The Confederacy "pulls a Meiji"
- Thread starter aspie3000
- Start date
samcster94
Banned
To make things worse their leadership also believed slavery was divinely ordained by God and people in Britain and France found slavery repulsive.
All that said and based on what the pre ACW leadership was talking about they would buy some powerful ironclads and try to filibuster stuff in the carribean basin. The Stonewalls are quite tasty for the day and not a lot to stop them.
aspie3000
Banned
I'm actually interested to see this conversation go forward as I've never seen anyone on the forum ever grant the confederacy any success should it survive and in such as convincing manner. I'm curious to see if this is true that the confederacy would've been successful and that the naysayers (quite possibly) suffer from an anti confederate bias and let their revulsion at slavery taint their objectivity, or that they're right and the confederacy doesn't have a chance (also possible.) However the argument of it being the fifth richest country in the world, already having more industry than some great powers, and having a literacy rate of 89%, plus the fact that its an English settler colony with English Liberal Democratic traditions and that English settler colonies tend to be rich whether in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or the United States (because Anglo Saxon culture is a very good and productive culture that seems to find success wherever replicated); these arguments seem pretty convincing to me that the confederacy would be a bit stronger than people are giving it credit for.
Stronger than people give it credit for, yes.
But not for the whole "Anglo-Saxon heritage thing". People compared the South to Latin America since before the United States existed. The people (of all races) were compared to those of Latin America and the Caribbean, the main reason being their extensive practice and reliance on slavery, the other being the climate which was said to produce lazy people. The latter argument has some slight truth to it (it's really hot and humid, which hinders work and productivity), although not nearly as much as 19th century (and earlier) writers placed on it. The former argument, the slavery thing we all bring up when we talk about the CSA, definitely has quite a bit of truth to it.
So what you more have is a Latin American country that has a nice headstart in certain aspects and a nicer heritage than Spain/Portugal's rule.
The handful of ironclads it could build would have to keep an eye on the USN. They are going nowhere.
1) A major portion of Confederate wealth was from slaves, which had gone up dramatically in price over the previous decade.
2) The states that formed the Confederacy had about 8% of the US manufacturing in 1860. If they could maintain that (which they didn't in OTL), by 1870 the Confederacy would come in 9th on industrialization behind the UK, the US, Germany, India, France, Russia, Belgium, and Italy.
3) The Confederacy did not have an 89% literacy rate among white people, let alone the population as a whole. When you count in the black people, the Confederacy probably had a literacy rate of about 50%, which was well behind the Union.
Good guess. n 1860, the Confederacy had 8% of the US manufacturing. If they could maintain that (which they didn't in OTL), the Confederacy would have about the same level of manufacturing as Italy in 1913. If they slip a bit, the CSA would be comparable to Canada or Belgium. That's fairly impressive, but only about half of France or Russia's industry and completely dwarfed by the US, the UK, and France.
The Confederacy was roughly the size of modern Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and Poland combined; but in OTL, the immigrants mainly went to free states.
The 1860 Census counted:
1,000,896 immigrants in New York
430,344 immigrants in Pennsylvania
328,196 immigrants in Ohio
324,605 immigrants in Illinois
276,913 immigrants in Wisconsin
259, 902 immigrants in Massachusetts
233.105 immigrants in all 11 states combined that would form the Confederacy. Over half of them were in Louisiana and Texas.
Respectible for its size no doubt. Personally I think if there was a scenario where there was no March to the Sea or fall of Atlanta and the economic devastation that followed the Confederacy would be in much better shape.
So I think Italy would be a fair comparison for the CSA circa 1900.
Bollocks, technical term.
In 1900 the popn of the entre USA is 78m Italy 32m or slightly larger than the Ottoman Empire, double Brazil. Seeing as just about everything productive has a very large labour component population size is necessary.
The CSA ( but see below) may be the 5th richest country in the world but that’s because it’s the biggest cotton exporter. And the value of the exports does not translate in to national wealth, that only applies if there is a taxation and distribution system to make use of it on a national scale. Otherwise it means there are some Cotton Sheiks with big Yachts.
For southern independence there are really five scenarios.
1. Immediately on Lincolns election
2. Immediately after 1st Bull Run
3. 1862 campaign succeeds
4. 1863 Campaign succeeds
5. 1864 election.
