If South Carolina goes out surely our beloved Georgia must follow suit! Down with this treacherous Union!

Will Cotton
Dec. 17, 1860

Oh and on December 17, 1903 a couple of guys from Ohio spent a few moments in a self-propelled gizmo floating over a sand dune off North Carolina.

But other wise, not much happened on this day in history. :)

--
Michael Johnson

Confederate 'State's Rights', a brief history

The Confederate view of 'States Rights' is based on four aspects: 1) Property and the institution of slavery; 2) Soft money Agrarian vs National commercial Bank system; 3) Political Power; and 4) Land, availability of the western land to agricultural expansion

1) Peculiar Institution of Slavery
Southerners would not accept threats to their slave properties and Northerners would have no dealings with reforms that might imperil their commercial endeavors.

By 1787 the affects of Enlightenment or the natural rights ideology of the American Revolution, caused increasing numbers of citizens to question the institution of slavery. Antislavery societies had begun to spring up in the North. As early as 1785 Southerners understood that if they took chattel with them into Pennsylvania, they ran the risk that their slaves might be liberated during their residency in that state or any 'free' state. Abolitionism with White Northerners was not a burning issue but Northerners were willing to stop the expansion of slavery. Within the decade, emancipationist legislation would be passed in every Northern state.

But when the choice was between saving the Union or eradicating slavery, the peculiar institution took a backseat. The national government embraced the notion that the Southern states should be left to deal with slavery within their respective jurisdictions as they saw fit. The South was delighted with its victory. Congress could terminate the African slave trade, but not before 1808. The run-a-way slave law required that slaves be returned to their owners even from 'free' states. Also, the national government guaranteed that slaves could be moved from one slave state to another as well as slaves could be brought into 'free' states at lest temporarily without being freed. The 3/5ths clause allowed slave states to include 60% of their chattel in the population count for the apportionment of representation in the lower house of congress and the electoral college. Congress was prohibited from taxing exports, a move that prevented slavery from being taxed indirectly through the imposition of duties on the cash crop produced by chattel. Finally, the national government could protect states from "domestic Violence" by suppressing Insurrections which include slave revolts. The 'slave' states had gotten all they sought.

2) Beware the "Stockjobbers" , Wealthy men in the northern states already owned most of the shares of the government's securities and with a national bank system, would become the principle stockholders in the Bank of the United States. These "stockjobbers" (northern commercial elite), Jefferson declared, would have the leverage to control both states and individuals to secure their every whim at the disadvantage of the Southern Agrarian Proprietors .

3) Political Power
The power of the national government at the expense of the states.

Under the articles of Confederation, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Delaware, whose combined populations did not equal that of the free population of Virginia, and barely exceeded the number of free inhabitants of North Carolina, each enjoyed one vote in Congress. Southerners were apprehensive that neither their personal interest, nor that of their region, any longer was safe. It appeared that their interests were no better served by the American Union than they had been in the empire.

Southerners were living under the umbra of depotism, the ancestors of these yeoman long ago had sought to escape the heavy hand of monarchical and aristocratically controlled central governments in England and Europe by fleeing to America. They were being confronted with what they believed was the "same tyranny which drove the first emigrants from their home".

4) Available Land for Expansion
The Southern states needed the western lands to be opened to settlement which allowed slavery. The Southern states feared that a national government controlled by an increasingly Abolitionist Northern states.

South Carolina Heritage
South Carolina was the most militant of the Southern states.
In 1663 King Charles of England gave a grant of land "South of Virginia" to a group of his friends.  They wanted to the use the colony for their businesses. They named the colony Carolina in honor of Charles. The first settlement was Charleston. When these men came they found that many settlers from Virginia were already living in the area. This caused arguments between the two groups. In 1680 the argument was solved by dividing Carolina into two separate colonies:  North Carolina and South Carolina.

Once approved by the King, in 1660, several of the Proprietors (who lived on the island of Barbados) drove the settlement of Carolina. In October 1665, Sir John Yeamans and a group of colonists established a colony in the area now know as Cape Fear. It was located slightly upriver from present-day Wilmington, N.C., and on a branch or creek on the western side of the Cape fear River. As many as 800 colonists may have been drawn to Charles Town, as it was known.

The first English settlement was made in 1670, when William Sayle sailed up the Ashley River with three shiploads of English emigrants from the Barbados, and they pitched their tents on its banks and built a town, which has since wholly disappeared. It has been estimated that nearly half of the immigrants to the new colony in its first three decades were from Barbados. In 1671, Sir John Yeamans, whom we have met in North Carolina, joined the colony, bringing with him about two hundred African slaves.

South Carolina differs from most of the colonies:
1) in not having had to battle against impending dissolution during its first years of existence
2) Also, nearly half of the immigrants to the new colony in its first three decades were from Barbados which had a strong slave economy already in existance.
3) And from all the others in depending largely on slave labor from the beginning.

