|
zoux posted:I thought you had to say Warfighter now. As Brad Colbert( fictionally) puts it so well in the Generation Kill mini-series, "we're not doing any fighting out here, we're just using the machines.. semiskilled labor".
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 15:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 16:37 |
|
|
my dad posted:Was there anything actively preventing them from industrializing, other than the profitability of cotton trade? This may have already been said, but the money needed to make industry possible in terms of infrastructure was funneled into more slaves as that was where the real money was. bewbies posted:This is true, however, I think you're seriously underestimating just how wealthy the antebellum south was, even independent of its slaves. Had their been a serious economic impetus to do so, they had more than enough resources to invest very heavily in modern industry. As it happens, when that impetus finally came around, their economy had largely been wrecked by the war. That is the real issue though. The South was high on the cotton is king idea and thus saw no need to change a system that to them gave them global prominence, completely unaware that the world was already starting to move past them even before the civil war.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 15:47
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:A major factor is that slaves are massively expensive and also hugely profitable, so taking risks on new ventures with them is not really strongly incentivized. Just because slavery was profitable for agricultural use doesn't mean their effectiveness was at all transferable to industrial purposes. I feel like if it wouldn't've been massively difficult if not impossible to integrate slaves into industrial processes, then southerners would have done it more. As time went on, would slaves be suited to operating combine harvesters? An overseer watching after them so they could run after the tractor if the slave misbehaved? And I don't think a factory floor would've worked well with slave labor. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Aug 10, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 15:57
|
|
|
Yeah, I've heard people suggest that the profitability of slaves was quite restricted to cotton - because cotton is lucrative, but complicated to pick and so impossible to mechanise, yet requires very little training. I think people underestimate the cost of the apparatus of supporting slavery is, from the rich dude's POV feeding and maintaining a slave is not inherently a way better proposition than paying someone to feed and maintain themselves. Politically the South was very much controlled by the slave owners of course, so they weren't gonna disrupt their power.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:13
|
|
|
Well, given a civic society where all non-black people would lynch you for misbehaving in the slightest, perhaps skilled and semi-skilled slave labor would profitable as well( such as you see, kind of, in for-profit prisons), but that's not the one that evolved.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:17
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:And I don't think a factory floor would've worked well with slave labor. Why not? It has worked perfectly well throughout the modern age.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:20
|
|
|
I suppose you could argue that subsistence wages are an improvement from slavery because the increased ongoing costs for the manufacturer are mitigated by the fact that you don't have to pay for them up front.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:22
|
|
quote:The plantation South was a rapidly growing, economically dynamic region, slavery was a viable and robust labor system, and slave plantations were highly profitable, efficient, and fully capable of out-competing free farms. quote:In Slavery Debates Fogel repeatedly asserts the claim first espoused in Time on the Cross that the overriding reason for the greater efficiency of plantations was their ability to exploit the gang system. quote:Slaves “who toiled in the gangs of the intermediate and large plantations were on average over 70 per cent more productive than either free farmers or slaves on small plantations. These gang laborers, who in 1860 constituted about half of the adult slave population, worked so intensely that they produced as much output in roughly thirty-five minutes as did free farmers in a full hour.” Slavery Debates, p. 36. The productivity advantage existed for gang-system slaves over free farms in both the North and the South after adjusting for soil quality, labor quality, the existence of work animals, and other farm capital. Slavery Debates, pp. 29-30. quote:Over the 50 years preceding the Civil War, picking efficiency increased at about 1.6 percent a year. The increase in picking efficiency was correlated with yield and quality improvements that further added to the incentives to grow cotton. quote:To put the pre-Civil War increase in picking efficiency into perspective, the early mechanical reaper, which represents the textbook example of an antebellum labor-saving mechanical innovation, increased wheat-harvest labor efficiency relative to using a cradle by roughly 50 to 100 percent.62 Our data on the impact of Mexican hybrids suggest that their impact on cotton harvest efficiency easily surpassed that of the reaper on the grain harvest. The total impact of the Mexican hybrids would of course have been even greater because of their effects on yields and cotton quality. The mechanical reaper had no parallel impact on either yields or quality. http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Economic-History/olmstead-050413.pdf
