Did Political Economy Cause the "Civil" War?

[Speaker to Animals]

Florida:

Laws clearly constitutional and as decided to be by the Federal Judiciary as well as by the Courts of all the non slaveholding States where the question has been presented for adjudication have been by counter legislation rendered inoperative, laws without the power to pass which none will deny that the Constitution would not have been adopted.

The nullification of these laws by the Legislatures of two thirds of the non slaveholding States important as it is in itself is additionally as is furnishing evidence of an open disregard of constitutional obligation, and of the rights and interests of the slaveholding States and of a deep and inveterate hostility to the people of these States.

The Congressional halls where the members should meet with fraternal feelings, a just regard for the interests of all the States there represented and respect for the feelings of all its members has been prostituted to the daily denunciation and vituperation of the slave holding States as sanctioning oppression robbery and all villainies, thus subjecting the members from these States to the degradation of gross and constantly repeated insults, and compelling the exclusion from our public press of the debates of our national Legislature or the circulation of the most incendiary matter.

By the agency of a large proportion of the members from the non slaveholding States books have been published and circulated amongst us the direct tendency and avowed purpose of which is to excite insurrection and servile war with all their attendant horrors. A President has recently been elected, an obscure and illiterate man without experience in public affairs or any general reputation mainly if not exclusively on account of a settled and often proclaimed hostility to our institutions and a fixed purpose to abolish them. It is denied that it is the purpose of the party soon to enter into the possession of the powers of the Federal Government to abolish slavery by any direct legislative act. This has never been charged by any one. But it has been announced by all the leading men and presses of the party that the ultimate accomplishment of this result is its settled purpose and great central principle. That no more slave States shall be admitted into the confederacy and that the slaves from their rapid increase (the highest evidence of the humanity of their owners will become value less. Nothing is more certain than this and at no distant day. What must be the condition of the slaves themselves when their number becomes so large that their labor will be of no value to their owners. Their natural tendency every where shown where the race has existed to idleness vagrancy and crime increased by an inability to procure subsistence. Can any thing be more impudently false than the pretense that this state of things is to be brought about from considerations of humanity to the slaves.

It is in so many words saying to you we will not burn you at the stake but we will torture you to death by a slow fire we will not confiscate your property and consign you to a residence and equality with the african but that destiny certainly awaits your children – and you must quietly submit or we will force you to submission – men who can hesitate to resist such aggressions are slaves already and deserve their destiny. The members of the Republican party has denied that the party will oppose the admission of any new state where slavery shall be tolerated. But on the contrary they declare that on this point they will make no concession or compromise. It is manifest that they will not because to do so would be the dissolution of the party.

[Speaker to Animals]

Georgia:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them. A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. While it attracts to itself by its creed the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government, anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose. By anti-slavery it is made a power in the state. The question of slavery was the great difficulty in the way of the formation of the Constitution. While the subordination and the political and social inequality of the African race was fully conceded by all, it was plainly apparent that slavery would soon disappear from what are now the non-slave-holding States of the original thirteen. The opposition to slavery was then, as now, general in those States and the Constitution was made with direct reference to that fact. But a distinct abolition party was not formed in the United States for more than half a century after the Government went into operation. The main reason was that the North, even if united, could not control both branches of the Legislature during any portion of that time. Therefore such an organization must have resulted either in utter failure or in the total overthrow of the Government. The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic the navigating, commercial, and manufacturing interests of the North began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business (which yet continue), and $500,000 is now paid them annually out of the Treasury. The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign shipbuilders and against competition in the coasting trade. Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burden of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above $2,000,000 annually for the support of these objects. Theses interests, in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers and the reduction in postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about $7,000,000 annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury under the name of postal deficiency. The manufacturing interests entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slave-holding States. Wielding these great States it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor the infancy of their business in this country, the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries toward them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence. These reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.

[Smitty-48]

The expansion of...

But that was the political economy right there, America had had slavery for centuries, was never a deal breaker before, the vast vast majority of the country firmly believed in white supremacy and that blacks were sub human chattel, and barely anybody in the North actually wanted those blacks freed, because they were afraid they would come north, a rapin' and a pillagin' on the white women, and taking all the jerrbs, the whole reason the Union sent the troops in, was political economy; the Confederacy was suddenly a competing empire for control of the continent, and they were out to stop it at all costs, the bankers in New York most of all.

Slavery was never an issue to go to war over, the war was exactly for what Lincoln said at the beginning, to preserve the Union, as in running everything from Washington and Wall Street, with no competitor to challenge it.

[Okeefenokee]

Same old shit.

No one ever said no one cared about slavery in 1861.

The intent in trying to pigeon whole the civil war into an issue over only slavery is to create a false moral cause.

The largest race riot in American history took place in NYC after the emancipation proclamation announced that conscription for an already unpopular war would re-purposed from preserving the union in favor of freeing the slaves.

You want to believe in fairy tales that never were. Wars aren't fought selflessly over high minded ideals for the benefit of others. That's childish nonsense. Northern industrial states waged economic war against the agrarian south from 1787 to 1864. The excuses changed from one year to the next, but the goal was always the same.

