a time dealing with passive and active resistance to the war. There were definitely anti-secession sentiments throughout the South (most states voted something like 60/40 for secession), but you might be going too far in saying that sympathy for slavery varied in the South. McPherson's For Cause and Comrades analyzes the war through correspondence sent to and from soldiers, and one thing he notes is that while both the North and the South have their own feelings about secession, there was not a single anti-slavery Southerner represented. There were very few in the North too, of course, but by 1864 or so a whole bunch of Union soldiers were writing their families telling them how wonderful all of these black people were. Rochallor fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 02:40
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Rockopolis posted:I hear this a lot and find it fascinating, because it goes against the "vicious evil Southerner" stereotype I'm used to, and because looking from the outside, the South seems so unified. This divide certainly still exists culturally - Appalachian people are not the same thing as Southerners. You should always remember that these were, only a few decades after the Civil War, the people who mostly died for the cause of labor in strikes and conflicts, along with immigrant workers. However, I think 150 years of propaganda and the introduction of modernity into the Appalachian region have reduced the "apartness" felt by Appalachians. They are still distinct, but the racial realignment of the two parties has left Appalachia hooked into the Democrats mostly through unions and little else. They are much more likely to vote Republican, in line with the South, than they used to be.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:10
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So one of my friends today outed himself as a 9/11 Truther. And so prompted by that I give you segments from my Thesis paper on the history of Conspiratorial thought in US politics from at least 1991 to the Present (2010 at time of writing.) I attempted a more open style of writing in this paper so that those completely unfamiliar with anything related to the material could approach it and leave with something. I have continued on with my research into the subject with the objective to at some point revisit and expand the paper, as it stands the full this is incomplete because I had a cap of pages I couldn't exceede. So be kind, but fair with any criticism. Komradex posted:Conspiracy theorizing can be better understood as a form of populism. Populism is a form of thinking that almost perfectly fits in to the conspiratorial mindset since it generally posits “the people” against “the other” of “powered elites”. We see this operating in all conspiratorial thought from the “9/11 Truth Movement” to the antics of the John Bircher’s but populism also operates in what was once considered more mainstream political events such as many of the Progressive Era reforms . Understanding conspiracy as populism brings us closer to a better understanding of how and why people subscribe to this form of thinking. One can see the appeal to conspiracy theory as a reaction to the post-modern condition and the demise of the grand narrative which lead Fredrick Jameson to say, “The theme of paranoia in the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system.” Now it is odd that Jameson a Marxist, would use a prerogative such as, “the poor persons cognitive mapping,” Fran Mason offers a fix to Jameson’s terminology by saying that, “In many ways, conspiracy theory offers not a ‘poor person’s cognitive mapping but a cyborg’s cognitive mapping –but this may be the only form of ‘cognitive mapping’ available in a multinational global society pervaded by technologies and simulacra.” Meaning that we have an information overload, that in order to cope with this, some people have turned to paranoid thought in order to reestablish control over their lives that has been lost in this age of Late Capital. So that was just a section from the opening. If people would like I can post more from it. If not forget it was ever here please.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:33
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Emanuel Collective posted:Yeah, something I think gets overlooked is that the Confederacy formed before Lincoln was even inaugurated. South Carolina began its official movement towards secession two days after Lincoln's victory. Even most pro-slavery Southerners thought this was a pretty bad idea but wound up going along with it because a) the state legislatures were far more radical than their nationally elected counterparts and their hands were forced, and b) negotiations crumbled when the Republicans were willing to surrender only most, not all, of their stances on slavery in negotiations. DynamicSloth posted:These so called gentlemen's agreements were actually quasi-constitutional compromises that all large federal states have to make to survive. A united and (thanks to the 3/5th's clause and the cotton boom) politically powerful South repeatedly overthrew these in the mid 19th century in favour of deals that would expand slavery further. If southerners hadn't thrown out the Missouri compromise there's no way the Republican Party would have even formed, true abolitionists were few and politically powerless prior to that point. An alternative view (from a leftist who is definitely not a Confederate sympathizer; the title of the piece is somewhat ironic) can be found in this article: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/the-war-of-northern-aggression/ Obviously it's a minority viewpoint among scholars, and you can read ideological motivations into it (an attempt by leftists to claim Lincoln as one of their own rather than a moderate?), but I think it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:36
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KomradeX posted:So one of my friends today outed himself as a 9/11 Truther. And so prompted by that I give you segments from my Thesis paper on the history of Conspiratorial thought in US politics from at least 1991 to the Present (2010 at time of writing.) I attempted a more open style of writing in this paper so that those completely unfamiliar with anything related to the material could approach it and leave with something. I have continued on with my research into the subject with the objective to at some point revisit and expand the paper, as it stands the full this is incomplete because I had a cap of pages I couldn't exceede. So be kind, but fair with any criticism. There's some interesting ideas in there, but the grammar is regrettable.