About 1693 by a sea captain, who gave a bag of seed to a South Carolina planter. Not many years passed till the Carolinas rivaled Egypt and Lombardy in furnishing rice for Southern Europe. By the middle of the eighteenth century indigo became a strong rival of rice in South Carolina, but not until a later generation was cotton enthroned as king. Rice grows best in marshy ground and swamps, and its cultivation is peculiarly destructive to human life. The same is in a great measure true of indigo. These facts had much to do in shaping the economic and social condition of South Carolina. They made it the chief slaveholding community in America. No white man could long endure the malarial atmosphere of the rice swamps. Even among the blacks the death rate was very high, and their ranks had to be refilled constantly from Africa. But slaves were cheap. A strong black man could be purchased for forty pounds and, as he could earn near that amount in a year, the planter found it more profitable to work him to death than to take care of him. Almost from the beginning the slaves in South Carolina outnumbered the whites; slavery became the cornerstone in the political system and so it continued to the time of the Civil War.

Many of the South Carolinians were men who had fled from religious persecution at home, such as the Huguenots. At the same time, yeoman farmers, who worked smaller tracts of land, sat in popular assemblies and found their way into political office. Their outspoken independence was a constant warning to the oligarchy of planters not to encroach too far upon the rights of free men.

Another difference arose from the important seaport of Charleston, and therefore direct communication with Europe, the West Indies or New England. Charleston through its commodious harbor, carried on a brisk foreign trade -- bringing the commodities and luxuries of civilized life. Here lived the wealthy planter, visiting but seldom his plantation were herds of black men toiled under the lash of the overseer. Most naturally the conditions in Charleston fostered the growth of aristocracy, while in culture and refinement the city came to rival Philadelphia, New York and Boston. Charleston, South Carolina, became the leading port and trading center of the South. There the settlers quickly learned to combine agriculture and commerce, and the marketplace became a major source of prosperity.

Western Agrarians' Post Revolutionary War Concerns

* Western Agrarians wanted to protect the small producers from the "money men" who did not live by their own labor but preyed upon those who did. They wished to minimize the levies of great men: taxes, rents, legal fees, and land payments.

* Western Agrarians feared prolonged economic dependence as tenants or wageworkers as the path to "slavery".

* Western Agrarians wanted and needed access to and possession of freehold land.

* Western Agrarians believed that republican government could not survive unless property was widely held and equitably distributed among adult (white, at the time) males. They feared that if the great men could not be checked in their greed that American would become an oppressive society of arrogant aristocrats lording over impoverished, landless, and powerless masses.

* The agrarian yeomen believed that wilderness land ought to be free to the needy and that common folks had the right to resist laws they perceived as unjust.

Pvt/Lt Craig Young
3rd Maine, Company A
29th Georgia/7th Maine
Lambh Deargh Erin Abu!
Most importantly we are free. Free in thought, body, and soul.
It is no longer the blood, but the spirit that makes us what we are.
We are Celts!

I hear there is a larger conference going to be held in Alabama..
Though myself bieng but an immigrent Irish tradesman, Printer my trade, and own no slaves I feel if Alabama does go I will have to fight any incursion from the North as my kin fought the Sassenach.
Seamus

"it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifing......nothing"
MacBeth

How can you invade a place that is part of our country?

We are coming to save our brothers from their wicked governments who conspire to sperate them from our beloved Union. The same Union which the Old Dominion help create through it blood during the Revolutionary War. And, has provided us with our consitution and many of our Presidents as well as Suprem Court judges. What our county is today has much to do with the guidence of the South.

Brothern, listen not to the pleasing sound of the serpent! Be not decieved, for the same army which is bound by law (the national government could protect states from "domestic Violence" by suppressing Insurrections which include slave revolts. The 'slave' states had gotten all they sought) to protect the citizens of the South from slave revolt, will now march to save you from traitors. Union Forever! Huzzah Boz! Huzzah!

Pvt/Lt Craig Young
3rd Maine, Company A
29th Georgia/7th Maine
Lambh Deargh Erin Abu!
Most importantly we are free. Free in thought, body, and soul.
It is no longer the blood, but the spirit that makes us what we are.
We are Celts!

"These abolitionists constituted one of the most controversial movements in American history. Its leadership included famous blacks and women as well as white males and was typified by editors such as the fiery William Lloyd GARRISON, orators such as Frederick DOUGLASS, Angelina GRIMKE, Wendell PHILLIPS, and Theodore WELD, and many other philanthropists, black agitators, and feminists."

I believe that the feminists movement was one of the main causes of the civil war. The feminsts believed that women could not receive their freedom without black men first gaining theirs. So, the feminists became key supports of the Abolitinist movement and its redicalization as examplfied by John Brown.

The government did not lionize John Brown. The government sent Captain Robert E Lee to capture him and the government put him before the law and the government killed him for his crimes. The abolitinist movement needed a martyr and John Brown became the man for that role. The Abolishist won the PR battle through books, editorials, and orators. They built the argument that slavery was a sin and had that position preached from the pulpit of many northern churches. Through their grassroot effort, the abolishist brought public pressure against the President and congress.

