SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! Mesa and South Africa

JohnRoth wrote:
Another point here is that the plantation system was ruining the soil through mono-culture agriculture; I've seen estimates that the South had to expand or it would have lost its economic viability in a few decades.

Seriously yes. I read a project about this some years ago, they found that if things had gone unchanged for another 30-40 years, then there was a severe risk of placing the southern plantation states on a oneway spiral(ie probably NOT reversible at all) towards becoming desert states by the 1950s, expecting the states by then to be between 30 and 90% desert.

It should probably be said that modern day current largescale open field agriculture is pushing several areas of USA towards this very same endpoint, just not as fast.

Dangerous...


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Howard T. Map-addict wrote:2 No, the ACW was not fought to test Seccesion Theory.
First time I've ever seen *that* idea!

Seriously? Reality is that it wasn´t really ANY single question directly and solely causing it, but THAT question has certainly been paraded around a LOT. Both for good and for bad reasons.

I am going to weigh in here. While David has indeed given us a nuanced view of the leadup to the Civil War, I feel that slavery was far more important than he seems to allow. Although the war is not a merely moral anti-slavery campaign, nevertheless I believe it to be the central issue around which all of the talk of nulification and succession circled with all the political, economic and moral issues involved.

The heart of the argument had to do with the whether or not slavery would be allowed to extend into the territories. The Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850 all bear witness to this argument. For a while states had to be admitted into the union in pairs to avoid having one side or the other gain an advantage in the Senate. Consider the fugitive slave act in 1850 along with how the Republican Party is founded in 1854 with its platform of free soil, free labor, and free men.

Now enter Abraham Lincoln running as a Republican candidate for the Senate in 1858, his debates with Douglas including his house divided against itself speech. His nomination to the presidency and resulting election to the White House may probably be fairly regarded as the trigger which launches the Civil War.

So what were they fighting over? The South was fighting to preserve its "peculiar institution," that is slavery. Its attempt to suceed was a tool serving that end. For the North, it is free labor vs slave labor and preserving the union.

It has been suggested that if Anderson hadn't moved into Sumter, the thing could have been negotiated. I don't believe that. South Carolina had already suceeded six days prior to Anderson's action. Further, the fort was federal property which means that Anderson had a right to be there.

David is right to point out that Lincoln did not enter the war to abolish slavery. Preserving the union was indeed his foremost goal. But it is also true that Lincoln despised slavery and ran as the standard bearer of an anti-slavery party and made anti-slavery speeches himself. The South was well aware of that and Lincoln and the Republicans scared the hell out of them. Succession happened because they found the situation intolerable and war started because neither Lincoln nor the North would accept that.

Whatever the framers may have intended, along with slavery, succession and nulification died on the fields of Antietam, Gettysburg and Appomattax Courthouse. It's settled in blood. I pray we never have to revisit that.

Don

Readers interested in this issue might find of interest Potter's The Impending Crisis and Nevin's 8-volume series, or perhaps The Road to Secession. Readers interested in tariffs as a cause might find it interested to read what Senator Yancey had to say about this. A reasonable case can be made that after John Brown southerners saw in Lincoln a boogieman, who did not actually exist, who was planning to kill them all, an image not corrected because people in different parts of the country lived in their separate mimetic bubbles, as now seen on the internet.

Readers more interested in SF might better move to a different thread.

phillies wrote:Readers more interested in SF might better move to a different thread.

This thread has actually managed quite nicely to stay on track. The topic, and most of the posts, are in fact very relevant to the direction the series is moving towards.

Just another demonstration that the Western tendency to compartmentalise the world is a fallacy - even though it might not always seem obvious, everything is interconnected and has some relevancy to everything else.

kzt wrote:

dreamrider wrote:A very tiny sidelight:

When I went to high school (46-50 years ago), in New Jersey!, it was a part of the approved high school history curriculum, state-wide I believe, to teach and discuss that the ACW/WBtS was NOT primarily about slavery/abolitionism.

I still recall clearly the gleeful way my rather jovial sophomore history teacher began that section with the trick question, "So, who can tell me what caused the Civil War?" It was one of those "If you read the assignment you're probably OK; if you didn't you are sunk" teacher's leading questions.

