Neil Howe: 'Civil War Is More Likely Than People Think'

[pbrower2a]

(02-18-2019, 12:47 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: It seems like the Mountain South and the Deep South differ only in the number of African Americans there. But in the Deep South the African Americans remain repressed and out of power, so politically there's little difference.

The Mountain South was less suited to plantation-based slavery because of its more-rugged terrain and a slightly-cooler climate. Such a state as Tennessee was rifted before the Civil War between the cotton-growing west (with plantation slavery) and the east, whose agriculture was more based upon subsistence farming, typically grains. In a referendum on secession of Tennessee, the referendum was strongly for secession in the planter-dominated west and hostile to secession in the east.

Eastern Tennessee, home of the Mountain folks largely of Scots-Irish origin (as is most of Appalachia south of the New York-Pennsylvania line)  was never friendly to the planters dominating state politics. and they were not going to die to defend slavery.

The paucity of African-Americans indicates (1) that the planters did not command the Mountain South because their way of life was not viable there, and (2) the African-American slaves could never really fit in in the Mountain South. It was pro-Union and anti-slavery because it was hostile to Planter power and domination. It was not friendly to slaves that it saw as part of the problem of Planter domination of state politics.

During the Great Migration, blacks went from the Plantation South to the industrial cities of the North. They found little opportunity in the Mountain South, as was so for many whites in the region. The key to economic success for many from the Mountain South, to the same industrial plants Up North, was to keep driving north on US 19 to Pittsburgh; 21 to Canton, Akron, or Cleveland; 23 to Toledo (and perhaps Detroit via 25), 25 to Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo, or Detroit; 27 to Fort Wayne or Lansing;  31 to Louisville, Indianapolis, or South Bend; maybe 52 (a diagonal route) leading eventually with 41 to Chicago after Cincinnati or Indianapolis.