Use of slaves in industry is discussed in Kenneth Stampp's "The Peculiar Institution". Page 63 says "Some Southerners were enthusiastic crusaders for the development of factories which would employ slaves." Page 64 quotes no less than the ardently pro-slavery De Bow's Review as advocating southern industry and the use of slave in it. That same page mentions that every slave state used slaves in industry, that they were used extensively in the cordage and hemp industries Kentucky, that nearly 13,000 slaves were employed in the Virginia tobacco factories, and that most of the iron workers in Tennessee's iron works were slaves. Page 65 mentions the Tredeagar Iron works used "almost exclusively slave labor". Page 66 says "The southern press gave full reports of cotton mills which used slave labor and ecstatic accounts of their success." Page 399 and following discusses the spectrum of southern views towards industry and the use of slaves in it. Page 400 mentions some critics of industry were accused of being abolitionist for saying slaves would not make good factory workers.
"Gusher Age" in the CSA.
- Thread starter Reggie Bartlett
- Start date
Use of slaves in industry is discussed in Kenneth Stampp's "The Peculiar Institution". Page 63 says "Some Southerners were enthusiastic crusaders for the development of factories which would employ slaves." Page 64 quotes no less than the ardently pro-slavery De Bow's Review as advocating southern industry and the use of slave in it. That same page mentions that every slave state used slaves in industry, that they were used extensively in the cordage and hemp industries Kentucky, that nearly 13,000 slaves were employed in the Virginia tobacco factories, and that most of the iron workers in Tennessee's iron works were slaves. Page 65 mentions the Tredeagar Iron works used "almost exclusively slave labor". Page 66 says "The southern press gave full reports of cotton mills which used slave labor and ecstatic accounts of their success." Page 399 and following discusses the spectrum of southern views towards industry and the use of slaves in it. Page 400 mentions some critics of industry were accused of being abolitionist for saying slaves would not make good factory workers.
Did you even read the post?
Totalitarianism is a particular political concept like Social Democracy or State Capitalism, it is not a catch all term for authoritarian governments.
Would the CSA (or Rhodesia) with Black's oppressing Whites or Blue oppressing Green's be totalitarian?
No.
To quote
Oxford English Dictionary said:
The free dictionary said:
Merriam-Webster said:
Whatever else it was the CSA was not totalitarian, in fact only three nations have ever been totalitarian, Stalin's Soviet Union, North Korea and Nazi Germany and the last one is questionable. This is due to the very high bar of not only wanting to control every aspect of society but being able to do so. The CSA and the Deep South state's prior to 1860 neither wanted to do that or were able to do that. If you are going to use big words learn what they mean first.
Hendryk
Banned
All other considerations notwithstanding, if we assume that this process continues and expands, then we're looking at a society in which much of the industrial proletariat is made of slaves. There is absolutely no way such a society could endure with its preexisting political institutions. Either it is brought down by revolution, or the inevitable upheaval is preempted by the elites going into full-fledged fascism. And then all hairsplitting about the meaning of totalitarianism will become moot: the CSA will be a totalitarian society in the strictest definition of the term.
Now that is a reasonable point, 40 or 50 years down the road after the replacement of the plantation aristocracy based "1st Gen" CSA with an industrialised urban society with an extremely badly treated slave class making up 40% of the population there is the potential (as in any state) to move towards some kind of extremely authoritarian state. Though I would argue that given the emphasis placed on "white man's liberty" that any such society would restrict it's oppression to black's and maybe poor white's and thus not qualify as totalitarian.
Hendryk
Banned
Hannah Arendt convincingly demonstrated that once you start using mass violence on darkies, it's only a question of time until you feel tempted to apply the same methods to unruly white folks. Besides, OTL's post-war Southern society wasn't above using the strong arm of the state to keep the white underclass in line, with crimes such as "vagrancy" being enough to earn a jail term and end up on a chain gang. "White man's liberty" will become "rich white man's liberty" and then "rich white man who toes the party line's liberty".
The planters had undue influence, but they did not have a monopoly. Look Away, William C Davis' history of the Confederacy mentions about 1/3 of the Confederate Congress were planters, 1/3 were other slaveholders, and 1/3rd owned no slaves, IIRC.
Why do you keep equating supporting industry with supporting abolitionism?