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:34
|
|
|
Previously, you had to house them and feed them. Now, you pay the legal minimum to them and you feel secure that they won't abandon you because they have neither time nor money to gain additional skills while other employers don't really feel like paying them any more than you do, either.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:35
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Just because slavery was profitable for agricultural use doesn't mean their effectiveness was at all transferable to industrial purposes. I feel like if it wouldn't've been massively difficult if not impossible to integrate slaves into industrial processes, then southerners would have done it more. As time went on, would slaves be suited to operating combine harvesters? An overseer watching after them so they could run after the tractor if the slave misbehaved? And I don't think a factory floor would've worked well with slave labor. Somewhat counteracting what I said earlier, I'm kind of curious how well slavery would have worked if it had survived until the advent of Fordism. An assembly line where each guy does exactly the same thing over and over seems very easy to quality check compared to traditional craftsmanship. Edit: juuust to be totally clear I mean 'well' as in 'well for dirt bag slave owners who were scum'. Slavery is horrifically bad m'kay. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Aug 10, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:42
|
|
feedmegin posted:Somewhat counteracting what I said earlier, I'm kind of curious how well slavery would have worked if it had survived until the advent of Fordism. An assembly line where each guy does exactly the same thing over and over seems very easy to quality check compared to traditional craftsmanship. Given that's what slave gangs did on plantations already, probably extremely well.
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 16:45
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Yeah, I've heard people suggest that the profitability of slaves was quite restricted to cotton - because cotton is lucrative, but complicated to pick and so impossible to mechanise Clearly not impossible, although it took International Harvester until 1944 to pull it off.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 17:14
|
|
|
bewbies posted:Why not? It has worked perfectly well throughout the modern age. Good man
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 17:33
|
|
|
This is getting hilariously dangerously close to the "They were better off when they were slaves" territory.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:00
|
|
|
I think the point is more that the slave owners were incredibly well off when they owned slaves which I don't think anybody would dispute.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:07
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:Expand because I suspect you're way off base. The key question here is "Why was the slave more productive". Because for some reason the slave decided to work more efficiently, or because of a far more aggressive means of pulling work out of them compared to a free worker. If the entire reason why they were productive was a more direct and legal threat of violence than the more subtle (heh) ones used against free workers then it's basically promoting a view of "Companies should be allowed to treat the workers as sub-human to increase production." Any such gains are going to be limited in long-term use, either by the accelerated failure of the workers physically or by a finite limit to just how much they can be pushed to work harder, if not both.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:16
|
|
|
Taerkar posted:This is getting hilariously dangerously close to the "They were better off when they were slaves" territory. Describing the economics of slavery isn't advocating slavery.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:21
|
|
|
Taerkar posted:This is getting hilariously dangerously close to the "They were better off when they were slaves" territory. lol what the hell
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:26
|
|
Taerkar posted:The key question here is "Why was the slave more productive". Because for some reason the slave decided to work more efficiently, or because of a far more aggressive means of pulling work out of them compared to a free worker. If the entire reason why they were productive was a more direct and legal threat of violence than the more subtle (heh) ones used against free workers then it's basically promoting a view of "Companies should be allowed to treat the workers as sub-human to increase production." What the gently caress are you talking about
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:29
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:What the gently caress are you talking about
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:31
|
|
HEY GAIL posted:s/he is routinely confusing "productive, useful, or pragmatic" with "morally right" No kidding.
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:32
|
|
|
HEY GAIL posted:s/he is routinely confusing "productive, useful, or pragmatic" with "morally right" In other words he's looking at it like an economist.  EDIT: Mind you, discussions of the productivity of the slave system in the South can go to really  places really fast, so I don't blame Taerkar for his reaction.
