How hard blow Gettysburg was for the Confederacy?

[Ming]

The South was kept impoverished, according to many estimates, for 85 years and this cycle ends in the 1950's with the post war economic boom. Texas complains loud and long prior to the Oil Exemption legislation passed during the war that New York controlled her ability to pump oil at the rate New York thought appropriate. And the South was determined to Rise Again.

So when @Director says they had no money - they had no money. Period. This is intentional. Divide and Conquer.

I am emphasing this point because I want you to understand the mindset of these individuals during the post-war years who lost everything, they need a cause to believe in and an enemy to hate. Neither are hard to find. I am not saying it is just, I am not agreeing with either faction, I am merely pointing out what color the cow is.

I think this is a little wrapped up in the Southern myth making. I would hazard to guess that the south was kept poor for this long time because of its backward approach to taxation.

A story we don't hear very much is how before WW2 the Plantation interests would chase out anybody who wanted to bring factories or build a new south. How they worked tirelessly to destroy any alternative to sharecropping labor and even tried to resist the first great migration. They were not as rich as they were before the Civil war but were even more politically powerful on the regional level.

The post war boom was possible because mechanization made sharecropping superfluous. The southern reaction to the second migration is very different.

 

[Ming]

Most newly settled states went through a pioneer stage with little or no cash economy. Which raises the question of how long that stage would have lasted in the South. Considering that the South possessed valuable trade crops and infrastructure lacking in the pioneer states, it seems to me that a cashless economy would be a very temporary situation.

It was the panic of 1873 and ensuing fallout that derailed the south's recovery.

In parallel to a lot historical forces, the event was devastating to white southerners but it was absolute murder on freedmen.

A planter whose contracts couldn't cover expenses would sell off some of his lands.

A yeoman farmer whose cotton crop was insufficient to cover his tax bill might lose his family farm and have to move to the city or in with relatives.

A negro tenant who bought a mule on credit and couldn't cover the note had two choices: Sharecropping or the chain gang.

 

[Barsoom]

You would be wrong. It was the worst situation imaginable. Grant and other generals describe hordes of people scraping grain off the ground left by government horses being fed for nourishment, people of some standing begging door to door, and incredible privation and starvation. The Southern Farms had grown wild, the levees were not maintained. The entire nation was starving at the end of the war and it was about to get worse.

The South was very profitable and wealthy prior to the War of the Rebellion. There were over $60M in deposits in Southern Banks in 1860. There was less than $15M at the end of the war. The railroads are wrecked, locomotives and rolling stock are all seized, and the paddle boats have vanished from the rivers. Confederate scripts and bonds were worthless. And the profitable Confederate cotton bonds sold in Europe to generate hard cash to buy ships and material were rendered worthless with the stroke of a pen leaving European speculators to take the hit.

Enter the Carpet Baggers and the Scallywags . . . .

There were approximately 2M bales of cotton at 400 pounds per bale worth about $175 each that all simply vanished as contraband seized - privately and publicly - by the North. The Cotton Traders were either immoral when they got there, or their head was turned by greed five minutes after they arrived according to the media of the day. That roughly $350M in potential hard currency was HUGE compared to the pittance of money available to the impoverised peoples of the South who had given everything they owned to support their boys in the field protecting their homes. But the Cotton Traders made a fortune, and leads to Grant banning Jews from traveling with the army because of their business tactics being in direct opposition to military policy by racing ahead and paying pennies on the dollar what it would be worth to the army sold at auction when seized.

And the coup de grace were 'back taxes'. The Federal Government had put a tax on private property in each state to raise money to wage war. The South ignored the taxes during the conflict, but the Treasury Agents collected and earned huge profits for themselves. They placed unpayable liens on prime real estate in re-captured lands and then resold them for a huge profit, the majority of which went into their own pocket. Even the govenment found this a vile practice and returned unsold property back to its owners, but the individuals who bought prime real estate cheap were allowed to keep their gains.

The South was kept impoverished, according to many estimates, for 85 years and this cycle ends in the 1950's with the post war economic boom. Texas complains loud and long prior to the Oil Exemption legislation passed during the war that New York controlled her ability to pump oil at the rate New York thought appropriate. And the South was determined to Rise Again.

So when @Director says they had no money - they had no money. Period. This is intentional. Divide and Conquer.

I am emphasing this point because I want you to understand the mindset of these individuals during the post-war years who lost everything, they need a cause to believe in and an enemy to hate. Neither are hard to find. I am not saying it is just, I am not agreeing with either faction, I am merely pointing out what color the cow is.