They are completely unrelated issues. DeBow's Review was one of the most influential advocates of slavery in the south. It favored secession, advocated re-establishing the international slave trade, and claimed that any slave that wanted to escape was insane.DeBow's review also strongly advocated industrialization.
But sure, the CSA will just drop slavery overnight and adopt capitalism with no consequences, because it's from the USA and Anglos can't be stupid.
Industrialization does not mean dropping the slave economy. No southern industrialist attempted or advocated that. As has been repeatedly shown, slaves were used in southern industry, They were the majority of workers in some industries. Southern industrialists like slave workers since they couldn't go on strike.
Snake Featherston
Banned
1) Except that my argument is that based on the CSA's trends before the US Civil War the CSA can only accelerate the repression of its black inhabitants and desire to strengthen further resistance to any potential challenge to that new order will lead also to stronger repression of CS Whites. There doesn't need to be a real threat from CS poor whites to slavery for the CS leadership to start getting repressive due to fear there might be one in the future. After all the CS leadership *itself* had laid the precedent of establishing governments on nothing but a good army.
2) Except if we state that Nazi Germany is questionable due to the gap between theoretical control and absolute then Stalin's regime is also questionable at points and the only real totalitarian regimes are Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea.
Fiver-
1) The planters were sufficiently strong enough to keep the CSA from changing slavery in the middle of complete political and social collapse IOTL when theoretically all means to win the war were available for it to use. And it did not use this one.
2) I agree that they're different things, the crucial matter is how CS political development would treat them, and the idea of capitalism might well be lumped in with the USA, especially when the USA starts leaving the CSA in the dust, economically speaking and a significant xenophobic group of politicians *will* claim any major changes in the CSA's economy will be "making us Yankees in all but name."
3) So what happens to the not-insignificant sections of the population that's poor white and will be even more marginalized than ever when the CSA decides to create the Gulag?
2) Except if we state that Nazi Germany is questionable due to the gap between theoretical control and absolute then Stalin's regime is also questionable at points and the only real totalitarian regimes are Saddam Hussein's Iraq and North Korea.
Fiver-
1) The planters were sufficiently strong enough to keep the CSA from changing slavery in the middle of complete political and social collapse IOTL when theoretically all means to win the war were available for it to use. And it did not use this one.
2) I agree that they're different things, the crucial matter is how CS political development would treat them, and the idea of capitalism might well be lumped in with the USA, especially when the USA starts leaving the CSA in the dust, economically speaking and a significant xenophobic group of politicians *will* claim any major changes in the CSA's economy will be "making us Yankees in all but name."
3) So what happens to the not-insignificant sections of the population that's poor white and will be even more marginalized than ever when the CSA decides to create the Gulag?
For all its faults the CSA wasn't totalitarian, it may move in that direction although it is more likely to be some sort of proto-fascist but more like Peron than Hitler. Look at it this way newspapers in the CSA called Jeff Davis all sorts of bad names without the editors being locked up. Try that in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia the papers would never hit the streets, ALL the editors and writers would have been shot along with anyone who distributed copies. People in conversations called him a fool and a madman without getting locked up. Again, if you try that in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia you would be sent to some death camp. I would also count Maoist China among the totalitarian states.
Snake Featherston
Banned
I never said the CSA would turn into Nazi Germany. I simply think that to judge by the pre-war trends in the Slave South and the ease with which the wartime CSA segued into the kind of power the USA as a whole would not enter until the Progressive Era literally overnight that there's every indication that the Confederacy as a political entity will be perfectly able to survive quite some time as a military dictatorship, one which adopts increasingly draconian policies to shore up its decaying institution and to pretend that the entire world just loves slavery.
True enough but a being a military dictatorship, by itself, is not enough to make it a totalitarian state. For that you need, among other things, a cult of personality on top, complete control of the economy and the media, absolutely no freedom of speech or religion and the CSA had none of that. Could it turn into it over time? Maybe, but it is far from certain. For some time it would have to at least be able to have some pretense at being a semi-democratic society. For one thing the planter class would not want an all powerful dictator on top, that would threaten THEIR power.
Exactly that's the main flaw with the "CSA will inevitably go authoritarian". If we take it as a given that what the planters say goes (and that wasn't true everywhere) how can they simultaneously be opposed to any changes that weaken their power (industrialisation, greater democracy, end of slavery) but in favour of a military dictatorship which weakens their power, it's a contradiction in terms. Far more likely is for the CSA to remain or decay into an oligarchic semi-democracy, it's what the initial founders wanted and it's what the people who control the CS economy want.