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 10, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:45
|
|
|
Taerkar posted:The key question here is "Why was the slave more productive". Because for some reason the slave decided to work more efficiently, or because of a far more aggressive means of pulling work out of them compared to a free worker. If the entire reason why they were productive was a more direct and legal threat of violence than the more subtle (heh) ones used against free workers then it's basically promoting a view of "Companies should be allowed to treat the workers as sub-human to increase production." I mean I think the fact that slavery persisted over many lifetimes suggest that the latter two aren't actually true. Turns out you apparently can just burn through people by horribly mistreating them and coercing labour out of them. And the universe doesn't implode and neither does society necessarily unless someone goes to war with you over it. Which personally, I'd read as an excellent exhortation of the importance and effectiveness of the ideological opposition to slavery displayed by abolitionists, because without that it's difficult to see why it would end.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 18:50
|
|
|
There are other things you can look at as well. Life expectancy for slaves sucked but a lot of that was about very limited efforts to provide for childbirth despite the fact slavers also demanded that female slaves conceive and give birth at close to the biological ceiling rate (also greatly increasing the mortality of slave women). On average slaves worked very intensively but also fewer hours than a comparable white agricultural worker. Their diets were extremely protein and calorie heavy, if basic, for their time.
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:00
|
|
|
High energy diets certainly were part of mass labour elsewhere, railwaymen were often very well fed if I remember right.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:03
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Which personally, I'd read as an excellent exhortation of the importance and effectiveness of the ideological opposition to slavery displayed by abolitionists, because without that it's difficult to see why it would end. This is correct. There were two ways American slavery was going to end. Either by having the slaves forcefully taken away, or as a result of (mainly international) political pressure that translated into economic consequences. Abolitionists did a lot to bring about the former; the latter wasn't going to happen without a full-scale international abolitionist movement.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:06
|
|
|
Their (the slaves) diets sucked though. It was basically just loading you up with pork and hoping that would be fine.
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:06
|
|
|
Yeah, I'm not advocating slavery, I'm advocating big govwrnment w/r/t what 'job creators' can get away with. I can also totally see slave industrialization. Industrial work takes crafting from a single skilled artisan and gives it to machines and low skill labor that operates them. In effect, the employee is a just a cog, and slaveoners are already considering slaves property. The Nazis did that (in a very wasteful way, because lol Nazis), sweatshops basically do that whenever they're found, and Amrican prison labor is kinda that. You just need a slaveovner of vision and means to see it become a reality.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:19
|
|
|
I could swear there was at least some political argument by the Republican Party at the time arguing against slavery expansion in the territories as tramping on free labor. Which I seem to recall amusing me as the Republicans using "the slaves are gunna steal your jobs!" working just as well back then as current job threatening, and it probably being one of the last times Republicans were in support of labor. On the flip side, there was definitely some Southern slavery apologia to the effect of Northerners mistreating their workers more than slaves were.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:44
|
|
MadDogMike posted:I could swear there was at least some political argument by the Republican Party at the time arguing against slavery expansion in the territories as tramping on free labor. Which I seem to recall amusing me as the Republicans using "the slaves are gunna steal your jobs!" working just as well back then as current job threatening, and it probably being one of the last times Republicans were in support of labor. On the flip side, there was definitely some Southern slavery apologia to the effect of Northerners mistreating their workers more than slaves were. If by 'at least some' you mean 'the primary reason offered to opposing slavery' then yes. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Soil_Party
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:45
|
|
|
Taerkar posted:The key question here is "Why was the slave more productive". Because for some reason the slave decided to work more efficiently, or because of a far more aggressive means of pulling work out of them compared to a free worker. If the entire reason why they were productive was a more direct and legal threat of violence than the more subtle (heh) ones used against free workers then it's basically promoting a view of "Companies should be allowed to treat the workers as sub-human to increase production." Alternately, I think it can and should be fed into a discussion about workers benefiting from productivity enhancements, especially those that increase stress on them, and whether we should treat productivity as the main goal rather than as a means to produce value for the people involved.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 19:51