Thanks for the explanation but this goes much further than the question I tried to answer. That was whether there were other states with a cashless economy and how long such a stage would last. I believe many of the transactions you describe involve cash, no?

It was the panic of 1873 and ensuing fallout that derailed the south's recovery.

In parallel to a lot historical forces, the event was devastating to white southerners but it was absolute murder on freedmen.

A planter whose contracts couldn't cover expenses would sell off some of his lands.

A yeoman farmer whose cotton crop was insufficient to cover his tax bill might lose his family farm and have to move to the city or in with relatives.

A negro tenant who bought a mule on credit and couldn't cover the note had two choices: Sharecropping or the chain gang.

If I recall correctly, sharecropping utilized company script and so was technically cashless, but the other processes involved cash, is that right?

 

[Director]

I would hazard to guess that the south was kept poor for this long time because of its backward approach to taxation.

A story we don't hear very much is how before WW2 the Plantation interests would chase out anybody who wanted to bring factories or build a new south. How they worked tirelessly to destroy any alternative to sharecropping labor and even tried to resist the first great migration. They were not as rich as they were before the Civil war but were even more politically powerful on the regional level.

The post war boom was possible because mechanization made sharecropping superfluous. The southern reaction to the second migration is very different.

@Ming - More going on than taxation - witness the segregation of education and housing in cities across the nation. Some industrialization was encouraged (Birmingham, AL steelworks for one, and a lot of light industry up to the present day). But the old planter elites - still mostly in charge through the 1940s in the Deep South - did not want an educated work force (they might question how things were, or unionize for better conditions) and worked hard to keep the poorer classes of all races in their places.

A planter who had a bad year and couldn't cover his expenses would go to his buddy the local banker and get a friendly, low-interest loan that might never be called in. In my youth I watched a SE Arkansas farmer tell everyone how bad prices were while buying his wife a new Lincoln Continental and building a new house. The logic of it was, if you can get a million-dollar loan at a few percent interest, why not add on another couple of hundred thousand and spend that on yourself? It's good to be country-club-buddies with the banker.

I don't recall a post-war boom in the South until maybe post-WW2. The South was still agrarian and rural (in the main) through the Great Depression, which hit more slowly there but lingered longer. Mechanized farming (including cotton-picking) wasn't common until after WW2, coming in alongside pesticides and fertilizers.

The planter class were content to be big frogs in small ponds and they worked very hard to keep anything from changing. Despite that we get 'New South' reform-minded governors in almost all Southern states from Huey Long of Louisiana in the 1930s through, maybe, William WInter of Mississippi in the 1980s. Today, metropolitan Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia are more like other urban areas than like the rural parts of their states.


@Barsoom - cashless people. I'm going to limit my comment to the same post-war time period we have been discussing. I'd assume poorer whites, freed men and free blacks everywhere, including the states that were slave-owning but did not secede like Missouri and Kentucky. Almost everyone west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies would have had little to sell and needed little that had to be bought. Add in rural California, Washington and Oregon. How long it lasted... um... dunno. Would speculate that the vast gold and silver strikes in the west provided enough metal for coin to match the US economy, so - maybe - 1900.

Sharecropping usually involved a planter or store-owner keeping the books, which poorly-literate and numerate people couldn't decipher and wouldn't be allowed to look at anyway. The customers would just be told what they owed and whether or not they could buy what they wanted. If you tried to argue, move or run you could be dragged back and treated to the 'tender mercies' of the law as a debtor, or just shipped to a chain gang. And needless to say the books were cooked like a dinner for twelve, so you never got ahead.

It combined all the 'joys' of slavery in one package and was open to all races, could be enforced by the full power of local and state law and gave everyone a big fig leaf to cover the nastiness.


@JodelDiplom - 'Wall of Text' - guilty. It is a personal failing.


Some terrific conversations here - very informative. Thank you all!

 

[Ming]

@Ming - More going on than taxation - witness the segregation of education and housing in cities across the nation. Some industrialization was encouraged (Birmingham, AL steelworks for one, and a lot of light industry up to the present day). But the old planter elites - still mostly in charge through the 1940s in the Deep South - did not want an educated work force (they might question how things were, or unionize for better conditions) and worked hard to keep the poorer classes of all races in their places.

