Well, that’s it for Disney for now and the predictable future anything whatsoever to do with a Disney brand anything for this family. Disney-brand movies, Disney-owned media outlets, toys, games and clothing with Disney characters on them, the parks the whole ball-o-wax. I was pretty certain I was done with them when I wrote this, almost a year ago. (Disney was already circling the drain with me, the year before, when this posted.) This most recent release of theirs has gone beyond offensive wokery, romped through partisan propaganda and plunged headlong into purveying outright lies lies about American history, which to me, as a passionate reader of history (as well as a scribbler of historical fiction) is a form of blasphemy. Worse than that a putrid and manipulative lie.
Slavery did not build this country. The ‘peculiar institution’ as it was described in antebellum writings, in fact rather retarded industrial development in the old South. I will concede that extensive production of cash crops as rice, tobacco, indigo and cotton did depend on slavery. Those enterprises enriched a small, elite fraction of Southern slaveholders and kept the rest of the South relatively poor, undeveloped, and almost medieval in backwardness, although like the medieval nobility, convinced of their own superiority. Industry, innovation, and immigration all inclined to those places North of the Mason-Dixon line, while the South stagnated, even after Northern victory in the Civil War brought an end to chattel slavery.
I will concede that slave labor did play a part in the construction of certain historic buildings and public developments, and in some industries like Richmond’s Tredegar Iron Works. But slaves did not build the Erie Canal, the fabric mills of New England, Samuel Colt’s industrial armory. Black slaves did not create or maintain the telegraph lines which bound the country together, nor did slavery figure in the Santa Fe trail, the Oregon-California trail, the various precious metal rushes which eventually filled up the far West, the Pony Express, the web of stagecoach routes that prefigured the transcontinental rail network, the coal mines and steelworks that dominated industry after the Civil War, the oil industry that eventually powered much of that growth, Thomas Edison’s laboratory and a hundred other manufacturing, mercantile or inventive enterprises … none of that was based on slavery, nor did formerly enslaved people play very much of a part, other than that of employees. To insist, as this wretched cartoon does, that slavery “built” the United States is a pernicious and poisonous lie, a gross distortion.
The Disney company should be deeply ashamed of perpetuating it I am certain that the late Walt would be. The danger in pushing such a gross misreading of history is that people without much historical knowledge will come to accept it as a fact. It’s a kind of racism every bit as destructive as the distorting fungal infection in the game and series The Last of Us. We have already seen countless instances of black-on-white or black-on-oriental violence, via the so-called ‘knock out game’ or even outright murder in the city streets, such as in this incident. And now the shambling corpse of reparations returns, yet again. If it weren’t for the fact that most of us genuinely judge by the content of character rather then the color of the skin envelope it’s in I believe that we’d already be in a race war to the knife. It may yet come to that, if Disney and the rest of the so-called anti-racist brigade of super-spreaders have their way. Discuss as you wish.
While it is hard to do it perfectly, because of all the interlocking ownerships in media, we have difficulty in totally avoiding Disney; but we try.
They are not the same company as when I watched the Mickey Mouse Club as a pre-schooler. And I daresay that the corporate HQ would catch fire if they were to re-shoot the old “Johnny Tremain”.
Subotai Bahadur
I try also, SB – this last installation of wokery on their part is the final straw. It is malignant propaganda. Walt is likely revolving in his grave like a Black & Decker drill. I will avoid Disney and Disney-adjacent as much as I can. Especially the branded merch. They are dead to me. Dead, nailed down in the coffin and six feet of dirt on top of it.
Hulu which is mainlining this trash, is affiliated with FX, (what exactly are they doing) one of this dezinforma artist is promoting, is the notion that lord bulmore the governor of virginia was an abolitionist, because he offered slaves who would fight for him, freedom, like Napoleon was really interested in Spanish independence, I was going to go goodwin, but I deferredm
now the Royal African Company was originally designed around mining the gold in the region of ghana and it expanded from there, I’m sure some Colonial enterprises were involving in the shipping side of the business, and probably some financial institutions,
In case anyone doesn’t already know this, the ABC television network is owned by Disney.
And while on the subject, FX is part of Fox, and aside from Fox News, Disney bought the rest of it some years back.
Far enough back that it was actually exciting because it meant Disney got back the film rights for the Fantastic Four and X-Men.
If the Gee Ohhh Peeeee was a genuine opposition party the crazy wouldn’t have gotten nearly this far. But it isn’t, and here we are. I despise you, gop.
For one small example, the party could have passed a law while it controlled the government 2017-2019 to mandate a la cart cable programming, which I bet would have negatively impacted the revenue stream that supports swarms of leftist-aligned cable networks. Disney might have received an early warning that their politics were impacting their bottom line, which may have inspired them to stop.
But that didn’t happen.
I’m pleased to see that Kevin McCarthy has lately taken the Chamber of Commerce to task, because that might mean that the party has realized that if it wants to have a future it must represent the people who actually vote for it instead of left-leaning rich people.
Might mean. It could happen. After all, someone always wins the Lotto, which is pretty unlikely.
Also, if we want to avoid that race war to the knife, it is going to have to be explained it to some fraction of black people that they aren’t actually being screwed over because they are sent to jail if they commit crimes. Forcefully explained, because I don’t think gentle reminders about the law have been enough.
Reparations are a non-starter. If the present regime really wants to suck-start a shotgun- to borrow from Larry Correia- try to force 90% of the population to give large sums of money to 10%, simply because of the shade of their skin envelope.
Surely the GOP will take a stand against reparations, right?
Right??
I don’t know where I heard the same dialogue of that but it was shocking and I went back thinking about the Disneyland program every Sunday were Walt Disney would introduce this evening’s program
He wanted entertainment for the family. How it got to here or more accurately how a bunch of embedded act activists got into their company…
WWWD?
