It's obvious to me, that from the safety of your home, now in the present, feel perfectly comfortably disparaging people in the past who are no longer alive to defend themselves.
You want to cherry picks facts and weave them together to rewrite history to a narrative you've decided on.
Your response is all over the place and I don't have time to write a book to answer everyone of them, so I'll pick out a couple and see what happens.
You make this statement:
"Slavery in the American North died out from mechanization, not moralization."The North morally rejected slavery, but, work had to be done, so they invested in and developed machinery to do the work instead of slavery, which they rejected.
Yet, you want to take that positive and twist it to your negative narrative.
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But, you really take the cake on this one:
"Your statement that slaves were purchased with borrowed money needs some sourcing; otherwise it is nothing more than an opinion."To make capital improvements and run a business, all businesses borrow against their assets.
What was the biggest asset that was owned in the South........................slaves!
So to claim that the fact that money was borrowed against the slaves needs "sourcing," just goes to show the lengths you will go to avoid reality in defending your made up history.
A Plantation consist of X number of acres. Each acres costs N number of dollars.
Each acres has to be worked by S number of Slaves. Each slave costs N number of dollars.
So we have a formula of XN + SN = Y.
That's a lot of dollars and this may come as a surprise to you but most people don't carry that around in their pocket. The money has to be borrowed and the assets bought with it are the collateral and the plantation isn't worth much without the work force to manage it.
Even the nobles who inherited their money in Europe, that then came to the new world to buy the plantations in the new world, still borrowed against their assets to make Capital improvements to increase production and maintain a cash flow.
Tomas Jefferson who is usually criticized for only releasing five slaves, could not release his other slaves, because, they were the collateral for the money he borrowed from his friends during his life time running his property.
Even if Jefferson tried to release al his slaves, his friends (creditors) would have stopped him in a court of law.
This is known history and common knowledge, never mind common sense, it doesn't need to be "sourced," it needs people to know their history and stop making it up.
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The Cotton Economy in the SouthThe Cotton Boom. While the pace of industrialization picked up in the North in the 1850s, the agricultural economy of the slave South grew, if anything, more entrenched. In the decade before the Civil War cotton prices rose more than 50 percent, to 11.5 cents a pound. Booming cotton prices stimulated new western cultivation and actually checked modest initiatives in economic diversification of the previous decade. The U.S. cotton crop nearly doubled, from 2.1 million bales in 1850 to 3.8 million bales ten years later. Not surprisingly, given these figures, the southern economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural. Southern capitalists sank
money into cotton rather than factories or land. More precisely, they invested in slaves; the average slave owner held almost two-thirds of his wealth in slaves in 1860, much less than he held in land. Economic historians have concluded that returns on capital in antebellum Southern manufacturing were reasonable and sometimes lucrative, but they simply failed to attract investors in any numbers. By 1860, while northeastern states such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had nearly $100 million each invested in manufacturing enterprises, even Virginia, the most industrialized of the Southern states, had invested less than $20 million, and the figure dropped below $5 million elsewhere in the South. A comparison of the value of goods manufactured in each region is similarly lopsided: more than $150 million each for Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, less than $30 million for Virginia, and less than $5 million for Alabama.
Antebellum Railroads. The South did participate in the boom in railroad construction of the 1850s, more than quadrupling its total mileage. Results were less impressive and, more important, less transformative than they proved in the North and Midwest, however. By 1860 the railroad mileage per thousand square miles in the seven most populous Northern states had reached sixty-two; in the seven most populous southern states, the figure was twenty-two. In other words, the southern rail network was less developed by a factor of nearly three. Moreover, Southern railroads tended to run fewer trains and make fewer stops than Northern ones. In addition, most Southern lines were built to connect plantation districts to southern ports; that is, they did not open new territories or serve new industries, as railroads did in the North.
Preindustrial Structures. The dominance of the slave plantation in the southern economic landscape had mul-tifaceted consequences for Southern economic development, including key social and cultural ramifications. As businesses, the plantations channeled economic functions that went well beyond cotton (or sugar or tobacco) cultivation. For example, larger plantation owners either procured or produced on site goods and services that, in the free-labor economy of the Northern states, were produced and exchanged as part of the wider economy. Thus, few towns or villages emerged in the South. Much of the region’s commercial exchange operated through the larger plantation owners or through businessmen known as cotton factors, usually agents of Northern or British firms, set up at river landings to market crops and provide planters with imported manufactured goods. The ideology of slaveownership probably inhibited key industrial values, fostering a fiercely defensive agrarianism and a sharp distaste for Yankee commercialism, industry, and wage labor, particularly as proslavery advocacy grew more insistent in the late-antebellum period. More tangibly, slavery cut off the potential immigration of free labor; while strong immigrant flows were feeding into the Northern economy in the 1850s, the South remained a largely closed society. Whether or not slaveowners can be called profit-minded entrepreneurs and capitalists (a question still under debate), the world they made was distinctly preindustrial, even anti-industrial.
Exports. During the period before the Civil War, Southern staples made up three-fifths of total American exports, and cotton was by far the country’s largest export. Southern plantations and farms supplied three-fourths of the world cotton crop—the mainstay of textile manufacturing in both Great Britain (the world’s leading economic superpower) and the United States. Southern planters saw themselves, and accurately so, as a key component in the Industrial Revolution and a critical part of an international economic system. As one planter bragged in 1853, “Our Cotton is the most wonderful talisman in the world. By its power we are transmuting whatever we choose into whatever we want.”
Read more at:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/cotton-economy-southIt's obvious to me, that from the safety of your h... (