The truth (and there are many truths) is the South's economy as well as the north's was based on a large pool of cheap labor. The answer: in the south it was slaves who worked in the fields while in the north it was the immigrants who worked in the factories. IF the south had freed the slaves and made it (the cause) about the bankers, then the farmers of the north would have joined the cause. The agrarian Midwest would have join with the South to give poltical battle with industrial northeast.

IF... this country would be very different today if it had followed an agrarian political course.

Pvt/Lt Craig Young
3rd Maine, Company A
29th Georgia/7th Maine
Lambh Deargh Erin Abu!
Most importantly we are free. Free in thought, body, and soul.
It is no longer the blood, but the spirit that makes us what we are.
We are Celts!

Well done, Captain Cotton. The use of a tariff through out the early history of our government has effected many regions of our country including Western Penn. & New England. Remember those short lived revolts?

FYI,
from:

In 1859 John Brown led a party of 21 men in a successful attack on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry. Brown hoped that his action would encourage slaves to join his rebellion, enabling him to form an emancipation army. Two days later the armour was stormed by Robert E. Lee and a company of marines. Brown and six men barricaded themselves in an engine-house, and continued to fight until Brown was serious wounded and two of his sons had been killed.

John Brown was tried and convicted of insurrection, treason and murder. He was executed on 2nd December, 1859. Six other men involved in the raid were also hanged. The song, John Brown's Body, commemorating the Harper's Ferry raid, was a highly popular marching song with Republican soldiers during the American Civil War.

(1) New York Herald (21st October, 1859)

Brown is fifty-five years of age, rather small-sized, with keen and restless gray eyes, and a grizzly beard and hair. He is a wiry, active man, and should the slightest chance for an escape be afforded, there is no doubt that he will yet give his captors much trouble. His hair is matted and tangled, and his face, hands, and clothes are smutched and smeared with blood.

Colonel Lee stated that he would exclude all visitors from the room if the wounded men were annoyed or pained by them, but Brown said he was by no means annoyed; on the contrary, he was glad to be able to make himself and his motives clearly understood. He converses freely, fluently, and cheerfully, without the slightest manifestation of fear or uneasiness, evidently weighing well his words, and possessing a good command of language. His manner is courteous and affable, while he appears to be making a favorable impression upon his auditory, which, during most of the day yesterday averaged about ten or a dozen men.

When I arrived in the armory, shortly after two o'clock in the afternoon, Brown was answering questions put to him by Senator Mason, who had just arrived from his residence at Winchester, thirty miles distant. Colonel Faulkner, member of Congress who lives but a few miles off, Mr. Vallandigham, member of Congress of Ohio, and several other distinguished gentlemen. The following is a verbatim report of the conversation:

Mr. Mason: Can you tell us, at least, who furnished the money for your expedition?

Mr. Brown: I furnished most of it myself. I cannot implicate others. It is by my own folly that I have been taken. I could easily have saved myself from it had I exercised my own better judgment rather than yield to my feelings. I should have
gone away, but I had thirty-odd prisoners, whose wives and daughters were in tears for their safety, and I felt for them. Besides, I wanted to allay the fears of those who believed we came here to burn and kill. For this reason I allowed the train to cross the bridge and gave them full liberty to pass on. I did it only to spare the feelings of these passengers and their families and to allay the apprehensions that you had got here in your vicinity a band of men who had no regard for life and property, nor any feeling of humanity.

Mr. Mason: But you killed some people passing along the streets quietly.

Mr. Brown: Well, sir, if there was anything of that kind done, it was without my knowledge. Your own citizens, who were my prisoners, will tell you that every possible means were taken to prevent it. I did not allow my men to fire, nor even to return a fire, when there was danger of killing those we regarded as innocent persons, if I could help it. They will tell you that we allowed ourselves to be fired at repeatedly and did not return it.

A Bystander: That is not so. You killed an unarmed man at the comer of the house over there (at the water tank) and another besides.

Mr. Brown: See here, my friend, it is useless to dispute or contradict the report of your own neighbors who were my prisoners.

Mr. Mason: If you would tell us who sent you here - who provided the means - that would be information of some value.

Mr. Brown: I will answer freely and faithfully about what concerns myself - I will answer anything I can with honor,
but not about others.

Mr. Vallandigham (member of Congress from Ohio, who had just entered): Mr. Brown, who sent you here?

Mr. Brown: No man sent me here; it was my own prompting and that of my Maker, or that of the devil, whichever you
please to ascribe it to. I acknowledge no man (master) in human form.

Mr. Vallandigham: Did you get up the expedition yourself?

Mr. Brown: I did.

Mr. Mason: What was your object in coming?

Mr. Brown: We came to free the slaves, and only that.

A Young Man (in the uniform of a volunteer company): How many men in all had you?

Mr. Brown: I came to Virginia with eighteen men only, besides myself.

Volunteer: What in the world did you suppose you could do here in Virginia with that amount of men?

Mr. Brown: Young man, I don't wish to discuss that question here.

Volunteer: You could not do anything.

Mr. Brown: Well, perhaps your ideas and mine on military subjects would differ materially.