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Yeah, I've heard people suggest that the profitability of slaves was quite restricted to cotton - because cotton is lucrative, but complicated to pick and so impossible to mechanise, yet requires very little training. I think people underestimate the cost of the apparatus of supporting slavery is, from the rich dude's POV feeding and maintaining a slave is not inherently a way better proposition than paying someone to feed and maintain themselves. It was profitable in all agricultural endeavors, with sugar and tobacco being two common commodities produced in the south. Training is not a huge issue because it also makes the slave more valuable. On the the Carolina coast slave buyers paid a premium to import people from rice growing regions of West Africa for their specialized skills. Rice production can be notoriously complex. Some writers have even theorized this as a reason chattel slavery was uncommon in East Asia, but it didn't prove an impairment to the plantation system in America. The slaves probably did benefit from their skills somewhat however, I guess because they were valuable they were less likely to be sold off far away and probably given more control over their life generally. Today their descendants the Gullah people speak the only African creole language native to the US. Elsewhere I feel like it would have been natural for slaves to take up a role in the southern logging and saw mill industry of the latter 19th century, had history taken another course.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 20:35
|
|
|
It depends a LOT on where and when you are talking about. American slavery is vastly different from Caribbean slavery and American slavery in the 1700s is really different than the 1800s. To give you an idea, the French figured out when the sweet spot was for actually training their slaves in sugar cane agriculture in . . . Haiti I think? Somewhere in the Caribbean or their Caribbean-coast S. American possessions. Anyways, working conditions were loving awful and slaves tended to die really fast due to disease. Why bother training and feeding a slave who is going to die quickly? They worked the newbies like rented mules, fed them the bare minimum necessary, and didn't assign them complex tasks. After the time of the year with the most illness passed and the big die-off was done they gathered the survivors (many of them we think with either natural or acquired immunizes) trained them in the more complex tasks, and took a whole lot better care of them. They had formulas for figuring out the sweet spot for putting resources into slaves to slow their dying off vs. how much they were buying them for. Remember: efficiency is only a virtue as long as waste is costly and damaging to your enterprise. If you have an essentially unlimited supply of cheap labor you really don't give a gently caress how much you kill them. It's the closing of the N. Atlantic slave trade that made slaves in the US as valuable as they were, which lead to all sorts of bizarre situations like when they built some canals in Louisiana in the 1830s. The work was dangerous, so no one wanted to use their slaves, to they brought down a bunch of Irish. Immigrants were plentiful, cheap to hire, and you didn't really give a gently caress if they died. See also: the treatment of natives as laborers by the Spanish early in the colonial period. Potosi was an absolute hellhole but the inefficiencies weren't being paid for by the people who profited from it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 22:15
|
|
|
I know that the lifespan of an African slave in the Brazilian cane fields was measured in a handful of years, since the Portuguese flouted the international ban on the slave trade and could replenish their supply. The more "humane" treatment of African slaves in the US was to maintain a breeding population, since the US recognized the international ban on importing slaves in 1807 but didn't outlaw slavery until later. I've heard, but can't substantiate, that there's a Portuguese idiom analogous to "good enough for government work" which was "good enough for the English" which refers to the practice of disguising slave trading activities from English enforcers. zoux fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Aug 10, 2017 |
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 22:18
|
|
|
bewbies posted:The south was less wealthy than the north on a per capita basis, but so much of the south's wealth was tied up in their planter class, their political clout was pretty much unmatched Also per capita income/wealth estimates of the antebellum South are driven downwards in a misleading way by the 1/3 of the population that was enslaved. Using the free population specifically, per capita income/wealth in the South comes out a little better in comparison to the North, albeit still behind. The real difference, as you say, is the total concentration of wealth and income in the hands of the tiny minority of substantial planters who were the wealthiest class of people in the world. Northern society was also very economically unequal but rather less so. The average or median free white Southerner was poorer than a similar Northerner. His condition wasn't too much worse than an industrial laborer in a Northern city, but his immediate counterpart in the Northern small farmer was not only more