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Nov 2, 2013 03:37
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Silver2195 posted:An alternative view (from a leftist who is definitely not a Confederate sympathizer; the title of the piece is somewhat ironic) can be found in this article: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/the-war-of-northern-aggression/ The idea that Lincoln and many Republicans thought that defeating the "slave power conspiracy" and containing slavery to where it would already exist they would put slavery on the "road to ultimate extinction" (to use Lincoln's phrase) is hardly a controversial assertion - Lincoln openly stated this. The idea that the Republicans were using this to bait the South into seceding or that from this premise the war was guaranteed to be emancipatory is not supported by the evidence, however. The Republicans thought Southern threats of secession were merely crude efforts to bully Northern voters until they began to be realized. Further, they were willing to permanently enshrine rights to own slaves in slave states as part of compromise proposals in an effort to avert disunion or war. Even after the war started Lincoln only tried to get Union slave states to agree to gradual, compensated emancipation and abandoned this process when he encountered resistance while the Emancipation Proclamation excluded these states - hardly indicative that the actual main war motive of the North was antislavery and not reunification. There was a shift towards antislavery sentiment in the North during the war especially among Union soldiers but it is anachronistic to pretend that this attitude was dominant in 1861. Rogue0071 fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 07:51
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Silver2195 posted:There's some interesting ideas in there, but the grammar is regrettable. Well it's a surviving draft I had after someone destroyed my all my back ups as a "joke."
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Nov 2, 2013 13:32
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How did Mclellan end up at the top of the Democratic ticket in 1864? Sure he built the army of the Potomac but then he squandered it. Was his incompetence against the Confederacy played up as them being unbeatable or something?
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Nov 2, 2013 13:33
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KomradeX posted:So that was just a section from the opening. If people would like I can post more from it. If not forget it was ever here please. I'll agree that it raises some interesting thoughts but I'd really look at reformatting and correcting the spelling before adding anything substantive :P That said you could possibly do with defining what you mean when you refer to right wing, conservative and fascist (especially when you say conservative with a small c). It might be a consequence of being outside US discourse but it seems you're using those labels interchangably at points and exclusively at other points. I'm also not sure how much I agree that conspiracy theories need be conservative with a small c. Some, such as UFO's seem to raise suspicions regarding the government's openness with the public but many of those that believe in the conspiracy wouldn't necassarily align easily with the right or left wing. Akin to single issue voters they have latched on to something that has come to define them that may be easily incorporated into a left or right wing set of beliefs. In terms of the role of conspiracy in US history it would be interesting to see which side tends to draw in such figures. I wouldn't think it would be easy to tie in a left/right distinction with regard to this, going back at least to popular culture conceptions of the 60's and the, generally, left wing counter-culture movement plenty of individuals within this would embrace conspiracy theories regarding the government, which was seen as essentially an arm of the military-industrial complex and enforcing a conventional way of life. I'd agree with you that this seems to have shifted and the embrace of populist movemments by the GOP post 1980's has led to an increasing level of influence of these conspiracies in political discourse and even in the policies the GOP is forced to pursue by the more radical members of its base. Ultimately I would say that's an effect of populist movements giving disproportionate voice to those who shout the loudest and the GOP shedding many of their more moderate supporters making groups that should rightly be societal outliers into a powerful element of the GOP base.
