thenation | Before the cannons fired at Fort Sumter, the Confederates announced
their rebellion with lofty rhetoric about “violations of the
Constitution of the United States” and “encroachments upon the reserved
rights of the States.” But the brute, bloody fact beneath those words
was money. So much goddamn money.
The leaders of slave power were fighting a movement of dispossession.
The abolitionists told them that the property they owned must be
forfeited, that all the wealth stored in the limbs and wombs of their
property would be taken from them. Zeroed out. Imagine a modern-day
political movement that contended that mutual funds and 401(k)s, stocks
and college savings accounts were evil institutions that must be
eliminated completely, more or less overnight. This was the fear that
approximately 400,000 Southern slaveholders faced on the eve of the
Civil War.
Today, we rightly recoil at the thought of tabulating slaves as
property. It was precisely this ontological question—property or
persons?—that the war was fought over. But suspend that moral revulsion
for a moment and look at the numbers: Just how much money were the
South’s slaves worth then? A commonly cited figure is $75 billion, which
comes from multiplying the average sale price of slaves in 1860 by the
number of slaves and then using the Consumer Price Index to adjust for
inflation. But as economists Samuel H. Williamson and Louis P. Cain argue,
using CPI-adjusted prices over such a long period doesn’t really tell
us much: “In the 19th century,” they note, “there were no national
surveys to figure out what the average consumer bought.” In fact, the
first such survey, in Massachusetts, wasn’t conducted until 1875.
In order to get a true sense of how much wealth the South held in
bondage, it makes far more sense to look at slavery in terms of the
percentage of total economic value it represented at the time. And by
that metric, it was colossal. In 1860, slaves represented about 16
percent of the total household assets—that is, all the wealth—in the
entire country, which in today’s terms is a stunning $10 trillion
.
Ten trillion dollars is already a number much too large to
comprehend, but remember that wealth was intensely geographically
focused. According to calculations made by economic historian Gavin
Wright, slaves represented nearly half the total wealth of the South on
the eve of secession. “In 1860, slaves as property were worth more than
all the banks, factories and railroads in the country put together,”
civil war historian Eric Foner tells me. “Think what would happen if you
liquidated the banks, factories and railroads with no compensation.”
15 comments:
But when do historians ask the question, "Why did poor White men who did not own slave go to war for the South?"
lol, we're not all bonobos....,
Historians don't have the testicular fortitude or direct personal experience to comprehend the phenomenon of gun-boys, (or back in their day, sword-boys - or before that - stick and rock boys) who civilization has always had to keep on a short leash. Heaven forbid one of these gun-boys, who live for the thrill of mortal combat have some extra melanin in his skin - then it's all about a complete and total cognitive collapse. The minute you allow the academy to become suffused with estrogen and the exclusive province of a feminine handle on reality, is the minute the academy ceases to have any relationship or bearing on real mammalian vertebrate, simian reality in an objective sense - such as it is.
These cracka-ass-crackas love to fight, live.to.fight period. Everything else is frivolous conversation....,
At 7:05 into the video, a cute graphic equates 150 small black slave icons working 24/7 to produce the energy consumed by one middle class [white] person. Perhaps the White men who supported the South had the future time orientation to foresee the day when all the means-dependent beneficiaries of gov't largesse would be put to work on treadmills driving generators to compensate for the coming energy deficit..........
CR-A-A-A-A-CK that whip....git to work, boy...
"Why did poor White men who did not own slaves go to war for the South?"
Several historians and social scientists have answered that question, including Howard Zinn, Kenneth Stamp, and even Karl Marx in “On America and The Civil War.” Marx said: “Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.”
Non-slaveholding white people were critical to the maintenance and enforcement of slavery. The roots of their support for slavery is found in policies enacted by the Slavocracy in the aftermath of Bacon’s failed rebellion.
