The Battle Hymn of the Republic

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Fido

I'm not really sure about that. My guess is that they thought they could make money if they could get the yankee traders of their backs; but I think the middle men had the money squeezed right out of slavery. I have heard that New York considered ceceding briefly, but how could a whole state let wall street wag their tail? Combine the bankrupt condition of the South with the fact that slavery robbed labor of its honor, and you have the facts as Lincoln saw them: that the South is not a place for a poor white man to remove to, but to remove from. So, when everyone one was talking free land, it was for all the poor whites who could not compete with slavery, and had too much honor to try. In one sense at least the South had the perfect defense. Since they had no infrastructure they had no infrastructure to be turned against them. As some in the North noted: Poor morals equal poor roads. Is it not still true today?

There is abundant evidence that slavery itself was a direct economic hindrance to the south, irrespective of morals, particularly on small farms. This evidence includes the weight of livestock on slave-tended farms versus farms without slaves and the crop yields on slave-tended farms. One reason is that slave-tended farms were unable to rotate crops and introduce new technology because they were employing a completely uneducated labor force, and it was difficult to train slaves to do entirely new agricultural tasks. Much of what I know about this I read in a long, encyclopedic book about the Civil War called None Died in Vain, in which the slave economy is presented with tremendous detail.

The vast majority of southerners had no slaves. The vast majority of slaveholders only owned one or two slaves, and they were relatively poor. But the vast majority of slaves were owned by a minority of rich, aristocratic southern families, including the families of many famous Virginians like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee and George Washington.

And the secessionist movement was started by these southern aristocratic slaveowners like Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, not by the poor farmers who had one or two slaves. This is in part why West Virginia seceded from Virginia at the time -- WV was poor, had few rich plantation owners, and did not stand to benefit from a military alliance with VA.

You're right that NYC was not especially in favor of the Union at the time, and this might have been because of financial ties with the large cotton plantations (which were very slave-dependant).

[Fido]

That sounds like a good book to have, and I would recommend Free Soil, Free Labor, and Free Men, by Foner. I have been to Harpers Ferry, and they had enlarged upon one of their walls a handbill from before the war, all the worse for wear comparing in great detail the condition of the South Per capita against that of the north; andin every respect the South fell short. And we have to remember that from their point of view it was the best, and the ideal, even if it would bear no objective comparison. The lesson for us is that we may think what we have is great, and we are happy with our progress no matter what the human cost may be; But we should hazzard a guess about where we might be if we could abandon injustice, and violence and legality without end or purpose, and reform our relationships on some other basis. The most difficult chain for any person to break is the one binding them to the past even if that is the very same one binding them to poverty and slavery. Thanks.