Moral outrage and the U.S. Civil War

[Sava]

You don't understand morality. Why do you try to talk about it so much? And authoritatively, for that matter.



you are also very terrible at it

[kentonio]

That same system, in the South, left a lot of poor crackers on patches of marginal land, who only accepted their lot because the existence of slaves gave them a kind of perverse equality with their social superiors.

The numbers don't support it. Here are some of the population percentages of slaves by state in 1860..

Alabama - 45% slaves
Arkansas - 26% slaves
Florida - 44% slaves
Georgia - 44% slaves
Kentucky - 20% slaves
Lousiana - 47% slaves
Mississippi - 55% slaves
North Carolina - 33% slaves
South Carolina - 57% slaves
Tennessee - 25% slaves
Texas - 30% slaves
Virginia - 31% slaves

You have states there where the number of slaves outnumbered the free. That's not just a system for keeping the poor whites happy.

The argument that slavery was inefficient and was on its way out anyway just isn't really supported by the economics and the politics. If it had been declining in economic relevance, the fight to keep it wouldn't have torn the country apart in the years running up to the war. I tend to think its part of the southern revisionist narrative, but I haven't spent enough time looking into it to be able to back that up with any real evidence.

[Sava]

poor crackers

tsk tsk

racial slur

some kind mod should send him a pm about it

[Sava]

nevermind, he's part of the oppressed white male brigade

they don't complain about one of their own

and no one else is going to complain about that except for you whiny ****heads

and you know who you are

oh well

[Elok]

And in fact it gave japan 2 centuries of peace, until Perry forcefully opened japan to western influence again

What I don't get is how that actually worked for so long. Why didn't they get the same "take your opium and shut up, piggy" treatment we gave to China next door? Did they not have enough trade goods to be worth the effort, or were we just so busy looting/colonizing other places? It can't have been fear of their army; they were technologically inferior even before they cut themselves off from outside influence, and decades of peace would have taken the starch out of it real quick. A bunch of guys with rusty arquebuses and pikes against eighteenth-century muskets and artillery? Not even close to a fair fight.

It just seems like Japan only avoided conquest by some kind of luck. They can't have predicted that everybody would be content to leave them to their stagnant impotence for as long as they did.

[Elok]

You have states there where the number of slaves outnumbered the free. That's not just a system for keeping the poor whites happy.

The argument that slavery was inefficient and was on its way out anyway just isn't really supported by the economics and the politics. If it had been declining in economic relevance, the fight to keep it wouldn't have torn the country apart in the years running up to the war. I tend to think its part of the southern revisionist narrative, but I haven't spent enough time looking into it to be able to back that up with any real evidence.

As I said, one book, you could very well be right for all I know. Also, I didn't say it existed to keep poor whites happy--I said they comforted themselves with the illusion of equality it gave them while big landowners lorded over massive plots.

[giblets]

What I don't get is how that actually worked for so long. Why didn't they get the same "take your opium and shut up, piggy" treatment we gave to China next door? Did they not have enough trade goods to be worth the effort, or were we just so busy looting/colonizing other places? It can't have been fear of their army; they were technologically inferior even before they cut themselves off from outside influence, and decades of peace would have taken the starch out of it real quick. A bunch of guys with rusty arquebuses and pikes against eighteenth-century muskets and artillery? Not even close to a fair fight.

It just seems like Japan only avoided conquest by some kind of luck. They can't have predicted that everybody would be content to leave them to their stagnant impotence for as long as they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakoku#Challenges_to_seclusion

[Imran Siddiqui]

The argument that slavery was inefficient and was on its way out anyway just isn't really supported by the economics and the politics. If it had been declining in economic relevance, the fight to keep it wouldn't have torn the country apart in the years running up to the war.

Very true. Slavery made the South's agricultural economy profitable.

[grumbler]

The numbers don't support it. Here are some of the population percentages of slaves by state in 1860..

