The Good Old Days and the Lost Cause

Everyone knows what those were. We all had them, lived through them, or at least heard a lot about them from someone who did. Unfortunately, The Good Old Days for some people also happened to be the stuff of horrendous nightmares for others. This is not always true but in most cases it is. When one group of people is having a grand old time there is usually another group that is suffering for it. Unsurprisingly, the more wonderful something is for one group the more horrible it tends to be for someone else. None of this is new knowledge but it is surprising how often we don’t recognize the reality of this fact of life when it applies to selective memory.

The Good Old Days I am thinking of today are those of the Lost Cause of the South. Unless you are from the South you are probably not very familiar with this particular form of The Good Old Days. Years ago I worked with someone from Minnesota. He was constantly surprised with Southerners concern and opinions about the Civil War. Talking with him made me wonder about why that event was so different for people from the South than it was for everyone else; both in what actually happened and in how we remember it.

It isn’t hard to understand the difference once you think about it. Previous to the Civil War the South was by far the wealthiest area of the country. Cotton truly was king in those days. Every millionaire in the country had a home in Natchez, Mississippi in those days. Not some of them. Not a majority of them. All of them had a home there because that is where Cotton was sold and bought and every really wealthy American in those days had some dealings with the Cotton industry. Most wealthy southerners had a home there and a home somewhere else but they all had a home there. While this is an interesting tidbit of trivia it also says quite a bit about what the South was at that time in history.

The South was an oligarchy at that time in our history. A very small group of people completely and totally controlled a section of our nation. This section also happened to be the wealthiest section of the nation at the same time. The South had long controlled national politics with their wealth and their united front. Although the industrial north was starting to build wealth that rivaled the South it was never a body of interest that was completely united. The South was. There was no dissenting voice to the oligarchic leadership of the south as they had all the money and all the power in a way that never existed in any other section of the country.

This total control of politics, power and wealth was soon to be the downfall of the South at the beginning of 1860 but no one within this group would have believed it at the time. Cotton prices were steadily rising. The price of slaves were steadily rising. It looked like the party would go on forever for this small group of wealthy southerners. Close behind this group was a larger group of aspiring to wealth southerners. This group saw the formula first hand. Buy slaves, buy land to clear and plant and watch the money roll in. The land was cheap for a long time. It was seemingly plentiful and the slaves to work it were too.

The new Cotton growing south was a great market for the old South of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina who were foundering in the mire of a slavery system that saw the cost of taking care of slaves constantly increase while the price of tobacco, rice, and indigo constantly fluctuated. In short, slavery was a failed system in those parts of the South but the invention of the cotton gin that allowed inland cotton to become profitable changed all that instantly. The rich soil of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi was there for the taking and the old South was only too happy to sell them the slaves needed to grow Cotton there. The price of slaves skyrocketed and prosperity returned to the old South with their glut of slaves and a ready market to make a handsome profit selling them into.

Everything was wonderful for the slave owners. I think I neglected to mention who the oligarchy of the South actually were; they were the slave owners. The vast majority of their wealth was tied up in slaves. Not part of their wealth. Not a percentage of their wealth. The vast majority of their wealth was the value of the slaves they owned. The land was still relatively cheap but the slaves were increasingly valuable as Cotton became king because that is the only way anyone could afford to put forth the massive amount of manual labor necessary to clear land, plant and pick Cotton.

Let’s be clear here. Cotton was king but Slavery was queen. If you were ambitious in the South and wanted to become wealthy there was only one way to do it. Buy slaves and grow cotton. That was it. It was the ONLY way to become wealthy or to maintain your wealth. Everyone understood this in the South. While there were small pockets of the South where slave owning was frowned upon there were no pockets of the South where people were foolish enough that they didn’t understand this reality.

Everything was wonderful for the slave owners and the ambitious wannabee slave owners. It wasn’t so wonderful for the non-slave owners who tried to compete with free labor in the south but they could always be kept happy with the promise that with a little luck and some hard work, they too could own slaves and get on the never ending rise to the top. Buy slaves, clear land, grow Cotton. Cotton was king and it was a formula that always worked; at least for a few years.

Then suddenly things began to go wrong in the Good Old Days of the slave owners. Some people began to develop a conscience about whether owning slaves was a good idea. The fact that our founding documents as a nation espoused the belief that “All Men are Created Equal” suddenly seemed a stumbling block to an institution that depended on the chattel ownership of other men. Slavery had been around for thousands of years, the indignant slave owners said. It was in the Bible for Christ’s sake. Besides, it was proven fact that Africans, the black race in general, was an inferior species. The slave owners were truly angry at the inference that their “peculiar institution” was a moral wrong. After all, many of the northerners who were now saying such things had made a lot of money importing and selling them the slaves to begin with.

About the same time this happened slave owners stumbled upon another problem with the never ending get rich with Cotton theme. They didn’t understand crop rotation or modern agronomy but they did understand that Cotton yields plummeted quickly on the new lands they were clearing. The freshly cleared rich soil of much of the Deep South yielded a lot of Cotton the first year it was planted. It yielded 30% less the next year. It yielded 60% less the next year. No matter how hard they drove their slaves (and believe me they drove them hard) the newly minted planter class of the Deep South soon discovered that they needed new land each year to keep up their profit margins. There were exceptions of course, the land along the Mississippi had its topsoil replenished each spring with the annual floods but there was only so much river bottom delta land to go around and a lot of the new planters were heavily invested in large slave populations with a profit margin they saw shrinking drastically as the yields dropped.

