CSA Economy

54% of the "free men of color" resided within the putative Confederacy in 1860.

No, 54% of the "free men of color" lived in the states where slavery was legal. 28% of the "free men of color" lived in the 11 states of the Confederacy; 72% lived in states that remained in the Union.

You're also ignoring that 6% of the blacks in slaveholding states were free, while 99.9% of the blacks in the non-slaveholding states were free.
 
There was not a nation of the earth guilty of crimes more shocking and bloody than the Confederate States of America. And to add insult to injury, 67th Tigers drags a man in shackles, a slave, into the grand temple of progress, and says to us, "This man was better off a slave then a free man," simply goes beyond the pale.


You must be new to history and given to superlatives. There are nations and peoples that have done worse.
 

67th Tigers

Banned
You must be new to history and given to superlatives. There are nations and peoples that have done worse.

On slavery, there is not a single nation/ people I'm aware of that didn't practice it, and variations on slavery continue to this day (usually with some platitude to excuse it). Singling out the Confederacy is not due to their practice of slavery (the same slavery practiced in virtually every state of the Union during the early 19th century), but rather their temerity in leaving the Union.

Whatever the morals of this abhorent practice, it persists because it is economically worthwhile.
 
The Confederacy is singled out because they first effectively forfeited the election of 1860 by splitting the Democratic Party three ways and then chose to secede based on the very election loss they had ensure, out of fear over what Lincoln would do in office without explaining just what Lincoln could do given the Democratic Party's power in the Senate and the Democratic lock on the Supreme Court.
 

67th Tigers

Banned
The Confederacy is singled out because they first effectively forfeited the election of 1860 by splitting the Democratic Party three ways and then chose to secede based on the very election loss they had ensure, out of fear over what Lincoln would do in office without explaining just what Lincoln could do given the Democratic Party's power in the Senate and the Democratic lock on the Supreme Court.

Lincoln is on record as wanting to stop slavery growing, but allow it to persist where it was, and that this would eventually undermine the value of slaves and cause the loss of slavery gradually (taking about 100 years by his reckoning). This is prettymuch in line with the northern Democrats and against both the Radical Republicans and southern Democrats. I have no doubt he was sincere and this was what would have happened without the ACW.
 
Lincoln didn't need to do much to stop slavery from expanding as it was proving impossible for slavery to expand, the last slave state to enter the Union having done so in 1845(Texas).
 
Getting back to the initial subject, could an independent CSA have survived economically? The answer to that question is plainly yes. there are lots of examples of nations being economically viable with a considerable portion of their population un-free (South Africa, 19th and 20th century Russia for example) Could a slave-holding CSA have competed successfully with the USA.? Almost certainly not. The static economy of such a state would not have been able to keep up with the much more dynamic economies of the US or Germany going into the 20th century, Slavery would have required a great deal of regulatory control by the economic dead hand of the central government. Just think of the wasted energy that was required to keep Apartheid South Africa going. Most likely the CSA would have been sooner or later become an economic satellite of either the US or one of the European powers, supplying unfinished goods and little else
 
Not to mention that CSA lacks the vast gold and diamond and other mineral reserves and we all know what's going to happen to the cotton crop in a few decades.
 
Lincoln is on record as wanting to stop slavery growing, but allow it to persist where it was, and that this would eventually undermine the value of slaves and cause the loss of slavery gradually (taking about 100 years by his reckoning). This is prettymuch in line with the northern Democrats and against both the Radical Republicans and southern Democrats. I have no doubt he was sincere and this was what would have happened without the ACW.

Yet the leaders of the Confederacy were so afraid for the preservation of the Peculiar Institution they chose war instead and ended up destroying the South That Was.

On slavery, there is not a single nation/ people I'm aware of that didn't practice it, and variations on slavery continue to this day (usually with some platitude to excuse it). Singling out the Confederacy is not due to their practice of slavery (the same slavery practiced in virtually every state of the Union during the early 19th century), but rather their temerity in leaving the Union.

Whatever the morals of this abhorent practice, it persists because it is economically worthwhile.

Actually the Confederacy represented the only case where fear of abolition, which as you noted was not even Lincoln's goal, he was far more moderate than that, created 4 years of bloody warfare. Even in Russia the Tsar said "No more serfs" and serfs were no more.

This thread has degenerated into fractal wrongness...

But honestly, we're dealing with an apologist and nationalist for a racist, slaveholding dictatorship.

