Who is this "Martin Luther King" and why does he have his day off today?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Yes, it was an issue of balance of power, tied to ..... wait for it ......





the Northern bank's lienholders interest in the South's interest in a slave-based economy.

Fixed. A balance of power between debtor raw material producing states and creditor raw material consuming and manufacturing states trying to compete with European demand for the same raw materials and cheaper European competitition in the production of durable goods.

[MRT144]

Nope. Not many southerners (and none that I know) defend either (a) the institution of slavery, or (b) the ineptitude of CSA politicians and policy.

Lost Cause revisionism was primarily a regional thing, not national, except when it was convenient to adopt for other purposes (e.g. the northern and western spread of the second wave Kluckers in the 1920s and northern white hostility to blacks in general).

Yankee revisionism is more pervasive in a couple of respects - on the smaller scale, yankee revisionism seeks to counter Lost Cause revisionism regarding reconstruction and carpetbaggers. There was plenty of corruption from the carpetbaggers - a lot of these were the same folks who'd bought "permits to trade with the enemy" issued by Chase's agents. Being a carpetbagger was a money making opportunity for most. Not near all, but most. There was a lot of good done by principled yankee missionaries and such, but that wasn't the political machine norm.

The second, bigger part of yankee revisionism is that whole "aw, shucks, we just done it for freedom and sweetness and light because Amurka's the good guys in the world" - the same sort of thing that minimized native genocide and cultivates that whole "Amurka's the beacon of goodness and light and righteousness in the world" horse**** that's been used to justify every yankee intervention everywhere.

You couldn't raise generations of school children to be unquestioning "Amerca is #1" Pay-tree-ots who blindly supported the government if you explored the effects of good ol' greed and economic dominance in relations between the states.

The north did it because you don't let a bunch of backwards hicks walk away from you without taking a few licks.

[MRT144]

Fixed. A balance of power between debtor raw material producing states and creditor raw material consuming and manufacturing states trying to compete with European demand for the same raw materials and cheaper European competitition in the production of durable goods.

This is by far your worst attempt to clear the south's reputation.

[MichaeltheGreat]

I'm not trying in the least to clear the south's reputation. Slavery is and always has been a moral abomination of the worst kind. There is no clearing of any slave-connected party's reputation that can be done. End of story. Period.

All I'm responding to is the modern revisionist notion that the giving a **** about the well-being of slaves was anything but a minority view in the north in the run up to the war and in the early days. Abolition was the moral point of view (especially the even more radical, mostly religious, minority that also supported education and integration into society as opposed to forced resettlement or other solutions). That sort of treat freed slaves like actual human beings brand of abolition (something adopted by John Adams before the turn of the century) was a very small minority point of view. Go back and read yankee newspaper headlines and enlistment broadsheets.

The popular majority really didn't care (especially as long as it didn't impact them), and the economic/political elite majority were more interested in the relative balance of economic power. From their perspective, it was really not a whole lot different set of humanitarian calculus, than say, bringing Baltic and slavic immigrants as coal mine strike breakers, or positioning other immigrant communities against each other (and later on, against free northern blacks) as competing pools of cheap labor. Especially after the crash of 1857, northern economic dominance over the south and maintaining control of captive southern markets was the key to northern economic prosperity. That was of far more interest to the yankee majority than the civil liberties or well-being of millions of slaves somewhere else. Sorry if that hurts your feelings.

[MichaeltheGreat]

The north did it because you don't let a bunch of backwards hicks walk away from you without taking a few licks.

I see your fiery intellect illuminating the halls of history.

[regexcellent]

When I conjure up the image of wealthy plantation owners the word "hicks" doesn't come to mind. East Coast Southern accents, north of Georgia anyway, sound ridiculously distinguished, too. Think Charleston. Or Virginia Tidewater.

[Dinner]

The plantation owners were the elite making up only a tiny percentage of the population. The vast majority of the white population really were dirt poor mainly because they couldn't compete against slave labor so the south remained mostly without any real business development or even much in the way of small business start up because if you had any money at all then it went to buy land and slaves as that made the highest rate of return. To compare if you were in the north, even the newly settled rural states of the north then industry, small businesses, finance, and international trade were every where.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Lack of economic diversity in the south was problematic. One big problem is that the plantations were largely self-contained and engaged in very little direct local commerce. Dirt poor isn't necessarily accurate, though - cash poor, yes, but there were a lot of pretty reasonably substantial farms even in non-slave owning population. Just a very different (and ultimately non-sustainable) economy.

[Ben Kenobi]

It's why it's significant that the Southern states are starting to creep up now.

[MichaeltheGreat]

It's telling IMO that the reddest of red states are laggards, except for those who have some skewed dynamic - e.g. Alaska, with about 3 people and tons of federal money coming in.

[Ben Kenobi]

North Dakota?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Thanks for illustrating my point. It's what, 3rd or 4th lowest population, with a current fossil fuel boom? Nothing to do with their policies whatsoever. Nevada become the dominant economy among US states when the Comstock lode was discovered. Same thing - resource boom applied across tiny population base.

[Ben Kenobi]

Thanks for illustrating my point. It's what, 3rd or 4th lowest population, with a current fossil fuel boom? Nothing to do with their policies whatsoever. Nevada become the dominant economy among US states when the Comstock lode was discovered. Same thing - resource boom applied across tiny population base.

Wyoming is also up there too. If your point is, "red state = poor", the actual data doesn't back you up.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Wyoming is another state with no population and disproportionate resource extraction. In other words, it's an outlier, that would be the same if it was red, blue, green or yellow. Nothing in their political philosophy or policies put resources in the ground, or did so in some frozen bum****istani wasteland that nobody wants to live in.

You're deliberately cherry-picking outliers. Average all red states and and all blue states. Red states give you places like Mississippi, Arkansas, Indiana. Blue states give you California, New York, and New Jersey. Even better, increase the granularity to county or even census tract level.

[Ben Kenobi]

Wyoming is another state with no population and disproportionate resource extraction. In other words, it's an outlier, that would be the same if it was red, blue, green or yellow. Nothing in their political philosophy or policies put resources in the ground, or did so in some frozen bum****istani wasteland that nobody wants to live in.

You're deliberately cherry-picking outliers. Average all red states and and all blue states. Red states give you places like Mississippi, Arkansas, Indiana. Blue states give you California, New York, and New Jersey. Even better, increase the granularity to county or even census tract level.

Wouldn't this reinforce my point about resource extraction being a significant factor in economic prosperity?

Also, I'm not cherry picking anything. Top 10, Alaska, Wyoming and North Dakota are all up there. VA gives you 4/10. Hell if you count NH, that's 5/10 right there.

If deep blue were correlated with economic prosperity, why don't we see California?