Prior to the start of the war the south takes positive pride in not needing an industrial sector, they are rich enough to buy the products of foul industry and indeed the existence of industry at all is dependent on the produce of Southern soil and the peculiar institution of labour that exploits it.
The earlier the independence the more this is reinforced. One of the reasons people pick 1864 is to allow the souths pathetic attempts to industrialise to bear their teeny weeny fruit. Then go all Speer and extrapolate from that.
What the south does is, in the context of a war and martial law, take 15th century science and 17th century production techniques and make gunpowder and makes percussion caps from stockpiled ore, stockpiled because the mine was uncompetitive commercially while bankrupting itself to buy in what goods it can.
The peacetime issue is not whether the CSA can manufacture things its can they do so competitively. To have the ( say) 10,000 people at the Selma arsenal working there postwar assumes that their owners will not make more money using those slaves ( which is most of them) to plant cotton and use the profits from selling cotton to buy cool stuff.
Railways BTW are not cool, for agriculture its easier to cart things to the river and move by water to the ports, no need for much by way of rail.
However the later in the war you pitch the end the more CSA land is occupied. One of the fantasies about 1864 is that the US forces will politely leave the pro union areas of Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama and not burn out the rest evacuating the slaves as they retreat. Not to mention the view in the CSA that Kentucky and Kansas ( Lecompton constitution) are slave states.
The other conceit is that there is no consequence to the USA of losing the war. As opposed to a series of further secessions or threats whenever a strong regional interest loses an election. Like 1864. So the continuation of slavery post 1864, and implementation of Scott and reenslavement of USCT has no consequences for, say New England or the Midwest. Especially when slaveowners start selling South. After all according to Scott no slave or descendent of slaves can be a US citizen.
It makes no economic sense for the Confederacy and even less for citizens of the confederacy not to double down on agricultural production.
In 1900 the popn of the entre USA is 78m Italy 32m or slightly larger than the Ottoman Empire, double Brazil. Seeing as just about everything productive has a very large labour component population size is necessary.
The CSA ( but see below) may be the 5th richest country in the world but that’s because it’s the biggest cotton exporter. And the value of the exports does not translate in to national wealth, that only applies if there is a taxation and distribution system to make use of it on a national scale. Otherwise it means there are some Cotton Sheiks with big Yachts.
For southern independence there are really five scenarios.
1. Immediately on Lincolns election
2. Immediately after 1st Bull Run
3. 1862 campaign succeeds
4. 1863 Campaign succeeds
5. 1864 election.
Prior to the start of the war the south takes positive pride in not needing an industrial sector, they are rich enough to buy the products of foul industry and indeed the existence of industry at all is dependent on the produce of Southern soil and the peculiar institution of labour that exploits it.
The earlier the independence the more this is reinforced. One of the reasons people pick 1864 is to allow the souths pathetic attempts to industrialise to bear their teeny weeny fruit. Then go all Speer and extrapolate from that.
What the south does is, in the context of a war and martial law, take 15th century science and 17th century production techniques and make gunpowder and makes percussion caps from stockpiled ore, stockpiled because the mine was uncompetitive commercially while bankrupting itself to buy in what goods it can.
The peacetime issue is not whether the CSA can manufacture things its can they do so competitively. To have the ( say) 10,000 people at the Selma arsenal working there postwar assumes that their owners will not make more money using those slaves ( which is most of them) to plant cotton and use the profits from selling cotton to buy cool stuff.
Railways BTW are not cool, for agriculture its easier to cart things to the river and move by water to the ports, no need for much by way of rail.
However the later in the war you pitch the end the more CSA land is occupied. One of the fantasies about 1864 is that the US forces will politely leave the pro union areas of Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama and not burn out the rest evacuating the slaves as they retreat. Not to mention the view in the CSA that Kentucky and Kansas ( Lecompton constitution) are slave states.
The other conceit is that there is no consequence to the USA of losing the war. As opposed to a series of further secessions or threats whenever a strong regional interest loses an election. Like 1864. So the continuation of slavery post 1864, and implementation of Scott and reenslavement of USCT has no consequences for, say New England or the Midwest. Especially when slaveowners start selling South. After all according to Scott no slave or descendent of slaves can be a US citizen.
It makes no economic sense for the Confederacy and even less for citizens of the confederacy not to double down on agricultural production.