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Nov 2, 2013 13:38
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I actually agree with that and my own stance on the subject had changed since I first wrote this 3 years ago. And had shifted into an idea that conspiracy theory is almost it's own wing when it comes to politics. Though in American mainstream politics it is the right wing that exclusively taps into it. Just a reminder that is just one small section from just the introductory pages to the thesis. I know the grammar is a bit off, and I apologize for that, but it was a paper I spent writing and rewriting right up until I handed it in for 2 and a half weeks on top of 9 months of research. I was a little stressed and just a little crazy by time I finished the paper. Oh boy is it easy to start falling into conspiracy beliefs. Would people like to see more of it there is about 20 more pages of it.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:02
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ReV VAdAUL posted:How did Mclellan end up at the top of the Democratic ticket in 1864? Sure he built the army of the Potomac but then he squandered it. Was his incompetence against the Confederacy played up as them being unbeatable or something? McLellan, aka "Little Mac," "Young Napoleon," etc was not widely perceived as an incompetent at the time the way he is today. Lincoln and many military commanders didn't like him, but he was charismatic with the troops, seemed careful not to waste the lives of the young men (winning the hearts of their families and relatives), did not disturb the notion that the war was meant to be a fight over the future of membership in the Union rather than an apocalyptic confrontation over the values the Union was based in, etc. McLellan was also a classic Northern Democrat with deep connections in the party. He was Jeff Davis' right hand man when Davis was Sec Defense and was considered so politically astute he was sent to Europe to be our official observer/mediator in the Crimean war. When he skyrocketed to public prominence during the war years, he could add that to his extensive political connections among Northern Democrats. Since there were no primaries in those days and the nomination was just favored-son strategizing and horse trading, McLellan seemed by far the best candidate -- he wasn't a traitor who wanted to end the war, but he could contrast his desire for a negotiated peace that would restore the South to the Union on easy terms with a minimum of more devastation and death with Lincoln's strategies and techniques. McLellan, in the circumstances surrounding his nomination, didn't seem like as awful a choice as he did after the fall of Atlanta etc made Lincoln's win assured.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:37
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Orange_Lazarus posted:Could someone tell me about the bad ol Jimmy Carter days that apparently led to Reagan's election? I understand inflation and interest rates were high but why was it high? I've heard people say that labor had too much power and they were hindering economic growth. Carter was mainly burned by the OPEC oil crisis caused by the big oil producing arab states deciding to punish the US for supporting Israel and also something called stagflation. Stagflation is economically devastating since you have high inflation rates but at the same time minimal GNP growth. For your question about interest rates the government decided to crank up the prime interest rate as way to burn off the inflation part of the problem. My dad bought his first house in the late 70s and remembers the interest rate being 16%. Luckily he was able to find a elderly lady he gave him the house through a reverse mortgage.
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Nov 2, 2013 15:56
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So something I was thinking about yesterday was how slavery/cheap labor effects technological innovation. I was listening to a lecture by Professor Michael McElroy in which he was discussing the history and development of wind and water power. Something that he brought up was how through much of the Roman Empire's history they relied upon slave labor for much of their economic activity, but as the empire began to crumble they came to rely upon the use of watermills to accomplish tasks that would have otherwise utilized slaves. It got me thinking how slavery in America effected technological innovation. Anybody know anything about this?
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Nov 2, 2013 16:04
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VitalSigns posted:I agree that the South was paranoid about something that most Northerners at the time had little interest in doing, and that the South was far more successful at forcing pro-slavery law in the North through Congress and the Supreme Court than the North was likely to be in enforcing abolition in the South. But the South was losing influence, and I was explaining that the secession was a direct response to that given their goal to control the government, and that it wasn't just a stupid rash decision. 1860 was really just the last time that a military victory over the north would even have been a possibility. It's the kind of stupidity that only arises when you've banned all free speech in ideas you find offensive, in the case of the South you had an entire generation raised in an environment where there was no free speech in any idea that hinted at a fault in slavery or the wisdom of the planter aristocracy. The South was so doomed to lose influence that even after their stupid war, 7 out of 12 post WWII Presidents came from that region (with 1/4 of the U.S. population). Silver2195 posted:An alternative view (from a leftist who is definitely not a Confederate sympathizer; the title of the piece is somewhat ironic) can be found in this article: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/the-war-of-northern-aggression/ I'd say this guy's entire argument is faulty for assuming that the radical Republicans who held sway in the rump Congress from 1861-1862 represented the viewpoint of Republicans generally before the South started shooting at Northerners. No one has ever said their weren't fierce abolitionists in the North or in the Republican Party prior to 1860, but it's foolish to assume they'd have had passed the exact same legislation if their hadn't been active hostilities with the South especially with 1/3 of the House and half the Senate being Southerners. DynamicSloth fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 17:26
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DynamicSloth posted:It was a stupid rash decision, there was no danger of abolitionists amending the Constitution in the next say 40 years to abolish slavery and by then presumably economic necessity would have been the primary frustration to the instituion. Usually you can never speak of counterfactuals with much certainty but there was absolutely zero chance in 1860 that slavery would be abolished in the next 5 years if the South had stayed in the Union, they held most of the Supreme Court, half the senate and the sympathies of the border states. Unlike the South the North was still a two party state where one Party was pro slavery and the other had no interest in a constitutional ban on slavery. The Abolitionist faction was more a fringe movement in the beginning than anything else and most people on both sides just wanted to maintain the status quo especially for economic reasons.
