Blaming the South: The War that Pitted Banania Against Banania

After a period of inactivity, the Report is back.  Today’s topic: The American Civil War.  The war that pitted brother against brother is recounted and looked back on with such a one-sided, incredibly inaccurate history that it almost makes me cringe.  The fact that our country is still deeply divided over the issues at the heart of the War (and I don’t mean [just] racism) but that no one is really interested in knowing what really happened so that we can move past them is to me evidence of long-standing banania that must be decried.

This controversial design had many Northern homos up in arms charging Marc Jacobs with racism and insensitivity...'cause they're tards.

The Civil War evokes one of the most reeking relics of colonial racism (i.e., the African slave trade), but that certainly was not what the War was fought over.  After the schrapnel fell and the dust cleared, slavery was ended, and that institution became the avatar of the tensions, but the idea that the North was on some holy crusade to abolish slavery is completely ahistorical nonsense.  Let’s look at the economic facts of colonialism:

When Native slavery and prisoner slavery failed, African slavery built up the colonies of Europe during the “Age of Discovery,” so much so that National Geographic reports that of the 6.5 million people who arrived in lands of the Western Hemisphere between Columbus’ arriving in the West Indes until the American independence, 5.5 million were African slave laborers.  Vast new territory meant the need for vast new labor to quickly develop it into sources for raw materials in the mercanitlist, Westaphalia world that Europeans had set up for themselves.  This means that of almost all the people moved via the Middle Passage and who were commoditized as part of the Triangular Trade who ended up in the United States were brought there when Britain was running the show.  It cannot be a serious question of North-and-South, then, who was responsible for the absolutely egregious crime of the Middle Passage and the beginnings of institutionalized slavery or the economies it bolstered.

Needless to say, having that much free labor was enormously profitable, but for whom?  After all, the South’s plantations thrived on chattle slavery to produce raw materials.  However, as we know from current struggles in the “developing world,” selling raw materials isn’t where the real money is, except for a small group of large property-owners: it’s in finding/being the buyers to process them and resell the materials as goods.

Tobacco, indigo, cotton – all these things are useless unless they’re manufactured into smokeables/chewables, dyes, or textiles and put back as commodities.  And guess who manufactured during the early 19th Century?  Why, it was none other than the industrializing Europeans and cities in the Northern US.  Even though slavery was highly profitable for the plantation owners up the day that it ended, it was only so because Northern and European manufacturing economies had high demands for the raw materials that the plantations produced.  The majority of slave narratives and stereotypes revolve around farming not because there were no slaves in manufacturing (there were quite a few), but because manufacturing was so incredibly rare in regions of the United States (and the New World in general) that allowed slavery.

The macroeconomies of slavery-allowing regions were completely dependent on slavery, which was only made profitable by the hunger for raw materials on which the economies in “free” areas thrived.  Slavery was not an anomalous, inefficient institution supported exclusively by pervasive racism and a retreat from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, but the fact of free labor that built the economies of nations later called superpowers.  The Northern and European economies, dependent on slavery’s goods, created a vacuum in which that economic institution was a fact.  Anyone who knows anything about mercantilism will know that this was the fact of colonialism and one of its main drives.

But what about people in the South?  Since slaves made up almost a third of the entire population of the South, what were the other two-thirds living like?  According to the same statistics, of that 8,036,700 person white population in the South, only 393,967 owned slaves at all in 1860.  So, a whopping 5% of the white population owned slaves.  (This statistic is often inflated to a “by family” number of about 1 family in 4.  Still, 25% of families isn’t a very great majority for a region that would later fall victim to holding all the pop cultural blame for slavery and racism.)

The other 75% of families and 95% of people?  They were in poverty, finding occasional temporary work on plantations or subsistence-farming their way to scraping by.  As pointed out in the book Poor Whites of the Antebellum South:

The existence of black slavery played a major role in perpetuating white poverty by limiting the development of industrial wage jobs and curbing the need for white farm labor…

The fact of the matter is that, for the vast majority of white people, Black slavery was a huge economic limitation.  The more profitable slavery got by the 1860’s (and business was booming), the more it hurt most people, whose infrastructure was left underdeveloped by a complete lack of governmental interest in the rural poor and whose economic circumstances were significantly hindered from the standpoint of development.