prosperous but also had other consolations like better access to consumer goods, transportation, social goods like education, etc. etc. quote:Without the war, they, and slavery, weren't going anywhere...even as cotton prices bottomed out, new opportunities for free labor to make the planter class gobs of money (read: oil) were about to emerge. The Confederacy's petroleum reserves would have been located in remote parts of Texas and Oklahoma where the main economic activity was ranching, so they would not have benefited the wealthy agrarian planter class. The development of a substantial oil industry might actually have been a serious political problem for a putative independent Confederacy. It would have created a new and extremely dynamic center of wealth and economic activity in a part of the Confederacy that was already geographically and economically distinct from either the Deep South or Old South. Given the structure of the Confederate government and the leeway granted to the states, this isn't necessary a positive development for the slave-holding elites. Also, the oil industry in America began in Pennsylvania and radiated out from there to the places where petroleum deposits were discovered--first PA, then southern California, then Oklahoma and Texas. Oil exploration, extraction, and refining in Texas were initially carried out by by the expertise of oil firms like Standard Oil of Pennsylvania, and funded by northern banks. Local capacity developed over time and eventually Texas became the center of the oil industry in North America. Because the Confederacy's banking and industrial sectors were undeveloped and there wouldn't have been much impetus to develop it further, you might be looking at a very different developmental path for oil in Confederate Texas. For example, maybe the necessary expertise and capital would be supplied by Northern or British firms entering into pseudo-colonial arrangements with Texan landowners, a la the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Or something similar to how out-of-state mining interests accessed coal in West Virginia. Finally, boll weevils. quote:This is true, however, I think you're seriously underestimating just how wealthy the antebellum south was, even independent of its slaves. Had their been a serious economic impetus to do so, they had more than enough resources to invest very heavily in modern industry. The problem here is the Confederacy was almost completely lacking in liquid capital. Elite planters were extremely rich but they didn't hold a lot of cash. Wealth was tied up in real estate and human property, which were not easily convertible to cash. Even selling off land and slaves to quickly generate capital was complicated by the fact that lots of potential buyers did not themselves hold much cash. The planter class was heavily reliant on debt for liquidity. Cotton harvests were regular, reliable, and valuable, so planters could make plans based on anticipated cotton profits. In terms of household spending merchants sold on credit and settled up when the cotton was sold, lubricated by loans from British and Northern banks. For larger loans they could put up collateral in land and slaves. What little industry and transportation infrastructure was present in the antebellum South owed much to funding from outside the South. The lack of infrastructure and industrial investment in the South before the American Civil War was a feature, not a bug. This becomes pretty obvious if you look at the transportation network. Southern road, canal, and rail construction are correctly derided as inferior in extent and quality to construction in the North. However, this only really applied to moving goods and people within and across the South. It was considerably difficult to travel between different sections of the South. However, it was pretty easy to move goods and people out of the South, because that facilitated the export of cotton to industrial cities in Europe and the North. Southern firms did invest (usually with capital assistance from British/Northern banks) in some canals and railroads, but typically those only traveled a short distance to river depots where they could start their journey overseas. This kind of network is also characteristic of a colonial economy. For example, early railways in Mexico ran almost exclusively in a North-South direction, because they were not designed to serve Mexicans. They were there to move goods from Mexico to the USA, and vice versa. The same applies to colonial India or Africa. Tredegar Iron Works was founded to supply Southern demand for railway construction materials. I think it is very significant that the works were very financially precarious and barely survived their first years of operation, largely because Southern railway firms were too poorly capitalized to make payments. Things only stabilized after Joseph R. Anderson took over the company and used his military connections to transition into military and other government contracts. Tredegar couldn't survive operating within the Southern regional economy, instead it had to be propped up by (essentially) federal subsidies. This leads us to the conclusion that the antebellum South developed industry and infrastructure to a level sufficient to its economic needs, or at least to the needs of the politically dominant planter class. Would that basis have changed dramatically if the Confederacy had won the war, stimulating more interest in industrial investment? Not necessarily. The end of hostilities and the lifting of the Union blockade would restore the CSA's access to the same international trade