Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[Liz Rosenthal]

Eva:

Slavery hindered the South's economic development because that is practically *all* the South had. There was little manufacturing - manufacturing was concentrated in the North - and most of the economic "opportunities" in the South related to slavery in some way. If you weren't a slaveowner, you could be an overseer, or a sheriff (for want of a better name) looking out for runaway slaves. Then there were the poor whites, who barely eked out a living on a small patch of soil. The poor whites made up the overwhelming majority of the white population in the South. But the slaveowners controlled the politics and the economy. There was little hope of upward mobility for the poor. That is, unless you were interested in the military. Military service was the chief way out of the southern economy and the South was a very militaristic society. This accounts for the disproportionate number of southerners among American military officers at the time that Civil War broke out... and why it was so hard for Lincoln to find good generals, since most of them had left their Federal offices to join the Confederacy!

Goods tended to be purchased from the North or as imports from abroad, since little was made in the South. Receiving education in the South was chiefly the province of the plantation owners and their families. At the same time, plantation owners and their families looked down on work. They believed that it was beneath a gentleman to work. In the North, everybody had to work. The wealthy became wealthy by working or through technological inventions or smart investing or all three.

The North was ahead of the South not only in manufacturing, but in education, "internal improvements" (which Southerners tended to oppose), upward mobility, immigration, finance and many other things that were vital to a strong, diversified economy.

(In fact, much of the money that bolstered the Southern slave economy was actually situated in the North! This is a shameful fact that most Americans probably don't know. Northerners were also instrumental in the "slave trade" - that is, the kidnapping of Africans from western Africa to bring to the U.S. to be sold into slavery.)

As far as how many abolitionists favored racial equality, someone else may be able to answer that. In general, I think some did and some didn't.

(04-30-2013 08:10 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  How should slavery have retarded the progress of the South? I thought the opposite was the case due to agriculture as the basic (or even single?) source of revenue and wealth.
And - this might be a rather dumb question - I also thought that, even if the economic contest was one reason for abolitionism, most of the abolitionists were more or less in favour not only of the slaves' freedom but also of real equality. If I read through this thread I feel I was wrong, so: to what extend did the abolitionists intend to achieve equal rights for the blacks? Or better: about how many of them did so?