What counts as a day of rest on a farm or in a farmhouse is a slippery concept. Some basic chores can’t be skipped. Animals needed to be fed, and so did people. Maybe fieldworkers got the day off but others wouldn’t, especially women.
Of course, this was true in cities and in the North as well, but we tend not to think of that as work in the same sense.
How would they do that? Were there specific laws against businesses? AFAIK entrepreneurs pop up wherever there’s an opportunity to make money.
You don’t feel that the government can do anything to encourage or discourage particular businesses popping up?
And keep in mind banks were small local affairs back then as well. So you wouldn’t be able to count on financing if the local existing business community didn’t want you around.
And on a plantation, a day off only meant you weren’t working for the owner or the overseer. That day off was usually the only opportunity that slaves had to do whatever work they needed for the personal well-being and upkeep.
Industrialized capitalism is premised on the notion of the free wage-earning worker. Slave labor is a pre-industrialization institution. It’s therefore not surprising that the North with its more advanced economy took a stance against slavery.
Yes, although I’m wondering how it would be profitable for some Northerners to (besides arms army suppliers).
The premise of my question is that, while moral justifications were enough to justify the war and were earnestly felt by many Northerners, the levers of power in the run-up to the war were probably moved by rich/powerful people who had something self-interested to gain beyond serving a just cause. I think it was caused by two elites who had incompatible interests. Once Lincoln, who had a policy that new territories would be free States, was elected, the Southern elite saw that its loss was a question of When rather than If and saw that its best odds of preserving its money/power was secession and then the war started.
Perhaps the question of whether new territories would be free or not was about whether they would come under the economic aegis of slaver agricultural elites or free industrial elites.
Premise = hypothesis.
Did slavers try to prevent Northern industrialists from setting up in slaver states?
From the little I’ve read, it seems a tiny amount of rich slavers had a fascist-like iron grip on Southern society. Is that accurate?
Two tracks of interests, intertwined but not identical, are involved.
The South was hysterical about keeping slavery from the very beginning of the country, long before the Industrial Revolution. The Constitution was a “compromise” - really a capitulation to get the South to join the Union - that ensured that the Southern states had an equal number of Senators and more Representatives than their smaller population would normally warrant. Keeping their political power drove every crisis thereafter, all those other “Compromises” that you get taught in American History. They understood perfectly that as soon as the North got control of Congress, they would be finished.
Larger global changes started becoming critical shortly before the Civil War. New England moved its economy from shipping and fishing to manufacturing, taking advantage of its massive amounts of water power. Industrial cities sprang up, needing far more jobs than could be filled by the population. They were the first to hire women in large numbers but also took advantage of the early waves of Irish immigration. Industry grew more slowly in the rest of the country because other northern states could still depend on farming, although water-powered mills and factories of all kinds started appearing wherever a waterfall existed.
Manufacturing was still growing in importance by 1860. The South didn’t have a real policy against it; in fact some factions were trying to encourage factories to compete against the Yankees. What they didn’t want were immigrants. As I said above, they saw advantage in using slave labor for their minimal costs, just as today industries move to Asia for lower labor costs.
It took the war itself to demonstrate the power of industrial might. The longer the war lasted the more obvious that materiel trumped personnel. In hindsight it’s bizarre that anyone thought the South could win. And, in historic-level irony, the North attracted more than a million immigrants during the war, most of them young men, largely Irish, who were lured by the $300 bounty the well-to-do could pay to get out of the war. The North gained more potential soldiers than they lost, something unique in war’s history. By the end of the war, the U.S. was a world-class industrial power and the South was a wasteland.
You’d think that even racists would learn a lesson from losing, but no. They embraced a plantation economy even more fervently and eschewed industry. That kept the South a backwards colony of the North for another century.
So, much like today?
New England could also do farming. Isn’t it more likely that the non-NE part of the North largely stayed with farming because coastal areas have an intrinsic advantage in terms of shipping and immigration?
Now that I think about it, didn’t the era of the robber barons start around the time of the Civil War? Were their plans held back by the antebellum situation?
All the coastal communities depended heavily on shipping in the beginning, but as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston grew in importance, New England’s dominance diminished. New York became the preferred port of entry for immigration. The locals also started to fish out the surrounding waters. New England had rocky soil that was never good for farming, something that wasn’t true anywhere else. By the time of the Civil War they needed new sources of income and this time they had the advantage over everybody else.
The robber barons appeared well after the Civil War.
