What about the North? For the most part, the northern industrialists didn’t give two hoots about slavery. They were pro-industrialism, which had nothing to do with slavery. They objected to the southern agricultural-based economy and federal policies and tariffs which benefited southern agriculture. They didn’t object to the slaves. If you could have somehow magically turned the slaves into free farm workers, the objections from the northern industrialists would have been the same. That wasn’t about slavery, and saying that it was just because the southern economy was slave based is taking anything tangentially related to slavery and saying it’s all about slavery. If you are going to make that argument, then pretty much everything in the western hemisphere at the time was about slavery.
And even in the South, it wasn’t all about slavery. The small farmers didn’t own slaves. If anything, they would have preferred to get rid of the slaves since it would have made it easier for them to compete with the big plantation owners (actually what most of them wanted was to become big plantation owners themselves, but leveling the playing field would have been an acceptable alternative to most, I think). The small farmers allied themselves with the big plantations for two reasons. One was racism, not slavery. They thought that blacks were animals and they didn’t want them to have rights. The other was simple economics. The North was attacking agriculture, and the little farmers were agriculture. They had to ally themselves with the plantations for their own survival. Yes, the plantations had slaves, but that doesn’t make that alliance all about slavery. Again, it’s only tangential.
Even with all of this, there still wasn’t a Civil War. All of this was in place by the 1830s or so. What really polarized people and turned everything from angry discussions in Washington into people picking up guns and shooting each other was a couple of decades of constant political battles with each side ramming their ideals down the other’s throats whenever they had a majority in Congress. Take away these couple of decades of poor conflict resolution, and you don’t have a Civil War either. And again, just because one of the issues that they were fighting over was slavery doesn’t make this entire factor all about slavery.
There is also an issue of state’s rights, one that gets almost completely dismissed these days since some folks like to say that the South went to war over state’s rights instead of slavery. Ignoring that, though, there was an issue over how much control the federal government should have over states. Yes, one of the main things that people were trying to control was slavery, but there’s a separate issue regarding exactly where the balance between states and the federal government should be, and that dispute pretty much ended up getting lost in everything else that was going on.
The democratic party in the 1940s and 1950s was a coalition of white liberals and southern whites. These two did not get along on racial issues. That is my understanding. The two eventually divided after LBJ passed civil rights reform, and Nixon promoted the southern strategy to absorb all the southern whites who were angry at the democratic party.
I believe the democratic party was the party of white liberals in the 40s and 50s. At the very least, their coalition had not only southern whites (who opposed integration) but groups who supported equality for blacks. However, who those groups were I do not know.
They do, because they need to make the war over something other than slavery. But there isn’t anything.
The southern economy was not tangentially related to slavery; it was based on it in its entirety. It’s true that most southerners were small farmers. It’s equally true that most **northerners **were small farmers. Even in 1860, farmers were more than 50% of the workforce and that percentage was far higher in previous decades. The North was not at any point attacking agriculture; every northern economy ran on farming. The north was notoriously more industrialized than the south, but it was the Civil War that caused the rise of industrial forces into dominance. They had not reached that point in the mostly farm-centric world of the first half of the century. If you are going to make tariffs an issue, then you are insisting upon making the plantation economy an issue: the small farmers on either side had little interest in tariffs because they put little of their money in foreign-made products.
You can look at the various party platforms for 1860. The word tariff cannot be found in them, although the issue is among several in the Republican point 12. State’s rights are not mentioned, unless you consider the Republican denunciation of the imposition of slavery in them. Not a single issue other than slavery would be worth even a passing glance, let alone something that could tear the country apart.
The Civil War was not about the rights of the Negro people. As you say, nobody other than the very small number of abolitionists cared about that. It was about the insistence of the South that their peculiar institution would be the law of the entire land, free from outside comment or limitation. Every other law, every other consideration, every other pronouncement was somehow twisted to be part of that monomania. The South seceded before Lincoln took office, while the acquiescent Buchanan was president. They understood what the election meant: that the North could no longer stand the insanity of their stand upon that one single and singular issue.
The South made the Civil War solely about slavery because the South made every issue solely about slavery, and had been doing so for decades. That the war was about slavery is the only place to agree with the South.
