Hello dear readers! The Civil War was the worst of the american homeland, with one-tenth of the population directly involved in the war, with millions of casualties on both sides and 750,000 dead. At the same time, this is also the founding war of the modern United States, after which the United States completely completed national unification and formed a unified domestic market, laying the foundation for the rise of the 20th century as a superpower. Despite the complex political, economic and cultural background of the Civil War, the slave issue has always been the most critical fuse or entry point. Many people say that the standard of living of black slaves in the south before the war was very high, but after the war it was not as good as before the war, for this question, the answer is not simple yes or no, let's analyze it for you.
Stamps reflecting the Civil War
The standard of living can be divided into material and spiritual, material is mainly food, clothing, shelter, living, the most important thing is to eat.
First, let's analyze how humans preserved food before the invention of cold chain technology during the Second Industrial Revolution.
As we all know, any fresh food, whether it is grain or vegetables, meat has a certain storage time, grain storage is relatively easy, vegetable meat is more difficult, and there was not much preservation at that time. For example, hulled rice and wheat, after being fully dried and reducing the moisture content to less than 12%, are piled up in closed granaries for storage, and at room temperature, if air circulation, moisture and sunlight can be isolated as much as possible, they can be stored for 3-5 years.
Meat, livestock slaughter, the untreated raw meat at room temperature preservation, if it is in the summer, then storage day will occur deterioration phenomenon, winter time is slightly longer, probably can be stored for 2-3 days. It can only be preserved for about 2 days in spring and autumn. Offal, on the other hand, has a shorter preservation time, only about half of the meat, and generally begins to decay in 4-5 hours in the summer.
As for vegetables and fruits, according to different types, the storage time at room temperature varies widely, and the summer leafy vegetables can generally only be stored for three days, watermelons can only be stored for four days, and apples, potatoes, onions, etc. can be stored for dozens of days.
Among them, we can already find that most of the fresh food can not be stored for a long time, and it cannot be transported for a long time, and the natural losses that occur in storage and transportation are very amazing.
Of course, at that time, there were already ways to handle food, and the storage time was as long as possible. One is the traditional way, the meat is dried or pickled, salt is the refrigerator of the ancients, and the sailors on modern European and American warships will even eat zombie salted beef that has a history of more than a hundred years and is insect repellent; The other is the early primitive canned food, which first appeared in the early 19th century during the Napoleonic Wars and became an important military munition before the Civil War, made of tin or cast iron. However, whether it is pickled or canned, at that time, industrialization was just beginning, and food processing could only be made by hand, and the processing capacity and huge food production capacity were a dime a dozen.
Table salt is the refrigerator of ancient times
This has also led to a large amount of food, especially meat can not be transported and sold for a long time, can not be processed food, if you do not want him to rot in vain, it can only be sold cheaply on the spot, consumption, this time benefiting the origin of the residents, including black slaves. In addition to the reasons for the superior natural environment and the abundance of food, the value of the black slaves at that time also allowed the slave owners to improve the living conditions of the black slaves as much as possible.
On 25 March 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which outlawed slave trafficking in the British Empire and imposed a fine of £100 per slave on British slave ships. In the same month, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson signed a decree abolishing the slave trade, and European countries enacted laws to abolish slavery. After this, the slave trade from Africa to the Americas was interrupted, and the black slaves in the American South had to reproduce on their own, and the number increased slowly, while the price of black slaves soared. In the 17th century, a black slave sold for less than ten dollars, and in the middle of the 19th century, a healthy black slave sold for as much as $1200-1500, when the dollar was still in the gold standard, which was very staggering, and the per capita GDP of the United States at that time was only more than one hundred dollars.
Modern slave ships
On the eve of the Civil War, an adult black slave in the south consumed as much as 179 pounds (81 kilograms) of animal protein per year, not only more than a feudal dynasty like the Qing Dynasty, but even more than most European countries.
But most of the animal protein here was pork or animal offal, and beef was also the most expensive meat at the time, and it was rarely eaten by black slaves. Black slaves eat well compared to other regions, and in the south, there is already a clear discrimination against black slaves in terms of diet. Until now, some traditional dishes in the Southern United States, such as pork ribs, offal chowder bibimbap, pork head cheese, boiled pork intestines and other original origins are also common foods for black slaves on plantations.
Pork ribs
Precisely because the overall standard of living in the United States before the war was relatively high, the propaganda of the abolitionists in the north before the war focused on the immorality of the black slave system, which the abolitionists believed was immoral; They believed that the legitimization of slavery was intolerable in a state established on the creed of "all are born equal." Most of the miserable lives of black slaves focused on mental oppression, separation of wives and children, and wanton insults, rather than lack of food and clothing. Although some domestic black slaves were highly valued by their masters, and even played the role of housekeepers and secretaries, they could not change the situation of the vast majority of plantation black slaves without freedom and dignity. Plantation owners treat black slaves like animals, arbitrarily marry and give birth to small black slaves, and arbitrarily break up, sell and reorganize black slave families, causing countless human tragedies.