Mr. Mason: How do you justify your acts?

Mr. Brown: I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity. I say it without wishing to be offensive - and it would be perfectly right for anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you willfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I do not say this insultingly. I think I did right and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and all times. I hold that the golden rule, "Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you," applies to all who would help others to gain their liberty.

(2) Frederick Douglass, speech on John Brown (May 30, 1881)

The true question is, Did John Brown draw his sword against slavery and thereby lose his life in vain? And to this I answer ten thousand times, No! No man fails, or can fail, who so grandly gives himself and all he has to a righteous cause. No man, who in his hour of extremest need, when on his way to meet an ignominious death, could so forget himself as to stop and kiss a little child, one of the hated race for whom he was about to die, could by any possibility fail.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Henry A. Wise in whose house less than two years after, a school for the emancipated slaves was taught.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask James M. Mason, the author of the inhuman fugitive slave bill, who was cooped up in Fort Warren, as a traitor less than two years from the time that he stood over the prostrate body of John Brown.

"Did John Brown fail? Ask Clement C. Vallandingham, one other of the inquisitorial party; for he too went down in the tremendous whirlpool created by the powerful hand of this bold invader. If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he did at least begin the war that ended slavery. If we look over the dates, places and men for which this honor is claimed, we shall find that not Carolina, but Virginia, not Fort Sumter, but Harpers Ferry, and the arsenal, not Col. Anderson, but John Brown, began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. Until this blow was struck, the prospect for freedom was dim, shadowy and uncertain. The irrepressible conflict was one of words, votes and compromises.

"When John Brown stretched forth his arm the sky was cleared. The time for compromises was gone – the armed hosts of freedom stood face to face over the chasm of a broken Union – and the clash of arms was at hand. The South staked all upon getting possession of the Federal Government, and failing to do that, drew the sword of rebellion and thus made her own, and not Brown's, the lost cause of the century.

(3) Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after this event, and I do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these men. I have since seen one noble statement, in a Boston paper, not editorial. Some voluminous sheets decided not to print the full report of Brown's words to the exclusion of other matter.

But I object not so much to what they have omitted as to what they have inserted. Even the Liberator called it "a misguided, wild, and apparently insane-effort." As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers.

A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declaring, "I didn't do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. It can't be fairly inferred from my past career." I, for one, am not interested to hear you define your position. I don't know that I ever was or ever shall be. I think it is mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. Ye needn't take so much pains to wash your skirts of him. No intelligent man will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he himself informs us, "under the auspices of John Brown and nobody else."

Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he acted "on the principle of revenge." They do not know the man. They must enlarge themselves to conceive of him. I have no doubt that the time will come when they will begin to see him as he was. They have got to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not a politician or an Indian; of a man who did not wait till he was personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless business before he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed.

I wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist.

Pvt/Lt Craig Young
3rd Maine, Company A
29th Georgia/7th Maine
Lambh Deargh Erin Abu!
Most importantly we are free. Free in thought, body, and soul.
It is no longer the blood, but the spirit that makes us what we are.
We are Celts!

SLAVERY or TARIFF?

"It is curious how indifferent historians have been to the South's complaint about the tariff, often dismissing it as a scapegoat for the section's own economic shortcomings or as a disguised form of slavery conflict," writes historian Clyde N. Wilson (in his section of "Slavery, Secession, and Southern History"). "But the plain truth is that [John C.] Calhoun was entirely correct in his opposition to the tariff. Debates about the actual macro- and micro-economic effects of antebellum protection are beside the point. The South, providing the bulk of the Union's exports, sold in an unprotected world market, while all American consumers bought in a highly protected one. And this was to the benefit of one class, no matter how plausibly disguised as a public boon.

"Such exactions are hard to justify at any time, but especially so in a federal Union in which economic interests are regionalized in such a way that the exploitive effect is concentrated. Americans had fought a revolution for smaller grievances. Not to mention, as Calhoun pointed out in the South Carolina Exposition, to the agreement of free traders, that the tariff's 'tendency is, to make the poor poorer and the rich richer.'

"But the tariff, like abolition, was also a question of honor. The disingenuous arguments of the protectionists tended, like those of the abolitionists, to dwell upon the moral inferiority and stupidity of southerners in comparison with wise, righteous, industrious New Englanders. Calhoun did not engage in that type of polemic, but he replied to it, again in the Exposition: 'We are told, by those who pretend to understand our interest better than we do, that the excess of production and not the Tariff, is the evil which afflicts us. ... We would feel more disposed to respect the spirit in which the advice is offered, if those from whom it comes accompanied it with the weight of their example. They also, occasionally, complain of low prices; but instead of diminishing the supply, as a remedy for the evil, demand an enlargement of the market, by the exclusion of all competition.' "[1]

The commercial and industrial rise of New England in the early 19th century was not an accident. It was a deliberate scheme, in which the South at first willingly participated. All was outlined at the inception of the republic by Alexander Hamilton, and the goal was to increase the prosperity and independence of the whole nation. But the result, from the South's point of view, turned out rather differently.

