Is the US destined to go to war with an Independent CSA

67th Tigers

Banned
It was only for economic in a very round about way, secession was about a loss of political power and influence, not actually about tariffs.

Tariff? I'm talking the slave gang system. It is inherently more efficient than free labour. Slave gang farms in the South had an output ca. 50% greater than Northern free labour farms.
 

Japhy

Banned
Tariff? I'm talking the slave gang system. It is inherently more efficient than free labour. Slave gang farms in the South had an output ca. 50% greater than Northern free labour farms.

Ah, silly me. That is true, it just doesn't really exist as solely an economic concern so I didn't connect it.
 
That is your opinion.

Then you need something to disprove the assertion that a society unwilling to abolish slavery when it was an extremely politically convenient move that easily could have won them the war will do so much later after a victorious war to save slavery and with the planters accustomed to a total monopoly on power. If the CSA cared as little about slavery as its whitewasher-TLs have it, then it would have scrapped slavery around the time of the Provisional Emancipation Proclamation and cut the Union's best weapon off from it.
 

67th Tigers

Banned
Ah, silly me. That is true, it just doesn't really exist as solely an economic concern so I didn't connect it.

Sorry, I was probably hasty in my reply. Some here deny that slavery had an economic underpinning. I'm slightly oversensitive towards certain myths.
 
Sorry, I was probably hasty in my reply. Some here deny that slavery had an economic underpinning. I'm slightly oversensitive towards certain myths.

Nobody denies this, the claim is that slavery is intractably linked with the Confederate state and its ideology and thus challenges to it in the Confederacy would be linked both to treason and attempts to make the CSA "more Yankee" than its leaders would want to be. This is far from unprecedented in human history, and it's not exactly a leap of imagination or CS-bashing to imagine a state where an ideology is directly connected with the state's legitimacy and the ideology is economic preferring to keep that economic system rather than risk its own complete collapse. This, after all, is why Russia kept serfdom as long as it did, the CSA would be the same but moreso.
 
If they wherent anti-industrial why did they secede?

So as not to be forced to buy Northern industrial goods thought high tariffs on imported European goods.
CSA made more money for cotton and tobacco exports to europe that it could by build factories and making the goods them selves.
Just as Arab countries trade oil for industrial goods today.
 
Cotton and tobacco etc. were.

As to the Boll Weevil, that's hardly relevant to the 19th century is it? By the time of the Weevil the CSA is the worlds largest oil producer.

The insect crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas to enter the United States from Mexico in 1892[1] and reached southeastern Alabama in 1915. By the mid 1920s it had entered all cotton growing regions in the U.S., travelling 40 to 160 miles per year. It remains the most destructive cotton pest in North America. Mississippi State University has estimated that since the boll weevil entered the United States it has cost U.S. cotton producers about $13 billion, and in recent times about $300 million per year.[1]

The cotton boll weevil: a, adult beetle; b, pupa; c, larva.


The boll weevil contributed to the economic woes of Southern farmers during the 1920s, a situation exacerbated by the Great Depression in the 1930s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_weevil#Infestation

The boll weevil infestation has been credited with bringing about economic diversification in the southern US, including the expansion of peanut cropping. The citizens of Enterprise, Alabama erected the Boll Weevil Monument in 1919, perceiving that their economy had been overly dependent on cotton, and that mixed farming and manufacturing were better alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boll_weevil#Infestation
 
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Japhy

Banned
So as not to be forced to buy Northern industrial goods thought high tariffs on imported European goods.
CSA made more money for cotton and tobacco exports to europe that it could by build factories and making the goods them selves.
Just as Arab countries trade oil for industrial goods today.

Annnnddddd there it is... The Tariff Argument I was afraid 67 was making.

If it was about Import Taxes, why didn't the Civil War begin under any Whig Presidents exactly? And why secede before Tariffs were raised? Why not fight that in the Senate rather then by force of arms when they can win that fight?
 
So as not to be forced to buy Northern industrial goods thought high tariffs on imported European goods.
CSA made more money for cotton and tobacco exports to europe that it could by build factories and making the goods them selves.
Just as Arab countries trade oil for industrial goods today.