But the large-scale agriculture that dominated the Southern economy (especially the cotton economy) would have been very unlikely without the institution of slavery. You could not, in fact, have “magically turned the slaves into free farm workers” because it was actually very difficult in the 19th century to get free Americans to work for wages on other people’s farms. That sort of wage labor lacked the independence that was, in the arguments of Thomas Jefferson and his ideological successors, the fundamental characteristic of the yeoman farmer.
To the extent that northern industrialists were opposed to policies that benefited Southern agriculture, they were, in very important ways, concerned about policies that benefited the plantation agriculture that relied on chattel slavery. There is some truth to your observation that many Northern industrialists were not opposed to slavery, per se, but the presence of slavery was fundamental to the shape of the Southern economy. Without slavery, the South might have developed as a mixed economy like the North, thus obviating some of the sectional politics of tariffs and other economic issues.
But racism, in its virulent 19th-century form, emerged in considerable measure not simply as a cause of slavery, but also as a result of it. Historical scholars of slavery point out that the institution of slavery itself helped to deepen and embed attitudes about racial superiority and inferiority. As early at the 17th century, colonies like Virginia began enacting racially-based laws that drew clear distinctions between white and non-white, and the social and political culture of the South developed in such a way that even the three-fourths of whites who held no slaves of their own still felt themselves attached to slavery in important ways. The qualities of freedom were increasingly defined as white, and non-freedom as black.
Creating the idea among poor whites that they had a vested interest in slavery was something that Southern elites did on both a conscious and subconscious level. Every effort was made to emphasize and exaggerate racial distinctions, while downplaying differences of socio-economic class. There were, to be sure, some whites in the South who resented the institution of slavery, but they were in a minority, and you can’t simply handwave away poor white support as being about racism and not slavery. The two were inextricable in the South.
I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that the North was “attacking agriculture.” For the whole time period we’re talking about here, before the Civil War, a significant percentage of Northerners also worked in agriculture, and large portions of the mid-west were dominated by family farms. Even in 1860, as Exapno Mapcase notes, at least half of Northerners still worked in agriculture.
Emphasis mine. This misses the point that these conflicts were, fundamentally, about thew institution of slavery, and especially about it (potentially) spreading to new states and territories in the West. It is, indeed, difficult to overestimate the importance of the connections between slavery and American expansion in the 19th century. America was an expansionist nation, and every debate over expansion during that period was shaped in large measure by questions of how to incorporate the new territory, and whether to allow slavery there. And Northerners were incredibly concerned about this, even as they themselves often showed very little concern for racial equality. When David Wilmot proposed banning slavery in the territories gained from Mexico in the war of 1846-48, his reasoning was that this would leave the West open for free white farmers.
Exapno Mapcase has dealt with this. To the extent that those in the South were concerned about states’ rights, the only states’ rights that they cared enough about to go to war over was the right to own slaves and to expand slavery into new territories.
A defense of slavery was also central to the new constitution of the Confederate States.
Actually, the Democratic coalition of the post-WWII period was a bit more complex than that. It was, in essence the New Deal coalition that had gathered itself around Franklin Roosevelt’s policies, and included:
[ul]
[li] industrial workers[/li][li] Southern whites[/li][li] Northern blacks (Southern blacks too, but most of them were prevented from participating in the voting process)[/li][li] farmers[/li][li] urban Catholics and Jews[/li][li] middle-class homeowners[/li][/ul]
In 1948, the Democratic Party convention approved a civil rights plank to their platform that was proposed by Hubert Humphrey. Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats walked out and form the States’ Rights Democratic Party. They also didn’t want Truman to be re-elected.
More for northern Democrats who wanted to be elected president.
Actual southern Democrats continued getting elected in large numbers until the Republican wave in 1994. Longer in some states. It took the election of an black northern Democratic president to really end the Democratic Party’s chances in states like Tennessee.
One point - the invention of the cotton gin allowed for the significant expansion of the cotton plantation economy and made cotton a huge part of the southern economy. Picking cotton ("…your cotton-pickin’ hands…") was apparently very seasonal and very unwanted work. I read somewhere (here, earlier thread?) that it was very hard on the hands, mind and finger-numbing callous-building work… hence, better suited to slavery than to paid work. So in the decades as this aspect of the Southern economy was taking off, the North was making noises about cutting off the Southern 1%'s main source of labour.
Perhaps without the cotton gin, the south’s addiction to slave labour would have withered away as it had been doing in the north, and cotton plantations would be a much smaller part of the ecomony.