Probably fire a good part of the creative staff and rebuild
SGT. Mom:
Y’all might find this interesting:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/disney-to-cut-thousands-of-jobs-to-save-money-as-desantis-set-to-take-control-of-companys-orlando-district-under-new-bill-report
Subotai Bahadur
Pretty much gave up on TV while in college, the same mindless drivel had exceeded its sell by date..at least for me. A few years ago I suggested to oldest son that going to Disney World was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. He has a friend with a timeshare, and they would go their together with their families for entertainment.
Yes, it may have been cheap entertainment…but as someone once said, Deborah didn’t have a day job with the Canaanites.
Wait I thought when Bob Iger came back to Disney last year he was going to restore Disney’s long-term growth? Keep in mind he replaced Chapel right after the PR disasters that were the company coming out against grooming Florida transgender kindergartners and the released video of Disney employees bragging about using content to indoctrinate children in Woke.
You would think that with the stock price (as of last month) was off about a third off its 12 month high and just announcing cutting 7000 jobs Warner Brothers that Disney wouldn’t be taking a sledge hammer to its brand let alone streaming service. Last year Warner Brothers took a $100 million bath cancelling Batgirl before release because it would damage it’s brand. I don’t know.what it cost Disney to produce this debacle but it was far less than the loss in it’s brand value.
There has been a lot of talk the past year that all this ESG and wokery in corporate America was going to hit the wall once it affected profits, i.e. fiscal reality. Go woke go broke or as Johnny Cash sang “You can run For a long time but sooner or later god Is going to cut you down” The problem here is that as far as woke content Disney decided to keep running, Over was faced with a decision on how to reorg his business.modeland he decided to cut jobs than Woke. Wow.. Shows you priorities
Netflix cut woke, but Disney didn’t Why? Maybe it’s because Disney has a bigger cash pile and the day of reckoning just takes longer to reach. Maybe it’s Disney thinking as the 800 pond gorilla it thinks it can do whatever it wants, create its own ecosystem. I wouldn’t bit against the latter. Disney is part of the corporatist (The nice way of saying fascist) WEF world and I have no doubt it would rather trade maximizing its revenue for cultural power. I thought corporate winery would be very hard to stop but I thought we would at least get a pause when it began eating into the bottom line or stock price. Nope. This is bad news in more ways the one
In 1959 Walt Disney did a TV mini-series about an anti-government militia staring a very young Leslie Nielsen
Woke progressives hate the country, hate the people and hate the slowly growing prosperity that allowed them to have the luxury of rejecting and spitting on it all while expecting the prosperity that funds their jobs to continue. They even expect to build the perfect socialist Utopia from the rubble. We dare not allow such people to have any say over our children and the future.
“The ‘peculiar institution’ as it was described in antebellum writings, in fact rather retarded industrial development in the old South.”
Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin in 1794, three years before he obtained a contract with the US government to produce muskets using interchangeable parts; McCormick invented his reaper in 1831, patented it in 1834; Henry Stone built the first prototype steam-powered tractor in 1860. And so on.
Agricultural mechanization was coming, and at a increasingly rapid pace. Slavery was ended in 1863 with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, enforced by 600,000 deaths, but even without that it had only a few more years to live. Enough mechanization to render slavery an inefficient and obsolete manner of production was only a couple decades away, and when a half-dozen men armed with machines and steam could out produce 100 or more slaves it would have died a natural death. A difficult death, to be sure, because of the economics and emotions involved, but a death nonetheless and one more natural than four years of violent family-splitting conflict.
I recently spend some time on The History Lounge’s YouTube channel looking at a few of its 1950s-1960s USA Road Trip videos. Back then, fresh and flush from winning World War II, America was, largely, a pleasant place to live, and families were the Coin of the Realm. The videos, composed of stills from nearly everywhere, are predominantly white, but then the black family was a solid feature. Economically and socially a few to several ratchet clicks below white families, certainly, but like all parents everywhere many black parents were striving to provide better opportunities and paths to success for their children. There’s no question their paths were rockier than those for whites, and the grade a bit steeper, but those paths were there.
Then in the late 1960s white liberals arrived, armed with college degrees, textbook theories, federal money and grand dreams and the rest is, as they say, history.
I do not contest the abandonment of anything and everything Disney, it’s a sound decision, perhaps even several years late. What concerns me more, however, is how that mentality has metastasized so severely through American culture as to be inescapable. Were it just Disney, we would quietly watch one corporation perform ritual seppuku, throw some dirt over the corpse and move on, and perhaps Disney’s place might be taken shortly by another organization more founded in reality. The problem is, Far Leftist Wokeism is everywhere, and in increasing amounts. Commercial television has been unwatchable for easily a decade, and even the non-Woke shows are thoroughly permeated with solidly Woke commercials. Avidly seeking to avoid commerce with even moderately Woke institutions, much less the Severely Woke, is condemnation to starvation, naked and traveling only by foot.
I have it on good authority that most of America does not conform to the messaging we’re being inundated with, but I’m not convnced that “most” is a large enough cohort to resist the tsunami. One might ask “who’s paying for all this and how?” but I suspect many of us already know the answer; despite that knowledge we’re at a loss as to discovering a way to control it.
All I can say is the ubiquitous “this will not end well” and hope and pray for a peaceful recognition of reality that returns us to sanity. I doubt that is in the offing, however.
The danger in pushing such a gross misreading of history is that people without much historical knowledge will come to accept them as a fact.
It’s not a danger, Sgt. Mom, it’s the desired end goal. Who was it that said, “Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future”?
They want the people ignorant so they can re-indoctrinate them in Progressivism, and bring about their heaven on earth.
Elrod Penwhistle
February 9, 2023 at 7:36 am
A difficult death, to be sure, because of the economics and emotions involved, but a death nonetheless and one more natural than four years of violent family-splitting conflict.