New Jersey was one of the very last slaveholding states, with slaves freed by the 13th amendment in 1865. (Though, with the kind of political correctness loved by the the inhabitants of the NE US, they were called "lifetime apprentices", not slaves.) It's still a giant plantation, run by corrupt overseers and populated by compliant serfs.

You obviously have never met any of the farmers I grew up with.

dreamrider

dreamrider wrote:A very tiny sidelight:

When I went to high school (46-50 years ago), in New Jersey!, it was a part of the approved high school history curriculum, state-wide I believe, to teach and discuss that the ACW/WBtS was NOT primarily about slavery/abolitionism.

I still recall clearly the gleeful way my rather jovial sophomore history teacher began that section with the trick question, "So, who can tell me what caused the Civil War?" It was one of those "If you read the assignment you're probably OK; if you didn't you are sunk" teacher's leading questions.


dreamrider

Mine (from the same time frame) was even sneakier/meaner. His question was "Who can name three causes of the Civil War? And as a hint, abolishing slavery was not one of them.". Ahhh.. the consternation.

The unique circumstances of my adoption by my maternal grandfather and step grandmother give me a unique perspective on the slavery issue. I learned very late in life that their illicit affair and larceny had been a contributing factor in my maternal grandmother's death and subsequently the deaths of my father and mother. My adoption had been motivated by a desire to retain ownership of the propertynand businesses that had been established with funds embezzled from my mother. My employment on the family farm and in the family businesses had been either involuntary or enticed by promises that they never intended to keep. The situated culminated in an estate planning structure that granted me minority interests in assets that my evil step siblings cntrolled and earned me nothing beyond liability for taxes on profits that I never saw.

I will make it clear that when this situation finally became the most intense, it was extremely difficult for me to resist the temptation to kill my step siblings. If I had known then what I know now, I certainly would have exterminated not only my step siblings but all oftheir progeny.

Given this experience, I would predict that the fall of Mesa might degenerate into a situation analogous to the slave rebellion in Haiti which resulted in the near extermination of all whites. The only mitigating factor will be the segregation of classes in high technology residential towers which are essentially fortifications. Of course industrial nukes might enable some interesting incidents.

Having been through much of the "usual" discussion of the causes of the ACW in high school, I ran into a couple of college classes that put things into a vastly different perspective. We are dealing with politics, economics plus a lot of people looking to either maintian what they have (or want to have) and conflicing moral convictions of what should be.

The 3/5 issue of counting slaves was one of those compromises that allowed the Constitution to move forward from the Convention (which was publicized as working out some details of problems that had cropped up in the operations of the then US government but which really was designed to redesign the system to work rather than just patch it some more). The bicameral respesentitive pieces of the House and Senate was part of that to address the differences in population between the states.

You can talk for years about the differences between the plantation systems and related industries in the South (focused on agriculture) and the rise of manufacturing in the North. Where the South had black slaves as a labor source (and this comming in great part from the Caribbean sugar islands(Dutch, English, French) and the Spanish enslavement of the native inhabitants plus importation of black slaves) the North had some of that but shifted over time to using cheap labor from either the local rural farming or people comming in from overseas. It is perhaps not that the people in the North who were taking surplus farm population or immigrant laborers were kept from using slaves because of stronger moral feeling about slavery as that slaves can be signifantly more expensive as a labor source. It "depends" on a lot and a not insignificant piece of that is the actual cost of aquiring slaves in the first place and then having to keep them. On the other hand, you can find people who are willing to work for a lot less than the othewise tradescraft skilled labor force (and train them quickly for the jobs which require a much narrower set of skills) and the discharge your preceived oblgations to them by "paying" them instead of "owning" them as slaves.

The economic realities apparent to or as understood by the people who were living with them in in the south would make it very difficult for them to give up their slave labor unless forced to do so by some force or another.

You have to look at all sorts of pieces of the puzzle. IF Whitney (or some one else) had not invented the Cotton Gin for another 20 years, the costs of slavery coupled with the damage that the mono-cropping could have significantly crippled slavery by pushing the cost to own and employ slaves in the cotton, tobacco and (on the coasts at least) rice industries while the yealds continued to fall. On another hand, as the population of slaves became too expensive to maintain many of them may POSSIBLY have been sold off not just "down the river" but shipped into Central and South America as their owners attempted to recover their investments. You would possibly have seen a lot of plantation (or just farmers and the related manufacturing) going bankrupt and loosing their slaves as property seized to pay off debts BUT what do you then do with those slaves if nobody wants to buy them? Humm.

