Scholarly history of Civil War vs. popular "history" of Civil War

[giblets]

Okay. So you can say the American Civil War happened for economic reasons, if slavery counts as an economic reason. Got it.

[Dauphin]

I'm not saying that slavery isn't a fundamental ingredient.

[Al B. Sure!]

You do realize that racism, as in a belief that another ethnic group of people is inferior to your own, was rampant in the South at the time and afterwards, right? You do know that the 19th and 20th centuries were filled with people who claimed the inferiority of Blacks and the need to keep these 'savages' in bondage for their own good?

[Dauphin]

Okay. So you can say the American Civil War happened for economic reasons, if slavery counts as an economic reason. Got it.

I don't give much truck to the slavery as an ideology argument vis-à-vis the economic argument.

[Dauphin]

You do realize that racism, as in a belief that another ethnic group of people is inferior to your own, was rampant in the South at the time and afterwards, right?

Yeah. And? I would gladly bet you a shedload of money that, if the cost of owning slaves exceeded their benefit, slavery would have been abandoned.

You do know that the 19th and 20th centuries were filled with people who claimed the inferiority of Blacks and the need to keep these 'savages' in bondage for their own good?

Slaves weren't owned to help the slaves.

[giblets]

I don't give much truck to the slavery as an ideology argument vis-à-vis the economic argument.

I'd agree that their rhetoric about slavery being the "natural order" or whatnot was mostly an attempt to justify their economic interests.

[Al B. Sure!]

It doesn't matter whether or not the racism was used as a tool to justify the economically-beneficent system of slavery of not; the fact is the racist propaganda was there and was gobbled up.

And no, slavery did not provide a net benefit to anyone but the small number of plantation owners.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and humans are not rational but abolitionists like Emerson knew at the time the obvious:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=654

The philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mail-bag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.” There appears to be a large element of truth in Emerson’s observation.

The South, like other slave societies, did not develop urban centers for commerce, finance, and industry on a scale equal to those found in the North. Virginia’s largest city, Richmond, had a population of just 15,274 in 1850. That same year, Wilmington, North Carolina’s largest city, had only 7,264 inhabitants, while Natchez and Vicksburg, the two largest cities in Mississippi, had fewer than 3,000 white inhabitants.

Southern cities were small because they failed to develop diversified economies. Unlike the cities of the North, southern cities rarely became processing or finishing centers and southern ports rarely engaged in international trade. Their primary functions were to market and transport cotton or other agricultural crops, supply local planters and farmers with such necessities as agricultural implements, and produce the small number of manufactured goods, such as cotton gins, needed by farmers.

An overemphasis on slave-based agriculture led Southerners to neglect industry and transportation improvements. As a result, manufacturing and transportation lagged far behind in comparison to the North. In 1860 the North had approximately 1.3 million industrial workers, whereas the South had 110,000, and northern factories manufactured nine-tenths of the industrial goods produced in the United States.

The South’s transportation network was primitive by northern standards. Traveling the 1,460 overland miles from Baltimore to New Orleans in 1850 meant riding five different railroads, two stagecoaches, and two steamboats. Most southern railroads served primarily to transport cotton to southern ports, where the crop could be shipped on northern vessels to northern or British factories for processing.

Because of high rates of personal debt, Southern states kept taxation and government spending at much lower levels than did the states in the North. As a result, Southerners lagged far behind Northerners in their support for public education. Illiteracy was widespread. In 1850, 20 percent of all southern white adults could not read or write, while the illiteracy rate in New England was less than half of 1 percent.

Because large slaveholders owned most of the region’s slaves, wealth was more stratified than in the North. In the Deep South, the middle class held a relatively small proportion of the region’s property, while wealthy planters owned a very significant portion of the productive lands and slave labor. In 1850, 17 percent of the farming population held two-thirds of all acres in the rich cotton-growing regions of the South.

There are indications that during the last decade before the Civil War slave ownership became increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As soil erosion and exhaustion diminished the availability of cotton land, scarcity and heavy demand forced the price of land and slaves to rise beyond the reach of most, and in newer cotton-growing regions, yeomen farmers were pushed off the land as planters expanded their holdings. In Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth. As slave and land ownership grew more concentrated, a growing number of whites were forced by economic pressure to leave the land and move to urban centers.

[Kuciwalker]

Dauphin: I disagree with your premise (in #74). It's predictable that such a fundamental part of their economy and society would become valued for its own sake. I believe there is a wealth of historical evidence that the South believed that black slavery was the morally correct way to organize society.

edit: the above was written before I had read #109 and later

Dauphin, just because an ideology is caused by (and in fact, concocted up as an excuse for) economic interests doesn't mean its followers believe in it any less fervently.

It was in the South's economic interest to commit horrific crimes against millions; they acceded to those interests, committed those crimes, and then invented an ideology to justify them. Given all of that, I'm not sure at what point it becomes useful to say "I think the real cause was economics" in response/rebuttal to "the cause of the Civil War was slavery".

[giblets]

And no, slavery did not provide a net benefit to anyone but the small number of plantation owners.

Yeah, it definitely didn't benefit the slaves!

[Dauphin]

Given all of that, I'm not sure at what point it becomes useful to say "I think the real cause was economics" in response/rebuttal to "the cause of the Civil War was slavery".

It was never meant as a rebuttal, but a hue.

[Dauphin]

Dauphin: I disagree with your premise (in #74). It's predictable that such a fundamental part of their economy and society would become valued for its own sake. I believe there is a wealth of historical evidence that the South believed that black slavery was the morally correct way to organize society.

Enough of a belief to go to war (or secede) over that morality, if the cost of losing slaves was compensated?

Edit - that may not be a good point of mine, as they were seceding, not going to war.

[Al B. Sure!]

Enough of a belief to go to war (or secede) over that morality, if the cost of losing slaves was compensated?

Edit - that may not be a good point of mine, as they were seceding, not going to war.

Yes. Absolutely. The language of the secessionist documents says as much.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

[Dauphin]

It was in the South's economic interest to commit horrific crimes against millions; they acceded to those interests, committed those crimes, and then invented an ideology to justify them.

Similarly for France and Britain. The end of slavery was a drawn out process in the Empires.

[Dauphin]

Yes. Absolutely. The language of the secessionist documents says as much.

Reasons and excuses. That is, in politics what you say, what you mean and how you would act are different. Hitler invaded Poland because of the actions of the Poles. It says as much in historical documents. Britain entered WW1 because of an old treaty with Belgium. etc.

[Kuciwalker]

Enough of a belief to go to war (or secede) over that morality, if the cost of losing slaves was compensated?

Edit - that may not be a good point of mine, as they were seceding, not going to war.

I don't think it's meaningful to try to predict someone's behavior in an impossible situation - there is no plausible history in which the North just paid the South enough money to compensate.