system that had served it through 1861. There was very little incentive for private individuals to invest in infrastructure or industry before the war, and the same conditions would apply after the Confederacy won. There's a reason that there was exactly one major manufacturing enterprise in the Confederacy, at Tredegar, plus a handful of smaller firms elsewhere. Industrial investment would have to be publicly supported. Purposeful large-scale government-backed programs to develop domestic transport and manufacturing capacity for reasons of national improvement ... meaning, the exact type of "American System" that built up the North, which the Southern political leadership had consistently opposed for at least the preceding 60 years. It is extremely unlikely that they would have the political wherewithal to do this. Partly this is because there are serious problems of regionalism built in to any such initiative. For example, the most practical locus for industrial development is obviously Virginia, because it has the most developed infrastructure, the largest available population to supply labor, better access to raw materials, etc. There are other candidates like Atlanta, New Orleans, and so forth, but the problem remains the same: there are specific areas of the Confederacy that might be well-suited to industrial development, and very large areas that were not at all. Why should Alabama pay for factories around Richmond, either directly through taxation or indirectly through debt service on deficit spending? This is one of the major reasons regional tension grew between the North and South to begin with, and expecting it to evaporate in an independent CSA is just wishful thinking. There is after all a reason that the Confederate constitution had specific provisions barring the central government from any preference for one state over another in spending on development. In sum, there are a lot of reasons to think that the Confederacy would have faced enormous and likely insurmountable obstacles to industrializing its economy.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 22:37
|
|
|
Schenck v. U.S. posted:
Basically it would have looked more like a South American export agriculture economy - potentially with the lack of internal development and political reliance on agricultural elites that goes with it - than a slave holding copy of the north. It's worth noting that developing the interior of the south was an ongoing effort well into the 20th century. If you look at a lot of educational benchmarks the south persistently lagged behind even the west well into the 20th century, and that's even with just separating out black schools into their own category.
|
|
#
?
Aug 10, 2017 22:48
|
|
|
poo poo, just look at TVA.
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2017 00:39
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Basically it would have looked more like a South American export agriculture economy - potentially with the lack of internal development and political reliance on agricultural elites that goes with it - than a slave holding copy of the north. Hell, the South is still backwards if you measure education. I should know, my state was 49th in the nation a few years ago IIRC.
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2017 00:49
|
|
|
Schenck v. U.S. posted:This leads us to the conclusion that the antebellum South developed industry and infrastructure to a level sufficient to its economic needs, or at least to the needs of the politically dominant planter class. Would that basis have changed dramatically if the Confederacy had won the war, stimulating more interest in industrial investment? Not necessarily. The end of hostilities and the lifting of the Union blockade would restore the CSA's access to the same international trade system that had served it through 1861. There was very little incentive for private individuals to invest in infrastructure or industry before the war, and the same conditions would apply after the Confederacy won. There's a reason that there was exactly one major manufacturing enterprise in the Confederacy, at Tredegar, plus a handful of smaller firms elsewhere. Industrial investment would have to be publicly supported. Purposeful large-scale government-backed programs to develop domestic transport and manufacturing capacity for reasons of national improvement ... meaning, the exact type of "American System" that built up the North, which the Southern political leadership had consistently opposed for at least the preceding 60 years. It is extremely unlikely that they would have the political wherewithal to do this. You say that, but don't forget this fun little clause in the Confederate constitution: quote:To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes; but neither this, nor any other clause contained in the constitution, shall ever be construed to delegate the power to Congress to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce; except for the purpose of furnishing lights, beacons, and buoys, and other aids to navigation upon the coasts, and the improvement of harbors and the removing of obstructions in river navigation, in all which cases, such duties shall be laid on the navigation facilitated thereby, as may be necessary to pay the costs and expenses thereof Even if they'd somehow won the war the Confederacy would've been doomed.
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2017 03:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 16:37 |
|
|
Surprisingly enough, that particular clause is critical in Turtledove's alternate history book.
|
|
#
?
Aug 11, 2017 03:55
|
|
