The Conspiracy behind Emancipation and the end to Slavery

In my other thread I tried to address economic issues involving slavery in the United States due to the fact there are many misconceptions. But in this I will address where the misconceptions came from.

The easy answer is the "Capitalist". In general both Southern Slaveholders and Northern Capitalists were of the same mould. They both invested money in assets, they both took a profit, and they both stimulated economic growth. The differences are profound when looked at mentality of growth. The Southern Slaveholder was familiar with agriculture and with finance but not with industry. It has recently been determined there is a mental block between agrarian financiers and industrialists because the industrial investments required different understandings of market forces to operate and be successful. *SOURCE* Political Economic Development (I'll have the source more affirmed when I am at home to pull the book off the shelf).

So the diverging interests of the South and the North led to conflict, but why? The North actually was willing by-and-large to cooperate with the South to make a profit.

So what was the perceived threat?

There are two perceptions that led to war and Emancipation; the Southron's and the Northerner's elite perceptions.

To quote the "Instrumentalist Approach to Ethnic Identity":

Ethnicity becomes politicized by centering around elites who use, distort and even fabricate materials from the cultures of the groups they wish to represent in order to protect their well-being and existence or to exploit for gain.

That should be self explanatory but it needs context. Let's begin with the South which most people are familiar with their arguments that were distortive to protect their self-interests.

The Southron elite: The Planter, slaveholder, whatever you call him. Generally he brandished the ethnic group of "Blacks" as inferior, or as needing whites as managers to be successful and productive. The Southron elite supported his system by institutionalizing a muted form of racism (it was not the racism experienced by immigrants or blacks in the North, because of class and employment conflicts) which the planter used to support the institution which he relied upon for wealth.

Let's examine the origins of the conspiracy to destroy the South and emancipate the slaves:

The Northern elite: The capitalist, the industrialist, the "Industrial Barron" call him whatever you will. Generally they diverted the harsh realities of early capitalism by redirecting (and in fact many capitalists financed the Abolitionists) attention from wage-slavery (which in Europe which mostly had emancipated slavery was contending with communism and socialism as a fight against capitalism's wage-slavery) to the actual institutionalized slavery of the South. It was more than just keeping social order in a wage-slave based economy of the North but the Northern Capitalist was as concerned about the unruly fear of their employees that a slave could do their job. So why didn't slaves do their jobs? Well, they did, but they were immigrants and they were the poor and the Capitalists had become liberal socialites leading the cause of God's righteousness against evil institutions such as Slavery.

If the Capitalist were not hypocrites, instead of invading the South, they would have simply paid their employees the same equivalence of what the planter paid their Slaves, which was approximately $1.50 a day. The average wage of the lowest paid in the North, working factories or building the canals and rail-ways was $0.83 cents a day.

So what were the perceived threats that led to the conspiracy of Capitalist Northerners to destroy Southern Slavery in order to profit for themselves, but also to protect their way of life?

Well - first off what did they have to fight for?

Find out in the second post of this thread!

The Capitalist Northerner was fighting to pay his wage-slave less than he would have to pay an actual slave for the same work (in terms of supplying him with the same standards of living as of a Southern Slave) *SOURCE* The US 1860 Census shows that the Southern Slave was the longest to live, the most healthy individual in the United States. The Northern Freed Black was the quickest to die, and the most unhealthy of the major groups identified in the US Census of the times.

In order for a Capitalist to make a profit (a man who wants to make money now, and not inherit his wealth) he needs capital, provided by banks which take a cut on their loan, usually then about 6%. So already the employee producing for the Capitalist is making only 94% of his production value, just to pay the banks. The Capitalist then needs a rate of return greater than 10% to become a millionaire (equivalent of the times) in his life time. Usually 20% means you will become wealthy (not super wealthy) within 20 years of your successful investment.

Already the wage-slave is making 74% of his production value.

Add on top of this, taxation, tarrifs, competition, advertisement, and a number of other factors including price fluctuation and economic stagnation...

