Southern History Series: Southern Decolonization

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

After the War Between the States, the South became an internal resource colony of the victorious East and was mired in poverty for the next 75 years. The second colonial era only came to an end as a result of federal spending during the mobilization for the Second World War.

The following excerpt comes from Numan V. Bartley’s book The New South, 1945-1980: The Story of the South’s Modernization:

“Even if significant numbers of businessmen, managers, professionals, and skilled workers reached a standard of living that did not marketdly from that of persons in the same occupations elsewhere in the nation, the South ranked among the poorest regions in the Western world.”

God bless, Abraham Lincoln!

After killing 1 out of every 4 White Southern men between the ages of 20 and 45, he made the South one of the poorest places in the Western world for generations!

Progressive Liberals:

“Reactionary American whites, as always, won’t give up their power unless it’s taken from them….Liberals need to be as Lincolnesque as possible in this endeavor, but we also need to be Lincolnesque in our commitment to winning America’s latest race war.” https://t.co/OHl2e9E8a2 pic.twitter.com/HoWPlkYPG3

— Kevin Drum (@kdrum) July 16, 2019

Conservative Liberals:

I bow to nobody in my admiration of Abe Lincoln, but he really doesn’t get enough criticism for picking Andrew Johnson as his Vice President *and then* ignoring his Cabinet’s advice not to go to the theater.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) July 16, 2019

Congrats on your new Lincoln book, @RichLowry. Lincoln understood the morality of economic freedom, which honors the dignity of all.

— Paul Ryan (@PRyan) June 11, 2013

“As the cause is new, so we must think anew & act anew.” Abraham Lincoln

21st century America needs a conservatism that isn’t just about the size of govt & GDP. But also about conserving & promoting family,community,faith,love of country & dignified work https://t.co/VTOSYIDFVN

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 4, 2019

What was the result of “the morality of economic freedom” that Abraham Lincoln understood in the South? We’ve already seen how it led to pellagra.

Bartley continues:

“The Roosevelt administration’s Report on Economic Conditions of the South identified the central problem as the region’s position as an economic colony of the Northeast. The South produced low-cost raw materials for northern industry while providing a market, albeit a limited one, for high-value manufactured goods. Absentee ownership of southern transportation and industry drained profits away from the region and produced the discriminatory freight rates and basing-point policies that limited southern development. Outside control of capital and credit contributed to high interest rates and further retarded progress. The report also traced the South’s difficulties to its staple-crop economy and its concentrated land ownership – both closely associated with plantation agriculture – but saw those factors as secondary to the dependence that economic colonialism inflicted.

The report joined an expanding body of research that ascribed the region’s economic woes to outside forces. “The effect is to keep the South poor,” one study reported in 1940, “and to put the people at the mercy of an impersonal outside economic power.” Economically as well as socially and politically, the southern scene was dismal, any number of critics reported, and absentee domination sharply circumscribed the potential for improvement.”

The system should sound familiar.

It was the same relationship that Ireland and India had with Britain.

Southern history can be neatly divided into two periods: the traditional South from the beginning in 1607 in Jamestown through the War Between the States and the New South down until 1940. The origins of the modern South which is our world trace back to the Second World War:

“To-day as for years past,” a liberal southern critic of the status quo stated in 1940, “the South remains a single-crop, plantation economy,” and indeed the great cotton belt that stretched through ten states from North Carolina to Texas was one of the world’s most specialized agricultural zones. Two-thirds of the southern population lived on the land or in hamlets of fewer than 2,500, and well over one-third of the work force and an even higher proportion of the population drew their livelihoods from agriculture. As Leonard Reissman has observed, “Prior to 1940 the South could fairly be described, with one or two states excepted, as a predominantly rural region here and there dotted with cities.”