Alabama - 45% slaves
Arkansas - 26% slaves
Florida - 44% slaves
Georgia - 44% slaves
Kentucky - 20% slaves
Lousiana - 47% slaves
Mississippi - 55% slaves
North Carolina - 33% slaves
South Carolina - 57% slaves
Tennessee - 25% slaves
Texas - 30% slaves
Virginia - 31% slaves

You have states there where the number of slaves outnumbered the free. That's not just a system for keeping the poor whites happy.

The argument that slavery was inefficient and was on its way out anyway just isn't really supported by the economics and the politics. If it had been declining in economic relevance, the fight to keep it wouldn't have torn the country apart in the years running up to the war. I tend to think its part of the southern revisionist narrative, but I haven't spent enough time looking into it to be able to back that up with any real evidence.

There is no dichotomy at all between slavery declining in economic relevance and the fact that a war was fought over it; quite the reverse. It is unwelcome change that leads to wars, not stasis. The economics and politics absolutely support the idea that the Civil War was the last, desperate rearguard action of a Southern economic and political elite that was on the decline because of the declining significance of slavery and the plantation system it supported.

The Civil War was fought not over slavery per se, but over the political clash between the old landed aristocracy (pretty much limited to the South by the mid-19th C) and the new industrial bourgeois. The Southern planter class had a monopoly on wealth (which had to be inherited because no one could afford to buy enough slaves to run a plantation, you had to inherit them) and thus education (public schooling was scarce and poor in the South in those days, and that legacy remains today) and thus political power. The planter class weren't just the plantation owners, but the army officers, the judges, the doctors, the lawyers, and the higher-level church officials. That old money monopoly was threatened by new money, and the industrial revolution created the opportunity for non-aristocrats to become rich. The planter class realized its days were numbered unless it broke off from a country which was being taken over by new money. Slavery was the bulwark of the planter class, but slavery wasn't its salvation.

Ironically, the planter class was land-rich and slave-rich (i.e. they had expensive assets) but were cash-poor, because slavery was so relatively uneconomic. Prime field slaves were worth tens of thousands of dollars in today's money, but the cash-poor planters couldn't realize the value of their slaves because there were so very few buyers (the other planters were as cash-poor as they were, and few besides the planters wanted to buy field hands). Thus, the planters couldn't have invested in commerce or manufacturing on any reasonable scale, even if they didn't shun those economic areas as unbecoming to well-bred folk. Slavery led to the ACW, but it was because of the failure of slavery, not the success of it.

[jsorense]

Grumbler makes several good points. The ACW was initiated by slave-holding states because of their fear that the new Republican administration would foster the political environment where slavery could be abolished. At the beginning of the war the North faught to preserve the Union. IIRC.

[grumbler]

Grumbler makes several good points. The ACW was initiated by slave-holding states because of their fear that the new Republican administration would foster the political environment where slavery could be abolished.

I would modify that statement slightly in the interests of (IMO) accuracy: the slave states seceded not because they were afraid of what Lincoln and his administration would do (he had already promised not to free the slaves, but to hold the Union together), but rather because Lincoln's election victory signaled that the Slave states no longer had the population and clout to prevent the election of an abolitionist. The South was growing weaker over time, and the North stronger, so, the sooner the Southern elites made their move to get the states they controlled out of the Union, the better.

[NICE MOBIUS]

Very true. Slavery made the South's agricultural economy profitable.

Also, with any obsolescence arguments e.g. methods etc. Well, whatever modernisations such as mechanisation etc can still be run by slaves - so surely it is an inherent advantage to have slavery.

[giblets]

Chattel slavery might be obsolete if you can outsource jobs to wage slaves earning $2 a day overseas

[The Mad Monk]

Cultural taboos can lead people to make profoundly unwise business decisions. Cf. Medieval Europe, where religious scruples kept Christians out of the banking business for centuries, and thereby gave the whole industry over to the hated Jews. Or Japan's suicidal decision to shun all innovation and outside contact for centuries.

I think you mean China's suicidal decision; Japan never completely cut off all contact.

[NICE MOBIUS]

Chattel slavery might be obsolete if you can outsource jobs to wage slaves earning $2 a day overseas

Another form of slavery, indeed.

That's Globalisation for ya!