Bollocks, technical term. Lower population than the CSA didn't stop countries such as Belgium or Sweden from industrialising very well in per capita terms.
Government wealth is not the same thing as national wealth. The CSA's national wealth will be driven by its patterns of consumption, and if there's one thing that the rich slaveowners were notorious for, it was conspicuous consumption. Yes, some of this wealth is spent importing goods, but enough of it was spent locally to produce significant national wealth. The wages for white workers (who were the ones who voted) were high. Yes, in macroeconomic terms the effects of slave "wages" also need to be calculated and considered. But it is quite incorrect to suggest that the profits from cotton benefited only the rich few.
That said, the history of the CSA shows that their government was more inclined to impose taxation and tariffs than the US government of the time was. Government wealth in an independent CSA is likely to be higher in per capita terms than in the USA, at least for the rest of the nineteenth century. (After that, taxation levels are likely to rise in the North too.)
Sadly, you've fallen for a common misconception about Southern attitudes to industry: namely, that they were fixed in terms of being pro-agriculture and anti-industry. In fact, even in the 1850s there were Southern advocates of industrialisation. But more importantly, Southern attitudes to industrialisation demonstrably varied based on the price of cotton, and to a lesser degree of tobacco.
When cotton prices were high, the rhetoric was more though not universally about the benefits of agriculture, and the pace of industrialisation slowed. (Note: slowed, not stopped. Commerce and manufacturing still grew proportionately faster than agriculture even during the antebellum cotton boom). When agricultural prices dropped, suddenly the rhetoric became more about the benefits of manufacturing and industry, and suddenly the pace of industrialisation became much more rapid. This is exactly what had happened the last time there were agricultural price declines (late 1830s/early 1840s), when industrialisation really picked up.
And here's the kicker: post-ACW, cotton prices crashed, and while there were some partial price recoveries, they remained in long-term decline throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In real terms, cotton prices would never regain their 1860 peak. In other words, manufacturing would have considerable attractiveness.
Given that cotton prices will be in long-term decline, the answer is that manufacturing will still have considerable profitability. Whether that is at Selma or elsewhere is harder to say, but in general terms manufacturing is going to expand considerably because agricultural prices are falling in real terms.
Railways were something which were gradually expanding throughout the slaveholding states. The slaveholding states were on the whole less effective at using their railways than the free soil states, due to a combination of factors, but still, their railways were growing rapidly. In the decade before the ACW, the amount of railways in the slaveholding states increased four-fold (albeit from a low base). This process of railway growth will continue in an independent CSA, facilitating economic growth.
Actually it's the exact opposite: it makes no economic sense for the Confederacy to double down on agricultural production when cotton prices are in long-term decline.
In more general terms, the best way to work out potential industrialisation etc from the South is to look at how they performed in OTL after the end of the ACW, and then look at how the different factors are likely to change ATL. There are factors which push both ways, but on balance I'd expect them to be more industrialised than OTL. I'll put together a separate post outlining my reasons for believing that.
The problem, Jared is that after the war the CSA is going to be flat broke and begging for funds. By the time Little Mac would be elected there would be a flat broke CSA even though it might be still holding Atlanta. Most of the money is going to be paying off the huge debt, paying the military and slowly rebuilding the wreck known as the CSA.
I don't think you can really build a industrialization on slavery, not because you can't make the slaves work, but because the cheapness of labour leads to low productivity, thanks to the short term bonus it deliver. Also slavery means the number of consumers have been lowered, in a industrial society we see a influx from rural to urban areas, because it gives the opportunity for higher wages, which lead to greater consumption, that factor doesn't exist here. A slave based industrialization have to build their economy on export, which make them incredible sensible to boom and burst circles and to foreign customs and tariffs. So yes it may in theory be possible to build industry with slave workers, in practice I don't buy it, for the simple reason that why should other countries accept this kind of competition on products they can make themselves. Germany can't grow cotton, but they can make their own industrial goods.