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Nov 2, 2013 17:28
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etalian posted:The Abolitionist faction was more a fringe movement in the beginning than anything else and most people on both sides just wanted to maintain the status quo especially for economic reasons. Well I wouldn't say the political class of Southerners, even the non-firebreather variety, wanted to maintain the status quo, if they did they wouldn't have tossed out the Missouri Compromise or Compromise of 1850. They wanted a guarantee of new slave markets and half of the Senate and this was never part of the initial compromises.
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Nov 2, 2013 17:33
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Emanuel Collective posted:Surprisingly, however, the prevailing theory is that the major differences developed mostly due to the English changing their accents; not because the American colonists developed their own. What we identify today as the "English Accent" started forming right around the time of the American Revolution, when the English upper classes stopped using rhotic speech---basically, stopped pronouncing the "r" in most words. The English education system quickly adopted this form of speech as proper. "American" accents were thus closer to traditional English accents than the modern English accent is. However, in cities like Boston and New Orleans, where the English presence remained strong, non-rhotic accents began to develop as well--which is how the Boston accent formed. I know this is a page back, but one interesting thing with the Rhotic R and its relation to class is that before WWII, non-rhotic speech was considered 'prestige' in the US (think FDR), but afterwards it sounds 'dumb' (Coastal Southern, Boston, Brooklyn)
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Nov 2, 2013 18:01
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DynamicSloth posted:The South was so doomed to lose influence that even after their stupid war, 7 out of 12 post WWII Presidents came from that region (with 1/4 of the U.S. population). Oh come on. Even if you count Truman as a Southern President (even though there wasn't enough support in Missouri for secession, so the state declared neutrality until the Union forced it to declare for the United States), I still only count 6 : Truman, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Bush, and W Bush. And of those 6, the first 4 were openly pro-civil rights and not the sort of candidates the Southern planter aristocracy would have supported. Truman won despite losing most of the Deep South:  As did Johnson:  As did Clinton:  Twice:  Only three of the twelve post-WWII Southern Presidents won with solid Southern support, which is about what you'd expect from a region with 1/4 of the population. The recent "dominance" of Southerners in Presidential elections has a lot more to do with tactical choices by Northern liberals to pick up a few Southern votes for liberal candidates rather than some ability of conservative southerners to influence policy out of proportion to their population. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 18:16
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Crasscrab posted:So something I was thinking about yesterday was how slavery/cheap labor effects technological innovation. I was listening to a lecture by Professor Michael McElroy in which he was discussing the history and development of wind and water power. Something that he brought up was how through much of the Roman Empire's history they relied upon slave labor for much of their economic activity, but as the empire began to crumble they came to rely upon the use of watermills to accomplish tasks that would have otherwise utilized slaves. It got me thinking how slavery in America effected technological innovation. Anybody know anything about this? Technological development is going to happen much more frequently in a modern context than in an ancient context so you can't really draw a direct comparison. There's a big before/after the rationalization of thought divide in play. American slavery didn't really take off until technological developments permitted the widescale cultivation of short-staple cotton. Without the cotton gin, slavery in America would have likely died out due to no particular use for vast quantities of cheap forced labor. However, it is very clear how American slavery inhibited the economic development of the South as compared to the North. This would have lead to less Southern technological innovation, but this would have had little/no effect on Northern development. The actionable component here is not the availability of cheap labor, but rather that said labor encouraged a rural, agrarian economy which would be less entrepreneurial than an urbanized, industrial economy. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 18:21
