No Sinking Down into Acknowledged Inferiority!
From: bernhard1848@att.net
The centralization of financial and industrial capitalism in the Northeast meant that the future of the American South would be as an agricultural colony, and politically inferior one at that. This trend was seen in 1827 by Robert Turnbull (below), and many others who viewed continued union with the North as troublesome.
Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net
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No Sinking Down into Acknowledged Inferiority!
“Southern interference with the emergence of modern America had, in fact, constituted the basic reason for Northern complaint. It was not just opposition to specific measures, such as tariffs, homesteads, and internal improvements, but rather the continued insistence on the locality in an age when increasing interdependence and improved communication demanded a consolidated nationalism: it was the emphasis on agricultural values and the refusal of Southerners to change their minds as the physical world in more than half the nation altered. These were the things that mattered most.
The mass production of goods, the widening of credit, the application of steam to transportation, and the greater mobility of ideas, persons, and things were all out of keeping with a restricted central government, with purely local financial agents, and with a leisurely way of life. Constitutional regulations and governmental agents made for a handful of agriculturists and traders in colonial days did not necessarily meet the requirements of thirty millions of people emerging into finance-industrial capitalism and spreading over half a vast continent. The enslavement of human beings did not jibe with the labor requirements of free enterprise or the ethical standards of a competitive society. A “backward” minority had no right to restrain a progressive majority. Men who were already economically-dependent had no right to political dominance.
The subjugation of the rural-agricultural South was, therefore, a foregone conclusion long before the indignation against Negro slavery, however real it may have been, provided the moral force which produced an irrepressible conflict. Regions which supply raw materials and markets seem inevitably to be cast for the role of backward dependents in the modern industrial age. Southerners had early realized this fact and their changing status in national life. Their complaints against a growing dependence were as bitter as were those of the North against restraint.
Robert J. Turnbull had declared in 1827 that “internal improvements are drawing off our resources to the North, and tariffs are driving us rapidly into Colonial vassalage.” He was convinced that the interest of the North and West was “that the government should become more and more National”; while that of the South was “that it should continue Federal.” The South would, therefore, have to wage a constant fight for the “preservation” of the Constitution against the “usurpation” of northern “manufacturers.”
John C. Calhoun had seen the Wilmot Proviso as “a scheme, which aims to monopolize the powers of this Government and to obtain sole possession of its territories.” This meant inequality, and rather than yield one inch of Southern equality he would “meet any extremity upon earth.” “What! Acknowledged inferiority!” he cried. “The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledged inferiority!”
The Pursuit of Southern History, Edited by George Brown Tindall, Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association, 1935-1963, LSU Press, Baton Rouge, 1964, page 273.
(Address delivered November 9, 1951, Avery O. Craven, “The Price of Union")