Southern New England was the first section of America to become overcrowded. At the end of the Revolution, it had too many families, not enough farmland, and too few jobs. The federal government set out deliberately to encourage there the commercial trades, especially ship-building and shipping, to save the region from sinking into poverty. The raw material for Northern factories, and the cargoes of Northern merchantmen, would come from the South.

Washington's "Farewell Address" makes this economic trade-off the chief practical argument for a continued union of the sections:

"The North, in an unrestrained intercourse with the South, protected by the equal Laws of a common government, finds in the productions of the latter, great additional resources of Maratime [sic] and commercial enterprise and precious materials of manufacturing industry. The South in the same Intercourse, benefitting by the Agency of the North, sees its agriculture grow and its commerce expand."
The July 4, 1789, tariff was the first substantive legislation passed by the new American government. But in addition to the new duties, it reduced by 10 percent or more the tariff paid for goods arriving in American craft. It also required domestic construction for American ship registry. Navigation acts in the same decade stipulated that foreign-built and foreign-owned vessels were taxed 50 cents per ton when entering U.S. ports, while U.S.-built and -owned ones paid only six cents per ton. Furthermore, the U.S. ones paid annually, while foreign ones paid upon every entry.

This effectively blocked off U.S. coastal trade to all but vessels built and owned in the United States. The navigation act of 1817 made it official, providing "that no goods, wares, or merchandise shall be imported under penalty of forfeiture thereof, from one port in the United States to another port in the United States, in a vessel belonging wholly or in part to a subject of any foreign power."

The point of all this was to protect and grow the shipping industry of New England, and it worked. By 1795, the combination of foreign complication and American protection put 92 percent of all imports and 86 percent of all exports in American-flag vessels. American shipowners' annual earnings shot up between 1790 and 1807, from $5.9 million to $42.1 million.

New England shipping took a severe hit during the War of 1812 and the embargo. After the war ended, the British flooded America with manufactured goods to try to drive out the nascent American industries. They chose the port of New York for their dumping ground, in part because the British had been feeding cargoes to Boston all through the war to encourage anti-war sentiment in New England. New York was the more starved, therefore it became the port of choice. And the dumping bankrupted many towns, but it assured New York of its sea-trading supremacy. In the decades to come. New Yorkers made the most of the chance.

Four Northern and Mid-Atlantic ports still had the lion's share of the shipping. But Boston and Baltimore mainly served regional markets (though Boston sucked up a lot of Southern cotton and shipped out a lot of fish). Philadelphia's shipping interest had built up trade with the major seaports on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, especially as Pennsylvania's coal regions opened up in the 1820s. But New York was king. Its merchants had the ready money, it had a superior harbor, it kept freight rates down, and by 1825 some 4,000 coastal trade vessels per year arrived there. In 1828 it was estimated that the clearances from New York to ports on the Delaware Bay alone were 16,508 tons, and to the Chesapeake Bay 51,000 tons.

Early and mid-19th century Atlantic trade was based on "packet lines" -- groups of vessels offering scheduled services. It was a coastal trade at first, but when the Black Ball Line started running between New York and Liverpool in 1817, it became the way to do business across the pond.

The trick was to have a good cargo going each way. The New York packet lines succeeded because they sucked in all the eastbound cotton cargoes from the U.S. The northeast didn't have enough volume of paying freight on its own. So American vessels, usually owned in the Northeast, sailed off to a cotton port, carrying goods for the southern market. There they loaded cotton (or occasionally naval stores or timber) for Europe. They steamed back from Europe loaded with manufactured goods, raw materials like hemp or coal, and occasionally immigrants.

Since this "triangle trade" involved a domestic leg, foreign vessels were excluded from it (under the 1817 law), except a few English ones that could substitute a Canadian port for a Northern U.S. one. And since it was subsidized by the U.S. government, it was going to continue to be the only game in town.

Robert Greenhalgh Albion, in his laudatory history of the Port of New York, openly boasts of this selfish monopoly. "By creating a three-cornered trade in the 'cotton triangle,' New York dragged the commerce between the southern ports and Europe out of its normal course some two hundred miles to collect a heavy toll upon it. This trade might perfectly well have taken the form of direct shuttles between Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, or New Orleans on the one hand and Liverpool or Havre on the other, leaving New York far to one side had it not interfered in this way. To clinch this abnormal arrangement, moreover, New York developed the coastal packet lines without which it would have been extremely difficult to make the east-bound trips of the ocean packets profitable."[2]

Even when the Southern cotton bound for Europe didn't put in at the wharves of Sandy Hook or the East River, unloading and reloading, the combined income from interests, commissions, freight, insurance, and other profits took perhaps 40 cents into New York of every dollar paid for southern cotton.