The only question would have been what the slave holders did with their slaves. I’m imagining it would have gotten very ugly in a few places. And plenty of others would have reacted badly out of fear.But it might have allowed “40 acres and a mule” to work out west.
@Elrod Penwhistle
No, slavery didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. That was limited only to areas where the Union had no effective control. Slave states that didn’t secede as well as those areas in seceding states controlled by the Union Army were exempted. The EP is best seen as a war measure to disrupt the Confederate economy by encouraging slaves to self-emancipate and as a PR gimmick to keep Britain and France from intervening on behalf of the South. The official end of slavery came with the 13th Amendment in late 1865 after the war was over. And still it was allowed as punishment for crime. In addition, there was another century of Jim Crow.
Elrod Penwhistle…”Enough mechanization to render slavery an inefficient and obsolete manner of production was only a couple decades away, and when a half-dozen men armed with machines and steam could out produce 100 or more slaves it would have died a natural death.”
Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, visited a Northern shipyard and observed:
“In a southern port, twenty or thirty hands would have been employed to do what five or six did here, with the aid of a single ox attached to the end of a fall. Main strength, unassisted by skill, is slavery’s method of labor. An old ox, worth eighty dollars, was doing, in New Bedford, what would have required fifteen thousand dollars worth of human bones and muscles to have performed in a southern port.”
And sometime around 1900, GE”s great scientist Charles Steinmetz calculated that one single turbine just sold by the company could do the physical work of the entire slave population of the US at the time of the Civil War.
The impact of industrialization on slavery is certainly strongly negative over the long term, BUT…a lot of kinds of work involve more than raw physical power. Mechanical cotton picking didn’t even begin to emerge until the 1920s, and many kinds of fruit are still largely picked by hand. Actress & diarist Fanny Kemble observed that when she lived on a Georgia plantation, one of her husband’s slaves was a talented boatbuilder…don’t know how common this level of skilled work was among slaves, but there was certainly some of it. In today’s world, low-priced labor is still an important economic factor…children are used for mining cobalt in the Congo, and cheap labor is a key criterion in the location of apparel production facilities.
Richard
February 9, 2023 at 9:18 am
The EP is best seen as a war measure to disrupt the Confederate economy
Ironically, just like the proclamation issued by Lord Dunmore that the 1619 Project loves to swing about. It was not intended to abolish slavery or make any true moral criticism of it, just to inconvenience the uppity colonists who benefited from it.
Savery had always been part of the human condition — up until the Industrial Revolution. African slavery ended in the English, French, Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America without a war, roughly contemporaneously with slavery ending in the former English colonies of North America with a war. Coal — fossil fuel! — freed the slaves!
The US Civil War was about lots more than slavery.
The plantation system in the southern states functioned much like a socialist police state. Those at the top lived very well, while the laboring masses, kept in line by brutal police forces, were exploited and cheated out of the wealth generated by their labor.
lincoln was more a unionist then a strict abolitionist, that was fremont and seward, which is ironic considering the latters anglophilia, he didn’t want slavery encroaching Northward, Douglas thought otherwise,
the Whigs of which Lincoln was one, had fallen apart because of the conflict over slavery, now looking from a higher perspective, the goal is to create a proletariat among the mass of African Americans, and a vanguard, where Dubois and Lenin coincide, the Stalinist focus was an nationalities question like Lenin had done to fracture the Czars authority, ask everyone from Chechnya to the Steppes how that turned out,
I think the end of reconstruction and the rise of jim crow, was a real knife in the self identity of the nation, much like the failed reforms of Alexander 2nd sowed the seeds for Lenin,
it didn’t erase all of the hard won gains of the civil war, but it did great damage.
even among some conservatives, there is strange new respect for the panthers well that’s ann coulter party of one, but robert williams, who would go on to urge revolution from Cuba, as part of Radio Free America (I first learned of him from Robert Moss’s Monimbo,)
The 1619 Project was always “too good to check,” Right after it came out the central branch of the nearby library had a large display it right next to the circulation desk. When I asked the branch librarian whether she was aware of its shoddy history or read the significant academic criticism of its work she said no… but the display stayed up.
Promiminent historians from across the ideological spectrum, from Marxists to popularly known scholars such as James McPherson and Peter Wood have all pointed out the huge holes in the supporting facts and reasoning in the project. I do remember Hannah-Jones once brushing off the criticism saying that the 1619 Project should not be seen so much as an academic of history as a reframing of the past and that is the key to understanding the Project’s Telos. It is to inform, not by facts and reason, but rather to provide a communicative signal of the the current party line. It was written not by a historian, but rather a journalist in order to provide a “CRT for Dummies” to NY Times readers through a narrative format masquerading as history. While the ground had already been plowed by DEI and Kendi, you can mark the success by 1619 by how quickly CRT was adopted by K-12 schools since its release.
In short it’s propaganda, an Information Warfare device and Hannah-Jones by saying it’s more about reframing than anything else admits it. It was a successful move by her part and right now it’s solidly embedded not only into the K12 curriculum but as the definitive statement on the history of slavery and race relations in American history. To criticize the 1619 Project is to whitewash American history, so the story goes. I think they are sleazebags for doing this but I can appreciate a good piece of information warfare work. We should study the methods even if we abhor the motives and outcomes.
I will avoid mention of Lincoln for the moment bur I wanted to address two other points mentioned above. The first is Hannah-Jones’ mention of Dunmore’s proclamation as some sort of revolutionary moment rather than the desperate move that GWB pointed it to be. What would she say then about Jefferson Davis’ proclamation in 1865 offering freedom to any slave that would fight for the Confederacy
The other was mentioned by Lewin. Why were the ranks of the Confederate armies filled by poor white men who were exploited and oppressed by the southern aristocracy? You would think they would have more in common with the black slaves than the guy in the plantation house. A Marxist would argue that the plantation owners used a social superstructure to impose a false consciousnesses (southern culture, race…) upon the poor whites in order for them to maintain the superior class position. In other words plantation owners fostered racial division in order to keep the lower classes from realizing their real interests, Sound familiar?