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Crasscrab posted:So something I was thinking about yesterday was how slavery/cheap labor effects technological innovation. I was listening to a lecture by Professor Michael McElroy in which he was discussing the history and development of wind and water power. Something that he brought up was how through much of the Roman Empire's history they relied upon slave labor for much of their economic activity, but as the empire began to crumble they came to rely upon the use of watermills to accomplish tasks that would have otherwise utilized slaves. It got me thinking how slavery in America effected technological innovation. Anybody know anything about this? Slavery alters the labor cost for certain varieties of production, chiefly agriculture and some kinds of basic manufacturing. For example, a lot of Thomas Jefferson's income came from a nail factory staffed by slaves. Anyway, you don't have to pay them wages but you do become responsible for their upkeep--food, clothing, housing, medical care, and so forth. You can think of slaves as a capital investment requiring regular maintenance, like machinery, rather than as an ordinary labor cost. There is also the problem of preventing slaves from escaping, which discourages skills training beyond the most basic level. A slave with substantial job skills can use them to build up his own supply of money in preparation to flee, to aid in his escape, and support himself once in freedom. This is why slaves were denied literacy, for example. In the Roman comparison between slaves and waterwheels, think of them both as types of machinery with their own costs of investment and maintenance. For a long time, slaves were the cheaper option, so they were used in preference to machines. Instead of building a device to capture wind energy to mill grain, you just have a human-powered mill for your slaves to push around. The collapse of the Roman state closed the supply of slaves seized in military campaigns and also it more difficult to keep control of the ones you already owned, who could more easily escape. As a result machinery became more attractive. Another issue to keep in mind is sunk costs as opposed to liquid capital. A large plantation represents a large amount of wealth in slaves and land, and it can be made self-sufficient for many requirements, with slaves growing their own food, building their own homes, sewing their own clothes, and so forth. But the plantation is cash poor because all the wealth is tied up in the means of production, slaves and land. The plantation receives periodic infusions of cash when batches of its cash crop are exported, but a lot of that goes back into upkeep on the slaves, and any surplus is used for expansion (more slaves and more land), or pissed away maintaining the aristocratic lifestyle. In fact most plantations ran on credit by borrowing against their next crop, so they were always in debt but seldom in danger of default, because they had continuous inflow of money from harvests and if things got really bad they could liquidate some property by selling their slaves or land. In the South, this system discouraged investment in infrastructure and technical innovation. Finished goods and luxuries were imported from the North or from the UK on the aforementioned revolving credit plan, so there's no reason to invest in manufacturing. Transportation infrastructure was built to facilitate exports, so the Southern railways weren't very useful for internal trade and transportation in comparison to the North's dense web of rails. They were designed to bring cotton to the North, or to ports like Charleston from which they could be sent to Europe--or to inland depots like Memphis or Vicksburg, where river barges would take them down to New Orleans or another port. Even if you wanted to invest capital in machinery or infrastructure, you don't have any liquid capital for such investments, and all of the banks with the money for such projects are located in the North or in Britain. This is sometimes overlooked, but at the very same time the slave system built the North. The wealth of Northern cities during the "Yankee Trader" period was heavily reliant on the export of food and manufactures to the slaveholding South and to Caribbean sugar colonies, and these same cities were also very active in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Eventually the slave trade was halted by the British Navy and also by US law. But Northern industry developed in large part to process Southern agricultural goods and to supply the Southern market with manufactures. Foodstuffs production in northern states also supported Southern cash crop production by reducing their need to supply their own food. The early stages of industrial development in the USA were funded by internal trade. Northern banks also profited handsomely because of the credit scheme described above. Southern plantations were often highly profitable but because they were always borrowing money, a good portion of those profits went North in form of interest payments. This cash could then be used by the Northern banks to issue the loans that funded the expansion of Northern industry and agriculture. Eventually the growth of the North created a dynamic internal trading economy, with wealth built by a strong multiplier effect. i.e. a dollar earned in the South would quickly go North, whereas a dollar earned in the North would pass through many different hands before it went anywhere else. Basically, the Southern slave system encouraged the development of a resource-based extractive economy, which supplied the capital that jumpstarted the North's commerce- and manufacturing-based economy. Eventually