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Originally Posted by unionblue Just wanted to check and make sure we were all on the 'same page.'  |
Neil,
I'd sooner think that crop circles were caused by UFO's than the small market of the South Eleven bought the majority of dutiable imports brought into the US.
The claim has its genesis in a couple of places, which are all flawed.
First, Jabez Curry's speech relies on the pure fiction of his making, and is disproven by the very same source he claims to base it on.
Second, it is clear that the gross percentage of exports of southern crops is thought to be equal to percentage of imports. This also is fiction. It totally ignores domestic commerce.
Third, it is assumed that since the Northeast produces more manufactures, they therefore have no reason to buy imports; whereas the South
must buy dutiable imports. This too is fiction. Foreign imports and exports are constantly conflated with domestic imports and exports.
Fourth, it is further assumed that duties only were collected on manufactures such as the North would produce, ignoring the duties collected on sugar, tabacco, hemp, and the raw materials and machinery used by industry.
Occam's Razor applies here, because there has been no evidence to show that a small southern market bought most of the dutiable articles imported into the US chiefly through northern ports. The claim is implausible both on its face and on deeper investigation. We should accept the plausible over the implausible.
But plausibility is not the end of it. Commerce generally evolves in natural channels. If the small population of the South was indeed
the great marketplace for foreign goods and the great concentration of liquid wealth, then the South is where great shipping and banking should have evolved. But it didn't. While the entrance of 93% of imports through the North is not proof that they are consumed there, the phenomenon does suggest that they were not mostly then sent south. And there is no reason to believe that any of the imports entering through the ports of the West Coast or upper New England states in 1860 ended up in the South Eleven.
While I have not seen southern testimony claiming that the stores are mostly shelved with foreign goods, I have seen testimony that the purchases of the South are mostly the domestic products of the North. A glance at a map of railroads in 1860 shows without doubt the enormous lead in mileage of track outside the South Eleven, and therefore shows an equal lead in iron consumption. Consumption of woolens, cottons, sugar, coffee and tea, cigars, nails, and every other article can at least safely be assumed to have been purchased in relative proportion to population.....(at least requests to specify which articles were bought predominately in the South have always gone unanswered), and of course this meant mostly NOT in the South. The mostly overlooked consumption of raw and finished materials of every industry from iron making to textile manufacture to shipbuilding was admittedly not southern.
All in all, I think its pretty easy to make a very reasonably case that the majority of consumption of goods, both foreign and domestic, was in the dense marketplace of the North and West. Occam would think so too.
Cedarstripper
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