Sound familiar?
The 80s cineplexes are envious of the amount of projection the progressives put out on any given day.
“In other words plantation owners fostered racial division in order to keep the lower classes from realizing their real interests, Sound familiar?”
Indeed it does; privileged upper-class white wokists maintaining their own position and deflecting criticism of themselves by dumping on working-class whites. And the 1619 Project is just another example of an intellectual fungal infection, intended to demoralize Americans of all ethnic backgrounds. Destroying our historical understandings and how we view ourselves is, I think, part of the kink. I’m wondering, though, if the constant pounding on about CRT/DIE, etc. in the media and business worlds, won’t have something of an opposite effect. I can see it in myself; the main media that I am exposed to every day is the classical music station. Of course, they are into Black History Month, so the listening audience is being served up lashings of Florence Price, Chevalier St. George, William Grant Still, Scott Joplin, etc. All of them perfectly acceptable second-rank regional composers (on par with, say, Dvorak, Elgar, and Grieg), but oh G*d the pious lecture from the announcers about civil rights and the plight of African Americans… racismjimcrowprejudice … pounding on, and on and on. I’m getting to the point where I start grinding my teeth as soon as any of those names are mentioned, because I know the lecture is coming. Could other consumers of music, movies, books, the arts and entertainment in general be starting to blank out, because they are so tired of the explicit or implicit lecture?
Another factor rarely mentioned is the British dependence on cotton for their textile industries that were growing rapidly with the Industrial Revolution. They were sorely tempted to side completely with the Confederacy. They did allow the building of commerce raiders like the Alabama.
Upon the completion of her seven expeditionary raids, Alabama had been at sea for 534 days out of 657, never visiting a single Confederate port. She boarded nearly 450 vessels, captured or burned 65 Union merchant ships, and took more than 2,000 prisoners without a single loss of life from either prisoners or her own crew.
She was built in Liverpool.
Contrast Pre-Civil War New England with the slave states and the South was the more primitive, mostly agrarian of the two.
Dave Foster: “The impact of industrialization on slavery is certainly strongly negative over the long term, BUT”¦a lot of kinds of work involve more than raw physical power. Mechanical cotton picking didn’t even begin to emerge until the 1920s, and many kinds of fruit are still largely picked by hand.”
It is a common belief that industrialization would have wiped out chattel slavery eventually. Maybe, but history does not bear that out. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia used slave labor in their factories during the 20th century, including munitions factories. China employs slave labor in this century.
It does not have to make economic sense either. A lot of it is about control. Germany had real quality-control problems with the output of munitions factories staffed by slave workers. (Those stories of US bombers returning to base with AA shells lodged in them that did not explode and turned out to have no explosive in the warhead? A lot of that was sabotage by the slaves forced to make the shells.)
It would be pretty to think slavery would have died away in the US even without the Civil War, but I doubt it. I could easily see an automobile assembly plant in Birmingham, AL with slaves on the assembly line supervised by overseers rather than foremen in the 1920s had the Civil War not occurred.
I also believe the growth of abolitionism following the Dred Scott decision was fueled by fears by Northern white factory workers that a Southern slaveowner would cut a deal with a Northern factory owner to staff a factory in Ohio or New England with slaves.
Federal case law held slaves remained slaves in Free States (the Fugitive Slave Law) and while states could take legal action to force the slaveowner to remove his slaves or face having them freed, the case would have wound its way slowly courts. In the meantime the slaves keep working at the factory until a court order mandated their removal.
If the courts ordered removal. The Supreme Court could just have easily ruled they could remain because they were property and the Takings Clause prevented their seizure. It tilted to the South.
Yes i mentioned seward in amanda foremans a word set ablaze about the international aspects of the civil war and it showed sewards deft hand in handling the relations with the uk
Seawriter: “I could easily see an automobile assembly plant in Birmingham, AL with slaves on the assembly line supervised by overseers rather than foremen in the 1920s had the Civil War not occurred.”
Then why did slavery in Brazil die (diversity, inclusion, equity?) out naturally, without any Brazilian civil war? Surely if the hypothetical were correct, then Brazilian slave owners would have similarly used slaves on auto assembly lines and cornered the global market?
In the 1800s, slavery was coming to an end throughout those many parts of the world which had fossil fuels, steam engines, and mechanization. But only one such place had a civil war. An outside observer of the planet would have to deduce that the untypical US civil war was about a lot more than simply slavery.
Seawriter, you’re not exactly correct in your statement. Runaway slaves did have to be returned to their owners, under the Fugitive Slave Act. But if an owner voluntarily took a slave to a free state, that act emancipated the slave, under the doctrine of “once free, always free”. How many slaves knew this, and how easy it was to get the government to recognize and enforce it varied from place to place, but it was the law even in the South. An example of this type of lawsuit was the Dred Scott case– had he confined his assertions to the fact that his owner had taken him to Illinois (a free state) for four years, he probably would have won! But the activists who funded his case wanted a precedent on slavery in the territories, had the lawyers argue based on his residence in Wisconsin territory (which was free soil, based on the Northwest Ordnance); and that was ultimately, tragically quashed by Chief Justice Taney.
Federal case law held slaves remained slaves in Free States (the Fugitive Slave Law) and while states could take legal action to force the slaveowner to remove his slaves or face having them freed, the case would have wound its way slowly courts.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River. Salmon P Chase actually became famous defending slaves who set foot in Ohio and, therefore, became free. The Dredd Scott decision was bad law due to the incompetence of his lawyer and the ideology of Roger B Taney. Scott and his wife had been taken to Minnesota by their owner, an army officer. That by law made them free. Taney’s decision violated the Ordinance of 1787.