Wolfpaw
Banned
Or the General Staff just becomes a Planter's Club, just like the CS Congress. There is absolutely no contradiction between having a military strongman/chieftain who relies on the support of regional chiefs.
And the antebellum aristo-republicanism won't be able to survive the socio-economic turmoils that are sure to plague an independent CSA in even the best scenarios. The Military is going to be the only cross-class national institution that the CSA has.
And the antebellum aristo-republicanism won't be able to survive the socio-economic turmoils that are sure to plague an independent CSA in even the best scenarios. The Military is going to be the only cross-class national institution that the CSA has.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Which is why the strong landowners objected so strongly to absolute mon-oh, wait. Which is why the strong landowners in Mexico and other Latin American countries never allowed cau-oh, wait.
Again, this argument relies more on "Anglos can't be run by dictatorships" than any actual argument rooted in the facts or what was already happening before the war, such as my argument.
Indeed, it's not like CS politics wasn't already de facto one party, run by personalities, not institutions, and it's not like the CSA didn't leap to use its military as law enforcement or based itself on 2/3 of its population owning the other 1/3 as property. None of this matters, none of the ever-tightening and constricting censorship matters. Why? The CSA's an English-speaking spinoff of the United States and only countries speaking a language other than English can ever go down the path of dictatorship.
The military dictatorship will consolidate their power, not weaken it, as the military will give the CSA what its democracy (democratic in the sense that the USSR was federalist) cannot: a political base across the entire Confederacy, transcending class, committed to the ideals of the Confederate nation. But surely the CSA will develop industrialization with capital it does not have using the one-third of its population that's slaves and the other third that's white and marginalized by the third third will just STFU and not ask what's going to happen to them if this goes on. The CSA exists in a vacuum, its leaders never meant anything they said, their amazingly stubborn actions never really meant anything in terms of what they did, they can accomplish geopolitical miracles larger, richer countries with equally rigid political systems could not.
Agreed, in large part it already was. A large percentage of the CSA general staff were planters. What you wind up with is a military dictatorship where most of the generals are either planters or sympathetic to them. SF suggsted Bedford Forrest who I think would be a good choice as military dictator although he may go by the official title of president.
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There is a difference between being an ordinary military dictatorship and a totalitarian one. The CSA is likely to become the former rather than the latter. Even the French Monarchy at its height wasn't a totalitarian regime. Louis had to worry about the various nobles which is why he built that fabulous palace to keep an eye them. While the nobles were partying it up they never could be a threat. That he did this at great expense shows that he thought they were a potential threat to his regime. Hitler, Stalin or Mao never did this. If someone was a potential threat they were eliminated. Even if they weren't a potential threat they might be eliminated due to paranoia or just to make an example so no one gets ideas.
Snake Featherston
Banned
I disagree, the inherent problems and complexities of its political system will make it into the latter, but it'd be more Ba'ath Iraq than the USSR or Nazi Germany. Ironically if it *does* turn into a petro-state, well......
I would argue that the CSA would becomeauthoritarian not totalitarian, I am not saying Anglo-Saxons cant be totalitarian I am just asserting that the planters as a class where to powerful for one strongman who rules absolutely to rise up. You are also thinking too 21st century, there was no real idea of totalitarianism at this point and until Fascism and Communism started taking hold in a few countries there hadnt been a totalitarian system yet.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Except that Francia showed that it was perfectly possible to have a powerful dictatorship in the 19th Century that could rival later dictatorships in terms of overall influence. Now, note that my argument relies more on the combination of existing social trends amplified by the absence of Northern influence in a direct sense on the South plus the crude reality that the only trans-class national institution in an independent CSA will be the military as opposed to simply "Slavery = dictatorship." The CSA imposed shackles on itself that make the rise of a dictatorship far more probable than not, and with the 11 Confederate states of OTL having a legacy of mass suspension of Habeas Corpus and relying far more on personality than institutions, coupling this further with the kind of siege mentality nutbar weirdness that a CSA's internal propaganda would create......
