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.
"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."
"...hundreds of Southerners were advocating the African slave trade..."
...and Southerners are accused of promoting "mythologies."
"Hundreds" means at least 200.
Name 200.
Well, the Knoxville paper that was in one of UnionBlue's posts seems to have had a circulation of 300 and was strongly pro-slave-trade. The Charleston Mercury of Rhett, perhaps the most influential and one of the most widely read of the Southern papers in that day, was an avid supporter of the re-opening of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Mr. Spratt, a major Southern figure of the day, became an editor of the Charleston Mercury in the late 1850s in addition to writing for other Southern papers. That seems to imply a paid circulation of many thousands for these ideas.
In addition, the Southern Commercial Convention (the biggest annual meeting in the South) had become a major political meeting by the 1850s. The re-opening of the slave trade was an annual debate there, with committees established to make proposals on the matter. In 1858, there was a famous debate on the matter in front of a packed crowd in the convention hall (actually a warehouse used for the occasion) between Yancey of AL and Pryor of VA, both Fire-Eaters. They were appointed to the reopen-the-Atlantic-slave-trade study commission by the previous year's Convention. Spratt was chairman of the Committee. The motion to petition for the re-opening was turned down that year, but brought up again in 1859 and passed.
Then we have further evidence that men like Pollard, Yancey, Rhett, Pryor, Ruffin, Spratt and others commonly wrote and spoke about this to crowds and in letters between themselves. Pollard, the man who would later write the "Lost Cause" book that gave its' name to the myth and legend, actually advocated re-opening the African slave-trade in a book published before the Civil War ("Black Diamonds") which sold quite well. So once again we have evidence of not hundreds, but many thousands, actually paying money for books and papers that supported this idea, or going eagerly to listen to speeches that advocated it.
But you already know all that -- if for no other reason because I have frequently made posts to you pointing it out, with references for you to verify. This pretense that you are trying to put across will not stand the light of day. All it will do is make it clear you have no interest in the truth, only in propaganda work. I urge you to stop shoting holes in your own credibility like this.
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.
Well, the Knoxville paper that was in one of UnionBlue's posts seems to have had a circulation of 300 and was strongly pro-slave-trade. The Charleston Mercury of Rhett, perhaps the most influential and one of the most widely read of the Southern papers in that day, was an avid supporter of the re-opening of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Mr. Spratt, a major Southern figure of the day, became an editor of the Charleston Mercury in the late 1850s in addition to writing for other Southern papers. That seems to imply a paid circulation of many thousands for these ideas.
Subscribing to a newspaper doesn't necessarily mean a person is subscribing to the ideas of the editor.
~
I have read something different about the Mercury.
Quote:
Originally Posted by trice
In addition, the Southern Commercial Convention (the biggest annual meeting in the South) had become a major political meeting by the 1850s. The re-opening of the slave trade was an annual debate there, with committees established to make proposals on the matter. In 1858, there was a famous debate on the matter in front of a packed crowd in the convention hall (actually a warehouse used for the occasion) between Yancey of AL and Pryor of VA, both Fire-Eaters. They were appointed to the reopen-the-Atlantic-slave-trade study commission by the previous year's Convention. Spratt was chairman of the Committee. The motion to petition for the re-opening was turned down that year, but brought up again in 1859 and passed.
There are all sorts of conventions.
These have no official status.
Quote:
Originally Posted by trice
Then we have further evidence that men like Pollard, Yancey, Rhett, Pryor, Ruffin, Spratt and others commonly wrote and spoke about this to crowds and in letters between themselves. Pollard, the man who would later write the "Lost Cause" book that gave its' name to the myth and legend, actually advocated re-opening the African slave-trade in a book published before the Civil War ("Black Diamonds") which sold quite well. So once again we have evidence of not hundreds, but many thousands, actually paying money for books and papers that supported this idea, or going eagerly to listen to speeches that advocated it.
People buy books about UFOs, Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis. Doesn't mean they believe it though.