The timid to nonexistent response by our scholarly “historians” to the pathetic “slavery built this country” lie demonstrates the almost complete control the Left has over the academy. The source material is there to read for anyone who seriously wants to know the truth. Yes, cotton was a big export crop, but its sale contributed little to the industrial development of the North. The entire agricultural production of plantations worked by slaves, including cotton, was significantly smaller than that of the north. The main difference is that most of the agricultural production of the North was consumed internally. Good records of agricultural production were kept before the Civil War, and anyone can check the figures for themselves. Many pre-war accounts exist of the stark differences one noticed in passing from the free to the slave states at the time. Many observers noted the poverty of the white inhabitants. They were impoverished, not only economically, but mentally as well. There were far fewer schools per capita in the south. Far from being the dynamo of progress touted by the 1619 shills, slavery retarded the development of the South by decades, not only economically, but in many other areas as well.
Anti-white racism is rampant in the US. The “slavery built the country” meme is just another example of it. Lost in the “conversation” is the fact that it never occurred to significant numbers of “people of color” that racism was bad to begin with until whites began insisting on it. The fight against slavery and its eventual abolition was initiated and led almost exclusively by whites until the fight was virtually over. It was ended in the US at the cost of over 600,000 white lives. As a result of slavery, blacks have a huge presence in two continents that they never would have seen without it. Blacks would have to be insane to insist on restoring the world to what it would have looked like without slavery. In spite of all this, we are supposed to owe them reparations. Legions of whites buy into this imbecility. It’s a prime example of what I like to call a morality inversion.
There is an aspect of the War of the Inevitable Consequences of the Three-Fifths Compromise that gets little if any attention. Slavery was more than just an end, it was a means to another end – political power. The compromise created a situation unique to the US: gerrymandering via the import of slaves. The Southern bloc had disproportionate representation in Congress, and the planters had disproportionate representation in the state legislatures. In the wake of the 1807 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, the South was numerically incapable of maintaining a House majority, making Senate control all the more important – and threatened by the admission of new states. I have wondered if issues other than slavery and tariffs motivated the antebellum cold war.
A peaceful resolution was impossible. The planters would have to have given up both slaver power and political power; there was no way of tossing the former without tossing the latter. People don’t give up power if they think they can keep it. Secession was their last-ditch effort.
A lot of folks who have been spoiled by an age of mass communications and MREs find it puzzling that large numbers of mostly-decent people would fight for the South. Like most Americans, they lacked the constitutional training to weigh an educated opinion on the legality of secession, which was ambiguous to begin with. People living one harvest away from starvation see an invading army coming, knowing who’s crops will be feeding that army, and having a general sense that invaders tend to have lasting negative impact on the livelihoods of the invaded – one need not read Abraham Maslow to figure out where allegiances will default.
If someone ever composes a list of individuals who contributed the most to ameliorating North-South tensions in the first half of the 20th century, the top five should include the name Isokoru Yamamoto.
Anti-white racism is rampant in the US. The “slavery built the country” meme is just another example of it. Lost in the “conversation” is the fact that it never occurred to significant numbers of “people of color” that racism was bad to begin with until whites began insisting on it.
The present level of racism is new and a consequence of Obama’s efforts to bind blacks to the Democrat Party. The Reparations thing is nonsense, although reasonable as an example of a greed driven response to guilt driven lefties efforts to virtue signal. Billions have been spent on LBJ’s Great Society in an effort to bring blacks to equality with other citizens. It has failed miserably.
“Why were the ranks of the Confederate armies filled by poor white men who were exploited and oppressed by the southern aristocracy?”
I don’t think of it in terms of Marxism’s victim/oppressor dichotomy. I think the reason is much simpler: the average citizen identified with his state, not the US.
“Them darn Yankees are invadin’ my state? Where do I sign up?” Patriotism, focused at the state, not federal, level.
I also believe the growth of abolitionism following the Dred Scott decision was fueled by fears by Northern white factory workers that a Southern slaveowner would cut a deal with a Northern factory owner to staff a factory in Ohio or New England with slaves.
Bingo. Spot on.
Surely if the hypothetical were correct, then Brazilian slave owners would have similarly used slaves on auto assembly lines and cornered the global market?
Brazil never developed any sort of auto industry without slavery, why would it have done so with slaves?
I presume the cost of labor was low either way, as were wages, and hence there was no reason to create or produce a mode of transport very few people could afford.
The US was not in that place. Thus, obviously, events unfolded differently.
Alas, since the demonrat party was the party of slavery in 1860 and remains so today, we are now in a situation increasingly like that of the Antebellum South.
That is, the demonrats seek to impose the sort of social structure that existed in their heyday. The super rich- equivalent to the plantation owners- will decide what is right, and everyone else will have to submit.
No thanks. But the demonrats have been politically dominant for decades, so we’re a long way down that road, unfortunately.
I would also suggest that if wages in the US had remained as low as they were in Brazil then no automotive industry would have developed in the US either, for the same reasons.
Xennady…”I would also suggest that if wages in the US had remained as low as they were in Brazil then no automotive industry would have developed in the US either”…there would have been no need for Henry Ford to employ assembly-line methods in order to economize on labor; there would have indeed by an auto industry, but it would have been small, working with craft methods rather than mass production, and serving a small number of wealthy buyers.
But even these buyers would have been limited in what they could do with their cars, because the market would have been too small to permit the development of an extensive road system.
David F: “there would have been no need for Henry Ford to employ assembly-line methods in order to economize on labor”
Arguably, that reverses cause & effect. Ford created assembly line methods because they were more efficient — and then shared the benefits of the more efficient assembly line methods with the workers through increased wages.
Slavery died around most of the world (not Africa & Arabia) in the 19th Century because it could not compete with mechanization & fossil fuel-power. Slaves were a big capital investment. With the advance of industry, it made more sense for those with capital to invest in machines rather than slaves. Anyone who wants to make the case that the US Civil War was mainly about slavery has to explain why scores of other countries around the planet ended slavery at about the same time without a civil war.
