Was South Carolina's Secession Simply Synonymous with Debt Repudiation?

James Lutzweiler

Sergeant Major
Joined
Mar 14, 2018
My Fellow Posters,

I have long felt, without any hard evidence until today, that a major ingredient in the Rebel recipe of South Carolina's Secession was the desire of planters and other Carolinian (and Southerners in general) businessmen to repudiate debts owed to New York and to the North in general. I now have in hand one piece of hard evidence in the words of a planter in Charleston. They appear on page 134 of Paul Starobin's wonderful 2017 publication entitled Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War. Thereupon Starobin quotes an unnamed planter who owned 2,000 slaves and who told a reporter, "Most of us planters are deeply in debt; we should not be[,] if out of the Union."

And on the same page, Harvard graduate, Mercury editor, fire-eater, and world-class champion of non sequiturs, Barney Rhett, Jr., "pointed out that Charleston's shopkeepers, LIKE MANY IN THE SOUTH [emphasis mine], typically purchased their inventory of goods on credit from suppliers in the North. Those debts would be suspended IN THE EVENT OF SECESSION [emphasis mine] and 'OBLITERATED FOREVER' [emphasis mine]."

While I have suspected that debt repudiation was a major ingredient, I was not hopeful of discovering it so shamelessly and clearly stated by an ostensibly chivalrous group of Southerners whom I have been led to believe were honorable above all. Barney Rhett, if not the Father of Fake News to the Fifth Power, certainly is in that family tree of fraud, though I think he got this statement correct and for which I give him an A+.

Question: Can anyone add more examples to these quite open Debt Declarations for Secession that South Carolina's December 20, 1860, Convention failed to include in their ostensibly honest and honorable but pitifully elliptical Declarations that so many contemporary historians have swallowed --hook, line, sinker, lake, boat, trailer, truck and highway-- like the unfortunate Rebel soldiers who marched to their unnecessary deaths, believing in them?

Sincerely for truth,

James
 
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