FillyofDelphi
Banned
Add to that the fact that the rate of attrition among industrial workers during the era (From accidents/injuries etc.) wasn't exactly low due to to low/no mandated safety standards, longer hours, generally more physical and closer work with dangeriously hot/sharp/fast moving/corrosive machinery and substances. When you don't have government-mandated workers comp, trade unions, or really even the right to sue over injuries to worry about, in a free labor system the owners/managers don't have any liability to those "spent cogs"; you can just fire them and replace them with one of the unskilled masses outside the factory eager to take his place. Slaves, on the other hand, were assets that had to be bought and paid for: if they were permenantly injured, you were at least out the purchase price if not expected to care for him, you had to eat the cost of their recovery if they were temporarily put out of working conditions, and even if you rented them you'd have to pay compensation if you damaged somebody else's 'property'. Because of this, slaves in factories just dosen't make economic sense for the owner because of the risk to the investment.
dcharles
Banned
Sorry for the delay in posting here. I've been wanting to address this. Real life, you know.
So, according to Wilson, "as a cotton manufacturing region, the slave states ranked behind the North, England, and France, but above Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Spain, and Finland...while Southern spindles were far fewer than those of the North, they were generally newer and more cheaply operated. A contrast with Britain in 1860 is instructive British mills held about eight times as many spindles as those of the US but produced only about four times as much cloth. The South had about the same relationship to the North.
"'If we treat the South as separate countries and rank them along the countries of the world, the South would stand as the fourth richest nation in the world in 1860'...Southerners possesed more wealth than France, Germany, or Denmark." [I don't know what his definition for Germany is, but I can't imagine it includes anything less than Prussia.]
With respect to the rapid wartime industrialization undertaken by the CS, its impossible to get a complete picture, but some case studies are illustrative. For example, an 1864 survey of factories in NC showed that the state was producing 3,945,432 yards of cotton goods, 531k yards of woolens, and 3,086,100 lbs of yarn. Which was itself 9 million yards of cloth. [Coupled with the remaining factories which had been seized by Governor Vance,] the 13 million yards of cloth and the output of major mills in the lower South alone represented one third of the antebellum capacity of the Confederate States.
In 1861, Confederates had to rely upon massive volunteer efforts to get socks for the soldiers. By 1864, new sock factories "established in 1863" produced "90 percent" of the needed socks for the troops.
According to Bonner, in 1862, Tredegar produced 981 tons of pig iron, while the CS government was able to supply them with another 855 tons. In 1863, the numbers were 3626 and 1737, respectively. It is of note that Tredegar wasn't focused on the refining of ore into pig iron, but the manufacture of finished metal goods from pig iron.
Interestingly, even with this increase in supply of raw materials, the Tredegar works (which expanded during the war) could never achieve more than 33% capacity.
Another ironworks, the Shelby in Alabama, could produce 10 tones of iron per day in 1860. By 1863, it could produce forty tons per day.
With the available records, I doubt we'll ever have a complete picture of the increase in manufacturing capacity in the CS, but we can know that there was a dramatic increase in their industrial capacity.
And any cursory review of the literature shows that there were many, many, people in the antebellum period who were strongly pushing industrialization. Manufacturers were very important in prewar Southern society.
I don't know why the factories would all disappear in the event of a Confederate victory.
To be fair, PA was by far the largest producer of pig iron in the US.
I don't know if you're being flippant there, but Belgium was one of the most industrialized countries in the world in 1860.
But let's look at some postwar data. In 1890, the Southern states produced about 20% of the pig iron in the US. That's about 2 million tons. That's double the output of Russia and Austria-Hungary, 2.5 times the capacity of Belgium, eight times more than Spain, 14 times more than Italy, equivalent to France, and about 1/2 of Germany and 1/4 of the UK. Without the massive losses in wealth brought on by the complete collapse of currency and abolition, I don't know why they would realistically be at a level less than this, and I can think of many realistic reasons why they would be ahead of what they were at IOTL.
The data on the Southern capacities comes from The Engineering and Mining Journal, vol. 54 page 54. The data on the European countries comes from
European Historical Statistics, 1750-1970, page 393.
In OTL, the South, meaning the previously wealthy people who lived there, was basically flat broke. The Southern banking system was ruined, their personal wealth (i.e. slaves) was ruined. For good reason, in the case of freeing slaves, but still destruction of wealth.
ATL, the CSA government is going to be in high debt - one can argue about exactly how high, but certainly high - but the personal wealth destruction is much-avoided. In the areas which have not been occupied, that is - but in any CSA which wins independence, that will need to be a significant part of the country. Industrialisation - or more precisely further industrialisation - does not require large amounts of government investment during this era; private wealth was the more common method.