Such a CSA will admittedly resemble more Assad's Syria or Ba'ath Iraq than the European totalitarianisms but it will resemble them entirely, including over-reliance on one fundamental root of the economy, an embattled minority ruling an increasingly hostile majority, a history of politics that favors savage, brutal means to retain power by said minority over the majority.....and for that matter potentially even a religious-class disjuncture with a primarily Episcopalian leadership ruling over primarily-Baptist/Presbyterian poor whites and a variety of underground black churches, this further accelerating the clash of classes and deepening the chasm.
Jared-Sure, planters as a whole were not universally in favor of sustaining the institution that made them the wealthiest class in the South with a political monopoly. You're absolutely right. All the actions before the war where they were completely and utterly banning censorship of slavery and engaging in willful suppression of the least hint of criticism of the institution are totally going to disappear in five seconds without any consequences whatsoever because a few planters put money in the Nashville and Richmond regions into using slaves with industry. I agree that there'd be *a* industrial sector in the CSA but it'd be as loved as merchants in feudalism as this in fact would be what it would amount to, and the more CS propaganda and society hardens and crystalizes, the more capitalism will be seen as Yankee and the less planters will be willing to do this. But sure, the CSA will just drop slavery overnight and adopt capitalism with no consequences, because it's from the USA and Anglos can't be stupid.
You've already demonstrated ad nauseum that:
- you're incapable of listening on this issue, and
- you will accuse people of making arguments which they've never made.
You've done that second point right there, when you accused me of saying that the CSA will drop slavery overnight, which I've never said.
Hell, I'm going to emphasise this one again because you really don't get it.
I NEVER SAID THAT THE CSA WOULD DROP SLAVERY OVERNIGHT. I'VE MADE IT ABUNDANTLY CLEAR, TIME AND AGAIN, THAT THEY WILL CONTINUE WITH IT.
This is why dealing with you is so frustrating, because you are incapable of listening to what people are actually saying, and you attribute views to them which they've never stated, even when they explicitly deny it. Or accuse them of making things up, which you've also done. Such as when you accused me of making up the textile factories that were developed in the slaveholding states. Even when citations were provided.
I'm not going to engage in another page-to-page text wall debate with you when you've already made it abundantly clear that you won't change your mind, no matter what evidence or arguments are presented.
But, for the sake of other readers, I'll point out the false statements/ misconceptions which are made above. Evidence can be obtained from the previous debates I've already linked to in the previous post, and if anyone other than Snake asks, I'm happy to clarify by PM or on this thread. I'm not going to respond directly to him again; it's not worth my time.
The false statements/misconceptions are:
- that planters were universally in favour of plantation agriculture, at all times and in all circumstances. No matter how many cites are provided from leading planters who were in favour of industrialisation, or how people like James H. Hammond had been in favour of manufacturing when cotton prices dropped during the early 1840s, Snake continues to argue that planters were universally in favour of plantation agriculture. When asked for evidence, none is provided.
- that being in favour of slavery meant being anti-industrialisation, and that being in favour of industrialisation meant being abolitionist. Seems to be a favourite misconception of Snake's, and means that whenever anyone argues that the CSA will use more slaves in industry, he then miscontrues the other person's argument as saying that the planters would become abolitionist. He's done it in the very post I quote above.
The reality, of course, is that there were planters who were willing to use slaves in industry even during cotton boom times, neatly disproving Snake's contention. The historical evidence also makes it abundantly clear that when cotton prices were low, more planters would argue for industrialisation as it gave them better rates of return than depressed agricultural prices, and also because they would be less vulnerable to the vagaries of foreign demand.
For instance, James Henry Hammond is probably best known as the author of the "Cotton is King" speech, which he made in 1858. And yet, this same man who was one of the most articulate defenders of a morally bankrupt institution had himself been keenly in favour of manufacturing a couple of decades earlier. Why? Because cotton prices were low at the time. And if cotton prices drop again (as they will, during the 1860s), he can be expected to return to this view.
- that planters had a political monopoly. They had a very large amount of influence, but not complete control. This is evident from examples such as the one I just cited where planter attempts to develop the Birmingham, Alabama site for industry were nixed by small farmer opposition, or the fact that far from all members of the Confederate Congress were planters. And anyone who thinks that planters had enough political control to get away with blatantly stripping most whites of the franchise in a post-war CSA is, frankly, kidding themselves. Vote-rigging, intimidation and so on, sure, but that happened even in OTL's Gilded Age USA. Overtly stripping all political power from the class of armed war veterans is another thing altogether.