SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:

Some of you seem to know a lot more about this than I do, let me ask a question:

Isn't it true that during the war of northern aggression

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Had the Confederacy won the war they would have created a slave empire stretching from Florida through the Caribbean into Venezuela/Colombia, Central America and probably a big chunk of Mexico.

Crowsbeak posted:

They would have tried. Emphasis on tried. Their lovely constitution made the economic development that was essential for them to even try major expansion, unlikely.

Agean90 posted:

This. The different states had differing currencies, could opt out of drafts, could refuse federal (or confederate whatevs) troops permission to move through states, and all sorts of other dumb poo poo that would have made any major offensive action an abject failure.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

While it's always dangerous to start engaging in counterfactuals, I've always thought that if the war had somehow continued through 1865 you would have seen Confederate troops moved in to control states like Georgia that defied the national government on various things (which Governor Joe Brown had done more than once) and leadership progressively transferred from the civilian government to a pseudodictatorship under Lee vaguely similar to what happened in Germany in the last couple years of WWI.

spacetoaster posted:

Wasn't the south producing cotton/tobacco/sugar for the north? Or were they exporting it?

safely sodomized posted:

the correct term is The War Between the States

StashAugustine posted:

the term is the War of Southern Agression

StashAugustine posted:

the term is the War of Southern Agression

Deified Data posted:

Can someone quote me the worst, craziest thing Scott Adams has ever said?

Every time my GF listens to an episode of Tim Ferris's podcast with a loon like Adams or Sam Harris in it she always comes back to me with "this guy isn't as crazy as you made him sound, you should listen to the interview", and apparently "he literally believes in The Secret" wasn't enough. I sometimes wonder if Ferris isn't low-key one of these guys himself, but I can't find anything on him besides the fact that he has people like Adams and Harris on and the inherent insanity that comes with being a Silicon Valley bro.

Agean90 posted:

counter factual are fun as hell so long as you acknowledge their ridiculousness. the trouble come when somebody asks for the likely historical ramifications of hitler being a gay black man then gets upset when people start making things up

zeal posted:

It worked like this. The south had three original export crops, in three separate growing areas: tobacco (Virginia), rice (Carolina littoral), sugar cane (Louisiana)--though bear in mind that Louisiana remained European-controlled until the early 19th century. These commodities were shipped from the South's two primary ports, New Orleans and Charleston SC, to the big transatlantic shipping centers of the American eastern seaboard: mainly New York, but also Boston and Baltimore. Banks in those northern cities offered loans to the Southern planters, providing capital that they could turn into slaves and, in the case of sugar cane, the fairly complex system of milling and boiling that turns raw cane into grain sugar. Merchant houses in those northern cities then handled the shipment of the slave-produced agricultural commodities to European markets. The main economic story of the American 18th century was how this symbiotic relationship relationship enriched the elites of both north and south, but with discordant note in the final decades: it looked like slave-agriculture as a system was on its way out.

The tobacco did very well for the first century+ after colonization, but tobacco's hard on the soil it's grown in and one of the persistent issues with the planters was that they were too busy hunting, dueling, loving their cousins and/or slaves, etc. to practice sustainable agricultural practices like crop rotation. By the end of the 18th century the soil of the main commercial growing areas of Virginia was practically worked to death, and the net volume of tobacco crops was declining each year. The rice and sugar cane cultivation systems didn't face that issue, but were tightly constrained by geography; there's only so many places in the American southeast where either could grow, and those were already in full production. With tobacco failing, it looked as though there would be no economic niche for slavery outside of the Carolina littoral and Louisiana in the American landscape within a few decades of independence. In the north actual slavery was already relegated to household servants for the wealthy, as it never proved economical in agriculture intended for domestic consumption. The practice was abolished in most of the northern states in the late 18th/early 19th, simply because it was an irrelevance to their economies, and there was considerable expectation in the 1790s that the practice would soon be gone for good. Enter cotton; more specifically, enter British textile manufacturing.

The Industrial Revolution finally really got underway in Britain after the Napoleonic Wars, and the end of the blockade the British government maintained on Napoleonic Europe through most of the 19th century's first decade and a half. The first capitalist textile mills, operating water- and steam-powered equipment, created an unparalleled demand for raw cotton almost overnight. Cotton's not nearly as hard on the soil as tobacco, and unlike rice or sugarcane it grew wonderfully throughout the southeast. The same financiers who'd made such bank offering agricultural loans to the planters soon had vast new fields of slave-worked export agriculture to invest in, while the shipping concerns had commensurately vast new cargoes of cotton to export to the British mills. The Brits tried to clamp down hard on their new industrial technologies, but with a little help from British immigrants smuggling out schematics northern elites were able to diversify from finance and shipping into actual production facilities, all processing slave-picked cotton, and still largely shipping their textile products to European ports. Elites in north and south continue to get richer, and as American expansion moved westward Southern settlers established huge new growing areas along the Mississippi and beyond.