The record shows that ports with moderate quantities of outbound freight couldn't keep up with the New York competition. Remember, this is a triangle trade. Boston started a packet line in 1833 that, to secure outbound cargo, detoured to Charleston for cotton. But about the only other local commodity it could find to move to Europe was Bostonians. Since most passengers en route to England found little attraction in a layover in South Carolina, the lines failed.[3]

As for the cotton ports themselves, they did not crave enough imports to justify packet lines until 1851, when New Orleans hosted one sailing to Liverpool. Yet New York by the mid-1850s could claim sixteen lines to Liverpool, three to London, three to Havre, two to Antwerp, and one each to Glasgow, Rotterdam, and Marseilles. Subsidized, it must be remembered, by the federal post office patronage boondogle.

U.S. foreign trade rose in value from $134 million in 1830 to $318 million in 1850. It would triple again in the 1850s. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of those imports entered through the port of New York. Which meant that any trading the South did, had to go through New York. Trade from Charleston and Savannah during this period was stagnant. The total shipping entered from foriegn countries in 1851 in the port of Charleston was 92,000 tons, in the port of New York, 1,448,000. You'd find relatively little tariff money coming in from Charleston. According to a Treasury report, the net revenue of all the ports of South Carolina during 1859 was a mere $234,237; during 1860 it was $309,222.[4]

The TARIFF

The commercial boom collapsed in 1807 when the war of nerves with Britain began and American merchant ships no longer enjoyed immunity. Coincidentally, the clock ran out on the lucrative slave trade. New England capital shifted from commerce to manufacturing ventures that exploited wage labor. The textile mill system of southern New England grew up under the embargo and the subsequent British blockade during the War of 1812. Capitalists hired whole families displaced by agricultural disruption and quickly reduced them to debt peonage.

The product was sold in large lots to Southern slaveowners or to "slop shops" that clothed the urban poor. The mechanics' old values gave way to the new ones of cost-cutting, access to merchant capital, and willingness to subdivide work and exploit unskilled labor. The boom turned a few mechanics into bosses and many into wage laborers. By 1816, 100,000 factory workers, two-thirds of them women and children, produced more than $40 million worth of manufactured goods a year. Capital investment in textile manufacturing, sugar refining, and other industries totaled $100 million.

The war ended in 1815, and American markets reopened to the cheaper, better made British products. In spite of the protective Tariff of 1816, the American economy collapsed in 1819. Fortunes vanished. Recovery took years. And Northern capitalists vowed never again to be without protection. From then on, they used political power for protection purposes; they convinced the voters that the crumbs that dribbled from the industrialists' tables were their essential interests, and had to be protected at all costs.

"Commercial boom made government promotion of economic growth the central dynamic of American politics. Entrepreneurial elites needed the state to guarantee property; to enforce contracts; to provide juridical, financial, and transport infrastructures; to mobilize society's resources as investment capital; and to load the legal dice for enterprise in countless ways. Especially they strove for a powerful gentry-led national state, through whose developmental policies they dreamed of rivaling British wealth and might."
Once they were in place, protective duties accounted for an estimated three-fourths of textile manufacturing's value added. Without them, half the New England industrial sector would have gone bankrupt.[5] It took until the 1840s for the New England regional market to really emerge. But sectional divergence of the boom-bust cycle was apparent by 1825-6, when cotton prices tumbled and the North suffered no ill effects. Economically, America was two nations at war with one another from this point on.

Calhoun and other Southerners had supported the tariff of 1816 as a fair recompense to New Englanders whose interests had been damaged by the embargo and the war. "This support was part of his pursuit of harmony and reciprocity," Wilson writes. "... Had reciprocity been forthcoming from the other side, how different might the course of American history have been."

Was the South economically backwards?
Statistical tables can't compete with harrowing narratives of runaway slaves. Perhaps that's why economic history isn't taught in our schools. Yet the economic picture is essential for anyone who wants to really understand, rather than simply be entertained. Turner's image of ante-bellum America was an empire like the British, whose "sections" took the place of "individual kingdoms." The role of the South was to devote itself to pouring out the raw material for New England's looms and for the bulk of America's export trade. This was laid out by Alexander Hamilton's "Report on the Subject of Manufactures" (1791, the blueprint for young America's economic program), and enshrined in Henry Clay's "American System," enacted in the mid-1820s with the support of Midwestern farmers as well as North Atlantic manufacturers.

That this was done most effectively by slave labor plantations was, after about 1800, no secret to anyone -- North, South, American, British. Robert Russell, the observant British traveller, wrote that slavery was "a necessary evil attending upon the great good of cheap cotton."

The shift of so much land and effort into cotton-growing meant that the people of the South relied on the West for much of their food and livestock, and on the North Atlantic states for most of their clothing and machinery. In turn, they provided more than two-thirds of the entire nation's exports, which brought in the specie that allowed commerce and growth in all sections.

"After 1830 the industrial North had become wedded, not only to the South's production of cotton, but to the institution of slave labor which made such valuable production possible." Northern factories based their profits on a steady flow of cotton.[6] The price of raw cotton was low during this period, and lagged behind the price of cotton goods. Northern bankers grew rich by extending liberal (but risky) credit to Southern planters against next year's crop. Cotton was already America's leading export by 1821. By 1850, Southern cotton accounted for nearly 60 percent of the nation's total exports, and was a major factor in Northern shipping prospects. While the looms of Lawrence and Lowell sucked up raw cotton, the ships of Boston bulged with it as they crossed the Atlantic, and their owners looked forward to increasing production on the slave plantations, which meant increased profit for them.