[This fear may help explain why Parliament, in 1717, made transportation to the New World a legal punishment for crime. After that, tens of thousands of convicts could be sent to Virginia, Maryland, and other colonies. It also makes understandable why the Virginia Assembly, after Bacon's Rebellion, gave amnesty to white servants who had rebelled, but not to blacks. Negroes were forbidden to carry any arms, while whites finishing their servitude would get muskets, along with corn and cash. The distinctions of status between white and black servants became more and more clear. In the 1720s, with fear of slave rebellion growing, white servants were allowed in Virginia to join the militia as substitutes for white freemen. At the same time, slave patrols were established in Virginia to deal with the "great dangers that may ... happen by the insurrections of negroes...." Poor white men would make up the rank and file of these patrols, and get the monetary reward.] --Howard Zinn
Nevertheless, thousands of non-slaveholding whites in the South rebelled against the Confederacy as evidenced by those areas of the South which were exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.
According to historian David Williams, 300,000 white southerners eventually fought with the Union against the Confederacy.
http://bit.ly/1fNYZX7
"Proceeding from this fact, McKibben leads us inexorably to the staggering conclusion that the work of the climate movement is to find a way to force the powers that be, from the government of Saudi Arabia to the board and shareholders of ExxonMobil, to leave 80 percent of the carbon they have claims on in the ground. That stuff you own, that property you’re counting on and pricing into your stocks? You can’t have it.
Given the fluctuations of fuel prices, it’s a bit tricky to put an exact price tag on how much money all that unexcavated carbon would be worth, but one financial analyst puts the price at somewhere in the ballpark of $20 trillion. So in order to preserve a roughly habitable planet, we somehow need to convince or coerce the world’s most profitable corporations and the nations that partner with them to walk away from $20 trillion of wealth."...
"The last time in American history that some powerful set of interests relinquished its claim on $10 trillion of wealth was in 1865—and then only after four years and more than 600,000 lives lost in the bloodiest, most horrific war we’ve ever fought.
To wrestle the nation of it's new found oil and wealth in the ground which made the video false at around 3:15, Obama is going to give it go without the public will through the EPA, but it will still be a tough battle as he redefines what used to be global warming, still remembered by most as climate change and now properly called climate disruption.
( http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/05/06/report-uses-phrase-climate-disruption-as-another-way-to-say-global-warming/ )
The media blitz is well under its way, but the meteorologist may not be ready to swallow it.
"A 2010 study by George Mason University's centre for climate change communications found that only 19% of TV weather forecasters accepted that human activity was the main driver of climate change."
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/may/06/barack-obama-climate-change-us-weather-forecasters?CMP=twt_fd
So you're saying that you don't believe in warming?
If you don't see it with your own eyes, it's not real. Next on, let's move to his favorite book http://youtu.be/IFyZOO4Bezg
"If we don't use up the oil before Jesus gets back, he's gonna be mad." "I got to draw my Bible." Lol That is some powerful shit right there. The video should go viral.
At the risk of dredging up some deeply held material, Ken used to love to argue that peak oil is also a myth http://youtu.be/4bHZRSlhJxY These horsecents videos brought much needed levity to those disputes, as well.
That made my night.
I have to admit I have shared that video a time or two. It's very funny, and it makes a point that should be obvious to all. Why should anybody wonder how many plants and animals it would take to make a barrel of oil, or even wonder what percent of the dead organisms came in contact with the right pressure and temperature to make oil. I mean in the world we're only using a little over 85,000,000,000 42 gallon barrels of oil a day with proven reserves increasing. There's absolutely no reason to question where oil really comes from.
Of course I believe the earth's climate changes, anybody can look at the earth's temperature graph and see the how the temperature has warmed (global warming) and cooled (global cooling). So I believe it happens, yes. I suspect that you are meaning something different with your phrase: believe [in] global warming, would you like to expand what that means to you?
Once a few weeks go by, there's an attempt to start the whole argument again from square 1. Every argument on every subject works the same way.
How many years are we going to spend ignoring that underhanded tactic and responding in good faith?
http://www.peakoil.net/headline-news/future-growth-in-u-s-crude-oil-reserves - there's every reason to question both the origin of oil and the validity of the numbers you're touting as proven (no mention of recoverable, still less economically recoverable) reserves.
lol, personally I find the phenomenon fascinating. Don't you know that one of these days you're going to wake up a born again evangelical member of the Pioneer Fund Church of God in Christ (COGIC) - if you only have faith Tom - that day will surely come!
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