And I don't care how plausible he thinks a strong post-war confederacy is. There was not a nation of the earth guilty of crimes more shocking and bloody than the Confederate States of America. And to add insult to injury, 67th Tigers drags a man in shackles, a slave, into the grand temple of progress, and says to us, "This man was better off a slave then a free man," simply goes beyond the pale.

That is the worst kind of apologia in the world. That is no better than Holocaust Denial or unreconstructed(heh) Stalinism. And then he has the gall to complain about Northern tyranny. This is simple brass fronted impudence and hollow mockery.

I think that Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Saloth Sar, Idi Amin Dada (a cannibal), and Tojo Hideki all oversaw worse crimes than Jefferson Davis did.

Getting back to the initial subject, could an independent CSA have survived economically? The answer to that question is plainly yes. there are lots of examples of nations being economically viable with a considerable portion of their population un-free (South Africa, 19th and 20th century Russia for example) Could a slave-holding CSA have competed successfully with the USA.? Almost certainly not. The static economy of such a state would not have been able to keep up with the much more dynamic economies of the US or Germany going into the 20th century, Slavery would have required a great deal of regulatory control by the economic dead hand of the central government. Just think of the wasted energy that was required to keep Apartheid South Africa going. Most likely the CSA would have been sooner or later become an economic satellite of either the US or one of the European powers, supplying unfinished goods and little else

Russia is a huge country that cannot be easily invaded and/or occupied and has military strength to keep itself from reprisals. Apartheid South Africa was part of the British Empire and then a US ally during the Cold War. The Confederacy is not going to have a friendly US and has an economic system that will be increasingly atavistic and self-inflicted handicapping of its industrial potential.........so yeah.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
Actually the Confederacy represented the only case where fear of abolition, which as you noted was not even Lincoln's goal, he was far more moderate than that, created 4 years of bloody warfare. Even in Russia the Tsar said "No more serfs" and serfs were no more.
Well it's a lot more complicated than that and in many cases serf's lives got worse after emancipation, but your point still stands; even a slave society like Russia eventually got around to saying "Ummmm....no more serfs."
The Confederacy is singled out because they first effectively forfeited the election of 1860 by splitting the Democratic Party three ways and then chose to secede based on the very election loss they had ensure, out of fear over what Lincoln would do in office without explaining just what Lincoln could do given the Democratic Party's power in the Senate and the Democratic lock on the Supreme Court.
It's also singled out because, unlike pro-slavery factions in contemporary societies, it literally instigated a hideously bloody rebellion in its determination to carve out a nation devoted to the preservation of slavery.
 
Well it's a lot more complicated than that and in many cases serf's lives got worse after emancipation, but your point still stands; even a slave society like Russia eventually got around to saying "Ummmm....no more serfs."

I realize this, my point, however, was that where he said "everybody had slavery then" it only took a decree from Alexander II to end Serfdom and that was the end of it. Where in the USA at the same time it took four years of bloody war to end a slaveholder's revolt.

You're right that it was a lot more complicated than that and that their lives did get worse after it. Unfortunately Alexander II's land reform was as poorly handled as the US one was. :(
 
The US Navy Planning Department of 1925? :rolleyes:

Actually, the US Navy Planning Department of 1925 concluded nothing like what you claim. A 1913 US government study concluded that if a first rate power could land 200,000 troops on the West Coast, they could conquer everything west of the Rocky Mountains. They didn't claim Japan was a first rate power. They didn't claim Japan could spare that many troops from another front. They didn't claim that Japan could successfully move them across the Pacific and drop them safely on the West Coast of the US. They didn't claim 200,000 troops from a 'first rate power" could do that well against the US of 1925, let alone 1939.

The people who created the Red-Orange Plan were a different group brought together over a decade after the first group was disbanded. The Red-Orange Plan was based on scenario of the US standing alone against the British and Japanese Empires. They concluded the main effort should take place in the Atlantic with minimal resources committed to the Pacific. Even with the majority of US forces committed to fighting the entire British Empire, minimal US resources committed to the Pacific, and the Japanese not having to fight any other country or pull resources from any other front, the Red-Orange Plan concluded the best the Japanese could manage were raids on the Panama Canal and the West Coast. Neither of these were in any danger of a successful occupation by the Japanese. Worst case, with a supreme effort on the Japanese military, they might have been able to occupy Hawaii, but not in sufficient force to keep the US from taking it back.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/war-plan-red-orange.htm

http://books.google.com/books?id=dq...-a&cd=1#v=onepage&q="RED-ORANGE PLAN"&f=false
 
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