Prior to 1854, democrats were pro slavery while the whigs were split. There was no concensus to end slavery. Recall Lincoln’s speech during his 1858 senate election campaign
against Stephen Douglas of ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’- the fight was over extending slavery to the territories.
Today we celebrate Lincoln’s birthday.
I don’t think of it in terms of Marxism’s victim/oppressor dichotomy. I think the reason is much simpler: the average citizen identified with his state, not the US.
“Them darn Yankees are invadin’ my state? Where do I sign up?” Patriotism, focused at the state, not federal, level.
I think this is spot on. In 1860, states were much more the political entities that ruled. Some of this was due to the difficulties of travel. Most long trips were by water. The Great Lakes and the Ohio River were the major routes east to west. West of the Mississippi, there was less travel because, aside from the Missouri River which went northwest, there were few water routes.
One of the negative consequences of the Civil War was the loss of states’ rights. I don’t think this was a goal of Lincoln’s but it was inevitable.
Ford increased wages because turnover was too high, and turnover was too high because people didn’t like assembly-line work and they had other alternatives. The assembly line, and lots of other productivity improvements, drove further wage increases over time.
re the difficulties of travel, see Fanny Kemble’s description of her journey from Philadelphia to Butler Island, Georgia, in 1838. The original post is gone, link is to archive.org, which has the text but not the original maps.
https://web.archive.org/web/20081227061134/http://www.univie.ac.at:80/Anglistik/easyrider/data/fanny_kemble.htm
For anyone not familiar with Fanny Kemble, I’ve written several posts excerpting her writing, the most recent of which (I think) is here:
https://ricochet.com/789514/america-as-seen-by-fanny-kemble/
probably the end of reconstruction, that led here, the south engaged in feudalism, thanks to the bourbons who were the respectable side of militias like the klan, wilson head full of german philosophy was the apex of that sentiment, but only the starting point for dirigiste philosophies,
it’s not a coincidence that the infamous breckenridge long got his start in the wilson administration, so did fdr his patron,
I haven’t read Fanny Kemble but agree that even north-south travel was difficult. In writing my medical history, I have a chapter on the Mayo family, including their travels from Glasgow Scotland to New York City to Buffalo NY, to Indiana, then to St Louis, then to avoid malaria, to Minnesota. Most of that travel was by water.
Miguel, I agree that the Progressive movement began with Wilson, a Confederate sympathizer, and was roughly based on New England Puritanism.
well one part puritanism one part german philosophy, which stems from kant, who doesn’t believe in inalienable rights, (this was popper’s analysis)
I have read that a number of plantation owner’s sons were enthrawled with some of the German philosophers, includiung Hegel, beginning in the 1830s. One such was George Fitzhugh, who wrote in ther 1850s that only 5% of the US population were suited to liberty, and hence to rule. The rest of were to be Serfs/slaves.
I would say that is very much within the Progressive provenance.
It’s true that citizen identity in respect to their state was of strength that is hard for us today to recognize. I think you all hit on the key parts of lack of a national transportation network and a large national government for that. Conversely the mobilization and use of large armies during the Civil War not only created a stronger, if not national identity, than one greater than one’s own state. Also for the first time in our history you had hundreds of thousands of men traveling hundreds of not thousands of miles from home. How are you going to keep them on the farm once they’ve seen Little Rock?
Not sure if I am completely on board with the idea of the Yankee invader being the conclusive motivator for the average southerner’s enthusiasm for supporting the Confederacy. There is strong evidence that support surged when Union armies crossed into Confederate territory; however, there are a number of outliers which make me curious. Why was North Carolina one of the largest suppliers of men to the Confederate Army when there were few if any Union troops on its territory? Also there were a large number of non-Virginia units at First Manassas. There seems to be more to this support for the war than just defense.
Another thing that make me curious is that in the slave state (both border and Confederate) pro-Union rose in those areas closer to the Appalachian Mountains (eastern Tennessee, western Maryland & Virginia) where one won’t expect to have a plantation-based economy. When Sheridan entered the Shenandoah in 1864 and conducted “The Burning” many of the farms he destroyed actually belonged to pro-Unionists.
So I have a working hypothesis that support for the southern war effort correlates with elevation, which is to be used as a proxy for plantation agriculture and therefore slavery. In short fewer blacks in your area, less support for the war. The southern aristocracy could only get the local support for the war by constructing a nationhood and therefore identity in relation to slavery (“I may be a little a poor dirt farmer but…”) . I am sure there is academic work on the area linking southern political economy with support for the war effort, maybe over at the Emerging Civil War.
Mike: “The southern aristocracy could only get the local support for the war by constructing a nationhood and therefore identity in relation to slavery”
Fair enough. That is a hypothesis. Now explain why the aristocracies in the English, French, Spanish colonies in the Carribean ended slavery without war? Why did the Portuguese aristocracy in the very large slave state of Brazil end slavery without war?
The historically unusual (not to say unique) nature of the US Civil War suggests that much more than slavery was involved. Obviously the Woke position is that the Civil War was 110% about slavery — but that is Woke!
From the outside, neither side of the Civil War made objective sense. Lincoln was not some sort of fire breathing abolitionist and even after the exit of the Southern legislators, it was three years before and a somewhat ambiguous battlefield victory before abolition was politically feasible and that limited to the territories not controlled by the Union. With those Senators and Representatives in Washington, abolition was not a remote possibility.
At the same time, Federal assets in the Confederacy were hardly extensive. Federal assets all together were hardly extensive. Probably not worth 500,000 lives. Some sort of amicable parting of the ways would seem to be sensible.