The decrease in profit margin increased the pressure to find new land for King Cotton to expand onto. This led directly to several attempts to invade foreign nations. Southerners publicly raised money and sent hired mercenaries to invade Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. These adventures met with only partial and temporary success. As this was previous to the days of oil based fertilizers there was even a couple of small scale military/naval battles that the US government was forced to intervene in wherein the slave owners financed invasions of places where Guana was plentiful as a fertilizer needed to increase their yield. Perhaps this is where the phrase “batshit crazy” came from as Guana was actually bat excrement found in large quantities in certain types of caves where the creatures had nested for centuries.

As yields further decreased the pressure increased to find new land for King Cotton. Many suspect that ensuing War with Mexico was simply an excuse for slave owners to find new land for their industry. This is open to argument of course. It was a belief with some credence in evidence as was put forward by a certain Representative Lincoln from Illinois during his only term as a Congressman in the national legislature. When the young congressman asked to be shown the “spot where Mexico crossed into US Territory and fired upon US Soldiers”, he suggested they were conveniently posted on ground that was in all likelihood disputed territory to begin with. He was derided for some time afterwards as “Spot Lincoln” for his comments.

All of this leads up to the point where the Good Old Days for the slave owners officially came to an end. The argument over whether they could take their most valuable property (slaves) into the new territories that came from the invasion of Mexico was to be the rock that the Union finally split upon. It was a state’s right issue. The Southern states firmly believed they had the right to carry their slaves into any territory of the US. They not only believed this, they understood it was completely necessary to keep Cotton king. If they couldn’t get new land for King Cotton to expand into Queen Slavery would collapse. The value of their slaves, the most valuable thing they possessed by a large margin, depended wholly on finding new land for King Cotton.

The attempted nomination of Stephen Douglas at the Democratic convention of 1860 was enough for the slave owners to walk out of the convention. Douglas had spoken heresy when he had espoused that the new territories should be allowed to vote whether they wanted to allow slavery or not. He didn’t suggest that slaves should be abolished. He didn’t say that slavery was a bad thing. As a matter of fact, he had very publicly avowed it to be a positive good and stated that everyone knew blacks to be hopelessly and inherently inferior to whites in numerous exchanges with Abraham Lincoln just a couple of years earlier in a set of widely publicized debates. He simply said that people should be allowed to vote whether they wanted it to exist in the new territories or not. This was more than the slave owners could stand. They had outlawed the very mention of the word slavery in the halls of Congress for many years previous. The very idea that slaves might be disavowed by a popular vote in the territories was enough for them to get up and walk out of the Democratic Convention.

When they walked out of their own convention the slave owners sealed their own fate and allowed Abraham Lincoln to be elected president. If Douglas’ nomination was so terrible an insult they simply couldn’t be expected to stand for the election of a man who had suggested that slavery was a moral wrong. Lincoln’s promises that he wouldn’t interfere with slavery where it existed was beside the point. The institution would collapse on its own if it couldn’t spread and they knew it. Slavery at the time was a parasitic institution. It was profitable as long as there was a constant and rapid increase in property on which to grow King Cotton. Anything else tended to destroy the real wealth of the South; Queen Slavery.

The Good Old Days of the South died a slow and excruciatingly painful death from 1860 to 1865. King Cotton and the forceful eradication of Queen Slavery killed the South and a large segment of the young population of the North during that time. The wealthy became poor, the poor died in massive futile battles and the land itself never really recovered. A whole society turned upside down in just a few short years and everyone involved suffered mightily. The Lost Cause scenario wherein the prime blood of the South bled itself dry on countless battlefields ignores the fact that King Cotton committed suicide when the slave owners walked out of the Democratic Convention of 1860. It also ignores the fact that very basis of the Lost Cause was the belief that one race of men can wholly own another. It ignores the fact that the race they believed was as inferior as to be blessed by God to die without the freedom of their own person, their children or their very soul working for slave owners don’t see that time as the Good Old Days. They correctly see slavery and the horrors it wreaked upon everyone involved as an abomination that we should be deeply ashamed of as a nation.

The Good Old Days of the Lost Cause were not so good for a lot of people. As a matter of fact, they were a living hell for literally millions of people enslaved and kept in perpetual base slavery strictly based upon the pigment of their skin. The Lost Cause died a painful death but it was pain well deserved and infinitely earned for hundreds of years of forceful abuse of a whole race of people for profit. I think of that every time I see some ignorant redneck flying a rebel flag. It’s bad enough to be raised in a belief system that tells you that slavery is good; that God justifies it in the Bible without opening your eyes to the horror of it as many of the slave owners themselves were. It is simply inexcusable to be willfully ignorant enough to ignore history because you don’t like what actually happened in preference to fairy tales about Lost Causes and the Good Old Days.