I can be an adult and recognize that the abolition of slavery as a result of this conflict was a good thing, but I'm not so childish that I am fooled into believing the motivation for any of it was any of the naive sentiments that are trotted out as the motives.

The south wanted slavery because it was good for them. The north wanted to end slavery because anything that was good for the south was bad for them. The south didn't need the north. Two thirds of the southern crop was exported to Europe. The fledgling northern industry needed subservient mercantile possessions in order to compete. Without colonial possessions, the north had only the south to subjugate, so they tried over and over and over to break the south.

They tried tariffs. They tried taxes. Over and over these naked attempts were rebuked with threats of secession. The debates of 1787 were public record, and no one was ignorant to what was happening, except some of the common people.

Finally, it came to slavery itself. The same states, which had campaigned for generations to subjugate the south, gave up on tariffs and taxes, and went straight to the source of southern economic solvency, not because they gave a single shit about the slaves, but because they knew that was the only thing propping up an agrarian system long past when it would otherwise have been competitive.

Again, it wasn't slavery for slavery's sake, on either side. You'd have to be a fool to think that slavery was defended or opposed simply on moral grounds. Slavery was the life blood of the south, and was the ultimate obstacle to the north in their efforts to subjugate their would-be colonial possession.

It was an economic conflict, same as just about any other.

[Smitty-48]

Ironically, the Union's position vis a vis the South has a lot of parallels with the Nazis, the Union essentially invoked "Slavery!" the way the Nazis invoked "Bolshevism!", in order to justify a military annexation and subjugation.

The Southrons were invoked much as the Nazis invoked the "Slavs"; anything goes, even total war of annihilation, the Union could do whatever to the Southrons, no holds barred, rape them, pillage them, burn Dixie to the ground, because they were ostensibly "evil", not just the plantation owners, but all of them, it wasn't just the defeat of two armies in the field, the Union cut a swath of destruction across the land which wouldn't be surpassed until the First World War, and they did not simply target the planting aristocracy, they destroyed everything in their path.

In terms of the black people in the South, the primary interest of the Union, was to militarize them, to unleash them against a defenseless civilian population without restraint, the contraband of war was employed as a terror weapon, and very deliberately.

The Lost Cause is not about slavery and never was, the Yankees allowed for indentured slavery, they placated the plantation owners first and foremost after the war, the Lost Cause is because, by 19th century standards, the Union basically nuked the place into the stone age, then went a rapin' and a pillagin' on the white women, then rubbed all their noses in it for decades after, still rubbing their noses in it now actually.

You have to factor in how utterly shocking it was for the Union to wage industrial total war against Dixie, it was the Operation Barbarossa of its day. Even now, 150 years later, when Americans express a fear and loathing of government, that's not the British government, wasn't the British Crown who ever waged total war of annihilation against the American people, only the American government has ever done that.

[Okeefenokee]

Hey look everyone, I have a wall of text written for consumption that proves the real motive of the Trojan war.

My husband, you were lost young from life, and have left me
a widow in your house, and the boy is only a baby
who was born to you and me, the unhappy. I think he will never
come of age, for before then head to heel this city
will be sacked, for you, its defender, are gone, you who guarded
the city, and the grave wives, and the innocent children,
wives who before long must go away in the hollow ships,
and among them I shall also go, and you, my child, follow
where I go, and there do much hard work that is unworthy
of you, drudgery for a hard master; or else some Achaian
will take you by hand and hurl you from the tower into horrible
death, in anger because Hektor once killed his brother,
or his father, or his son; there were so many Achaians
whose teeth bit the vast earth, beaten down by the hands of Hektor.
Your father was no merciful man in the horror of battle.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

There's no telling how 2116 will view us.

Oh, I am sure they will be too busy mining cryptocurrency 21 hours a day while soylent and stimulants are being auto-fed to them rectally by their AI overlords to be concerned with what their primate ancestors were up to.

[heydaralon]

The Civil War caused this thread! Think about it:

If Fort Sumter had not been fired upon, this thread would not exist, because there would be no Civil War for it to reference. There may have been a different thread, but it would not be about the Civil War that happened in the mid-nineteenth century in the United States. It gets stranger. Appomatox Courthouse could have been a filming location for Judge Judy, if they had wanted to make the show civil war themed! This is why I don't like to go down these rabbit holes, because there is no telling where they will take me. I have so many insightful points to make about the civil war causing this thread on MHF, but some of this insight will probably be lost on you folks. That's ok. I have my imagination to keep me company, and no one is going to tell me that the civil war was a conflict between the North and South, because using geography as a defining construct did not come out until the 1960's. If you asked a antebellum Southerner what direction Polaris was, they would probably beat you with a whip, especially if you were black. But they would not even know what a map or compass was, because the "South" did not exist, at least not with those quotation marks. They would have just called it the South, not the "South." I hope this comment puts things in perspective for you guys.

[Fife]

One or two of you might be interested in some, gasp, history.

Donald Livingston: The Southern Critique of Centralization

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique of centralization. Nothing comparable to it exists elsewhere in America or in Europe.

