Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Bill Richter]

Now that all of the neo-abolitionists have had their say, let one poor, misguided, ignorant Southerner have his.

It is true that the South had great difficulty in growing industry during the pre-Civil War years. But it was not that there was little industry. It is that industry in the South was different in scale than in the North. One of the biggest was tobacco products. It was the South that grew and manufactured into useable products, cigars, plug tobacco, and flavored twists of tobacco. Popular brand names included Wedding Cake, Cherry Ripe, Nature's Ultimatum, and Diadem of Virginia. This was the tobacco that Yankee soldiers traded coffee for during the war.

Southern cotton mills began before the war, but they tended to manufacture cheaper grades of goods, sheerings, osnaburgs, yarn, and what was called "Negro" cloth for plantation use. Mills sprang up along the so-called fall line in all of the Southeastern states. Two of the biggest manufacturing areas were in the South Carolina Piedmont, Alamance Creek in North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia.

One of the most important industries in the South was iron-making. The second growth area in Virginia that became the heart of battlefields in the East, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Chancellorsville was made possible by the harvesting of the opriginal hardwoods for iron "furnaces" as they were called. These were much like Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens' New Caledonia Ironworks Near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, destroyed by Lee's invasion army in 1863. Major iron companies were Tredegar in Richmond, Shelby's in Alabama, and Maramec in Missouri. Tredegar and Shelby were major distributors to the Confederacy during the war. The last great Union cavalry raid was Randal MacKenzie's on the Shelby works. The great iron producing veins at Birmingham were not discovered until after Redemption (throwing the North out of the military occupation of the South, know as Reconstruction).

The milling of wheat and corn was a big enough industry that Southern mills around Richmond sent most of their product to Brazil's slave plantations.

Naval Stores (tars, pitches, turpentines) in the Carolina Piedmont was a big industry from colonial times. In addition Southern yellow pine provided the lumber that built balloon frame houses and stores all over the nation. Barrels, oak for ships, cypress for frames and foundation (termite resistant), also came from Southern forests, where trees were raised and harvested much like ordinary crops because the growing season was long and warm.

In the upper South of Kentucky and Missouri, hemp was a big product used for rope and cotton bagging. Ropewalks, as the factories were called, were so important to Missouri that the section north of Kansas City along the Missouri River, known as the Platte was added to the state in 1838, advancing slavery west above the 36-30 line with no opposition in Congress.

Another industry no often thought of as Southern was gold manufacture. The original American gold rush took place in the Southern Appalachian foothills in the Carolinas and Georgia (at Dalonega). Why do you think it was so important to get the Cherokee out of there? It took the massive California gold rush to make us all forget that fact. Ever hear of the Panic of 1857? It was caused by the sinking of the gold from California off Cape Hatteras headed to the New York market.But what happened to railroads, the biggest investment in the North before the war? Why did the South not invest its money here as the Yanks did? At 6% it was the greatest annual return one could make above the Mason Dixon Line and the Ohio. But the South did not need railroads as did the North. It had all those big, deep rivers. They invested in steamboats. But even more important, slavery was unbelievably profitable to Southerners. The historical debate on slave profitability has been long and hard. But in the end, slavery returned 14% as an investment. And contrary to what used to be "fact" slave labor has recently been called more efficient than free labor. The discrepancy was in the slaveholders' own account books. They often counted assets as liabilities. These historians that find slavery profitable are often called Cliometricians, historians who rely on mathematics.

We have not begun to explore the use of slave labor in western mines, a practice of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru at the towns in both nations named Potosi.

As for HR Helper, he was an anomaly. Most Southerners wanted to get into slave ownership, not avoid it. Those areas that did not like slavery became the Benedict Arnolds of the Confederacy, led by Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second vice president.

Did the South have inferior canon? I do not know about that but they had inferior fuses. The North used a newer fuse that was more accurate in its artillery shells. It was that difference that cost Lee part of his Second Corps Artillery Reserve when Lattimer's Battalion was destroyed by Yankee counter-battery fire on July 2 at Gettysburg. But no Civil War battle was lost because of a lack of ammunition on either side. McClellan had his faults as a field general, but remember, he forged the Union Army of the Potomac that withstood years of defeat and incompetence to win in the field in the end.

In reality, Lincoln came as close to losing the war in 1864 when Jubal Early advanced on Washington as at any other time. The issue was not industry, railroads, or cannons. The issue was war weariness. That was the same issue that finally defeated Lee at Petersburg, too. There is more than one way to skin a cat or win a fight. Or an agricultural nation can win a war against and industrial one. But all things being equal such an event is a rarity.