Except that if the CSA cared that little about slavery, the fall of 1862 would have been a perfect time to yank the moral high ground right out from under the Yankees by saying "We'll take a Confederate state over slavery, so what'll you do now, huh?". If the CSA was of slaveowners, by slaveowners, for slaveowners then its policies make perfect sense. If slavery had nothing to do with it then the CSA missed two very good chances to just scrap it and preserve itself as a state first and foremost.
 
Annnnddddd there it is... The Tariff Argument I was afraid 67 was making.

If it was about Import Taxes, why didn't the Civil War begin under any Whig Presidents exactly? And why secede before Tariffs were raised? Why not fight that in the Senate rather then by force of arms when they can win that fight?

Not to mention why not simply scrap slavery as a means to end-run the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, in order to ensure that the USA would have to conquer a CS state without its easiest means to gain the moral high ground and squeeze the CSA without the CSA being able adequately to respond? If the CS state as an independent entity, even if independence would have required abolishing slavery to secure it and be damned anything else mattered more than a CSA with slavery, then the fall of 1862 and the first months of 1863 was the best time imaginable to just ditch slavery to save the Confederacy, the precise rationale Jefferson Davis himself used in 1865.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Annnnddddd there it is... The Tariff Argument I was afraid 67 was making.

If it was about Import Taxes, why didn't the Civil War begin under any Whig Presidents exactly? And why secede before Tariffs were raised? Why not fight that in the Senate rather then by force of arms when they can win that fight?

It's worth differentiating between immediate causes and ultimate causes. The ultimate cause of the Civil War was that there were (at least) two, increasingly mutually exclusive social systems growing up within the antebellum Union: One based on slavery, one on state capitalism. The Northern states whose elites thrived on state capitalism had interests that had diverged from those of the Southern states whose elites thrived on chattel slavery sometime at the end of the 18th century, so, at the very least, there had to be a split.

The immediate cause of the Civil War happening in 1860 was twofold:

1. The Slave Power had unequivocally lost control of the Federal government, permanently. No more slave states were likely to enter the Union, and Lincoln was elected without a single electoral vote from below the Mason-Dixon line. The rapidly tilting population balance guaranteed Northern states control of the House and the lack of new slave stats guaranteed them control of the Senate, going into the long run.

2. A manifestation of this was the incoming Morrill Tariff (which was far larger than any previous tariff except the tariff of abominations itself) which, taking the previous point into account point, the export-import dependent slave lords had absolutely no way to effective oppose.

So, it's not incorrect to say the Morrill Tariff caused the Civil War. But the Morrill Tariff was important because of the divergent social systems of the two major halves of the country. Saying the Morrill Tariff caused the Civil War doesn't suppose that slavery didn't, it requires that slavery did. The North needed a large, wealthy captive market to sell manufactured goods to, so it couldn't let the South go, and the South knew it would never be able to effectively oppose Northern policies, and getting rid of slavery and adopting their own version of Northern state capitalism was essentially out of the question, so we got a war of secession instead.

This need to simplify things into easy to understand mono-causal frameworks is, IMO, another manifestation of the need to see history as a morality play. I'm more or less convinced that a South that left the Union peacefully would not descend into a dictatorial 3rd world hell hole, and I feel like the opposition has utterly failed to argue otherwise. I'm also convinced that slavery was just about the most evil thing to ever exist on this continent; in fact, I blame slavery for almost every social problem we suffer from today. The two positions are, from my view, not mutually exclusive.
 
MAlexMatt, if slavery wasn't anything important to the CSA, why didn't it simply abolish it as a counteraction to the US Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation and say "Screw slavery, we're a country first. Come and get us now?". That's a way to politically ensure the USA is nothing *but* a conqueror and undercut its major moral advantage all in one. It's the politically and militarily rational thing to do.
 

Spengler

Banned
The CSA was not anti-industrial it did not need industry as industrial good could be traded for from Europe for cotton cheaper that they could be made in the CSA.
That won't continue much longer though, the European powers were already beginning to buy cotton from Egypt and India by that point.