In the era before chemical fertilizers, the plantation economy was doomed. The only way of maintaining yields was to bring new land under cultivation. Of course, west and north of of the Texas Blacklands, land suitable for cotton production rapidly petered out. So the end was on the horizon.
Yet Confederate soldiers that never owned or had any prospect of owning slaves found themselves killing Union soldiers that were not sold on the idea that slaves were fully human and were killed in their turn.
I’ll leave it at that. The last few centuries don’t make a strong case for the objective advantages of starting wars.
Gavin,
Slavery was certainly not the only reason for the Civil War. Looking at the the 40 years preceding the War, there was a long list of southern grievances including tariffs, the Nullification Crisis and issues of such as popular sovereignty and concurrent majorities. All of these led to the vials of wrath to be pretty well filled by 1860.
However while these are each discrete issues, they are all intertwined to some extent with slavery. Tariffs meant to benefit northern industry interfered with the southern cotton trade. Nullification, related to tariffs but an interpretation of constitutional doctrine, was about the relationship of the states tot he federal government and therefore about keeping Washington out of state’s internal affairs. Popular sovereignty and concurrent majorities were justifications for maintaining the balance of power between the states but at its heart was the extension of slavery into the territories
So why did the Civil War happen? For one the South felt justification in secession, Given the reasons I stated above the South saw the North through the federal government acting in a tyrannical fashion to crush the freedom of the southern states. This gave the South, in its view, to claim the mantle of 1776 and declare its independence (yes the right to claim its freedom to deny the freedom of others.) While this was the motive, the South also uniquely had the means for War. Being a “War Between the States” meant that secessionists not only initially controlled large contiguous territory but also the governmental apparatus to coordinate action. The Confederate units that fought at First Manassas . were for the most part either preexisting militia units or units raised on that model. In other words when the various southern states decided to make a break for it and secede they figured they had the means to pull it off.
The other reason for secession and therefore the War was more cultural. The North and South over the preceding 80+ years had grown apart in so many ways. The North industrialized and whatever agriculture it had was of the small farmer, while the South had its economic wealth still rooted in the plantation system. Large scale immigration from Ireland and Germany changed the complexion of northern communities while the southern communities experienced far less immigration and maintained its “Anglo-Saxon” character; in the ante-bellum period you started to see the emergence of term “mongrel” society thrown about.
Lastly there was a difference in political outlook, by the 1840 southern political leadership while clinging to parts of the Constitution had more or less broken away from the conception of natural of rights in the Declaration of Independence. Slavery was no longer seen as a necessary evil or something that would (thankfully) die of its own accord as was thought in 1787, but rather was seen by Calhoun and others as a positive good. The period between 1776 and 1860 saw both a generational shift in the southern plantation class both in terms of outlook (on slavery and natural rights) and in geographical center from the more genteel Virginia to the newer territories of the West and Deep South.
Slavery was the black hole of early 19th Century America that warped everything around it. There is a lesson in that, we some times tolerate practices and institutions because we feel (perhaps rightly) that circumstances will eventually undermine those things and it will fade away. That’s what the founders in 1878 thought would happen to slavery, but then you had the cotton gin…. So what would be the equivalent of slavery, as far as a civilization-distorting influence, today?
the reasons for the conflict were as much territorial impulsesas ideological, we can see this in the Caucasus crack up, Lee was the son of a signer of the declaration, a decorated veteran of the Mexican war,
Ukraine has often been split between the Right Bank, which leans to Russia, and Left Bank that leans toward Sweden Poland, et al, the dynamic has been true for hundred of years
Khelmenitsky, Bulovin Petlura, Bandera
Mike: “So why did the Civil War happen?”
No disagreement with much of what you described there. But that was not the question. The question was rather why did events similar in character to the US Civil War NOT happen around the world?
Remember that slavery had been a standard element of societies around the world from time immemorial. Today’s preening Scandinavians are the descendants of people who gave us the word “slave” by enslaving the Slavs of eastern Europe & Russia. The Bible describes the enslavement of the Jews by the Egyptians. Slavery was standard practice in Africa — and unfortunately continues in places to the present day.
Then slavery came to an end in much of the world in the 19th Century. But only one place in the world ended slavery through a war. Since slavery everywhere pitted the interests of the aristocrats against the interests of the common people, why did the rest of the world manage to end slavery without civil war? What was different in North America?
Okay let me condense the above argument. I cannot explain in any meaningful detail why other countries did not have a civil war over slavery, but let me propose a basic human principle of behavior. People do not give up what they want to keep unless you force them to (taxes, your night out with the guys, your lunch money) So apply that to my argument above on why you had a Civil War
1) The South liked having slavery. It not only undergirded their cotton economy but was seen as a moral good that was foundational to their civilization and culture.
2) The South did not like the people who wanted to get rid of slavery, i.e. the North. From late 1810s to 1860, the South felt the North was acting in a tyrannical manner to the South. The South thought slavery was a concern of the individual states and over a 40 year period built a lot of resentment as the North looked to restrict slavery expanding into the territories, impose tariffs, and not pursue fugitive slaves
3) The South thought it had the moral right, through the example of the American Revolution, to revolt against the U.S. in the name of fighting a tyrannical power. Secession was a hot topic long before 1860
4) They thought they could get away with it, in fact they did not even think the North would fight secession. Due to its beliefs in its marital prowess and that the North was a bunch of wimps as well as their ability to concentrate military power the South felt if it came to war they would make short work of the North. If the North wanted to fight secession, as the kids say, FAAFO
Seemed the South didn’t get the last part right, huh? Yeah but they came real close. So tell me where else in the world did pro-slavery people have the cultural confidence to think they had not only the moral right to keep slavery but the ability to project sufficient military power to protect that peculiar institution?