immigration, infrastructure investment, and innovation in industrial techniques caused the Northern economy to take off like a rocket, whereas the Southern economy kept chugging along at its own pace. The explosive growth of the Northern economy and population made it increasingly untenable for the South to dominate the USA's political system, as it had done through the 1850s, hence the election of Abraham Lincoln in spite of his not even appearing on the ballot in most of the South. I want to finish by noting that the above narrative of regional difference and unbalanced growth was used as the primary explanation for the Civil War for a long time, because economic determinism evades the immorality of the Confederate cause. "Kids, it was sterile historical trends unrelated to human beings that caused the Civil War!" The process I described above didn't cause the Civil War, it just created a situation in which Southern power was gradually eroded relative to the North. The South had actually been dominating the conversation about slavery for decades to that point, advancing increasingly extreme positions. The perception of pro-slavery extremists that they were losing the ability to control the federal government just contributed to their decision to take their ball and go home.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:30
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It was a pretty much nice blast from the past with the mercantilism concept in which the South never attempted to specialize in manufactured goods and instead just ended fueling capital/infastructure improvements in the North. It's also why the South was pretty much crippled even on the financial side during the Civil War due to being starved for foreign credit and also not being able to maintain a stable currency.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:41
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VitalSigns posted:Oh come on. Even if you count Truman as a Southern President (even though there wasn't enough support in Missouri for secession, so the state declared neutrality until the Union forced it to declare for the United States), I still only count 6 : Truman, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Bush, and W Bush.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:43
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Thanks for that, I was really curious about how the North became more profitable than the South.
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Nov 2, 2013 18:56
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etalian posted:It was a pretty much nice blast from the past with the mercantilism concept in which the South never attempted to specialize in manufactured goods and instead just ended fueling capital/infastructure improvements in the North. Also going to war when you have no capacity to produce or transport military supplies is a pretty bad idea! The Confederacy was so hard up for anything that Governor Joe Brown of Georgia put out a call for motherfucking spears. I think the only reason the war lasted so long is that Confederate troops were fighting for 'survival' as well as generally incompetent Union commanders in 1861 and 1862. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 19:02
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DynamicSloth posted:Well I was also counting Ike as a Texan as he was born there, met his wife there and won crucial support from Texas to capture the Presidential nomination (although he himself would've probably considered himself a Kansan). I don't know, I'd be pretty reluctant to consider Eisenhower an actual Southerner (not to mention hesitant to entirely lump Texas in with the traditional South) but I really think considering the Bushes as actual southerners to be kind of a stretch.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:10
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DynamicSloth posted:Well I was also counting Ike as a Texan as he was born there, met his wife there and won crucial support from Texas to capture the Presidential nomination (although he himself would've probably considered himself a Kansan). Eisenhower was born in Texas but his family only lived there for like three years total.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:12
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Speaking of Texas, one of my professors in undergrad made the argument that a large part of the failure of the South militarily was that it never seriously treated the West and Border States as "serious" states. This seems to make sense to me, as the South seemed overly fixated on battles in the East while letting Grant and Sherman kind of split the entire South in part in the west. Also, Texas never seemed to really play a big role in the entire war. But this was a several years ago! So I may be misremembering things. I was curious if more Civil War military history minded people had an opinion though.
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Nov 2, 2013 19:24
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Texas never played a big role in because they were on the far side of the Mississippi and even if Vicksburg didn't fall until 1863, Union gunboats made it tricky to maintain solid, steady connections with the western side of the Trans-Mississippi.