__________________ 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."
Subscribing to a newspaper doesn't necessarily mean a person is subscribing to the ideas of the editor.
~
I have read something different about the Mercury.
There are all sorts of conventions.
These have no official status.
People buy books about UFOs, Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis. Doesn't mean they believe it though.
ROFL. Let us know when you want to be serious.
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.
There are all sorts of conventions. These have no official status.
Like Lovejoy's Alton Convention (which, by the way, was an excellent comeback.). I did note that anti-abolitionists added their own punctuation.
Now. Name 200 with some kind of official influence.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
"The high cotton prices of the 1850's noticeably boosted the price of slaves. The price of a prime field hand in the New Orleans market skyrocketed from $700 in 1845 to $1,000 in 1850 to $1,800 in 1860, and the slave prices in the Virginia, Georgia, and Charleston markets followed the same pattern. In 1859 Edmund Ruffin estimated that slave prices had doubled since 1844 and that the escalation would continue. A Southerner told Frederick Olmsted " a n i g g e r that wouldn't bring over $300 seven years ago, will fetch $1,000, cash, quick, this year." Southern newspapers throughout the fifties reported the new slave prices with great excitement. In 1854 the New Orleans Delta, for example, announced that at a recent sale slave prices were "extraordinary," and that one man commanded $3,000, another $1,970, others $1,600 and $1,700.
"...All the southern states," complained Edmund Ruffin, "suffer greatly from the scarcity and high price of labor. They can obtain no supply from abroad, because the only available and useful supply, of negroes, is prohibited by law." Concerned about the limited resources of slave labor and the consequent high prices of slaves, the editor of the American Cotton Planter demanded the reopening of the African slave trade."
Another reason for reopening the African slave trade was the South's desire to use slaves in factories and industrial development, not just in the fields.
"Many advocates of the African slave trade shared this passion for Southern industrialism and economic independence , but they saw that Southern industrial progress was handicapped by the lack of laborers to fill the factories. In a letter to the Jackson Daily Mississippian, Henry Hughes asked how the South could develop manufacturing when it did not have enough slaves for agriculture. John Mitchel of the Knoxville Southern Citizen put it this way: "What hinders the South from manufacturing her own cotton? Want of labor." Obviously Southern industrialism was impossible without the reopening of the African slave trade. But if the South could reopen her gates to African slaves, industrialism would become a reality. "Give us, then," they promised, "more and cheap operatives, and we would not only have the will, but be enabled to diversify our labor, and improve our country. We would build our own vessels and steamboats, railroads...erect manufactories and foundries, build our levees and dikes..." Dr. Daniel Lee, editor of the Southern Culivator, noted the value of Africans for the mining industry. The editor of the Jackson Semi-Weekly Mississippian asserted that the Africans could be used in cotton factories amidst the fields..."
"The scarcity of slave labor and the consequent rise in slave prices plagued the advocates of the African slave trade with another problem. To the advocates, the increase in slave prices meant that fewer whites would be able to enter the slaveowning ranks, and that slavery would become the monopoly of the rich. Such a development would shatter the nonslaveholders' hope to possess slaves--the symbols of wealth and status in the slave society of the South. As Southern poet William J. Grayson remarked, "no matter how one might begin, as lawyer, physician, clergyman, mechanic, or merchant, he ended, if prosperous, as proprietor of a rice or cotton plantation." A perceptive analyst of the Southern white psychology, slave Frederick Douglass painfully knew that poor white men like Edward Covey strained "every nerve" to obtain the "first condition of wealth and respectability"--the "ownership of human property." "A plantation well stocked with hands," a settler in Mississippi observed in the 1830's, "is the ne plus ultra of every man's ambition who resides in the South."
