Revising per assorted posts in the thread:
The entire [del]economy[/del] textile industry of the U.S. at the time was built on the raw material, cotton, the labor for which was provided by the institution of human slavery. Terminating the institution of slavery demonstrated that the dependence was on the raw material, and on the labor required to produce that raw material, but not on the institution that originally provided the labor.
Feel free to mention the field you majored in. 
They need GQ questions at least and CoCC& CoSR.
Anyone else surprised we’re still in GD and not the pit?
Jim
Aren’t you supposed to be at a War or Northern Aggression reenactment?
Well, I think YOU are the Yank there dandrews! Everyone knows that you are a yank unless you are from MS, AL, LA, AK, SC, and parts of TN and GA. Texans are just annoying. But no way are you going to come down there from VA and not have people think you are a Yank.
As you can see from my (previous) location, I don’t really give a rats ass about any of this shit, so…
But yeah, its funny because I do know a lot of people who think that VA is Yankee territory. You sure do talk like them. Oh I am also sorry that, God forbid, someone try to develop the south. I read some of your other posts, and they seem to be reasonably intelligent. But then you post something like this… Tsk tsk.
I already declared this post as being tongue in check, and quite frankly, just reading it, that should have been fairly obvious.
But even if it wasn’t, why all the bashing?
America, Freedom of Speech, that sort of thing.
Wasn’t defending the Constitution one of the things the Civil War about?
I thought you were supposed to fight ignorance here.
Isn’t debate and persistence the best way to fight bigotry?
Well, sure, you’re free to say anything you want. But you’re not free to start up a thread like this–in GD!-- and not get a, well, a debate.
And the idea that my Yankee (Mayflower descendent and DAR, if you please) feet would somehow sully any part of my own country (especially a part that rose against it) is rather–risible.
I drove through Virginia once, leaving Canadian tracks in my Japanese car.
I don’t remember a single thing about it.
Seeing as how you’ve already confessed to the SDMB’s biggest nono with this gem:
I don’t see it being an issure for too long.
-Joe
Righteous.
Wasn’t a huge portion of the cotton going to England and France? I seem to recall Louis of France being offered 1 million bales of cotton to recognize the Confederacy. I seem to recall the textile industry in Liverpool and Manchester lying idle, starved of cotton, due to the Northern blockade.
These things indicate to me that much of the Western world at that time consumed “slave” cotton, so, if we’re looking to blame people for slavery…
More to the point, the Southerners at the time maintained that the Northern economy was a great evil. There was a lot of talk about how working for wages was low and somehow vile behavior, and a lot of genteel shuddering at the Southern European and Eastern European immigrants coming into the North to take said jobs…which smacks (to me) of barely-disguised racism, and certainly constituted class disdain.
My point is, Southerners at the time of the war felt very specifically that the Northern economy was based on an alien (to them) principle. That conflicts with the assertion that the whole U. S. economy was based on slavery.
Did they feel, and often say, that the North couldn’t get along without them? Yes. I’m not sure that’s really the same thing as saying slavery itself was indispensable to the North. I doubt the plantation owners envisioned a U. S. with slavery but no plantation owners, for example. I think it was more a “you guys need us” way of thinking than an actual belief that slavery underlay the Northern way.
None of the above absolves the North for complicity in allowing slavery to become encrusted into law over the preceding centuries. It’s just that the North finally did something about it. 
Sailboat
Well, I can appreciate that! I’ve been to Northern Virginia, it’s just one huge burbsprawl these days. Is your Board of Supervisors familiar with the concept of “sustainable development”? Or “transit-oriented development”? Or the “New Urbanism”? (The latter, as some point out, could better be labeled the “New Suburbanism,” as it’s mainly about building compact, walkable, high-density, mixed-use communities, and usually not in the city centers.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_urbanism
I had a girlfriend once who came from rural Virginia and she considered Pinellas County, Florida, the “big city” by comparison. I mean, just waking up with that level of traffic noise outside the window was a big change for her. And big city it ain’t! (I’ve lived in D.C. and Baltimore, I know what a big city is.) I got the impression that a lot of Virginians are still kind of isolated, even today, despite living not far from one of the world’s major metropolitan areas. Whether that state of affairs is worth preserving – well, I can see arguments on both sides.
Mmmm . . . BTW, dan, was that what you were actually offering to debate? Growth-management policy? Or were you just venting about how narrow-minded your neighbors are? The latter is an acceptable thread topic on this board, but only in the BBQ Pit forum. In the GD forum, we argue, and a thread needs a topic we can actually argue about.
If you read the Constitution carefully, you’ll note that it doesn’t say that bashing of one’s self is illegal; indeed, the Constitution says the opposite.
We have traditions on this board, one of which is making sarcastic replies to sarcastic original posts, which is what happened in this thread. Bashing happens on occasion; tt’s happened to me many times, as a quick search will show you. I take a certain amount of pride in that, since it shows that people think my views are worthy of an intense response.
What is so terribly wrong with a ficticious hypothetical, in an attempt to stir peoples emotions, and debate an issue.
If you have some unwritten rules you live by here, why don’t you post them for guests to read, so they don’t have to get raked over the coals for breaking one?
The problem is that local governments in the Commonwealth of Virginia have very little power to restrict development, no matter what their knowledge or views. In Virginia, it seems, “states’ rights” means very specifically state’s rights, rather than the principle that government ought to be on the level closest to the people. In Virginia, they trust neither the Feds nor the localities; the state delegates as little power as possible to local governments.
Moderator’s Note: Dandrews02, don’t do this.
This thread is closed. You might want to concentrate on participating in other people’s threads rather than starting your own until you get more of a feel for this place.