To MCS’ point about an amicable separation instead of war, I am sure there could have been such a separation short of war had Fort Sumter not happened but the fire-breathers in the South sure wanted a war because they thought such a war would be short and unify the slave states. However could such a split remain amicable? Could two countries, one slave and one free, co-exist? Given the amount of abolitionist sentiment in the North, I’m very doubtful. I think whether it could or not depends on what you think about Lincoln and his views of slavery co-existing with freedom even across an international boundary with free nations. Some alternate histories like Guns of the South state that even with southern independence the Confederacy would have to get rid of slavery but that is doubtful at best and even if it tried would cause the South to implode. The protection of slavery through secession would have been the defining moment of Confederate nationhood and it would be difficult at best to just toss that aside
Also what would have happened to the rest of the U.S. if the concept of secession was legitimized? An unknowable for sure, but I’m going to speculate that we would end up with several and not just two countries in the lower 48 and that would mean the 20th Century would have been very different.
As far as the motivations for the people who actually filled the regiments and fought it? I agree with MCS that the primary motivation wasn’t slavery but rather independence vs. preserving the Union but the oncoming of war cannot be understood without incorporating slavery as the driving factor behind secession.
One question is what did our more recent imperialist adventures to remake Afghanistan and Iraq or current ones to impose Woke ideology around the globe inform us about Reconstruction? Our recent experience shows you just cannot fundamentally remake of a society in a decade or two if ever. Even without the corrupt deal of 1876 could Reconstruction ever have worked given that it was imposed from the outside? I don’t know but I think an interesting book would be to explore attempts to remake the culture of an occupied enemy, what worked, and what didn’t.
Mike: “I agree with MCS that the primary motivation wasn’t slavery but rather independence vs. preserving the Union”
I can agree with you on that point. Slavery may have been the burr under the saddle, but it was not the underlying cause of the war.
That gets to the question about why the lack of war in Brazil and many other places that abandoned slavery in the 19th Century? There were not the social circumstances in those many other countries which made vast numbers of (non-slave) ordinary people see the (non-slave) ordinary people on the other side of certain issues as enemies.
Common people do not necessarily do what their rulers want them to do. Think about the withdrawal of Russian soldiers from the fighting with Germany during World War I — they simply walked away and refused to fight on behalf of the rulers. If it had not been for Northern aggression, it is quite possible that ordinary Southerners would have refused to fight on behalf of the plantation owners.
An interesting speculation is what would have happened in the absence of the nearly bloodless bombardment of Ft. Sumter? The U.S. Army was all but non existent and what there was of it was riven with Southern sympathizers. Even if Lincoln had been prepared to advance south in force without some overt provocation, there was no force to do so. Some sort of economic blockade might have been possible.
At the same time, it seems clear to me that had Lincoln somehow ignored Ft. Sumter, further provocations would have occurred until the attack desired by the Confederates was forthcoming. While Lincoln was not a radical abolitionist, he was very much a part of the Republican party and no friend of slavery, I doubt he saw much to be gained by resisting the enormous pressure to answer Ft. Sumter.
The one thing that Ft. Sumter did was to galvanize the North and provide the recruits to enlarge the Army. Simply another example of how easy wars are to start and how unknowable the end is.
Mike: “I agree with MCS that the primary motivation wasn’t slavery but rather independence vs. preserving the Union”
Gavin Longmuir in reply: I can agree with you on that point. Slavery may have been the burr under the saddle, but it was not the underlying cause of the war.
Have you consulted the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union? Look at how many times the root “slav” is found.
Also note the complaint that the federal government wasn’t doing enough to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. That is, South Carolina wanted States’ Rights for the South, but wanted States’ Rights of the Northern states to be trampled on in enforcement of the Fugivie Slave Act.
If it weren’t for slavery, there would have been no Secession.
I have said in other threads here that the Civil War was about slavery and little, if anything, else. What I’m saying is that with the Congress as it stood in 1861, there was no danger that of abolition being enacted. Setting aside the Southern votes against, I believe that only a small minority of the anti slavery legislators would have accepted emancipation without some scheme to relocate those newly freed elsewhere. Not in 1861, and the mirage of resettlement persisted through the war.
Had resettlement somehow come about, it would have been more destructive to the Southern economy than the war by depriving them of most of the labor force. Jim Crow was as much, or more, about binding the newly freed slaves to the land as maintaining White supremacy.
While Lincoln’s election wasn’t going to free any slaves, it was going to cut off any chance that slavery could be pushed further west. That this was likely moot because of geography wasn’t clear at the time.
What Dred Scot did was pre-empt the power of the states decide whether to be free or slave in contradiction to historic precedents extending well before the Revolution, including legislation such as the Northwest Territory Act, the Missouri Compromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In this, it sort of brings to mind a more recent decision based on previously undiscovered penumbras in the Constitution. As honorable men, the Founders seem to have had a blind spot when it comes to partisan hacks in judicial robes and we have and continue to pay a high price for this. It was Dred Scot that really changed general distaste and aversion to slavery in the North to much more active opposition. Where before it was something that happened “down there”, it became local.
Gringo: “Have you consulted the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union?”
The Declaration was a product of the Southern Ruling Class — and no-one disputes that the rulers of the South benefitted from slavery and wanted it to continue, even though they could see that slavery was being abandoned elsewhere in the world.
The question is why hundreds of thousands of ordinary Southerners willingly went to their deaths in the war against Northern Aggression, even though they had no personal stake in the institution of slavery and arguably even were damaged by it? To explain that anomalous behavior, we have to look at causes & beliefs which had little or nothing to do with slavery. And to do that, we have to be prepared to break with today’s Wokeness.
Gavin Longmuir
Class status is one answer. Many lower-status Southern whites supported slavery because they saw slavery maintaining their status over black slaves. Free blacks might rise in status above poor whites. That is the argument from preservation of one’s class status. From the argument of increasing one’s class status, many non-slaveholding whites saw the possibility of their increasing their wealth and becoming slaveholders themselves.
From Colin Edward Woodward’s Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Condederate Army During the Civil War: