Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Slavery: Not Just Something For The South

Part VIII

From 1825 on, in volume and value of imports and exports, the seaport at South Street outdid the combined trade of its two closest competitors in Boston and Philadelphia.

New York's dominance only increased as the 19th century progressed. Long before war loomed, New York, after London and Paris, had become the third major city of the Western world, and its glory was built largely of cotton bricks.

Cotton bales would be tilted on a dolly and wheeled from a dock onto one of thousands of flatboats, sloops, brigs, barks, schooners, clippers, and steamboats, and for over half a century before the War, cotton was the backbone of the American economy; it was the king and the North ruled the kingdom.

From seed to cloth, Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York, controlled nearly every aspect of cotton production and trade.

Only large banks, mostly located in Manhattan, or in London, could extend the credit to plantation owners, the credit they needed between planting and selling their crop. If a farmer wanted to expand his operations during those boom decades, he required Northern bankers' deep pockets for the money to buy more equipment, as well as additional labor. Slaves were usually bought on credit.

The power of New York over key aspects of cotton production was wide and deep, and involved many of the most solid and prestigious businessmen of the day.

Looking back over the years leading up to the War one wonders how a country that was so interdependent on one another ended up bloodying fields with fathers, sons, brothers each willing to fight each other over different ideas.

One basic idea stands out, according to Craven's "Civil War in the Making": "The total effect of the Industrial Revolution was vastly to increase the interlocking of human interests and the dependence of man on man."

With the coming of machines, and men to work them, they became dependent on the producers of raw materials going into their products, and on the markets which consumed their mass production. Industry caused cities to grow but no city could feed itself or consume the goods which its industries produced. They became increasingly dependent on the rural areas for food and most of the other necessities of life, and without widespread markets, they'd perish. Nations which became industrialized, as did England, by 1845, ABANDONED their tariffs on foodstuffs, and reached out all over the world for markets and raw materials.

In the US this growth of interdependence was as marked as elsewhere. New England textile mills took a larger percentage of Southern cotton crops each year, while the South, more and more, depended on the North for its plantation supplies. By the 1850's, speakers often referred to New York City as "the prolongation of the South".

Southerners, in June & early July flocked North for their annual supply of dry goods, hardware, boots, shoes, and other merchandise. Many major stores had branch houses in New Orleans, Charleston; stores like Daniel Parish and Company had branches in 5 different Southern cities.

Cotton planting was financed by Northern firms, and paid for at harvest with drafts on New York banks. The cotton was shipped in Northern vessels, insured by Northern companies, and handled by Northern factors. In fact, as Foner says, "Down to the outbreak of the Civil War, New York dominated every single phase of the cotton trade from plantation to market."

Farmers in the Northwest were busily sending enormous quantities of corn, salt pork, flour, and whiskey down rivers to Southern plantations, and the market gardeners of Virginia, each night,m loaded their ships with potatoes, cabbages, fresh vegetables, and berries, according to season, for the morning markets in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.

One of the most glaring realities of the day was interdependence-the unsettling fact that, in an economic sense, this was "One World".

Interestingly historians should also remember that the harshest attacks on slavery in the 1820's came from Virginians, North and South Carolinians, & Tennessee and Kentucky. Their legislative halls were backed by antislavery societies that would have been admired later on by the most rabid Northern Abolitionists.

No one should forget that slavery had existed in Southern states for over 200 years without becoming "too heavy a burden" for many a Northern conscience.

Two great forces fundamentally altered lives around the Atlantic Basin in the decades between 1830 & 1860. As the late Charles A. Beard would say a few clues would offer "a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss."

The Industrial Revolution requires no comment, but one profound social change needs emphasis: The total effect of the Industrial Revolution was vastly to increase the interlocking of human interests and the dependence of man on man.

The 2nd force, also working towards the same end, was the application of steam and electricity. The first gave the railway, the steamship, and power press while the 2nd gave the telegraph; the effect of both was to cut space and bring men closer together.
Thus began the shrinking of nations.

The dependency of the sections of the United States was vividly expressed by a Southern commercial convention speaker in 1855, who, in a plea for greater home production said (ominously, in hindsight): "From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South to the shroud which covers the cold form of the dead, everything comes from the North. We rise from between sheets made in Northern looms, and pillows of Northern feathers, to wash in basins made in the North, dry our beards on Northern towels, and dress ourselves in garments woven in Northern looms; we eat from Northern plates and dishes; our rooms are swept with Northern brooms, our gardens dug with Northern spades and our bread kneaded in trays or dishes of Northern wood or tin; and the very wood which feeds our fires is cut from Northern axes, helved with hickory brought from Connecticut and New York." This picture was confidently balanced with the assertion that if the cotton supply were cut off from Northern factories, or the Mississippi River closed, the economy of the North would fall in ruin.

The biggest social-economic fact of the period from 1815 to 1860 was bringing men closer together and the increase of interdependence to the point where peace/security all depended on an equal increase of humility and patience to make the democratic process work. This would require tolerance of differences, compromise and rational discussion of problems. No one people could insist that their pattern of existence was best for all. With these elements in place the US could conceivably be called indivisible.

The irony was that two distinct, differing social-economic systems were already evolving: one, primarily agricultural, the other increasingly more commercial, industrialized and involved in finance. One depended on white labor. By 1860, the other contained nearly 4 million slaves.

The spread of agriculture based on the continued employment of Negro slave labor hadn't changed men's reliance on local and state government as Thomas Jefferson had said. Belief in the rural-agricultural life as the only foundation for democracy justified in their minds the continued holding of slaves as good for the Negro, the white man, and society.

This completely new way of life was beginning, to which not a single existing institution, relationship, or old value applied. Even basic concepts were being examined. The thinking which had been dominated by shipping and agriculture didn't meet the needs of the new industrial order. Manufacturers, forced to find their raw materials and markets in all parts of the country, and the merchants and bankers, who marketed and financed wheat and cotton, were bound to be nationalist in outlook.

There were many factors at work in the years leading up to the war: pseudo-religious fanaticism, raw greed and corruption, political folly, rampant ambition, not to mention the cultural misunderstanding that was abundant in those days. Problems had festered for years with interesting features, but war could have been avoided. The generation living in 1860 could have come and gone without major incident if events hadn't been manipulated by interests with sufficient capital to exaggerate destructive personalities and influences all out of proportion to their actual importance.

The divisive antagonisms between North and South weren't just unfortunate historical accidents. These antagonisms were deliberately agitated during the 1850s by great international banking houses.Nothing would suit them better than to provoke secession.

By Allen (Piewacket1861) He is member in the forum