A nation founded on tunnel vision

[struggle4progress]

Lee Ballard GUEST COLUMNIST
10:24 a.m. EDT July 17, 2015

... I didn’t switch sides in the Civil War until my missionary years, far from Georgia. Living closely with people of another race taught me that white supremacy was ridiculous. And white supremacy underpinned Jim Crow segregation of the time — and the Civil War. That switched me.

Get this picture: The South was run by men with enormous wealth in slaves and what slaves produced. Per capita wealth in the South was twice that in the North.

Now add this: For 200 years, U.S. states and almost all countries had been abolishing slavery. In 1807, the U.S. Congress banned the importation of slaves. By 1860, the U.S. South stood virtually alone.

What would a wise person, like you, have done? Time to rethink, right? Isn’t there another way to grow cotton besides slavery? But slaveholders had tunnel vision. For decades, they maneuvered to retain slavery ...

http://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/contributors/2015/07/17/nation-founded-tunnel-vision/30290605/

[Nitram]

1. Per capita wealth in the South was twice that in the North.

Why do I suspect 'per capita' does not include slaves?

[GTurck]

2. Harold Meyerson...

in The American Prospect wrote a piece entitled "How the American South Drives the Low-Wage Economy" which addresses the Southern ethos driving the Republican Party (and associated cults) and businesses. We really don't have to accept the South as a guide for our economy and our culture because the people who made the Deep South, in particular, such a hell hole for human beings, were hardly models to emulate. One of my ancestors, Samuel Smitherman, was deported to this country for stealing 10 pence of buttons along with 2 others. He became an indentured servant (short term slavery) and eventually a slave holder himself. I am not proud of this but it is what it is from the past. He was illiterate as were most of his children although they were fairly well off. Yet they aped what they thought was the lifestyle and mores of the Virginia planter. Copying anything but especially those things is always a problem and they behaved as most Nouveau Riche do and copied very badly. Slavery is never acceptable but those like Smitherman are who the South wants to emulate today. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, and others were slave owners but it bothered their conscious. There is no evidence that Deep South "elites" were much bothered by the peculiar instituion then or shoddy and damaging governance now.