Now, in no way was slavery justifiable, and every (white) person who had access to the social system that slavery put into place economically gained from it.  However, slavery was not supported because of democracy, demographics, popular economics, or anything remotely reflective of the “Will of the People.”  Economic demands from the North and Europe and an economic system more closely resembling modern Europe that dominated in the South kept slavery in place.  Never, in all the talk of banning slavery, were alternatives offered to that economic system.  Northern manufacturers craved slave-made raw materials and Southern manufacturing franchises of Northern companies leased slaves to work their mills while their politicians competed over who was more in line abolitionism.

If the North were on a crusade for abolitionism, as its politicians at the time and contemporary histories portray it, why then did the North continue to deal with the Southern agricultural configuration it was exploiting?  Why not offer alternatives to slavery such as infrastructural improvements and more equitable property distribution among white Southerners to promote cooperative raw materials growing and subsidies to start wage industry?  These facts of Northern life had made slavery less economically beneficial in that region and had therefore ended it in places where Puritan theology didn’t already make it unpalatable.  Why couldn’t these things have been done in the South?  The interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federal government were not in favor this kind of interaction, but if slavery had been such a terrifying moral issue and had been a fight against good-hearted Protestants versus evil, racist trash, why not?

Because there was no moral crusade at the level of government or business or even of the public-at-large against slavery.  Northern people, much like Southern people (as evidenced by quotations from such infamous individuals as Robert E. Lee), recognized slavery as a blemish on any “enlightened” society, but they didn’t see any way out of it economically.  How then can it be a surprise that the South, offered no other alternatives and constantly hearing from the people who benefited the most from its raw materials cultivated by slave labor that slavery was on its last legal leg, would try to opt out?  The Southern states did not have the economic backbone to even support themselves in a transition without significant redistribution from the booming North.  The Civil War was a failure of an empire to correctly compensate for the circumstances of its chief supplier-provinces.

The War was not a war to end slavery – as Abraham Lincoln made perfectly clear on several occasions.  This is most notable since the Emancipation Proclamation only ended slavery in the occupied territories of the Confederacy.  The Emancipation came 1862 and into effect in 1863.  Now, this did not include the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the newly-minted State of West Virginia, or the other border states, Missouri, Maryland, or Delaware – nor did it include any area of the unoccupied South or territories claimed by the Confederacy.  Slavery would end in these areas not with the cease-fires but in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.

So, two years passed with slavery in a government run completely by the North’s anti-slavery crusaders, right?  There’s not even any logic to the completely one-sided history that paints all of the South as villainous racists and the North as angels sent from God to free the slaves.  It also doesn’t take into account the incredible historical circumstances of Reconstruction.

As the South was being “dealt with” after the War, it was clear that steps that would bring social, economic, and cultural order were just not going to be undertaken effectively.  In 1877, when the compromise to put Hayes in office ended Reconstruction, it was nail in the coffin of social justice in the South for the next century and beyond.  While the KKK was already blooming and flourishing and threatening newly-elected and newly-emancipated, politically active Black Republicans, the reconquering North completely refused to take concrete steps to protect Black political participation, equality, or Southern social justice on any platform until far into the 20th Century.  What this led to was an increasingly racist political dialogue, managed by former slaveholders and imposed on war-ravaged population.

Then the North set back, and through its complacency supported, for nearly the next century public segregation, terrifying “judicial oversights” and lynchings, exclusion, and systematized rural poverty that fueled the resentment between the races.  Moreover, this kind of lack of actual attempts from the North to bring all Southerners up to a standard of living that they were enjoying, combined with the ways in which the laws of the time fostered the “pioneer spirit” delusions that allowed the archetypal secluded Appalachian/backwater shack with more shotguns than books to fester in abject poverty and to be poked fun of for backwardness.

Even now, the attempts at leveling the playing field of made so unlevel by slavery are dotted with stereotyping and half-assed policies that allow the systematic problems that fuel the racism that lingers from Reconstruction to be a predominating cultural feature of even metropolises in the South (for example, New Orleans and Atlanta) and a terrifying fact of life in the rural South (Jena 6 ringing a bell?).

If the North and its citizens (one of whom recently told me that South was “wrong,” the North was “right,” and that the South “deserved to be punished”) continue to be on the high horse, they at least need to change the systems that continue to this day to exploit the South and then blame it for the social problems that the exploitation causes.  I’m definitely not justifying the racism in the South, but the fact that people from the North see themselves as the enlightened freedom-bringers throwing their pearls before redneck swine is absolutely and atrociously untrue.  That level of self-agrandizing and complete refusal to see one’s own role in the problems of “those people” is one of the truest definitions of banania.