I cannot agree with the majority of laudatory comments. I am in fact quite confused that you gloss over the importance of slavery to the Southern economy, particularly in the deep south, and the importance of subjugating non-landowning whites in Mississippi and Alabama. I commend to you the excellent text, The Secessionist Impulse Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 by William L. Barney, PUP 1974. You do not discuss how Alabama and Mississippi refused to seat unionist delegates at their secession conventions, and also you do not discuss how slave owners had a monopoly on skilled labor in the rural south, because they had slaves performing skilled labor. This prevented non-slave laborers from learning trades such as blacksmithing, coopering, and indeed industrial farming.
“The bulk of the nonslaveholders were subsistence farmers, not poor white “trash,” but they were nontheless isolated, uneducated, and denied a proportionate share of either political offices or economic control. Above all, by having on a peripheral relationship to a market economy, they were locked into rural self-sufficiency.” Barney, p. 32.
“The ineffective consumer demand in rural areas led both to a dearth of the locally oriented service industries and small businesses that were the base of a viable town life in the North and West and to a weak home market in foodstuffs … Percy Roberts, a Mississippi planter, credited no more than one in twenty of Delta planters with meeting their own needs of corn and meat … [t]hey alleviated most of their food deficiencies with importations by cheap water transport from the farmers of the West and upper South, not with purchase from local farmers.” Id. at 33.
Secession was also not a foregone conclusion, but was largely a project of wealthy landowners and slaveholders. Barney’s entire book examines how the secession movement gained ascendancy in these two states of the Deep South, and it reveals it for the cynical economic shell game it was. This was about wealthy slaveholders subjugating the residents of their states. According to the 1860 census, Mississippi and South Carolina were the only states in the Union with a greater slave than free population. Mississippi had a similar overall population to Michigan, which, at the time, was a rural state as well.
Mississippi had 793 blacksmiths out of a total population of 791,305. Michigan had 3,098 blacksmiths out of a total population of 749,113. South Carolina had 882 blacksmiths out of a total population of 703,768. In both Mississippi and South Carolina, most of the blacksmiths were slaves. In Michigan, all of the blacksmiths were not. This is just one example of the economic bondage that slavery engendered over the entire Southern society. Poverty for the majority of the South was the experience of slavery, and remains its legacy in places where old times there are not forgotten.
