This is 100% true by the way, the Confederate government BEGGED the planters to plant food rather than cotton so they could feed the troops who were fighting to maintain the means by which the planters got rich but they all refused because cotton had a higher profit margin
Wait did emancipation happen partly because the South was too greedy to support the people fighting for their right to own slaves? That's too much
emancipation happened because the South was disenfranchised this is a good lesson for modern anti-racists: cooperation with racists got us nothing
I mean, it was one factor,but it didn’t help
"we will simply buy the food we need with our profits" *Can't export* *Dies*
And then their biggest trading partner, the British Empire, boycotted Southern cotton Like how did it get so bad that the the British Fucking Empire outpaced them on a moral issue. That's honestly pathetic
FWIW, recent studies suggest that a lot of planters tried to shift to food production, but ran into all sorts of issues from occupation of the breadbaskets, to infrastructure breakdown, to labor walking off, to tool shortages, to widespread drought, the last one something I wrote about.
This is all true, ofc two big factors were that their breadbasket regions just so happened to be the closest to the Union and fell fastest and that planters did fail to plant food the first year buying into classic “the war will be over by Xmas” mindset then were backfooted when they tried to pivot
This is apparently slightly less than 100% true, appreciate the additional info bsky.app/profile/kenn...
oh this is why the rivers in NSW Australia are drying up actually
While it would not have been easy to just switch like that, I would point out that at same time the ANV was reduced to eating boiled corncobs, a few hundred miles south Sherman’s troops were shocked by the endless largesse of local food and treats they confiscated in just a narrow belt of territory.
“What if Imperial Russia but filtered through pre-unification German kingdoms and duchies” wow great system you’ve got here, definitely not a world-historical joke