Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
71) COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS, EXEC. DEPT., Boston, November 27, 1861.
Capt. G. V. Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy:
SIR: I wish to call your especial attention to a subject which has been pressed upon my notice by some of our most practical, experienced, and influential business men, and which I cannot but regard with much favor. It is that the Federal Government should make its next demonstration upon the coast of Texas, the State easiest to take and hold, with larger public consequences dependent upon such action than any other. Texas we virtually bought; her rebellion makes her a dependency for treatment under the war power and through Congress. The force when landed should proclaim martial law, with reference to the future action of Congress, when the proper time arrives to free all the slaves, compensating loyal owners if necessary.
RESULTS.
1st. We flank the whole rebellion.
2d. We open a way out for cotton.
3d. We cut off future annexations in the interest of the rebels and demonstrate to foreign powers that this war is to stop the spread of slavery.
4th. Instead of loyal men leaving Texas, as they are now doing, for California and elsewhere, they will remain, and in a few years will fill Texas with a European emigration, which will demonstrate, as the Germans of Texas are now doing, that cotton can be raised without slaves, though hired negroes may also be used.
5th. Galveston is but 600 miles from Lawrence and Saint Joseph, and a railroad will be run through Texas and Arkansas to those places, and the question of conflict of systems of labor andpolitical power will be settled forever, leaving the question of slavery in the cotton States for philosophical treatment, unless it becomes necessary to settle it under the war power before the present war is ended.
These points are urged, not in the interest of Abolitionists, but by leading commercial men and capitalists, as fairly coming under the necessities and rules of war. Martial law proclaimed, events will no doubt educate the people and the next Congress to a wise solution of all questions which may afterward arise in connection with slaves and slavery in an exceptional State or dependency like Texas. By such seizure and treatment of Texas as is briefly indicated above it is urged that we shall have at the end of the war material guarantees that will prevent any such compromise or settlement as to make a renewal of the struggle for ascendency or another rebellion possible. Please excuse this inroad upon your time, and give to the subject only such attention as you think its intrinsic importance demands.
Yours, most faithfully, JOHN A. ANDREW [Governor of Massachusetts].
[Indorsement.]
GOVERNOR: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communication of the 27th instant, and have reason to believe that this project has already received great attention. [G. V. FOX, Assistant Secretary of the Navy.]
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
The unemployment rates during the years of the Great Depression (1930s) ranged from 15% to 25%. Very comparable.
Well, no; trying to compare statistics from a day when such numbers were not actually kept will tell you nothing. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics did not directly record an unemployment statistic before 1940, and from 1940 to 1947 their survey included people down to age 14; from 1948 on, it include those age 16 and over. Since the Bureau was actually established in 1884, any attempt to generate statistics for the ACW on a national basis is unlikely to be reliable, and any rates given for the years before 1940 are based on various other sources and known to be incomplete.
When my Dad graduated from high school in 1933 (age 16), unemployment in New York City was generally estimated at 40%, although I have seen higher estimates. They say it was 50% in Harlem (northern Manhattan).
A year after graduation, my Dad was the only member of his graduating class with a paying job. He might have been more motivated than most; both of his parents died by the time he was eleven, and he had a brother five years younger than he was.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
Please tell us what you think you are trying to say here.
Until the South seceded and began the war, there was no need to "...open a way out for cotton...". Cotton was being bought freely in the Winter of 1860-61. The letter you are trying to mislead us with was written seven months after the new Confederacy attacked Ft. Sumter -- and also after the Confederacy decided to impose an embargo on itself.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
I think what Battalion is getting at is the idea that 21 percent of New England's cotton workers were out of a job; therefore, money must have been the reason.
If the warehouses in Jolly Old England were crammed to the rafters with bales of cotton during the winter of '60 - '61, might not the warehouses on American soil been also crammed?
Cotton production during the last years of the decade were bumper crops and cotton was as cheap as it was foreseeably going to get. Hence, warehouses were packed.
By mid '62, cotton was dribbling up the Ohio and on steamers out of New Orleans.
I don't mean to claim that there was no shortage and that no one was thrown out of work. It seems equally out of line that 21 percent of the workers were necessarily unemployed.
Wonder how many of those joined the army?
ole
__________________ "Belief does not make truth. Evidence makes truth. And belief does not make evidence."
I think what Battalion is getting at is the idea that 21 percent of New England's cotton workers were out of a job; therefore, money must have been the reason.