Ofaloaf fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 19:31
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Berke Negri posted:Speaking of Texas, one of my professors in undergrad made the argument that a large part of the failure of the South militarily was that it never seriously treated the West and Border States as "serious" states. This seems to make sense to me, as the South seemed overly fixated on battles in the East while letting Grant and Sherman kind of split the entire South in part in the west. Also, Texas never seemed to really play a big role in the entire war. Texas was too far away to matter much, plus there wasn't any tangible military value - it was lightly populated and the Confederacy didn't really need more agricultural output (at least until famine kicked in but like always that was a problem of distribution). The Confederacy's best chance to win the war was to do sufficient morale damage to the Union to encourage pro-peace factions and force the Union to submit through war weariness. To achieve this objective, it was necessary to win battles and generate headlines. Battles were unlikely and too small to stir national attention the further west one went, especially on the frontier past the Mississippi. The action wasn't all in Virginia. Grant and Sherman were both heavily opposed in the 'west'. Problem was by the time that the Union really got serious about appointing tough, aggressive commanders to deal serious damage to the Confederate war machine, attrition and privation had set in and the Confederacy was incapable of fighting off the practically endless Union assault. Really at no point would a Texas campaign have provided any value to the Confederacy. Berke Negri posted:I don't know, I'd be pretty reluctant to consider Eisenhower an actual Southerner (not to mention hesitant to entirely lump Texas in with the traditional South) but I really think considering the Bushes as actual southerners to be kind of a stretch. East/North Texas is in the South. Central Texas is proudly Texan (subset of Southerners). West Texas is part of the Southwest. South Texas is a unique ethnic zone. Kind of like how North Florida is unquestionably the South, but then south of Orlando suddenly Florida becomes some weird Caribbean/America hybrid. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Nov 2, 2013 |
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Nov 2, 2013 19:45
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Berke Negri posted:Speaking of Texas, one of my professors in undergrad made the argument that a large part of the failure of the South militarily was that it never seriously treated the West and Border States as "serious" states. This seems to make sense to me, as the South seemed overly fixated on battles in the East while letting Grant and Sherman kind of split the entire South in part in the west. Also, Texas never seemed to really play a big role in the entire war. As people have said, Texas was sparsely populated and had very limited communications with the rest of the Confederacy. The rail network in the South west of the Mississippi was practically non-existent, and the Union naval blockade and closure of the Mississippi River neutralized the Confederate Transmississippi. As to the Confederate fixation on the Eastern Theater, they had very good reason for that and to a large degree it was unavoidable. Relative to the Union, Confederate supplies of men and war materiel were limited, so they had to concentrate their available resources in the most critical areas. The loss of Richmond and with it Northern Virginia most likely would have been fatal to the Confederate cause, whereas reverses in the West were unfortunate but could be survived at least temporarily. Since Washington D.C. was very nearby the Confederate capitol and served as the hub of Union military activity in the East, the commitment of the Confederacy's main strength to that area was unavoidable. Conversely the Union had sufficient strength to maintain the Army of the Potomac as a dagger at the Confederacy's throat, while at the same time mounting major operations in the West. They could fight in both places, while the Confederacy had to choose one, and really they made the only sane choice.
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Nov 2, 2013 21:07
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EvanSchenck posted:But Northern industry developed in large part to process Southern agricultural goods and to supply the Southern market with manufactures. Foodstuffs production in northern states also supported Southern cash crop production by reducing their need to supply their own food. The early stages of industrial development in the USA were funded by internal trade. Northern banks also profited handsomely because of the credit scheme described above. Southern plantations were often highly profitable but because they were always borrowing money, a good portion of those profits went North in form of interest payments. This cash could then be used by the Northern banks to issue the loans that funded the expansion of Northern industry and agriculture. Eventually the growth of the North created a dynamic internal trading economy, with wealth built by a strong multiplier effect. i.e. a dollar earned in the South would quickly go North, whereas a dollar earned in the North would pass through many different hands before it went anywhere else. That is interesting, I've always learned that the Northern and Southern economies were actually largely independent of each other. If you were to look at a map of the US, the economies of both grew westward, parallel to each other, but were not interrelated at all. The best example of this was the antagonism over tariff policy. The North desired a strong protective tariff to protect industries and manufacturers in their infancy against better and cheaper produced goods from England and France. The South despised this, as they had no industry to benefit from a tariff, yet they imported most of their industrial goods and luxuries not from New York or Boston but from London and Paris. Thus, the South was being "taxed" to promote northern industry. South Carolina's nullification of the Tariff of 1828 best exemplifies this antagonism between the North and South's economy and was a strong reason for the advocating of States Rights.
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Nov 2, 2013 23:32
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