That was definitely part of it. After dismantling the reconstruction property taxes the southern states turned to poll taxes and taxes on labor, but they also refused to spend on public goods that would be consumed by the poor. Education was a tax funded public good and the bourbon democrats refused to collect revenue to fund expenses. After redemption, they even enshrined low taxes and low services into law. During the same constitutional convention where Mississippi disenfranchised blacks they required super majorities of 3/5 in BOTH legislatures for all tax increases. Arkansas and Louisiana later copied the practice. Alabama put property tax caps in their 1875 constitution. Arkansas, Texas and Missouri following later. These are all in force today. Alabama's property tax revenue as a share of its economy is the lowest of any state in the country which has serious implications for local governments to raise revenue and provide services. (Funnily enough, the share of who pays these taxes is also not even. Surprise, African American property owners pay much higher proportion of taxes than whites)

Southern poverty before WW2 consisted of a lot of things (disease, illiteracy, poor roads) that would have been ameliorated by public goods that northern states funded but southern governments refused to fund such as schools, hospitals and infrastructure (Or if forced to, underfunded unequally)

The planters couldn't keep out all industry, but they mostly succeeded in preventing an alternative to the rural workforce that they didn't control.

A planter who had a bad year and couldn't cover his expenses would go to his buddy the local banker and get a friendly, low-interest loan that might never be called in. In my youth I watched a SE Arkansas farmer tell everyone how bad prices were while buying his wife a new Lincoln Continental and building a new house. The logic of it was, if you can get a million-dollar loan at a few percent interest, why not add on another couple of hundred thousand and spend that on yourself? It's good to be country-club-buddies with the banker.

I don't recall a post-war boom in the South until maybe post-WW2. The South was still agrarian and rural (in the main) through the Great Depression, which hit more slowly there but lingered longer. Mechanized farming (including cotton-picking) wasn't common until after WW2, coming in alongside pesticides and fertilizers.

If I wasn't clear, I was referring to post WW2 'boom' in response to Andre's post. We certainly agree that prior to this time the heirs of the plantation system had the south under their thumb, economically and politically.

If I recall correctly, sharecropping utilized company script and so was technically cashless, but the other processes involved cash, is that right?

Rarely hard cash. Notes of credit were usually extended in the immediate aftermath of the war, iirc. This is how some freedmen gained land from their former masters. . . who often had abandoned the property during the war and had it returned by the Johnson administration. They didn't actually have much cash and didn't risk anything by allowing their former slaves to continue working the fields 'on credit'.

There weren't a whole lot of these, and they were mostly wiped out after 1873. Tenants who used credit to invest in capital saw the same fate. Sharecropping was the end result for most.

Though there were some successes. By 1884 Blacks were able to gain title to some land, some 2.6 million acres but that's when the redemptionists gained complete control of their respective states and black land titles were not secure.

 

[Director]

I lived in Alabama in the 90s. The state constitution did not permit local option - no local ordinances in a wide range of areas, meaning anything you wanted to do locally required an amendment to the constitution. As a result the document fills a half-dozen wheelbarrows. What i've always heard is that if you doubled Alabama property taxes they'd still be the lowest in the nation. Sales taxes - highly regressive on the poor - are very high, 10% when I lived there.

 

[Dinglehoff]

There's been some mention of industrialization and factory work coming south.
Beyond the poor working conditions and abuse that I've heard a little about, were the job numbers and workers wages going to be so much to sing about?
I've only ever heard of Henry Ford offering good pay for his workers because he wanted to, with other advances elsewhere were from unionization labor battles. From what I understand, this came much later after the Civil War and has since been all but destroyed since the 1980's, with workers being screwed since then.

That's not to say that nothing is better than something, but what's to stop these factories from adopting the sharecropper/company store scams?

 

[Henry IX]

There's been some mention of industrialization and factory work coming south.
Beyond the poor working conditions and abuse that I've heard a little about, were the job numbers and workers wages going to be so much to sing about?
I've only ever heard of Henry Ford offering good pay for his workers because he wanted to, with other advances elsewhere were from unionization labor battles. From what I understand, this came much later after the Civil War and has since been all but destroyed since the 1980's, with workers being screwed since then.

That's not to say that nothing is better than something, but what's to stop these factories from adopting the sharecropper/company store scams?

Labour competition and monetary environment.

In a city or town the economy is almost exclusively monetary. Credit is only generally given out by institutions specialised in loan finance. Store credit is much less useful because a worker could get credit from multiple stores, well beyond their means to repay, leaving the stores to bare the cost of the unrecoverable debts. In addition, urban workers need to buy virtually everything they need, whereas a rural worker is far more capable of partial safe sufficiency + barter. A factory worker has no product that they own at the end of a day's work (unlike a sharecropper, who owns a percentage of the crop) and so must be paid for their labour.

