The Great Plantation: The Civil War Was Caused By Capitalism

Editor’s Note: The photo above isn’t recent. It comes from a Confederate Memorial Day event we attended in St. Louis in 2015. Also, I will continue to update this article throughout the day.

I get so tired of being pigeon holed with labels.

The truth is that I have a wide variety of interests. I write a lot about current affairs and politics on this blog, but the truth is that half the time I am spending my days studying history, philosophy, religion and economics. I’ve also been doing lots of low-carb dieting, weight lifting and fasting. This is why I gradually became less and less active writing on this blog in 2018.

Ever since my college days when I became interested in Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, my whole approach to writing and analyzing things has been to look at it through a historical lens and trace the development. This is how I look at what we have come to “morality” in the 21st century. It is the fundamental reason why I don’t believe in this “morality” too.

Go take a look at Woke Twitter.

Those people spend all their time getting offended, staying mad and witch hunting heretics over their very serious “moral” values. These values are essentially a laundry list of -isms and -phobias that constitute the confession of political correctness.

Where does this shit come from? What are the roots of it? If you were, say, a Renaissance humanist and wanted to trace it back to the sources (Ad fontes), what would you find? You would find that this moral creed as we know it today DID NOT EXIST a century ago. Instead, it was created in the 20th century and was spoonfed to the Boomer generation in college and the mass media. Many of them on the other side of the political aisle got their version of Christianity the same way.

Something big happened in the 20th century that changed the world in a major way. I would argue that it was the rise of the mass media and its ability to reprogram our culture. I’ve thought a great deal about this stuff because I am such a Jack of all trades.

Imagine the world without Boomers.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this to be insulting. I deeply love my parents. All I am saying is that there were no Boomers in the past. The world that the Boomers grew up in and absorbed didn’t exist. As a result, there were no Boomers arguing about x number of dumb things.

The nature of the morality and religion of the Boomers is one of the biggest differences. Abraham Lincoln never reached across his desk and whispered into the ear of Jefferson Davis, “I think you might be a racist and a xenophobe, Jeff.” Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both “racists” and “white supremacists.” Their disagreement was mainly over the rights and liberties of negroes and the form of capitalism the United States should pursue in the 19th century.

Abraham Lincoln and the Union fought for Free Society and wage slavery. Jefferson Davis and the Confederate side fought for Slave Society and chattel slavery. There really isn’t much of a substantial difference between the two except in one area. In essence, capitalism IS slavery. The difference between the boss and the master is mainly one of theory and degree.

Cultural geographers know that the cultural imprint of the Great Plantation still exists in the 21st century. 246 years of Slave Society isn’t so easily shrugged off.

Dixie was a Slave Society. It still had a capitalist economy, but with a Greco-Roman and Medieval twist. Yankeedom was a Free Society. It also had a capitalist economy, but with a modern British twist. The Southerners were fond of Aristotle, Cicero, Sir Walter Scott, etc.

Where did the Founding Fathers of Southern civilization come from? We shouldn’t confuse them with the Founding Fathers of the United States. That only happened 169 years later.

The founding stock of the lowland South largely came from the West Country of England and metropolitan London in the 17th century. The Scots-Irish later came from the north of England, Scotland and Ulster and settled the backcountry in the 18th century.

In a curious twist to this story, however, we have largely forgotten that a huge number of English settlers poured into the British West Indies in the 17th century where there was a lot of cultural crossover with Dutch and Portuguese Brazil. The plantation complex was imported to Barbados from Brazil. It spread from Barbados through the British West Indies. It also spread from there to South Carolina and with lightning speed west to Texas creating the Deep South.

The plantation took a different route in the Upper South. The first plantations in the British Empire were in Ireland. Northern Ireland was a plantation of the English nation. The plantation was already a familiar way of organizing production when it was brought to Virginia. In the 17th century, Virginia was settled by indentured servants and slaves who worked on the emerging plantation complex in Tidewater. It spread across Virginia from Chesapeake Bay to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains where Thomas Jefferson lived on his plantation near Charlottesville!

Unlike in the Deep South, the plantation complex had a more difficult time spreading west due to the Appalachian Mountains. There is no such barrier in the Deep South which is dominated by the Gulf Coastal Plain and has a more sub-tropical climate. The Virginians hopped across the Applachians though and brought their plantations through the Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas. They also later went to Texas.

I could expand on the reasons for this all day. I’ve lately shifted my research from understanding the South and the Caribbean to understanding Britain and Western Europe in the Early Modern Era. It will suffice to say for now that the South is really one big plantation. What is the White House in Washington but the Big House that was built for the Founding Fathers?