But the nasty fight to balance slave and free states started at the American Revolution, well before industrialization, and continued during the early 1800’s before industrialization. Accommodations were written into the constitution, and even the Senate and electoral college were designed to avoid northern (or large state) domination. So even at the founding of the republic, there were those who opposed slavery on moral and religious (and humanitarian) grounds, and those who recognized this as an existential threat to the South’s economy.
Industrialization, with increasing population and growing economic power just aggravated the issue. The population overflow went west and established small homesteads. I assume small homesteads could not afford slaves, and probably small homestead farms were not suitable to using slaves. The situation was difficult after the revolution and got progressively worse.
I’m also going to guess the real problem with southern industrialization was that the north got a head start. Along with the resources (like, as mentioned, water power) was concentration. The place with millwrights attracted other millwrights, and so put up more mills; similarly with every profession from mill designers to the mechanics and then the workforce. There’s a synergy - much as the auto industry became concentrated in Detroit, etc. As a result, the late-comers are at a competitive disadvantage.
And one of the reasons for the entrenched plantation economy can be traced to the idea that “farming” was a purer form of economy - tied to the idea of class in Britain where manufacturers were definitely “cits” while landowners were “gentlemen.”
The Constitution as written absolutely had compromises and accommodations on the issue of slavery (the Fugitive Slave Clause, the Three-Fifths Clause), but—whatever one thinks of their continuing desirability in the 21st century—the Senate and the Electoral College weren’t instituted as part of the negotiations over slavery; those parts of the Constitution were the result of the negotiations and compromises over other issues.
It’s not accurate to run together “northern” and “large state”, and certainly not with the implication that “northern = large state = free state” and “southern = small state = slave state”. Representation on the basis of population (what eventually was implemented in the U.S. House of Representatives) favored the interests of high-population states, while equal representation by state (the U.S. Senate; with the Electoral College being a compromise between the two ideas, not to mention showing a distrust of direct democracy) favored the interests of low-population states, and also favored “states’ rights”—but those different interests simply don’t map onto “northern” and “southern” in the way that’s suggested here.
At the time of the debates over a new constitution, Virginia was easily the most populous of the states, and also most favored “democratic” ideas—and was initially opposed to the United States Senate, as it was actually implemented. The Virginia Plan would have instituted representation proportional to population in both houses of the new national legislature legislature, while the New Jersey Plan (proposed by Northern state) would have continued the equal representation of the states.
It’s a common misconception that the North was anti-slavery, and that’s the reason that the North went to war against the South. While the South side is fairly simple (it really was all about slavery and racism), the Northern side is a bit more complex.
There was an abolitionist movement in the U.S. for as long as the U.S. was a country (and even before it was a country). Abolitionism in the North mostly started with religions, especially the Quakers. In fact, the first anti-slavery laws in the U.S. were in states with large Quaker populations (Pennsylvania was first).
The abolitionist movement had been growing in the north all through the 1800s, but even by the time of the Civil War, the abolitionists were not strong enough politically or economically to take on the southern plantations.
But there was another north-south divide, the northern industrialists against the southern plantations. What was good for one was often not good for the other. For example, if you put taxes on goods from Europe, that made European goods more expensive and allowed northern factories to compete with European imported goods. But then Europe put taxes on things like tobacco and cotton, which hurt the plantation sales. Remove the taxes, and the plantations do better, but the northern factories do worse.
If you were a businessman or a banker, through the early 1800s, the Whig party was for you. They supported protective tariffs and other things that benefited business. But the Whig party collapsed around 1850-ish.
This is where you get into the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation. The abolitionists opposed the southern plantations, and the northern industrialists and businessmen opposed the southern plantations, so the two groups joined forces and created the new Republican Party. Each group alone could not defeat the southern plantations, but together, they won the 1860 election.
It’s important to note that about half of the Republican party really didn’t give two hoots about slavery and the other half of the party really didn’t give two hoots about northern factories (mostly - there were exceptions of course). But that didn’t matter. What the southern plantations saw was a single political party that voted against them both on slavery and on industrial/agricultural trade issues.
So what about the western territories?
Well, obviously, the abolitionist half of the Republican Party opposed slavery in the western territories because they opposed slavery everywhere. The industrialists didn’t give two hoots about about slavery, but they cared how these new states would vote, and they wanted these states on their side. Better to align them to the free states of the north. So even though the industrialists really didn’t care much about slavery, they cared how these states voted, and the new states being free states became a major part of the Republican Party’s platform in the 1860 election.
The South could see the writing on the wall. Lincoln promised the South that they could keep their slaves, but that didn’t matter. The South knew that with the new states becoming free states, the South would be outvoted, and their entire way of life was now in danger.
At that point, war was inevitable. The only question was where the first shot would be fired.