That's the CSA government, not state government or private wealth. It's not like the money for development has to come from the government - it largely didn't even in OTL. The CSA federal government has the taxation available to pay down the debt, albeit slowly (tariffs, the 10% tax on agriculture which included cotton, etc), though it may not be doing much else.
More generally, while the CSA debt is certainly a significant problem, it's not an insurmountable problem. Even going bankrupt was not ruinous in the longer term. State governments in the USA went broke during the nineteenth century but it didn't ruin private wealth in the process.
Thanks for digging up some interesting statistics. I'd add one point about looking at iron production. The usual focus on CS threads here is to look at total US iron production in 1860 and conclude "gee, the South was hopeless at iron production", since most of the iron production was in the North, and more precisely mostly in Pennsylvania.
In fact, what's happening here is that the 1860 census data captures a moment during a technological transformation that meant that the CS iron production was aberrantly low, and from which it would be expected to recover significantly. Not to make it comparable on per capita levels with the North, necessarily, but still quite respectable in global terms.
What happened from the late 1840s onward was that the new processes of using anthracite for more efficient steel production, concentrated mainly in Pennsylvania, meant that other iron producers around the rest of the country couldn't compete and reduced or completely shut down production. Fun fact: the iron production in the states of the proto-CSA declined between 1850 and 1860, even when other manufacturing (e.g. textiles) grew in production. But this decline in iron production also occurred in some Northern states, such as New England, which did not have access to anthracite.
Now, such techniques did eventually spread from Pennsylvania, of course, and when they did, iron production expanded in other parts of the country. (Birmingham, Alabama being the most well-known example in the South.) So it can reasonably be expected that an independent CSA will also see a large growth in iron production when compared to 1860 levels. As, indeed, they managed in OTL.
In 1860, the Union states produced over 1 billion yards of cotton goods, over 124 million yards of woolen goods, over 30 million pounds of cotton thread, over 6 million pounds of woolen thread.
In 1860, Union States were producing 2600 tons of iron per day.
While Confederate factories wouldn't all disappear after a Confederate victory, they would be affected by a dramatic drop in orders from the postwar Confederate government. Also, with the end of the unintended protectionism from the Union blckade and low tariffs, Confederate industry could be overwhelmed by cheap imported goods.
While this is true, in 1860 Ohio produced about 3 times as much pig iron as all 11 stated that formed the Confederacy combined. New York or New Jersey produced more pig iron than all 11 stated that formed the Confederacy combined.
dcharles
Banned
As I've mentioned several times, I'm not contending that the CS had the production capacity of the Union, or would ever have the production capacity of the US. As I said, the Southern states in the antebellum period stack up quite respectably by international standards. IOTL, textile production moved South in a huge way during the postwar period. That trend would be even more evident in most conceivable ATL worlds.
First, see above. Two, that's not an apples to apples comparison. I'm showing the increase in pig iron production at one ironworks. My point was that production at that site tripled, and operating blast furnaces and bloomeries wasn't even the Tredegar's main thing. Pig iron production in Alabama alone increased by at least a factor of ten. The number of new blast furnaces constructed between 1863-65 in that state was more than double the amount of prewar blast furnaces. Unfortunately, there's no way to get a complete picture of total production in the whole of the CS and compare it to prewar production in the antebellum states. But from what we do know, the increase was simply enormous. We know that by international standards, the antebellum Southern states had a respectable manufacturing base. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Austria-Hungary. By the end of a successful war, I think they would be well ahead of that.
http://www.uwa.edu/uploadedFiles/alabamareview/1954Jul_ALAIronManufacturing.pdf
Well, the CS congress adopted the US tariff schedule--with the exception of cotton--more or less unchanged. The manufacturers lobbied hard for that. After the war, manufacturers would have more influence and not less. They're richer and their importance to the nation has been demonstrated in a dramatic way. They will all be affected by a drop in orders from the Confederate government, but a lot of that is offset by an increase in the market for consumer goods. And, since the price of cotton would drop after the war, textile manufacturers can get it for cheaper than they could prewar. The prewar price for cotton was more or less an all-time high. The drop in its value provides the foundation for the Southern economy to transition to a more industrialized one.