If there are multiple factories in a given area then there will also be competition for labour. While there will often be surplus labour, giving the factory owner a great deal of power over wages and conditions, trying to reduce their workforce to virtual slavery is likely to lead to a lack of labour - ultimately the workers can emigrate, turn to sharecropping or form a militant union. While there are many cases of 'company store' style factories (including in modern China) where the workforce lives on the site and has their lives totally controlled by the owner, this tends to only be sustainable in situations where the owners can call on significant coercive force from the government. In the South, the hostility of the plantation class to industry meant that factory owners could not rely on coercive government force to regulate their workers (along with the relatively strong rule of law in the US mitigating against the use of private force).

For sharecropper, in perpetual debt to a plantation owner and unable to escape a life of poverty and exploitation by that debt, even a poorly paid industrial job was a step up. Monetary pay at least gives the possibility of wealth accumulation, while the system of company stores ensures that the price of goods can be 'adjusted' to accommodate for the harvest size and wealth of the individual to allow maximum exploitation by the owner. Wages allow for the mirage of an eventual escape from poverty.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

@Ming - More going on than taxation - witness the segregation of education and housing in cities across the nation. Some industrialization was encouraged (Birmingham, AL steelworks for one, and a lot of light industry up to the present day). But the old planter elites - still mostly in charge through the 1940s in the Deep South - did not want an educated work force (they might question how things were, or unionize for better conditions) and worked hard to keep the poorer classes of all races in their places.

A planter who had a bad year and couldn't cover his expenses would go to his buddy the local banker and get a friendly, low-interest loan that might never be called in. In my youth I watched a SE Arkansas farmer tell everyone how bad prices were while buying his wife a new Lincoln Continental and building a new house. The logic of it was, if you can get a million-dollar loan at a few percent interest, why not add on another couple of hundred thousand and spend that on yourself? It's good to be country-club-buddies with the banker.

I don't recall a post-war boom in the South until maybe post-WW2. The South was still agrarian and rural (in the main) through the Great Depression, which hit more slowly there but lingered longer. Mechanized farming (including cotton-picking) wasn't common until after WW2, coming in alongside pesticides and fertilizers.

The planter class were content to be big frogs in small ponds and they worked very hard to keep anything from changing. Despite that we get 'New South' reform-minded governors in almost all Southern states from Huey Long of Louisiana in the 1930s through, maybe, William WInter of Mississippi in the 1980s. Today, metropolitan Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia are more like other urban areas than like the rural parts of their states.


@Barsoom - cashless people. I'm going to limit my comment to the same post-war time period we have been discussing. I'd assume poorer whites, freed men and free blacks everywhere, including the states that were slave-owning but did not secede like Missouri and Kentucky. Almost everyone west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies would have had little to sell and needed little that had to be bought. Add in rural California, Washington and Oregon. How long it lasted... um... dunno. Would speculate that the vast gold and silver strikes in the west provided enough metal for coin to match the US economy, so - maybe - 1900.

Sharecropping usually involved a planter or store-owner keeping the books, which poorly-literate and numerate people couldn't decipher and wouldn't be allowed to look at anyway. The customers would just be told what they owed and whether or not they could buy what they wanted. If you tried to argue, move or run you could be dragged back and treated to the 'tender mercies' of the law as a debtor, or just shipped to a chain gang. And needless to say the books were cooked like a dinner for twelve, so you never got ahead.

It combined all the 'joys' of slavery in one package and was open to all races, could be enforced by the full power of local and state law and gave everyone a big fig leaf to cover the nastiness.


@JodelDiplom - 'Wall of Text' - guilty. It is a personal failing.


Some terrific conversations here - very informative. Thank you all!

Wait.

What were you doing in SE Arkansas in your youth?

More importantly, define SE Arkansas. And feel free to send PM if you prefer.

 

[Director]

I grew up in the McGehee, Arkansas area. My parents were from Arkansas City, I was born in Dumas and I had relatives across the area including Greenville, MS.

 

[Kovax]

I was thrown out of Arkansas, once.

Back in the late 1970s, a bunch of co-workers and I (working in NJ, and living in PA and NJ) decided to use our vacation week to visit a former co-worker who had moved to Texas. We all piled into a car and drove. On the way home, we took the scenic route through several states via 2-lane highways instead of the Interstates, and got a better look at what the states were really like. On our way through one small town in Arkansas, we passed a Motel with a badly hand-painted sign reading "air condition" without the following "-ing" or "-ed" on the end, because the painter had run out of room, even crowding the last couple of letters of what he did fit. The air conditioners had been installed with the same level of expertise: jagged holes hacked into the sides of the rooms with an axe or chain saw, with 2x4s nailed across the gaps to hold the individual air conditioners in place. The 2x4s weren't even remotely wide enough to cover the gaps in places, so you could see light streaming out through the open holes big enough to put your hand through on all 4 sides of several of them, and on at least one side of every single one. It was so badly done that we could hardly believe it, and it wasn't the only butcher-job in sight, merely the worst of a long list.