Black Slave Auction
If before the Civil War, due to abundant products and backward food preservation methods in the context of the times, a large amount of food could only be consumed cheaply on the spot, so that the dietary level of the United States, including black slaves, was higher than that of most people in most parts of the world at that time, then was this also the case after the war?
By the late nineteenth century, the invention of a key technology had changed the inability of fresh food to be trafficked over long distances, greatly extending the shelf life of food: refrigerated ships. The world's first refrigerated ship to be put into official use was the British Straslevin, which, after being completed in 1879, traveled from Sydney Harbour in Australia with 40 tons of beef and mutton to the Port of London, a journey of tens of thousands of nautical miles, which lasted several months, and when it reached the end, the beef and mutton were still frozen into pieces of hard meat ice, and did not deteriorate at all.
Early refrigerated ships
The big impact of this key technology approach is the rapid marketization of agriculture and animal husbandry, where a North American farmer, rancher, and slaughterhouse owner can sell their own food to any high-margin region at will, including overseas markets and domestic markets. Chicago, as an inland city along the river, even became one of the largest ports in the United States at one point. Located in the Great Lakes Region, guarding the transportation hub of the east and west, rail, river, the port of Chicago can be directly connected to Europe by the St. Lawrence Inland Waterway, and can also be transported by barge to the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River, thus developing into the largest grain, meat processing and distribution center in the United States.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States had become the world's first industrial country, but until world war I, the United States' dependence on foreign trade had been very low, remaining between 12% and 14.1% for a long time, with a steady stream of immigration, rapid domestic population growth, and domestic consumption as the biggest engine of economic growth. The living standards of the people at the bottom fell sharply in the past decade after the war, but with urbanization and industrialization, the living standards have shown a rapid upward trend. By 1890, the urbanization rate in the United States had reached about 70 percent, and although the overall progress was continuous, the gap between the rich and the poor was extremely serious, on the one hand, a small number of billionaires who indulged in luxury, and on the other hand, millions of toiling people struggling on the hunger line.
At the beginning, I said that the black slave problem was only a fuse or opportunity of the Civil War, and the deep causes were not directly related to the black slaves. On the one hand, there were loopholes in the early U.S. Constitution, where state and federal rights were not clarified, and the prevailing notion at the time, especially in the South, was that a federal citizen should first be loyal to the state in which it was located. On the other hand, there is the conflict between the two economic models of the North and the South.
Before the Civil War, the U.S. economy was dominated by agriculture, with 84 percent of the country's population in the countryside and 90 percent of the country's manufacturing in the north. Although the total value of manufacturing increased by about ten times between 1810 and 1860, the added value of manufacturing in 1860 was still significantly less than the output value of corn, wheat, pasture, cotton and other crops. As the most important light industry sector at the time of the first industrial revolution, the United States, in order to develop textile technology, once went to The United Kingdom to recruit technicians to the United States, including Samuel Slater, who was later known as the father of American manufacturing. At the same time, in order to avoid the impact of Britain on its own textile industry and other industrial industries, the long-term implementation of the high tariff policy, the tariff decree of 1828 made the average tariff rate of far more than 50%, so it was called "abominable tariff" by southern planters.
Cotton fields
In 1793, the American Whiteney invented a machine that could quickly remove cottonseeds, the "cotton ginning machine", and one operator produced more cotton in a few hours than the cotton produced by a group of people in a day, making black slave labor profitable. At the end of the 18th century, a black slave could generate a profit of $300 a year, and with the improvement of technology, by the eve of the Civil War, the profit was as high as more than $1,000. By the 1850s, cotton production had occupied a vital role in the economic life of the South, with an annual cotton production of nearly 3 million bales, compared with 500,000 bales 30 years earlier, and by 1860 it had reached about 5 million bales, accounting for more than half of the country's exports.
The industrial development routes of the north and the south are completely opposite, and the core industries in the south are cotton planting and export, and the industry is very weak; The North began to industrialize early, while at the same time in charge of the federal financial power and the main export administration and ports. The south exports cotton, the need for the import of machinery and consumer goods, and in order to import things that can be bought cheaply, the export is competitive, in addition to the need for blacks to continue to be slaves, it must also have low tariffs, preferably zero tariffs, and the protective tariffs implemented by the north invisibly increase the price of imported products. What is even more intolerable to the South is that all tariffs are federal taxes, and before the outbreak of the Civil War, 80% of the revenue of the US federal government came from tariffs. This was magnified by the rising volume of cotton exports, and in the eyes of many Southerners, the federal government was fed by its own taxes, and it became the object of exploitation in the North.
In the final analysis, the Civil War was a question of which way the United States wanted to go, whether it was to engage in plantation agriculture and become a british raw material supply land and vassal, or to develop the road of industry and commerce to establish a country, and to become an independent and autonomous country. To be fair, according to the U.S. Constitution and national philosophy at that time, the law was not prohibited, there was no unconstitutional behavior in the South to break out of the Union, and many Southerners at that time also believed that they inherited the free spirit of the Founding Fathers. But history has given the answer, and the North has maintained national unity and abolished the black slavery system, which not only stands on the moral high ground, but also represents the process of the development of the productive forces.