That wasn’t a north/south divide. The midwestern states were just as tied to agriculture as the southern states were.
People also forget that the tariff wasn’t intended as a political weapon. Its purpose was a source of government revenue. This was back before there were things like income taxes. The government collected a substantial part of its revenue by taxing imported goods.
To make money, you had to tax goods that were actually being imported into the country. There was no point in putting a tariff on agricultural products because nobody was importing agricultural products to the United States; we were an exporter of those. The goods that were being brought into the United States were mostly industrial products, so that’s what we taxed.
England did the opposite. They imported agricultural products and didn’t import industrial products. So they had a tariff on agricultural products, which made American agricultural products more expensive there than English ones. This also was unfavorable to American agricultural producers, although they couldn’t complain about acts of Parliament the way they could about act of Congress.
But it was not really an ideological issue aimed at hurting American plantation owners or farmers. It was just the consequences of basic economics.
That wasn’t true at the time the Constitution was written, but it certainly was by 1860. The flood of immigration helped the North grow much more quickly than the South, which, since blacks couldn’t vote, were more handicapped in presidential elections than in Congressional ones. Breckinridge’s Southern Democrats took almost all the Southern states and won 71 electoral votes. New York and Pennsylvania alone were worth 72. The Republicans won with no Southern states at all.
It’s difficult therefore to realize how much of a minority the Republicans were. In fact, the pro-slavery parties got screwed over royally. The Repubicans receive 1.9 million votes. The two Democratic parties and John Bell’s Constitutional Union party, which won the border states, combined for 2.8 million votes. (Republican got virtually no votes in the South but the Democrats were competitive but losing in the North.) Imagine the screams if that happened today. Why, there might be a civil war or something.
So, the pro-slavery faction lost because it split its votes?
Opposition to immigration, both then and now: One part of the conservative faction dislikes it because it decreases its % of Congressmen/electoral votes while another part of the conservative faction dislikes it because of racism/xenophobic paranoia?
I don’t feel that’s an accurate way of depicting the 1860 presidential election. Why combine all of the non-Republican parties into a single total?
Here are the totals for each individual party:
Republican - 1,865,908 (39.8%)
Douglas Democrats - 1,380,202 (29.5%)
Breckinridge Democrats - 848,019 (18.1%)
Constitutional Union - 590,901 (12.6%)
This shows that the Republicans have a valid claim to having won the election by actual votes and not just by circumstances.
If you’re going to eliminate some candidates, why assume there would be a combination against the Republicans? The Democrats were obviously deeply divided. So I think it’s reasonable to assume that if Douglas hadn’t been around, a lot of his votes would have ended up going to Lincoln rather than Breckinridge.
If we split Douglas’ votes 50/50 between Lincoln and Breckinridge, we get these totals:
Republican - 2,556,009 (54.5%)
Democrats - 1,538,120 (32.9%)
Constitutional Union - 590,901 (12.6%)
I think the fact that the Republicans lost every single slave state and border state and won every single free state indicates that if the pro-slavery forces had been able to field a single candidate they would have the same result.
It’s true that neither Douglas nor Bell ran pro-slavery campaigns, since they tried to fudge the issue to appease everybody. But the voting patterns show that people voted for them to not vote for the Republicans. Here’s a county-by-county map that is fascinating.
But to what extent were the new western states agricultural exporters? My impression is that north of the cotton line(??) they were mostly small homesteaders and raised food crops that mostly went to feed he industrial east. Consequently, they were less likely to get worked up about import tariffs on manufactured goods, particularly since the lower cost of shipping from the east (via the Erie canal and Chicago, then rail) probably made those goods competitive with goods that had to be shipped upriver from Europe via New Orleans. So, many of the new states generally were not that hung up on preserving slavery despite being agricultural. Plus northern states and northern new states being attractive to small homesteaders encouraged a larger population, while farmland concentrated in massive plantations discouraged an influx of immigrants looking for farms.
But very true, tariff-free cotton was what made the UK complicit in the South’s rebellion.
I assume had the South gotten heavily into processing their own cotton into cloth, then they would have run into a tariff wall the other side, by British mills defensive about competition; but they would have the northern market to sell into.
An explanation I read said the electoral college was designed to ensure that whoever won the presidency was popular all over the Republic, not just a dominant regional figure. While someone like Washington could carry that off, the thought when the constitution was written, when there was a single string of minor settlements along a long coastline with slow communication, was very few other political figures would clear that bar and win an electoral majority - in most cases congress would pick the president. Then country-wide party politics took off and rarely did congress need to decide (and the first time they did, was due to overly strong party politics)