The wage-slave earns about a total of 30% of his production value.

This is the system the Captialist says is better.

The slave made about 90% of his production value, albeit he was paid in food, housing, clothing, amenities and comforts (such as alcohol) and health care, instead of actual currency, albeit he was a slave and had no choice in the matter anyway. During the 1840s-1860s a slave was earning 90% of what he produced. *SOURCE* Time on the Cross.

This is now understood to be an authoritative understanding of southern slavery historically.

A southern slave was paid better, and produced 34% more than his Northern counterpart.

So how does a backward system like Capitalism feel threatened?

The Southern Slave system was closed.

As a slaveholder you inherited your wealth, you did not start from scratch. A Capitalist took $5 and turned it into $500. A southern planter could never do this.

This was the division.

In order for a Capitalist to succeed he had to eliminate the ultimate competition to his unfair practices.

Slavery.

Both are unfair practices, but one was clearly more humane albeit less politically correct.

And so the Capitalist worked his war on the Southern planter.

The threat in their perception came from the westward expansion. An expansion of slavery was lost profit for the Northern capitalist, an expansion of slavery may mean that formerly emancipated states might reinstate slavery as the South was by 1850 proving that urban slavery and slaves working in factories were viable and not "rebellious" like their Northern counterparts (trying to unionize).

The South perceived a direct threat by a populous North hostile to slavery.

In effect the conspiracy is that the Capitalists sold a worse economic system to the world under the pretenses that it was better. The result against this lie was Socialism which proclaimed a person should make more of their production value than they did under Capitalism.

Slaves made 90%

Wage-slaves made 30%

The Civil War was a clash of economic systems because Southern slavery threatened NEW WEALTH.

The Capitalist in destroying slavery has in time paid his employee better, but imagine how well a slave would live today if he were making 90% of a modern production value.

He would be living the life style of a person with a $200,000 income, for the job of picking fruit.

Of course, Capitalists would never want you to know this.

This is a large post so I will bullet the main points:

1. Capitalists were "new wealth"
   
2. Southern slaveholders were a closed system compared to Capitalists
   
3. The Capitalist system while treating workers worse than slaverholders, allows anyone to become super rich
   
4. The conflict between Capitalist and Slaveholder led to the Civil War
   
5. The perceptions of threat came from employer/employee relations and how much was being given to the southern Slave
   
6. Westward expansion threatened to reverse the system the Capitalist required to make his money
   
7. The Abolitionist movement distorted slavery in its true practice to portray it as horribly inhumane
   
8. Abolitionist Terrorists in the North sold slavery as a threat to employment, a threat to humanity, against God, etc. in order to destabalize slavery
   
9. Employees (Wage-slaves) felt threatened by slavery because slavery threatened their job security
   
10. Southern Slaveholders did not understand industrial risks and so did not invest their capital into industry as much as into finance and agriculture
    
11. Racism is a result of white wage-slaves or non-owners who were threatened by immigrants and slaves that would do their jobs at a higher rate of productivity (lower cost for immigrants and higher production value for slaves)
    

What are you trying to prove. Slavery is wrong, get over it.

You left some very basic information out of your very long and tedious post. The North, who not only defeated the South in battle and freed the slaves, was developing machines that replaced human power in agriculture.

Does the term "Git your cotton pick'n hands off my gin" come to mind?

This was also part of the economics of the time where machines could do far more work than "people" for a far less cost. It's called progress or new technology.

Sorry, but you just can't have them back....

When did the agricultural industry become labor-free? This is news to me? You know that hundreds of thousands if not millions of immigrants work the fields in California? Millions of people in America work farms.

There is always a need for slavery; just choose your master, Capitalism? Slaveholders? What's the difference?

Instead now we pay a farm hand much much less than he was paid comparatively during Slavery. With machines a Slave would have made so much more from his work.

It's been proven already that slavery was becomming more profitable in the 1850s, and was not moribund at all.