This symbiotic relationship between northern capitalists and southern planter aristocrats only began to fray in the later 19th century, due to two contributing factors: 1) new export-driven cotton production schemes in Egypt and India driving the commodity's overall price down; and 2) the beginning of the American railroad boom opening whole new fields of investment for the same financial and industrial concerns that had previously made most of their money from southern ag exports. The capital generated by the transatlantic cotton trade diversified into new forms of industrial production in the early-mid 19th century, based in and around the big northern cities and staffed by immigrants fresh off the boats from Europe. Extension of rail lines into the relatively recently settled American northwest offered excellent return on investments, and those same lines allowed northern manufacturers to begin selling cheap mass-produced tools and early steam-powered farm machinery to the settlers of places like Ohio and Michigan--all paid for with agricultural loans from the same banks that had made their fortunes financing the southern plantations. With the profitability of the planters' produce diminishing by the year, the northern tycoons needed the southern aristocrats less and less, while the planters felt the rough political parity they'd held with those tycoons slipping away. The planters grew ever more paranoid over a political possibility that seemed impossible in the salad years of the cotton industry: national abolition, as the northern elites lost their material interest in protecting slavery from northern anti-slavery activists. Tension mounted from the 1840s onward, accompanied by increasingly acrimonious Congressional gridlock quite familiar to 21st century Americans, till the proverbial kettle boiled over when Abraham Lincoln, an openly anti-slavery Republican candidate, won the 1860 presidential election. Some assholes in Charleston lit up Ft. Sumter, the slaveholding states declared secession, and the rest is history.

spacetoaster posted:

Deified Data posted:

Can someone quote me the worst, craziest thing Scott Adams has ever said?

Every time my GF listens to an episode of Tim Ferris's podcast with a loon like Adams or Sam Harris in it she always comes back to me with "this guy isn't as crazy as you made him sound, you should listen to the interview", and apparently "he literally believes in The Secret" wasn't enough. I sometimes wonder if Ferris isn't low-key one of these guys himself, but I can't find anything on him besides the fact that he has people like Adams and Harris on and the inherent insanity that comes with being a Silicon Valley bro.

Deified Data posted:

Can someone quote me the worst, craziest thing Scott Adams has ever said?

Deified Data posted:

Can someone quote me the worst, craziest thing Scott Adams has ever said?

Every time my GF listens to an episode of Tim Ferris's podcast with a loon like Adams or Sam Harris in it she always comes back to me with "this guy isn't as crazy as you made him sound, you should listen to the interview", and apparently "he literally believes in The Secret" wasn't enough. I sometimes wonder if Ferris isn't low-key one of these guys himself, but I can't find anything on him besides the fact that he has people like Adams and Harris on and the inherent insanity that comes with being a Silicon Valley bro.

lancemantis posted:

Tim Ferris is literally Mike Cernovich without the obvious reactionary politics

Mermaid Autopsy posted:

I think it's the one where he said Obama would declare martial law and cancel the election but you'll have to find it yourself; it was some time in the last year or so if it hasn't been erased from the Internet

Captain_Maclaine posted:

While it's always dangerous to start engaging in counterfactuals, I've always thought that if the war had somehow continued through 1865 you would have seen Confederate troops moved in to control states like Georgia that defied the national government on various things (which Governor Joe Brown had done more than once) and leadership progressively transferred from the civilian government to a pseudodictatorship under Lee vaguely similar to what happened in Germany in the last couple years of WWI.

Crowsbeak posted:

I could see that. but the place would still be hosed. They won't be discovering oil for a long time, and there main export is losing. I could see them becoming a effective colony of the brits, but even their victory in the war wouldn't end liberalism from expanding in the UK, so that would reate long term problems. I imagine the place getting annexed within ten years of oil being discovered by the USA.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Well yeah that's the other problem. The south was both economically and ideologically wedded to the plantation economy and even if the blockade went away somehow they'd at best had a much smaller share of the overall cotton market.

One other possibility I toss around when daydreaming this stuff is the potential for the much-feared wide-scale slave uprising, potentially fostered and financed by the North, particularly with southern white manpower so diminished and exhausted by the war.

Jeb! Repetition posted:

The Civil War was the very first imperialist "humanitarian intervention" the United States did, and just like the Iraq War it we left the region worse than we found it and full of extremists after early abandonment of rebuilding efforts. That's my take, and yes it's hot.

Deified Data posted:

Can someone quote me the worst, craziest thing Scott Adams has ever said?

Every time my GF listens to an episode of Tim Ferris's podcast with a loon like Adams or Sam Harris in it she always comes back to me with "this guy isn't as crazy as you made him sound, you should listen to the interview", and apparently "he literally believes in The Secret" wasn't enough. I sometimes wonder if Ferris isn't low-key one of these guys himself, but I can't find anything on him besides the fact that he has people like Adams and Harris on and the inherent insanity that comes with being a Silicon Valley bro.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

The South had been organized around preventing any sort of large scale slave uprising since the Haitian Revolution. The ban on teaching slaves how to read was an immediate reaction to Nat Turner being able to read the bible and identify with the Jews in Egypt. Slave patrols constantly marched along the major roads, and any white man could be pressed into the militia at any time. All of the most successful slave revolts in the South were merely mass escapes.

Deified Data posted:

Can you expand on this? As far as I've been able to tell he's a bland self-help "I did it and so can you" sort of guy, no real signs of gargling gorilla cum.

I see he's got an interview with Rubin where he discusses the "groupthink of Silicon Valley" which sounds telling but I don't know if I have the patience for that.

Captain_Maclaine posted:

Yeah, I know, and in time of peace that was fine, but the slave patrols were significantly diminished in number by how many men had been called away to the army, especially late in the war (which many rich planters who had evaded the draft via the twenty negro law were increasingly alarmed at). My bullshit counterfactual runs along the lines of if the war continued past 1865, what are the odds the enslaved population of the South would begin to at least act more aggressively to emancipate themselves, perhaps even rising in open revolt, particularly if we add in elements of outside assistance from Union saboteurs running guns to the slaves (yes I know white Northerners weren't that much keener on arming the slaves themselves shut up we're what-ifing).

Agean90 posted:

there's also the factor of heavily pro-union areas in the mountains. Half of Tennessee was under martial law due to pro union sentiment after it tried to break off

zegermans posted:

galaxy brain: we would have been better off long-term if we kept VA intact

Agean90 posted:

there's also the factor of heavily pro-union areas in the mountains. Half of Tennessee was under martial law due to pro union sentiment after it tried to break off