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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Encouraging economic policies that were good for cotton plantations but not for your wheat crop?

I recall that during this period, US tariff policies meant that much of government spending was funded by Southerners importing foreign luxury goods at a mark-up. This money would then be spent on many things, including developing railways in the North. Northern industries were shielded from foreign competition while the South had to compete in world markets. This made the South quite angry, causing one of the many pre-war crises. There was a long struggle with different parties raising and lowering tariffs, Lincoln's Republican Party was elected on a platform of raising tariffs significantly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_crisis

This is not to say that slavery was not a primary contributor to the war but there were a range of issues causing division.

Somehow, plantation owners burning big piles of money buying Italian art funded the Industrial Revolution a thousand miles away. I'm really not connecting the dots here. Didn't every country in the world have rich aristocrats at this time?

The distribution of taxes is important. There was no income tax at this point, the main source of revenue for the whole country was taxing trade. The US tariff policy was designed to develop industries like metalworking, shielding them from superior British competition. It strengthened Northern industry by weakening foreign competition and some of the revenue went to developing infrastructure in the North, at least more than went to the South.

Effectively there was South-to-North wealth transfer, which made Southerners angry.

I think the whole debate is a little pedantic, since (as you note) many of these issues are highly interrelated. The foreign policy dimension is also understated since Britain was both the center of the abolitionist movement and the main exporter of industrial/manufactured goods to the US, chafed at tariffs, was worried about the Union invading Canada or causing trouble for the Caribbean colonies and sympathized to some extent culturally with the South. The stereotypical Dixie argument can be made persuasively and isn't wrong, it just lies by omission; the same is true for the union 'it was just about slavery' argument.

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