Northern politicians were ever ready to sacrifice whatever anti-slavery sentiments they had for the sake of a tariff deal. Rumors after the Compromise of 1850 linked it to logrolling for tariff protection. Illinois votes for the Compromise were connected to railroad land grants that Illinois obtained in 1850. Southern congressmen claimed to have won over Pennsylvania's delegation by promising to repay a vote for the Compromise with "adjustments" in the tariff rates. At the same time, the Pennsylvania legislature voted to repeal laws that handicapped efforts to recapture fugitive slaves.

In the 1820s or '30s, no one would disagree that the tariff was the chief political issue disturbing the United States. But it was not then purely a regional split: many Northern farmers and merchants joined the Southern planters to oppose high tariffs. After the Missouri Compromise, slavery was a deeply troubling, but minor, irritant on the political scene. So how, in 25 years or so, did this national conflict shift to Southern slavery -- which was the same thing it had been in 1820 and '30 -- so much so that the declarations of independence of the various Southern states in 1860 and '61 seem to make it their chief reason for secession?

The answer is the combination of economic self interest and political machination which was itself, rather than slavery, the power that split the country. In opposition to the Democratic Party, the Whigs made a high tariff their strongest plank. But it wasn't enough.

"[T]he values of a dominant national party had to represent more than the transparent self-interest of the manufacturer in having a good transportation system, a protective tariff, a stable currency, and a dependable work force. In order to achieve national support, the manufacturers' values had to be anchored in a social issue of paramount national concern. That issue was the politicization of the moral struggle between North and South over the extension (or contraction) of slavery."[7]
The Free Soil movement of the late 1840s began the shift. Manufacturers needed a steady flow of laborers from overseas to man their machinery. The wages weren't better than in Britain, and the work was just as back-breaking. But in America, immigrant workers were willing to endure a few years of drudgery, secure in the knowledge that they could then take their small savings and set up as homesteaders in the Western territories. "The availability of free soil was functionally necessary to the manufacturing interests because it contributed to the maintenance of a highly productive factory labor force with high morale. Thus the initial transformation of the tariff issue was into a regional issue that involved free soil as well as protective tariffs."[8]

"With northern manufacturers and workers solidly aligned on the tariff and free soil issues, all that was needed to cement the alliance was a sense of moral outrage at the South." And office-seekers on plenty were ready to help whip it up.

The addition of slavery to the prevailing economic issues was fuel on the pyre of the Union. This was what Robert Toombs (right) outlined in his report to the Georgia convention considering secession in 1860:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all. In the first years of the Republic, the navigating, commercial and manufacturing interests of the North, began to seek profit and aggrandizement at the expense of the agricultural interests. Even the owners of fishing smacks, sought and obtained bounties for pursuing their own business, which yet continue -- and half a million of dollars are now paid them annually out of the Treasury.
The navigating interests begged for protection against foreign ship builders, and against competition in the coasting trade; Congress granted both requests, and by prohibitory acts, gave an absolute monopoly of this business to each of their interests, which they enjoy without diminution to this day. Not content with these great and unjust advantages, they have sought to throw the legitimate burthens of their business as much as possible upon the public; they have succeeded in throwing the cost of light-houses, buoys, and the maintenance of their seamen, upon the Treasury, and the Government now pays above two millions annually for the support of these objects.

These interests in connection with the commercial and manufacturing classes, have also succeeded, by means of subventions to mail steamers, and the reduction of postage, in relieving their business from the payment of about seven millions of dollars annually, throwing it upon the public Treasury, under the name of postal deficiency.

The manufacturing interest entered into the same struggle early, and has clamored steadily for Government bounties and special favors. This interest was confined mainly to the Eastern and Middle non-slaveholding States. Wielding these great States, it held great power and influence, and its demands were in full proportion to its power. The manufacturers and miners wisely based their demands upon special facts and reasons, rather than upon general principles, and thereby mollified much of the opposition of the opposing interest. They pleaded in their favor, the infancy of their business in this country,the scarcity of labor and capital, the hostile legislation of other countries towards them, the great necessity of their fabrics in the time of war, and the necessity of high duties to pay the debt incurred in our war for independence; these reasons prevailed, and they received for many years enormous bounties by the general acquiescence of the whole country.

But when these reasons ceased, they were no less clamorous for government protection; but their clamors were less heeded, -- the country had put the principle of protection upon trial, and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from fifteen to two hundred per cent, upon their entire business, for above thirty years, the Act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free-trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people.

The South, and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal, -- upon the direct issue, none at all. All these classes saw this, and felt it, and cast about for new allies. The anti-slavery sentiment of the North offered the best chance for success. An anti-slavery party must necessarily look to the North alone for support; but a united North was now strong enough to control the government in all of its departments, and a sectional party was therefore determined upon.

