Have class on Civil War in two hours.
So...if y'all had slaves (yes, Y'ALL), then you were rich. And praaaahbably lived in the South. Lectures have been about a week of proving this. Efficiency isn't mentioned, only profitability...in toto I guess, not relative to "free labor" (and yes I will put that in quotes). Slavery was profitable.
But then, Foner relates the Northerners who would visit the south and come back home to write and publish how backwards and stupid and ignorant and such the South was. Roads are crap, mechanical efficiency is bunk, the free white males are lazy...dun dun dun. At the same time, professor in lecture compared the wealth of the South and North, concluding that the South "had" all the wealth. Of course the suppos'ed basis of this is in the fact that they have slaves, but that's not what I'm getting at right now.
What I wanna know. Was the North not as wealthy because of the American System? State governments spent all their revenues/focused tax/tariffs on canals and roads, subsidies to manufactures/factory builders -- I suspect that the builders er investors at Lowell were not James A. Hills, and if they were, how does that possibly hold as the rule for so many other states?
If the North really did blow all their blow on public infrastructure, and the South apparently didn't (although, maybe the politics differed locally-a county along the Mississippi I guess or some other high-commercial traffic area, may have less scruples than someplace..."in the middle of nowhere")...theeeeeeeen.
I have $20. Paula has $20. I buy $15 worth of nail polish, Paula buys one 99-cent nail polish. Walking out the store, the fact that she has more moneys than I do...isn't really the point. It's truuuuuue. But not everything.
