Why did the South not Industrialize?

From what I've read, they were definitely in terminal decline. Other producers were engaged in a "race to the bottom" that the Empire could not or would not match.

What Emancipation did was kill the island sugar economies quickly, sort of like being shot through the head versus wasting away from cancer. Because the "death" was so rapid, there was little chance for other economic activities to pick up the slack. Plantation owners who were watching their profits dwindle each year, for example, might have had time to experiment with other cash crops. As it was, the labor force immediately bugged out and - very understandably - worked for the former slavers just enough to feed themselves.

Economic consequences aside, I would have shot slavery through the head too. It couldn't be ended fast enough and the consequences be damned.

I know. I was just pointing out that from what I've heard, the sugar economy was not strong and vigorous before emancipation killed it. Like you say, it was already in deep decline. But I see that you know that.

And I don't think you need to argue with anyone here that slavery should have been ended as soon as possible. :)
 

katchen

Banned
There is a grain of truth in it. Southern agrarianism was resistant to transition to commodity production, preferring self-sufficiency whether on the small farm or on the plantation. And the political culture and institutions opposed internal improvements, both by the federal government and even by states, to preserve that agrarian autonomy. Less investment in infrastructure can easily explain even the most hyperbolic of those observations.

A lot of times, when lines of communication are poor, and it is hard to find markets, idleness is preferable to overproduction or needless toil.
And this resistance to "big government" from Southern Republicans and a willingness to cut government spending to the bone (and even shut the federal government down) is still with us.
 

Flubber

Banned
And I don't think you need to argue with anyone here that slavery should have been ended as soon as possible. :)


I think I do. :( There are people here dim enough to equate my pointing out that emancipation had immediate negative economic effects with support for slavery.
 

katchen

Banned
The South had several things militating against industrialization from 1600 to 1865.

One, population density was always lower in the South. People forget with air conditioning and pesticides how yellow fever and malaria used to decimate populations in the South, even in the Mid-Atlantic states during the summers.
Why do you think they imported slaves?
They figured Africans had innate resistance to such diseases vs Whites.


Two, as said before, the population of Highland Scots and Scots-Irish that formed the nucleus of white settlers were only interested in land to farm because what they had back home was commons either enclosed or seized during the various rebellions of the 1600's and Act of Union in 1706.

They'd passed through British cities, got used as brute labor and wanted none of that when they came to North America. They wanted to be freeholders farming their crofts beholden to none.

Three, Jeffersonian ideals against public works, against establishing a national bank, or anything smacking of effective central government
crippled Southern economic and political development from the birth of the US until now.

You didn't need eminent domain to run a riverboat line or pole barges along a river as you did with railroads to establish rights-of-way, sell stock at home and abroad for capital, and a steel industry to make rails, locomotives, and cars.

In Southern states, property rights were absolute and getting property owners in a county, much less a state to agree on things was like herding rabid cats.

Some great points have been made about how the manual trades and commercial skills folks practiced freely and eagerly in the North were viewed with suspicion down South.

Challenging those cultural prejudices took generations but you still see it quite evident in the current body politic throughout the US.
Resistance to and suspicion of industrialization by local gentries was actually quite common all over the world in the 19th Century. It could be readily seen in Austria-Hungary, in Russia especially, where factories were resisted because "too many people living in towns" was feared, and the pattern of remote villages (mirs) connected by bad roads persists in many areas to the present day. And in the South of France, there seems to have been a great deal of suspicion of the French Government. And in the Latifundia (feudal estate) country of southern Portugal, Southern Spain and Southern Italy and SIcily, industrialization seems to have been resisted until very recently. And in Latin America. And traditionally, by China's "scholar gentry" until the Communist takeover swept that gentry aside. And in India, Korea and Japan.
 
I think I do. :( There are people here dim enough to equate my pointing out that emancipation had immediate negative economic effects with support for slavery.

Explaining why 'things' were used =/= defending why 'things' were used

While its no debate that with present day humanism, slavery is horrible, certain situations called for slavery as the best way to push forward. Meiji period in Japan comes to mind, although by name it was closer to indentured servitude ... The Japanese industrialization wouldn't have happened (at least not anywhere as succesful) if the fledging industrialists weren't able to get cheap laborers for their manual silk weaving, and in their position women and children were both cheaper and more accessable than free labour, whom worked either in the fields (as tenant farmers) or in mining operations
 
Citation needed.

'Modern' Slavery, mainly used for manual labour had no need to read, and them knowing how to read would merely leave them knowing about whats outside their preception (beyond oral knowledge defusing down to them) which might very well leave them (even more) willing to try escaping a (cruel) owner
 
Citation needed.

I'll type up a longer post later, but the system of controlling slaves in the plantation economy revolved around the white gentry being able to write, and slaves being entirely unable to.

If you disbelieve this, please ask yourself why teaching slaves to read and write was illegal in slave-holding states.

edit: Alright, longer post:

In most cases, slaves were managed and thus controlled by a system of written passes and papers. Written passes were used to tell other white overseers why a slave was traveling from one location to another, how long a slave had been hired out to work at another plantation, if a slave had permission to visit other slaves on another plantation, and a variety of other reasons for detailing a slave's status and movements. Keeping slaves illiterate so they could not subvert this system was considered so important in many states in the South that teaching a slave to read or write was outlawed, and even whites could be punished for violation. In fact slave owners were so paranoid about passes being forged that in addition there were other laws mandating extremely harsh punishments for any literate free black caught writing such passes for slaves.
 
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Citation needed.

There is a wide variety of literature about the laws governing slaves. Just by looking it up in Google right now, I came across a Wikipedia article and a Google Books entry talking about it. There's many more.

Because each state had its own laws, there was not uniformity of laws regarding the teaching of slaves to read and write. The states with the least amount of slaves had more lenient laws, while states with most slaves had the most restrictive and severe laws. In some there were no legal barriers, while in others any teachings were illegal. I'm sure that such laws rose and fell depending on how threatened slave owners felt at the time.

Contemporary estimates of the literacy of the slave population at the time of the Civil War was around 5-10%. So it is obvious this is something that was suppressed by law and cultural attitudes. While I have no map distribution, I suspect if we saw what areas the literate slaves were at, we'd see them almost exclusively in the border states and a handful of important cities (Richmond, Atlanta, New Orleans) where the needs of urban slave owners required some of them to be literate.

The reasons one wouldn't want literate slaves are obvious.
1) Slaves can start reading anti-slavery literature and become more disobedient.
2) Slaves will be able to forge documents that allow them to escape.
3) Slaves will get higher value for their work and become more independent, encouraging them to escape elsewhere since they have a better chance of surviving.
4) Even if you teach a select number of "trusted" slaves to read (say help in the household to raise the kids or to assist in clerical work), there is a high chance those slaves will teach others that you don't trust.

So while some industrial slaves might be literate, the same reasons to keep that limited apply.
 
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