More to follow,
Unionblue
__________________ "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
"The high cotton prices of the 1850's noticeably boosted the price of slaves. The price of a prime field hand in the New Orleans market skyrocketed from $700 in 1845 to $1,000 in 1850 to $1,800 in 1860, and the slave prices in the Virginia, Georgia, and Charleston markets followed the same pattern. In 1859 Edmund Ruffin estimated that slave prices had doubled since 1844 and that the escalation would continue. A Southerner told Frederick Olmsted " a n i g g e r that wouldn't bring over $300 seven years ago, will fetch $1,000, cash, quick, this year." Southern newspapers throughout the fifties reported the new slave prices with great excitement. In 1854 the New Orleans Delta, for example, announced that at a recent sale slave prices were "extraordinary," and that one man commanded $3,000, another $1,970, others $1,600 and $1,700.
"...All the southern states," complained Edmund Ruffin, "suffer greatly from the scarcity and high price of labor. They can obtain no supply from abroad, because the only available and useful supply, of negroes, is prohibited by law." Concerned about the limited resources of slave labor and the consequent high prices of slaves, the editor of the American Cotton Planter demanded the reopening of the African slave trade."
Another reason for reopening the African slave trade was the South's desire to use slaves in factories and industrial development, not just in the fields.
"Many advocates of the African slave trade shared this passion for Southern industrialism and economic independence , but they saw that Southern industrial progress was handicapped by the lack of laborers to fill the factories. In a letter to the Jackson Daily Mississippian, Henry Hughes asked how the South could develop manufacturing when it did not have enough slaves for agriculture. John Mitchel of the Knoxville Southern Citizen put it this way: "What hinders the South from manufacturing her own cotton? Want of labor." Obviously Southern industrialism was impossible without the reopening of the African slave trade. But if the South could reopen her gates to African slaves, industrialism would become a reality. "Give us, then," they promised, "more and cheap operatives, and we would not only have the will, but be enabled to diversify our labor, and improve our country. We would build our own vessels and steamboats, railroads...erect manufactories and foundries, build our levees and dikes..." Dr. Daniel Lee, editor of the Southern Culivator, noted the value of Africans for the mining industry. The editor of the Jackson Semi-Weekly Mississippian asserted that the Africans could be used in cotton factories amidst the fields..."
"The scarcity of slave labor and the consequent rise in slave prices plagued the advocates of the African slave trade with another problem. To the advocates, the increase in slave prices meant that fewer whites would be able to enter the slaveowning ranks, and that slavery would become the monopoly of the rich. Such a development would shatter the nonslaveholders' hope to possess slaves--the symbols of wealth and status in the slave society of the South. As Southern poet William J. Grayson remarked, "no matter how one might begin, as lawyer, physician, clergyman, mechanic, or merchant, he ended, if prosperous, as proprietor of a rice or cotton plantation." A perceptive analyst of the Southern white psychology, slave Frederick Douglass painfully knew that poor white men like Edward Covey strained "every nerve" to obtain the "first condition of wealth and respectability"--the "ownership of human property." "A plantation well stocked with hands," a settler in Mississippi observed in the 1830's, "is the ne plus ultra of every man's ambition who resides in the South."
More to follow,
Unionblue
The amazing thing to me is that, to these Southerners at least, "labor" seems to have meant "slave labor" only -- they had no interest in allowing free labor to come to their country in the form of immigrants, no matter where they came from.
Regards,
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.
The leaders of the south wanted no 'greasey mechanics' or the 'mudsills' from the north.
To the slave owners and poorer wannabe's, a society NOT built upon slave labor seems to have been, literally, beyond their comprehension.
"No Irish need apply", seems to be almost universal in 19th century America. At least in the North canal building labor was opened up for them. Later factory work opened up too. My father's Irish ancestors labored digging canals and weaving in the mills and also fought in several wars before they were considerd true Americans. Too bad the South had few canals and factories because the Irish made good Union soldiers.
__________________ "Those who forget to remember the past are condemned to repeat it", George Santayana.
Read an article, Freddy, (may even have it stashed somewhere) that claims that "No Irish Need Apply" signs were a rarity; i.e., discrimination against the Irish was not so bad as common history tells it.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
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