AN OLD POST SOMEONE SAW RE DK POST WHY NOT REPRISE IT

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

SEE DK'S CURRENT POST AND COMMENTS

I may have made myself misunderstood by Mr Glover and others.

See this article and especially the quote below:

www.nps.gov/resources/story.htm?id=251

The Southern lag in industrial development did not result from any inherent economic disadvantages. There was great wealth in the South, but it was primarily tied up in the slave economy. In 1860, the economic value of slaves in the United States exceeded the invested value of all of the nation's railroads, factories, and banks combined. On the eve of the Civil War, cotton prices were at an all-time high. The Confederate leaders were confident that the importance of cotton on the world market, particularly in England and France, would provide the South with the diplomatic and military assistance they needed for victory.

Here was my comment:

Professor

Very interesting post. Many thanks.

I don't want to get into the telephone squabbles now under way.

I would just say that I had thought that the South, both in colonial days, and until the Civil War, far from being economically backward (by the primarily agrarian economic principes and metrics of those times), had been the most prosperous and profitable sector of the country, albeit based increasingly on disastrous northern banker financing, and on free trade with Europe rather than with the North.

I guess by economically backward, you mean merely less industrialized...but that is not necessarily how it would have been interpreted in the 17th, or even the early 19th, centuries, anywhere but in places like Manchester, or London, etc.

all the best,

Here was Glover's:

"Bozon:

When South Carolina seceded, General Sherman described the South's economic backwardness in his famous prediction of its ultimate result:

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it... Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth—right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

A few months ago I read an excellent comparative survey ("A House Dividing", John Majewski) of economic development in two counties, one in Virginia and the other in Pennsylvania. Well before the Civil War the wealth, and the sources of wealth, were on two very different trajectories in the two counties. In simple terms, with their sparse consumer populations, regions based on planatation economics were totally barren ground for the development of industry and rail networks. Further, this was widely acknowledged at the time."

 

I would just add, here, May 19, 2017, that if industrial economic development had been Lincoln's goal, which it supposedly had been at some time, that goal was utterly confounded by the Civil War and its aftermath, not merely by Sherman's military tactics, but by thw whole tenor of occupation and so called Reconstruction.

 

Ironically, I commented, just the other day, regarding Krugman's idiotic article, about how our so called economy is mainly, yet again, and even now, quite a misguided agrarian one:

RE NATTERING NABOBS OF NAFTA KRUGMAN ACTS LIKE THIS SOME KIND OF GENIUS THE MORGENTHAU PLAN AGAIN

We should have continued to conduct a robust Western Civilization first colonial policy, getting only raw materials, labor intensive agricultural products, and unprocessed foodstuffs, from them, and giving them only as little, in the way of industrial products and manufactures, as possible, for as long as possible.

If the West had done that, we would not now be in the ridiculous, and highly dangerous, position we are now in.