Personally I do not think the Democrats have changed much. They were for slavery back in the day, and are for slavery now. The only difference is how you define it.
Now am I being sarcastic, yes. However In my view there is a strong element of truth to the idea of the liberal plantation.
Well, there were white liberals in the Republican party too, and in the Democratic party, there were union members, “urban ethnics” and so on. It’s a mistake to call Northern Democrats “white liberals”. Some were, but they all weren’t.
The thing about a lot of the South after Reconstruction was that the Republican party was anathema. I once met somebody from rural South Carolina who had been the postmaster of his local town in the 1950s, and he told me that, in the 1950s, he was one of the only two Republicans in the county.
This didn’t hold true for the “New South”; the upper south and the urbanizing south, but in the rural deep south, Republicans were pretty sparse on the ground, and a lot of the ways that state governments were set up in the South meant that rural counties had power outside their population. See, for instance, the County Unit System in Georgia from 1917 to 1962, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
That meant, in effect, that much of the south was effectively run by a single party; the Democratic party, and partisan disagreements took place within state party factions.
I just wanted to mention that the south didn’t give two hoots about state’s rights when it didn’t suitheir purpose. Read someday about the fugitive slave act, which directly impinged on the rights of the northern states.
Yes, secession was all about slavery (the states’ acts of secession made that clear) and the war came about because the southern hotheads could not abide the resupply of Fort Sumter. I have often speculated that if the south had not started the war, secession might well have just become a fait accompli without any formal acknowledgment of the fact.
In any case, the Republicans began as a party of the northern industrialists and have remained so. But until the depression they were also the party of the blacks. Then came the New Deal that cemented the difference between the party of big business and the party of the powerless. Until the civil rights acts which caused the final split of the Democrats.
Civil War, slavery or not, is not particularly germane to the question. Believe it or not, Herbert Hoover is. We ignore him except to poop all over him, but he was a fascinating character, in many ways a blend of Trump and Bill Gates. After leading the effort to save millions of Europeans from starving in the economic wreckage post WW1 he was appointed Sec of Commerce in the 20’s. Along came the great Mississippi River flood of 1827 which impacted a much greater area than Katrina. Hoover was put in charge of relief. The only land above ground for miles along the river were the levees, which was where the planters concentrated the black sharecropper population, thousands of men, women, and children living in ankle deep water alongside a raging river with no food or shelter. Hoover moved in to rescue them. Southern power structure said no, we don’t want to lose our labor force. Hoover backed off and left them to the mercies of their masters for more than a week before he had the Nat Guard take them off in flatboats. Price of a ride was singing some of the old ‘negro spirituals,’ Mel Brooks had a laff at that practice in Blazing Saddles. When HH later ran for President national black leaders told him he had to promise all kinds of reforms or they would vote Dem. He promised, then reneged, and this was the 1st major blow to black support of Republicans. HH led a fascinating life before the trainwreck of his Presidency…
But what aspects of the democratic coalition were calling for civil rights? Were liberals part of the democratic coalition back then, or were they split between the two parties?
The modern democratic coalition is minorities, white liberals, the disadvantaged, etc. Were white liberals part of the democratic coalition in 1948 along with southern whites?
What do you think Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was? Of course white liberals were calling for civil rights. They were in the forefront of those calling for civil rights.
Yeah but in modern times, virtually all liberals are democrats. Were liberals split between the two parties before the civil rights era, or were they almost all democrats even in the 1930s, 40s and 50s?
I admit liberals were probably the ones calling for civil rights, but weren’t liberals in both parties? The republican party supported civil rights too.
Basically a lot of Southern Dems were on board with Democratic economic policy and were willing to stay in the party until civil rights became a much bigger issue. The LBJ era civil rights emphasis started them on their way out of the party and the much more dovish foreign policy which came later finished the job.
There were a lot of liberal Republicans too, although the word “liberal” in those days pretty much was limited only to describing a person’s views on civil rights. Even the “liberal” Republicans of those days, like Rockefeller and Percy, still held to the main Republican idea of not liking government intervention, although certainly not to the degree that became the case later, so their “liberalism” constituted little more than lip service.
Liberal Republicans would often vote for amendments to bills to make them more “civil rights” compliant, then join Southern Dems in voting against the bill on the grounds of governmental overreach.