Southern Wealth and Northern Profits (review) (1966)

274CIVIL WAR HISTORY Southern Wealth and Northern Profits. By Thomas P. Kettell. Edited by Fletcher M. Green. (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1966. Pp. xxv, 181. $5.95. ) Thomas P. Kettell was bom in Boston, the son of a New England merchant , whose occupation he followed briefly until 1837 when he settled in New York and began a distinguished career as a writer on economic and commercial subjects. This book, which became his best known work, first appeared in 1860 and immediately stamped him with a strong pro-southem bias. With an array of impressive if sometimes inaccurate figures he showed that the North took out of the South an annual profit of $232,500,000. While he called southerners "suckers" for submitting to such economic vassalage , he was even more pronounced in condemning the folly of northern antislavery agitators who threatened to destroy an important segment of northern business. He seemed to be the spokesman of the New York-centered commercial interests which had long and profitable economic ties with the Souths leading social and planting interests. Kettell interpreted the twenty-year continuation of the foreign slave trade by the framers of the Constitution as a concession to the New England interests who owned the shipping and enjoyed great profits from the slave traffic. He estimated that $40,000,000 was paid by the South in annual tribute to northern shippers alone. He included in his indictment of northern commercial chicanery the federal bounties paid to New England fisheries, customs duties, profits to northern maufacturers on goods sold in the South, commissions paid to factors and brokers, money spent by southern travelers who patronized northern resorts, and even money sent north by Yankee school teachers employed in the South. He described the planter's relationship to the factor and to eastern sources of capital as disastrous to the southerner. This debtor-creditor relationship depressed the price of cotton below its true value. Thus the marketing of cotton was somewhat like a pawn-broker's sale of a watch which had been pledged for a debt. Neither brought anything like its real value even in prosperous times. "In return for these special advantages," he concluded, "all the South has claimed is the Constitutional protection of her property under the national flag, and that has been denied." He charged that the antislavery agitation was carried on by "a few unscrupulous politicians, clerical agitators, and reprobate parsons" who insist upon manufacturing morality as well as shoes. He predicted that such activity would reduce Massachusetts to an agricultural state whose "summer crop is granite and her winter crop is ice." It is significant that he made no attempt to meet the moral arguments of the abolitionists, or to apologize for slavery. On the other hand, his description of northern free Negroes and their sad plight was an echo of the aggressively proslavery agitators in the South during the 1850's. His findings gave southern politicians and journalists an effective argument with which to unify their followers against the charges of northern aggression. Robert Barnwell Rhett proclaimed that the South was the best colony that any people ever possessed. BOOK REVIEWS275 While Kettell's book, judged by more than a century of hindsight, does not represent an accurate view of the economics of slavery and of intersectional economic relationships, it is still significant for the role it played in the sectional controversy. Of enduring value is a comprehensive description in Chapter II of developments in the early cotton textile industry. Professor Green's introduction, bibliography, and index will increase the volume 's usefulness to scholars. The introductory sketch of Kettell's life takes note of the high regard held for his writings in commercial centers here and abroad and of the influence which these exercised. The zenith of Kettell's career passed with the secession of the South. His loyal support of the Union after that event did not restore to him his former position of eminence as a writer on economic matters. Removing to San Francisco after the war, he failed to re-establish himself as a trade publisher. He became se forgotten that the place, date, and circumstances of his death...