Wednesday, April 13, 2011

150th Anniversary of the Civil War

1961 U.S. News & World Report article, "The Untold Story of the Civil War", included.

Author Fergus Bordewich penned an essay in the Wall Street Journal last week about the Civil War. Mr. Bordewich examined what would have happened if the South had won the war. He posits several theories about how such an outcome would have changed history:

  • The Union victory showed the world a Republic would withstand such a conflict. This was no small feat at the time as many predicted since America's founding it would be conquered or collapse from within.
  • Pograms against Blacks in the South would have taken place and slavery for the rest.
  • When slavery eventually came to an end (I estimate within 20 years. Industrialization and other revolutions in technology would have made slavery very inefficient and costly.), Blacks would be subjected to laws making Jim Crow seem mild.
  • The South would have expanded out to the west coast and probably tried to annex Cuba. Hmmm....Would saving Cuba from Batista, Castro, and Hyman Roth have been a bad thing?
  • No "muscular" United States to carry the day in World War I and II.
Interesting column and worth reading. Click here for column. I also posted this old U.S. News & World Report story from 1961 during the centennial anniversary of the Civil War a couple of years ago when JJ had a much smaller following. Since it is the 150th anniversary of the start of The Wah this week, it seemed appropriate to re-post it. The article is posted below. Original post:


I came across an article from an old issue of U.S. News & World Report commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. What is interesting is it compared the treatment of the South for decades after the war's end to the millions of dollars and additional support given to Germany and other European countries through the Marshall plan. It concluded the South's fate was a drag on the rest of the country as it remained the poorest section of America by far. Some quotes from the article:

"The South found itself selling its cotton in world markets at competitive prices while forced to buy its shoes and clothing and luxuries in tariff-protected markets in the north. Southerners felt that their region was becoming a colony of the North..."

"At war's end, the South lay prostrate. Nearly one of every four white men in uniform had been killed or died in service. Many more were maimed. Cities, industries, and railroads had been burned and dismantled. Rich farming regions.. had been laid waste by Northern armies..."

"After the United States helped to defeat Germany and Japan in World War II, great efforts were made to ease the pain of defeat for those nations..."

"There was no great relief efforts by the North comparable to those made by the U.S. after WWII, even though more than a million persons faced starvation in the South during the years following the war and some DID starve. Only a pittance of aid came from the North. The Government in Washington created a Freedmen's Bureau, which got $4 in taxes on cotton for each $1 it gave in relief. Funds from private charities were pathetically small in comparison to what was needed..."

"U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."

"Between 1868 and 1874 the carpetbaggers managed to build up the state debts in the South by $101,232,000.....Mississippi's tax rates for example, were 14 times higher at the end than the beginning.

"At that time (decades following civil war), the South was trying to educate a third of the nation's children in a dual school system, but it only had a sixth of the nation's school revenues."

One passage sounds just like the debate currently taking place over the proposed auto bailout:
"Complaints are hared now in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and in other areas of the North that are losing industries to the South... In the past two decades (1940's and 1950's), the South has undergone something of an industrial revolution....

In 1860, the South had 17.2% of the factories and 11.5A5 of the capital in the nation. By 1904- with the war years far behind- it had 15.3% of the plants and 11% of the capital."

Of course, such an area rich in resources and poverty was irresistible to the robber barons and their government allies. It's no wonder Huey Long burst upon the scene as Standard Oil and others raped the South for its resources, while giving almost nothing in return:
"Northern capitalists took command of many Southern resources. A cottonseed-oil firm ownd in the North controlled 88% of the production of that product. the entire supply of American bauxite, found in four Southern States, went to ONE Northern company. Control of 80% of America's sulphur was picked up by another firm....

Control of the major Southern railroads, the Alabama coal and iron industries, many millions of Southern timberlands was all held by Northern interests. Only the cotton-textile and tobacco industries, among major enterprises, remained principally under Southern control..."

Ready for this one? One of the major reasons why the South lags behind the nation in industrialization:
"Southern shippers had to pay higher freight rates than did shippers in the Northeast for sending the same goods equal distances (Everyone got that?) Rates were set by Southern railroads but the roads were controlled , largely, by Northern Capital. The rates held the approval of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Not until 1945 was this changed.

The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."

Such policies created a region so poor and under-educated that FDR called the South the "nation's number one economic problem" in 1938. While blacks and whites in the South stayed at each others throats for decades, the Northerners laughed while they plundered and taxed them. The cries of bankrupt Detroit automakers who made too many cars and paid thousands of employees NOT to work (see jobs bank program) about how they couldn't compete with the South unless Southern taxpayers bailed them out sounds somewhat familiar, and is poetic justice to some degree. Having said that, the rest of the article is pretty good and reveals many more interesting and forgotten facts.





Posted by Kingfish at 7:13 AM

7 comments:

Anderson said...

Good points about the economic effect on the South. Unfortunately, John Maynard Keynes wasn't around, and it's not like anyone listened to him the first time around anyway.

How much capital was tied up in slaves, and thus wiped off the books? Better if the war hadn't happened and the U.S. had compensated slaveowners ... somewhere between simple emancipation and the Russian liberation of the serfs (which was too unfavorable to the serfs).

April 13, 2011 8:36 AM
Ironghost said...

There was also what they did in Brazil, I believe, which was declare everyone born after a certain date free and let slavery die off. Certainly, however, industrialization would have killed slavery off faster than that.

April 13, 2011 10:48 AM
Kingfish said...

I also think at some point the North and South would've formed some sort of mutual defense pact. They both considered themselves Americans and subscribed to the Monroe Doctrine. They weren't about to let England and France start coming over here.

What probably would've happened is the North would've gotten richer as the world became more industrialized. The South was primarily agricultural and it would have suffered the fate of Eastern Europe after Prussia/Germany, England, and other European countries entered the industrial age. Not in terms of warfare but in terms of economic power. The world was changing and the South would have been ill-equpped for it.

Then there are the robber barons who did build up American industry with railroads and other tools of commerce. I doubt the South would have been able to duplicate the feat as the states would've made it nearly impossible to deal with them all.

April 13, 2011 10:56 AM
Anonymous said...

where are my reparations?!?

April 13, 2011 11:37 AM
Anonymous said...

Very interesting article in the clarion ledger today. I have never heard such words ever taught in school.



By LEONARD PITTS JR.

lpitts@miamiherald.com


‘‘It is not safe . . . to trust $800 million worth of negroes in the hands of a power which says that we do not own the property . . . So we must get out . . . ”

— The Daily Constitutionalist, Augusta, Ga., Dec. 1, 1860

‘‘[Northerners] have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery  . . . We, therefore, the people of South Carolina . . . have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and other States of North America dissolved.”

— from “Declaration of the Causes of Secession’’

“As long as slavery is looked upon by the North with abhorrence . . . there can be no satisfactory political union between the two sections.”

— New Orleans Bee, Dec. 14, 1860

“Our new government is founded upon . . . the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

— Alexander Stephens, “vice president’’ of the Confederacy, March 21, 1861


Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/04/09/2159376/the-civil-war-a-conspiracy-of.html#ixzz1JQbOKznS

April 13, 2011 1:13 PM
Anonymous said...

Geez Donna, go home.

April 14, 2011 10:19 AM
Anonymous said...

Yikes! I had no idea that there was so much "get back" after the Civil War. It's heartbreaking really, but as they say the victors always write the history books.

April 14, 2011 11:40 AM

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