While we were blissfully laughing at the stupidity of it all, and the overall shabbiness and pathetic workmanship of the town, a police car pulled up behind us and turned on the flashing lights. We were pulled over by an officer who strongly reminded me of all of those overweight and under-brained southern cops in various comedy films, wearing the traditional wide-brimmed hat. He remarked that we clearly weren't "from around here", and told us (with one hand on his holster) that "you northerners" weren't welcome, then pointed in the direction of the nearest interstate ramp and told us to go and don't come back. He followed us to the bottom of the ramp, and when we entered, pulled the car across the ramp so we couldn't back out. I can only assume that he must have called ahead to warn the next town that there were Yankee folks trying to infiltrate or rob the poor southern folk, and to be on the lookout in case we tried to exit, because there was a police car at the end of the next off-ramp. We essentially had no choice but to stay on the Interstate until we were out of Arkansas.

The experience was unnerving, and I have had no desire to ever see Arkansas again.

 

[bz249]

I was thrown out of Arkansas, once.

Back in the late 1970s, a bunch of co-workers and I (working in NJ, and living in PA and NJ) decided to use our vacation week to visit a former co-worker who had moved to Texas. We all piled into a car and drove. On the way home, we took the scenic route through several states via 2-lane highways instead of the Interstates, and got a better look at what the states were really like. On our way through one small town in Arkansas, we passed a Motel with a badly hand-painted sign reading "air condition" without the following "-ing" or "-ed" on the end, because the painter had run out of room, even crowding the last couple of letters of what he did fit. The air conditioners had been installed with the same level of expertise: jagged holes hacked into the sides of the rooms with an axe or chain saw, with 2x4s nailed across the gaps to hold the individual air conditioners in place. The 2x4s weren't even remotely wide enough to cover the gaps in places, so you could see light streaming out through the open holes big enough to put your hand through on all 4 sides of several of them, and on at least one side of every single one. It was so badly done that we could hardly believe it, and it wasn't the only butcher-job in sight, merely the worst of a long list.

While we were blissfully laughing at the stupidity of it all, and the overall shabbiness and pathetic workmanship of the town, a police car pulled up behind us and turned on the flashing lights. We were pulled over by an officer who strongly reminded me of all of those overweight and under-brained southern cops in various comedy films, wearing the traditional wide-brimmed hat. He remarked that we clearly weren't "from around here", and told us (with one hand on his holster) that "you northerners" weren't welcome, then pointed in the direction of the nearest interstate ramp and told us to go and don't come back. He followed us to the bottom of the ramp, and when we entered, pulled the car across the ramp so we couldn't back out. I can only assume that he must have called ahead to warn the next town that there were Yankee folks trying to infiltrate or rob the poor southern folk, and to be on the lookout in case we tried to exit, because there was a police car at the end of the next off-ramp. We essentially had no choice but to stay on the Interstate until we were out of Arkansas.

The experience was unnerving, and I have had no desire to ever see Arkansas again.

It is well known that Hungarian=Gypsy....

À la zingara - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... and gypsy is almost like negro. So the police officer had no reason to be docile with someone of a clear troublemaker look.

What is strange, that it was the rural South where the Saturn-V rockets were produced right at that timeframe.

 

[Kovax]

It is well known that Hungarian=Gypsy....

À la zingara - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... and gypsy is almost like negro. So the police officer had no reason to be docile with someone of a clear troublemaker look.

...and here I thought that it was all because we didn't have the proper Confederate Flag bumper sticker on the car, or the right NASCAR team emblem. Next time, I'll have to try hiding my violin so they don't recognize my natural Hungarian "Gypsy-ness".

 

[Director]

On the other hand... I've had a number of experiences with Southerners that showed they were helpful past the point of their own best interest.

Sorry you had a bad experience. Most of the state is lovely - everything in the north and west, basically. South of Little Rock the land drops down to the Delta and it is flat, cultivated, soggy and flat. As in pool-table flat, if a pool-table was planted in rice, soybeans and cotton.


Early rocketry was done at the Redstone Arsenal, which was set up to test artillery in a remote location so as not to injure anything. The culture clash between the 'Professor kids' and the locals continues in Huntsville, AL to this day.

 

[Dinglehoff]

...and here I thought that it was all because we didn't have the proper Confederate Flag bumper sticker on the car, or the right NASCAR team emblem. Next time, I'll have to try hiding my violin so they don't recognize my natural Hungarian "Gypsy-ness".

It's fortunate your encounter wasn't worse, considering more recent events.