Democrats … Then and Now

My current writing project is Maelstrom, a political novel about the Civil War.  To a great extent, Maelstrom is a sequel to Tempest at Dawn, my novelization about the Constitutional Convention. The Civil War tested the tensile strength of the Framers work. Although both books stand alone, they share style and structure and many of the Framers descendants make brief appearances.

I’m reading stacks of books to get alternative perspectives on the players and events. One is The Impending Crisis in The South written in 1857 by Hinton Rowan Helper. Nothing like getting the skinny from someone who actually lived in the period.

Helper begins his book with startling statistics. He compares the economies of slave and non-slave states at the time of the Framing of the Constitution to just prior to the Civil War. Here are some of his statistics comparing New York and Virginia.

 

                                                                New York                             Virginia

1790 Population                                        340,120                              748,308

1850 population                                     3,097,661                            1,421,661

1791 Exports                                       $2,505,465                           $3,130,865

1852 Exports                                      $87,484456                           $2,724,657

He didn’t have 1790 numbers for some economic indicators but provided contemporaneous comparisons for imports, manufacturing, real and personal property, and farms.

 

                                                                New York                        Virginia

1853 Imports                                     $178,270,999                      $399,004                                             

1850 Manufacturing                          $237,597,249                      $29,705,387

1850 Property (Incl. slaves)           $1,080,309,216                      $391,646,438

1850 Farms                                       $576,631,568                      $223,423,315

Helper then compares Massachusetts versus North Carolina and Pennsylvania versus South Carolina. The results are similar. North and South Carolina in the lead at the time of the Constitutional Convention and the woefully behind by mid-nineteenth century.

For the six states Helper examines, slaveholding states were far stronger in 1787 than their northern counterparts, but after sixty years, the free states explosive growth had left the South far behind. It was like the South was in a footrace wearing concrete boots. Hinton Helper, a southerner, identifies that concrete as slavery.

The political implications are interesting. The South was controlled by a single party, and they retained power by keeping the general populous uneducated, poor, and dependent. Upward mobility? Almost unknown. Income disparity was of feudal dimensions, social norms insisted on conformity, and politicians and the press constantly demonized the North while telling the lower classes that they lived in a morally superior society.

Here’s a thought; that same political party wields ironclad control over our largest cities with income disparity, poor education, and dependency the order of the day. Sure seems like that party is using the same strategy to retain full and absolute power.