made it unlawful to teach slaves to read and write. In any event, small white farmers in the South
were very much at the mercy of the big plantation owners and had to go along with them." Those
who produced cotton, rice, sugar, tobacco, and slaves on a large scale were all-powerful. As one
historian has put it, There was never in America a more perfect oligarchy of businessmen.' Slavery was not the only issue between North and South. Indeed it is possible that an attempt at secession might have been made even if the slavery issue had been resolved. The North favored high tariffs, the South low ones; the North, in consequence, backed indirect taxation, the South direct taxation. It is significant that once the war began, the North, shorn of the South, immediately introduced high tariffs with the Morrill Act of 1861, and pushed through direct federal income tax too. There were huge differences of interest over railroad strategy. Increasingly, the railroad interests of the Northeast and the Northwest came into alignment in the 1850s, and this in turn led to an alliance between Eastern manufacturers seeking high tariffs and Western farmers demanding low-cost or free lands-both linked by lines of rail. This was the basis of the power of the new Republican Party, and the South saw it as a plot-indeed, it was what finished them. Many Southerners believed deeply in their hearts that the moral indignation of the North was spurious, masking meaner economic motives. As Jefferson Davis put it,You free-soil
agitators are not interested in slavery ... not at all ... It is so that you may have an opportunity of
cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is so that you
may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an
engine of Northern aggrandisement ... you desire to weaken the political power of the Southern
states. And why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry
of the North-East states, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.'
Davis was reflecting a bitter conviction held by all thinking' men in the South: that the North, while accusing the South of exploiting the blacks, exploited the whole of the South systematically and without mercy. Their feeling was exactly the same as the resentment felt by the Third World towards the First World today. There was something inherent in a plantation economy which put it in a dependent position, with the capitalist world its master. There was, of course, no control by the state of national production and prices, of cotton or anything else. If world markets were high, profits rose, but there was then a tendency to reinvest them in increased production. If prices fell, the planters had to borrow. In either case, the South lacked liquid capital. So the planters fell into the hands of bankers, ending up dependent on New York or even the City of London.' The South lacked its own financial system, like the Third World today. When cotton made big profits, it spent them, as the Arab rulers today dissipate colossal oil revenues. And it was in a real sense milked, like the primary producers today ii Africa and Latin America, at the same time accumulating massive debts it had no hope of repaying. In effect, the South had all the disadvantages of a one-crop economy. It had only 8 percent of US manufactures. It should have put up the money to open factories, and so pro vide employment for poor whites and diversify its economy at the same time. But there was no spare capital in the South itself, and the North had no intention of building factories there and competing against itself with low-wage, low-price products. So the South saw itself as the slave of a Union dominated by Northern capital. As the Charleston Mercury put it:As long as we are tributaries,
dependent on foreign labor and skill for food, clothing and countless necessities of life, we are in
thralldom.’
The Civil War was not only the most characteristic event in American history, it was also the
most characteristic religious event because both sides were filled with moral righteousness for