That kind of economic collapse in the South would have lead to a lot of other problems. Politics and economics. Who gets to make the rules and can we make AND keep money? At the same time, the US -in its different parts and for different reasons- was pushing for greater or lesser tariffs on goods they either could not produce or could not produce as cheaply as they could be imported.

Ask yourself why all of this sounds so much like the arguments made in the American Colonies of Britian in the years leading up to the Revolution. Then ask yourself why the arguments that were going on in Congress in the 30+ years leading up to the Civil War plus the arguments being published in the States sound ever so much like the partizan politics we hear today? There were a lot of compeating interests that are driven by self interest and to obtain the support of existing or potential constituents which are not easy (or may be impossible to) reconcile between the various areas of the several states let alone regions of the country.

On that note, I will crawl back under my poltical rock.

Brigade XO, in many ways what you wrote is true of societies throughout history and around the world. For a significant proportion of people, no matter socio-economic class, ethnic or religious identity or any other social category, any changes to their familiar social, economic or political dynamics present a threat to their security and stability, and hence to their survival. It doesn't matter whether that threat is real or simply perceived. What matters is that no one can know what the ultimate impact of any particular change to their current circumstances will be, and that uncertainty is the major driving force behind 'conservatism' as a political ideology.

On the other hand, progressives believe that change is an inevitable fact of life, and that it's better to manage change than try and stop or deny it, which is how progressives often view conservatives. Of course, conservatives often view progressives as careless radicals, who are more concerned with change for the sake of change than in the possible dangers inherent in change.

That dichotomy is an innate part of human nature. We're all conservative to an extent, or in some aspects of life, but we're also all progressive to a different extent, or in other aspects of life. It's a dynamic tension that will always be with us.

For most of human history, CHANGE was virtually non existent. There was little technological innovation. Populations oscillates around equilibrium level. People generally lived their lives in the same manner as their great-to-the-tenth grandparents had. When change occurred, it was usually a very unpleasant change such as war, famine, earthquakes, floods or war.

The rapid advancement of technology makes change inevitable. However; the progressive argument that change should be promoted because it is inevitable is a logical fallacy. Change has to be evaluated on at least practical if not moral criteria.

The Southern States and Mesa have historical events, particularly the Hatian Slave Revolt, to inform their opinions and judgements. One can argue that the danger of a slave uprising makes the abolition of slavery imperative. However; the Hatian Slave Rebellion was itself the result of liberalized policies. The Haitian slave masters just like Southerners such as Thomas Jefferson were in the habit of having sex with their black slaves which resulted in Medes race children. The Hatian slave holders freed their hybrid children, educated them and allowed them to enjoy many rights.

Given Honorverse technology, I find it extremely difficult to imagine how genetic slavery can be economically viable beyond people adapted for harsh environments or sex slaves. Even so, voluntary genetic modification of one's own children motivated by the lure of high hazardous duty pay or colonization opportunities. There is no shortage of sex workers in a free society either.

One factor that might mitigate conflict on Mesa is the realization that the carnage inflicted by operation Hudini was orchestrated by a secretive cabal.

hanuman wrote:Brigade XO, in many ways what you wrote is true of societies throughout history and around the world. For a significant proportion of people, no matter socio-economic class, ethnic or religious identity or any other social category, any changes to their familiar social, economic or political dynamics present a threat to their security and stability, and hence to their survival. It doesn't matter whether that threat is real or simply perceived. What matters is that no one can know what the ultimate impact of any particular change to their current circumstances will be, and that uncertainty is the major driving force behind 'conservatism' as a political ideology.

On the other hand, progressives believe that change is an inevitable fact of life, and that it's better to manage change than try and stop or deny it, which is how progressives often view conservatives. Of course, conservatives often view progressives as careless radicals, who are more concerned with change for the sake of change than in the possible dangers inherent in change.

That dichotomy is an innate part of human nature. We're all conservative to an extent, or in some aspects of life, but we're also all progressive to a different extent, or in other aspects of life. It's a dynamic tension that will always be with us.