Matt the Morill tariff argument is a tired argument largely originating with Racist defenders of the south who flirt with Austrian Economics. Anyone reading the actual firebrands rhetoric knows that such argument is a pack of lies. Especially when one considers that several of the slave states voted for the constitutional unionist party which had a strong tariff element to it.

Also Snake an excellent point on the black and the gray, it really should just be put into the badly written ASB section.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Matt the Morill tariff argument is a tired argument largely originating with Racist defenders of the south who flirt with Austrian Economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Anyone reading the actual firebrands rhetoric knows that such argument is a pack of lies.

ME said:
Saying the Morrill Tariff caused the Civil War doesn't suppose that slavery didn't, it requires that slavery did.

Like I say here, the Tariff argument and the Slavery argument are not just not mutually exclusive, but are actually joined at the hip. The Morrill Tariff only mattered because slavery mattered. A South without slavery would have almost certain developed its own class of state capitalists who would be interested in squeezing the export-import dependent small farmer class as a captive market for domestically produced goods.

Especially when one considers that several of the slave states voted for the constitutional unionist party which had a strong tariff element to it.

The slave states that voted for Bell just so happen to be the ones where slavery was least prevalent. This is because the culture of non-Piedmont Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee was based in the Scots-Irish/Borderlander English and Scottish culture of 18th and 19th century Appalachia, rather than the elitist planter culture of the Deep Southern states or Piedmont Virginia/North Carolina. They were slave holders, but they were slave holders like 18th century New York or Massachusetts, instead of 17th century Barbados like in South Carolina or Georgia.

They had developed a (relatively small) class of native state capitalists who had the same interests as those in the North. National liberalism wasn't exclusive to the North, it just dominated there like it didn't in most of the South.
 
Looking at the history of north/south relations from well before the Civil War, one striking fact is the development of two very different visions of what "America" should be. Free labor, public works, and industrialization (and protected in growth by tariffs) for the north, and a sort of "squirearchy" in the south, based on agriculture and low tariffs allowing export of agriculture (cotton/tobacco) while getting foreign industrial goods inexpensively, and no "wasteful" spending on public works. This fight was going on for >30 years before the war.

At the time of the CW the south had minimal industry, and what it had was way behind the north. Likewise RR trackage was small. It is also worthy of note that educational institutions in the south were conspicuous by their scarcity, even accounting for the smaller population. In fact, after the CW public education from grammar school upwards was way behind the north, and this was due to priorities not the depredations of Sherman's Bummers.

Had the south succeeded in becoming independent industrial development would have been "third world", and their poor educational system will further retard development because the scientists and engineers needed for development will certainly not be there. Furthermore lack of industrial development and the slave system, as well as even more prejudice against non-UK immigrants than the north, will severely limit white immigration to the south from Europe.

The CSA will continue slavery at least in to the early 20th century, and while chattel slavery may end then, blacks will remain the lowest possible non-slave peons. Infrastructure development will be severely limited, it should be noted that even under the stress of war the central government of the CSA could not get several states to agree on the route for a new and important rail line, or the gauge for the tracks.

It should also be noted that the UK and France were already switching to Egyptian and Indian cotton when the CW began, which is why the strategy of the cotton embargo the CSA tried to leverage them in to recognition did not work. The CSA post-independence will be at the mercy of the international commodities market.

Does all this mean USA-CSA war will be inevitable, but the CSA counting on tons of support from Europe will be a pipe dream. And, should there be CSA revanchism over West Virginia, Kentucky, etc or over-eager slave catchers, expect them to get kicked.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Your claim is the Morrill Tariff, not slavery, began the war. So I repeat if it was all about the fucking tariff, why did the CSA refuse to use slaves as combat troops when its white manpower was withering on the vine from its political fuckups?

ME said:
Saying the Morrill Tariff caused the Civil War doesn't suppose that slavery didn't, it requires that slavery did.

Can you even read?

Or do you just notice that I replied so you re-word the argument I've already refuted and post it again?

Are you just trolling me?
 
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