John Oliver wrote:
The Industrial Revolution. Slaves were expensive and problematic... you have to pay for all of their upkeep, keep them from running away, etc. Machines came about twenty years later that quickly killed manual cotton picking.
Except for the fact that most slaves were actually cultivating rice, tobacco, sugar cane (especially), and legumes. Cotton was the focus of much slave-related education for the simple fact that hand-picking cotton is a lot more dangerous than the aforementioned four plants. Cotton boles have sharp spikes that can easily pierce skin. When picking cotton by hand, it is nearly unavoidable to return from a day's work without shredded skin on your hands. Hence, it was extremely cruel to force these slaves to pick cotton day-in and day-out, which is why cotton got the most attention.
The reason sugar cane was so popular was for its byproduct of molasses, from which rum is distilled. In the early 1800s, it was not uncommon for adults to consume a fifth[-gallon] of rum every day. Not to say that most citizens were alcoholics -- the rum 200 years ago did not have the raw alcohol content today's rum contains. But I digress -- the demand for sugar cane, rice, tobacco, and peanuts was far greater than that of cotton.
Actually, it would have been better for the North to have not forced the issue. The Federal government was always supposed to be extremely limited, and the states handled everything else. But, with the war happening, I would have preferred that the South had won their independence. After all, that was the *exact* same fight that the Thirteen Colonies had fought 80 years previously.
The cultures are so different between the Northern states and the Southern states, that it really does make sense for this to be the case. Just as California should probably be two separate states -- what's good for Northern California isn't necessarily good for Southern California, and vice versa. The same could definitely be said for North vs. South. More and more I see the "one ring to rule them all" philosophy being grossly inadequate in today's society.
Read "No Treason" by Lysander Spooner. Interesting stuff.
I'll have to pick that one up. Cheers, -Kelsey -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
