- babypolis
- Nov 4, 2009
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john jay sounds like a cool dude i voted for him
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Nov 17, 2015 19:03
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May 5, 2024 15:15
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- babypolis
- Nov 4, 2009
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i will forever love anyone who effortposts about historical elections btw
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Nov 17, 2015 19:04
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- babypolis
- Nov 4, 2009
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Cool, thanks.
In that case I am throwing all my support behind Jay, because I do not only support his stance on slavery due to ethical reasons, but also because IMHO slavery was a major factor that held the American economy back. It was only profitable for a really small class of people who were overrepresented in Washington and in the trade policies of the time.
The US could have started to get properly industrialized much earlier, were it not for the free trade with the UK, which hampered manufacturing industries but poured money into the pockets of plantation owners (and hardly anybody else).
In other words, if you love the US as much as I do and want to see it prosper, vote Jay/Adams 88!
yeah that idea that american greatness was built on top of slavery has always seem pretty weird to me considering how inefficient slavery is
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Nov 17, 2015 19:38
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- babypolis
- Nov 4, 2009
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I look foward to forming the Socialist States of America in a few years
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Nov 17, 2015 19:44
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- babypolis
- Nov 4, 2009
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like pretty much everything else in the american constitution it was a weird compromise between the large and populous states and the small and lovely ones
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Nov 30, 2015 19:37
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May 5, 2024 15:15
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- babypolis
- Nov 4, 2009
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immediately after the war southerners used vagrancy laws and unilateral contracts to tie black workers to the land, but reconstruction gave the freed slaves the vote, which resulted in the real but meager gain of escaping gang labor and allowing individual black families to operate as economic units, with parents deciding how much their kids would labor, even if they were still living on the same master's land and stuck in debt slavery paying him more for food than he paid them for their cotton.
that's sharecropping, and it worked - by 1870 america was already growing more cotton than it had in 1860 - partly because poor white southerners who had been subsistence farmers before the war became cotton growers just like the black sharecroppers on the former plantations. it took some investments in bureaucracy, transportation infrastructure, and bringing things like those vagrancy laws in to use the state as an overseer - it's not a victory of free labor, it's a victory of modern forms of coercion over the forms used in slavery, as we can see by the descent of poor whites into pretty close to the same situation the former slaves were in. soon, southern white terrorism overcome the northern appetite for military occupation and black political rights were extinguished in the south for almost a century, freezing the sharecroppers in place basically until the great migrations of the early 20th century
that's the impression i get from this book empire of cotton. here's some more context of what i can understand from memory, having read the chapter about this last night:
the blacks had wanted to become subsistence farmers, which made most of their former northern supporters cast them off as 'lazy' (not all, thaddeus stevens and a few other radical republicans were willing to accept lower cotton profits), but the same processes that drew poor whites into the cotton trade made it impossible for blacks to stay out. from what i can understand, new railroads and the expanding market economy allowed poor farmers to sell lots of cotton with low transportation costs, but also led to them going into debt buying both consumer goods and the food they weren't growing for themselves any more. meanwhile, the price of cotton dropped with increasing supply but southern farmers couldn't grow anything else their creditors would accept as collateral because cotton was still reliably saleable, so the farmers kept falling behind, their debt increased, and as time went on more and more farmers dropped from owning or leasing land to being pure agricultural wage laborers
at the same time the former plantation owners and now major landlords remained locally rich but lost pace with elites from other regions. cotton manufacturers paid less money for more cotton and held more and more debt from the farmers they were buying from. it made the south poorer but kept the world cotton industry running on southern cotton, which no-one had expected when emancipation first hit
the same thing happened to farmers in india, egypt, and the ottoman empire. in egypt the landlords' mortgaged their farms to british creditors on a massive scale, which led to the british occupying the country for about forty years to guarantee their investments.
probably not totally accurate, but it's what i can remember
i loved this post btw. oystertoadfish is a forums treasure
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Jan 26, 2016 11:17
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Nov 17, 2015 19:03