But isn't the point that any shortage of cotton and the alleged alarms of New England mill operators and politicians was a result of the war started by the Confederacy - not a cause of it.....and the name of the thread (and Battalion's assertion) is "Money; The Cause?"
IMO, this thread has reinforced the historical record, that the monied interest 'most' intimately tied to secession was, also, the most 'intimately' tied to slavery was the political leadership of the south.
That the south's leadership thought that cotton was 'King' was clearly an economic assessment.
The arguments for secession 'most' favored by the movers and shakers of southern society, was how much the economy (slaves/cotton) were under threat by the actions of the north i.e., that slavery (the 'source' of the southern leadership wealth and position in southern society) would no longer be guaranteed.
As I have argued in other posts, IF, Money was the cause of the CW, then, the historical record is very clear that it was southern money.
I think what Battalion is getting at is the idea that 21 percent of New England's cotton workers were out of a job; therefore, money must have been the reason.
But they were all apparently working just fine in late 1860, and the only reason they might have for worrying about the cotton supply in 1861 is the secession of the Southern states and the war they were waging on the rest of the nation. This is not a cause for the war; it is a result of Southern actions. Plus, the letter Battalion is referring to was written 7 months after the war started -- which also means everything it is proposing is done as a result of the Southern actions, and is not a cause of them.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
From the on-line article, Origins of the American Civil War- encyclopedia article - , an excerpt:
Economics
Historians generally agree that economic conflicts were not a major cause of the war. Economic historian Lee A. Craig reports, "In fact, numerous studies by economic historians over the past several decades reveal that economic conflict was not an inherent condition of North-South relations during the antebellum era and did not cause the Civil War." Aside from the economic institution of slavery, no other economic issues brought about the Civil War.
Regional economic differences
The South, Midwest, and Northeast had quite different economic structures. They traded with each other and each became more prosperous by staying in the Union, a point many businessmen made in 1860-61. However Charles Beard in the 1920s made a highly influential argument to the effect that these differences caused the war (rather than slavery or constitutional debates). He saw the industrial Northeast forming a coalition with the agrarian Midwest against the Plantation South. Critics pointed out that his image of a unified Northeast was incorrect because the region was highly diverse with many different competing economic interests. In 1860-61, most business interests in the Northeast opposed war. After 1950, only a few mainstream historians accepted the Beard interpretation, though it was accepted by libertarian economists (read DiLorenzo and Adams). As historian Kenneth Stampp--who abandoned Beardianism after 1950, sums up the scholarly consensus. "Most historians...now see no compelling reason why the divergent economies of the North and South should have led to disunion and civil war, rather, they find stronger practical reasons why the sections, whose economies neatly complemented one another, should have found it advantageous to remain united."
Free labor vs. pro-slavery arguments
Historian Eric Foner has argued that a free-labor ideology dominated thinking in the North, which emphasized economic opportunity. By contrast, Southerners described free labor as "greasy mechanics, filthy operators, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists." They strongly opposed the homestead laws that were proposed to give free farms in the west, fearing the small farmers would oppose plantation slavery. Indeed, opposition to homestead laws was far more common in secessionist rhetoric than opposition to tariffs. Southerners such as Calhoun argued that slavery was "a positive good", and that slaves were more civilized and morally and intellectually improved because of slavery.
Contemporary explanations
In July 1863, as decisive campaigns were fought at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Republican senator Charles Sumner re-dedicated his speech, The Barbarism of Slavery, and said that desire to preserve slavery was the sole cause of the war:
"[T]here are two apparent rudiments to this war. One is Slavery and the other is State Rights. But the latter is only a cover for the former. If Slavery were out of the way there would be no trouble from State Rights.
The war, then, is for Slavery, and nothing else. It is an insane attempt to vindicate by arms the lordship which had been already asserted in debate. With mad-cap audacity it seeks to install this Barbarism as the truest Civilization. Slavery is declared to be the "corner-stone" of the new edifice."
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
72) "...If the two sections can no longer live together, they can no longer live apart in quiet till it is determined which is master. No two civilizations ever did, or can, come into contact as the North and South threaten to do, without a trial of strength, in which the weaker goes to the wall...
...We must remain masters of the occasion, and the dominant Power on this continent..."
New York Times, 9 April 1861
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
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