Category: Causes & motives of the Civil War

Second take on the Causes and motives of the Civil War

Paul Newkirk –

It was all about basic economics. The 2000 or so plantation owners in the South had gotten to be the wealthiest people in the Country, by far, by shipping on hundreds of ships, huge quantities of raw cotton to the state-of-the-art textile mills in Britain, where they just could not get enough of the stuff.

Since the raw cotton had been produced by utilizing wage-free slavery, its cost of production was artificially low, so its selling price to the Brits was also relatively low. For them, this was a sweetheart deal to get cheap raw material.

Which meant that the Brits could also get rich by producing excellent, very popular, finished cloth at reasonable selling prices and selling it to the whole world.

Once the ships unloaded their cargo of cotton in Britain, they were highly motivated to get back to the USA to pick up yet another load of cotton because the demand fr it was so high .

But these were sailing ships which do not sail well when empty. They had a choice of loading up with English rocks just for the weight, and then dumping them somewhere in the USA, or they could take on a cargo of all kinds of British manufactured goods instead of the rocks, and sell them in the USA for whatever price they could get. A break-even price was just fine for them since what they really wanted was to empty their cargo holds so they could refill them with raw cotton and then get back to Britain.

Now remember, the only people in the South who had cash to buy stuff with were those wealthy, but few in number, plantation owners, since all the available jobs in the agrarian economy of the South were already taken up by millions of slaves who had never even seen a pay envelope. So the returning ships stopped first in Northern ports, since the people there all had at least some small pay envelopes to buy stuff with.

The newly developing factories in the North found that whatever they could produce, a similar imported Brit product was offered for sale at a price they could not match.

All these imports had to pay an import tax, so the Government was making out okay. The only ones who were NOT benefiting from this situation were the factories in the North, both the owners and the wage-earning workers; which represented two-thirds of the population of the Country.

The Northerners were not happy at being left out of the whole exchange, so they politicked constantly for increased tariff taxes on those imports, to create the effect of increasing the selling prices of imported goods, so the Northern-produced goods could compete. And they were very well aware that it was the wage-free slavery that made it all possible to begin with. 

Eliminate the slavery or increase the tariffs, and the problem equalizes itself, by itself. But with either alternative, the plantation owners would no longer make the huge profits that they were accustomed to.

And THAT is why the North and the South were not getting along.

Economics 101.

Why was there a Civil War

Paul Newkirk –

It was all about basic economics. The 2000 or so plantation owners in the South had gotten to be the wealthiest people in the Country, by far, by shipping on hundreds of ships, huge quantities of raw cotton to the state-of-the-art textile mills in Britain, where they just could not get enough of the stuff.

Since the raw cotton had been produced by utilizing wage-free slavery, its cost of production was artificially low, so its selling price to the Brits was also relatively low. For them, this was a sweetheart deal to get cheap raw material.

Which meant that the Brits could also get rich by producing excellent, very popular, finished cloth at reasonable selling prices and selling it to the whole world.

Once the ships unloaded their cargo of cotton in Britain, they were highly motivated to get back to the USA to pick up yet another load of cotton because of the demand for it was so high.

But these were sailing ships which do not sail well when empty. They had a choice of loading up with English rocks just for the weight and then dumping them somewhere in the USA, or they could take on a cargo of all kinds of British manufactured goods instead of the rocks, and sell them in the USA for whatever price they could get. A break-even price was just fine for them since what they really wanted was to empty their cargo holds so they could refill them with raw cotton and then get back to Britain.

Now, remember, the only people in the South who had the cash to buy stuff with were those wealthy, but few in number, plantation owners, since all the available jobs in the agrarian economy of the South were already taken up by millions of slaves who had never even seen a pay envelope. So the returning ships stopped first in Northern ports since the people there all had at least some small pay envelopes to buy stuff with.

The newly developing factories in the North found that whatever they could produce, a similar imported Brit product was offered for sale at a price they could not match.

All these imports had to pay an import tax, so the Government was making out okay. The only ones who were NOT benefiting from this situation were the factories in the North, both the owners and the wage-earning workers; which represented two-thirds of the population of the Country.

The Northerners were not happy at being left out of the whole exchange, so they politicked constantly for increased tariff taxes on those imports, to create the effect of increasing the selling prices of imported goods, so the Northern-produced goods could compete. And they were very well aware that it was the wage-free slavery that made it all possible, to begin with.

Eliminate slavery or increase the tariffs, and the problem equalizes itself, by itself. But with either alternative, the plantation owners would no longer make the huge profits that they were accustomed to.

And THAT is why the North and the South were not getting along.

Economics 101.

Causes and motives of the Civil War

Was slavery the real reason for the Civil War? This is a common question when discussing causes and motives of the Civil War…

Some may vaguely recall reading somewhere a long time ago that slavery was actually a ‘secondary’ reason for the Civil War.  The primary reason was economic. The south was growing cotton and exporting it to England’s cotton mills. The northern mills couldn’t get the cotton they needed for their manufacturing. One thing led to another and fighting broke out. BUT manufacturing differences? It wasn’t a ‘good reason’ to have an all-out war. Northerners didn’t “approve’’ of slavery and slaves were doing planting and harvesting of the cotton. So, if slavery was eliminated, then the cotton couldn’t be shipped to England. Therefore, “we will ‘make’ them stop using slaves.”

Paul Newkirk –

Yes, it WAS an economic problem. But then again, slavery itself was based on economics. The wage-free aspect of slaves is what made them a good investment, not the opportunity to boss them around. The plantation owners became the wealthiest people in the whole Country because of wage-free labor. The North could buy as much raw cotton from the South as it wanted, but it’s cotton mills were nowhere near as efficient as the state-of-the-art mills in Britain. Therefore the finished British cloth was lower-priced than anything the Northern mills could produce.The British mills were selling cloth all over Europe, a huge market, and needed a steady supply of raw cotton from the South. But once the raw cotton was offloaded in Britain, they were incentivized to send the ships back to the USA to get some more, and they had to load up those ships with SOMETHING, since they did not sail well when empty. Sometimes they filled them up with just rocks, which were simply dumped once they got back to the USA. As often as they could, the ships were instead filled up with whatever manufactured goods were available, including not only FINISHED CLOTH, but also things like farm plows and shovels, etc.New England is full of pretty stone walls, but after a while one notices that the stone walls on the properties in the seaports are so intricate and precise they look like an architect had something to do with it. And the stones, oddly, are different than the ones on inland stone walls. Ask how that could be, and the answer is “these stones are not from around here.” When that seems outrageously unlikely, considering the weight of stones in general, one is further told that they are referred to as “slave walls.” Oh.    And then they tell you the rest of the history. They love their walls and they will fight you to the death to retain them, but they are rather uncomfortable with how they got built. The manufactured goods were loaded in the ships in the first place mainly as ballast weight, remember, and the USA was a dinky-sized market compared to the whole of Europe. The Captains sold the cargo, at cost or below, as quickly as they could, so they could then fill the holds with more raw cotton, the real prize in all this, and get back to Britain. Now picture what the effect was on all the factories and mills in the North, trying to establish a market for their own struggling factories, when all these factory products from Europe got dumped on their doorstep whenever a ship arrived, several times a day. And NONE of this would have happened without millions of wage-free slaves working for free, all over the South. And it becomes obvious why the plantation owners of the South and the factory owners of the North were in severe economic conflict with each other.