Time, and issues upon slavery were necessary to its completion and final triumph. The feeling of anti-slavery, which it was well known was very general among the people of the North, had been long dormant or passive, -- it needed only a question to arouse it into aggressive activity. This question was before us: we had acquired a large territory by successful war with Mexico; Congress had to govern it, how -- in relation to slavery -- was the question, then demanding solution. This state of facts gave form and shape to the anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North, and the conflict began.

Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation, and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South. We had shed our blood and paid our money for its acquisition; we demanded a division of it, on the line of the Missouri restriction, or an equal participation in the whole of it. These propositions were refused, the agitation became general, and the public danger great. The case of the South was impregnable. The price of the acquisition was the blood and treasure of both sections -- of all; and therefore it belonged to all, upon the principles of equity and justice.

1. Clyde N. Wilson, "Calhoun's Economic Platform," in Slavery, Secession, and Southern History, Robert Louis Paquette & Louis A. Ferleger, eds., Univ. of Va. Press, pp.87-88.
2. Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port [1815-1860], N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, p.95.
3. K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States, University of South Carolina Press, pp.74-75.
4. Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Ses., Appendix, p.70.
5. Mark Bils, "Tariff Protection and Production in the Early U.S. Cotton Textile Industry," Journal of Economic History, 44, Dec. 1984, pp.1033-45.
6. Thomas H. O'Connor, Lords of the Loom, New York: Charles Scriber's Sons, 1968, p.47.
7. Anthony F.C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Co., 1972, p.422.
8. ibid., p.423.

Pvt/Lt Craig Young
3rd Maine, Company A
29th Georgia/7th Maine
Lambh Deargh Erin Abu!
Most importantly we are free. Free in thought, body, and soul.
It is no longer the blood, but the spirit that makes us what we are.
We are Celts!

Why is it that those southern gentleman are so concerned with their own rights but not those of other peoples?

--
Michael Johnson

Dear Major, I agree with your statement that one can not compare sensibilities. And I can not find a quote this moment that illustrates my statement of Dec. 20. However, I think I can make an aurgument that such a sentiment was considered by some.

I have no aurgument with your other points.

--
Michael Johnson

Seamus,
You are right. I do take a lot of space to say a little. It's the Celt in me. I spend most of my time talking to myself and God for it is hard for a Celt to find his equal in any discussion.

Steve,
I agree. It is the few at the top that keep most of us working in their factories or on their land to make their money and give us just enough to give us the false hope of living the "American" dream.

I found it interesting that:
"The white slaves were treated the same or worse than the black slave.  The white slave did not fetch a good price at the auction blocks."  Most of these were the irish who worked in the swamps of the South.

FYI:
"Scotch prisoners"

The great majority were prisoners who were taken captive by the armies of Oliver Cromwell and brought to America in 1651 or 1652 Here they were sold as indentured servants for a period of seven years or less. Many of the "Scotch prisoners" were deported to Boston where they were acquired by planters from Maine to the Plymouth Colony.

After suffering the time as indentured servants, it is little wonder that the new American colonists were willing to face uncharted land and Indians to secure their freedom and their future.

FYI:
White Slavery

According to the Egerton manuscript, British Museum, the enactment of 1652: it may be lawful for two or more  justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant.. in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation.

The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662-1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class.  (Register for the Privy Council of Scotland, third series, vol. 1, p 181, vol. 2, p 101).

The above accounting sounds horrific but slavery was what the Scots have survived for a thousand years.  The early ancestors of the Scots, Alba and Pics were enslaved as early as the first century BC.  Varro, a Roman philosopher stated in his agricultural manuscripts that white slaves were only things with a voice or instrumenti vocali.  Julius Caesar enslaves as many as one million whites from Gaul.  (William D Phillips, Jr.  SLAVERY FROM ROMAN TIMES TO EARLY TRANSATLANTIC TRADE, p. 18).

Pope Gregory in the sixth century first witnessed blonde hair, blue eyed boys awaiting sale in a Roman slave market.  The Romans enslaved thousands of white inhabitants of Great Britain, who were also known as Angles.  Pope Gregory was very interested in the looks of these boys therefore asking their origin.  He was told they were Angles from Briton.  Gregory stated, “Non Angli, sed Angeli.

Dear Friend,
I must write to you this evening concerning the government of our contry. The members of Congress, like the people generaly, seem to be at a perfect loss to know what to do in the present perilous condition of the country. They are like persons groping their way in a dark cave where not a ray of light penetrates. All in gloom, darkness, danger and dread. They feel it will not do to stand still, and yet they know not what to do in what direction to move, for fearful danger envelops them on every side. The people look to Congress to lead the way out of this labyrinth of danger but it seems that that body does not process an Ariadne who can furnish the clue by which that object can be obtained. We can only pray that the heavens will open and a dove descend with a proper message to them.
Your Obediant Servant,
CA Young

Pvt/Lt Craig Young
3rd Maine, Company A
29th Georgia/7th Maine
Lambh Deargh Erin Abu!
Most importantly we are free. Free in thought, body, and soul.
It is no longer the blood, but the spirit that makes us what we are.
We are Celts!