A criticism of centralization presupposes that decentralization is a good thing. But why is that? The answer is complex and requires viewing what was happened in 1776 from a trans Atlantic perspective. The Declaration of Independence is merely the American version of a conflict that had been going on in Europe since at least the 17th century between the emerging centralized modern state and a revived interest in the classical republican tradition which goes back to the ancient Greeks.

. . .

In contrast, a modern state is supposed to be large. Thomas Hobbess, published in 1651 the first systematic theory of the modern state. He titled the book “Leviathan,’ a large sea monster. It contains a central government endowed with irresistible and indivisible power over individuals in a territory. Unlike republicanism, it does not require, self-government or tradition. Nor does it require the rule of law since the central authority itself can make law. Its purpose is to contain anarchy by enabling autonomous individuals to pursue their own ends in a condition of enlightened self-interest called “civil association.” Such a regime is compatible with an association of strangers, as in a regime of traffic regulations.

Since the only goal of the modern state is “civil association,” there is no internal limit to its size. In fact, the larger the better because outside the realm of civil association lies anarchy or its ever present threat. The logical extension of this is global government or as close an approximation as possible. Although a modern state may expand in size indefinitely, its territory cannot be divided by secession because if one set of individuals could lawfully secede, so could any other set, and so on within each set, to the unraveling of all government.

Here we have two incompatible models of government. The small classical republic and the indefinitely large modern state. But there is a third model to consider. Medieval civilization was also decentralized, and it was vast in scale. It was a mosaic of thousands of independent and quasi-independent political units: kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, papal states, republics, free cities, and tens of thousands of titled manors.

. . .

The country closest to Jefferson’s vision for Virginia is Switzerland which has twenty six sovereign states, the smallest of which has 15,974 people and the largest a little over a million. The average size is 300 thousand. Fourteen states have less than that, and eight are under 100,000. Switzerland is so decentralized that its central government has no original taxing power. Its power to tax requires a constitutional amendment approved by a majority of the cantons, each of which has one vote, and a majority of individuals. And the military is in the hands of the canton militias. Switzerland is regularly ranked by the UN’s World Happiness Report in the top ten happiest countries in the world. The top ten are usually always small states. The U.S. has yet to make the top ten.

[heydaralon]

One or two of you might be interested in some, gasp, history.

Donald Livingston: The Southern Critique of Centralization

The Southern political tradition, in practice and theory, is one of its most valuable contributions to America and the world. The one constant theme of that tradition from 1776–through Jefferson, Madison, John Taylor, St George Tucker, Abel Upshur, John C. Calhoun, the Nashville Agrarians, Richard Weaver, M. E. Bradford, down to the scholars of the Abbeville Institute–is a systematic critique of centralization. Nothing comparable to it exists elsewhere in America or in Europe.

A criticism of centralization presupposes that decentralization is a good thing. But why is that? The answer is complex and requires viewing what was happened in 1776 from a trans Atlantic perspective. The Declaration of Independence is merely the American version of a conflict that had been going on in Europe since at least the 17th century between the emerging centralized modern state and a revived interest in the classical republican tradition which goes back to the ancient Greeks.

. . .

In contrast, a modern state is supposed to be large. Thomas Hobbess, published in 1651 the first systematic theory of the modern state. He titled the book “Leviathan,’ a large sea monster. It contains a central government endowed with irresistible and indivisible power over individuals in a territory. Unlike republicanism, it does not require, self-government or tradition. Nor does it require the rule of law since the central authority itself can make law. Its purpose is to contain anarchy by enabling autonomous individuals to pursue their own ends in a condition of enlightened self-interest called “civil association.” Such a regime is compatible with an association of strangers, as in a regime of traffic regulations.

Since the only goal of the modern state is “civil association,” there is no internal limit to its size. In fact, the larger the better because outside the realm of civil association lies anarchy or its ever present threat. The logical extension of this is global government or as close an approximation as possible. Although a modern state may expand in size indefinitely, its territory cannot be divided by secession because if one set of individuals could lawfully secede, so could any other set, and so on within each set, to the unraveling of all government.

Here we have two incompatible models of government. The small classical republic and the indefinitely large modern state. But there is a third model to consider. Medieval civilization was also decentralized, and it was vast in scale. It was a mosaic of thousands of independent and quasi-independent political units: kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, papal states, republics, free cities, and tens of thousands of titled manors.

. . .

The country closest to Jefferson’s vision for Virginia is Switzerland which has twenty six sovereign states, the smallest of which has 15,974 people and the largest a little over a million. The average size is 300 thousand. Fourteen states have less than that, and eight are under 100,000. Switzerland is so decentralized that its central government has no original taxing power. Its power to tax requires a constitutional amendment approved by a majority of the cantons, each of which has one vote, and a majority of individuals. And the military is in the hands of the canton militias. Switzerland is regularly ranked by the UN’s World Happiness Report in the top ten happiest countries in the world. The top ten are usually always small states. The U.S. has yet to make the top ten.

What is the best book that covers the history of the South, if such a book exists?