Confederate Independence and the Lure of Profit
From: bernhard1848@att.net
The American Confederacy could have won foreign recognition and independence by taking proffered loans from European capitalists – in the very same manner that American capitalists who extended loans to England and France in the early years of World War One would clamor for eventual US intervention to save their investments.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Confederate Independence and the Lure of Profit:
“When the South went in [to the war], she had no government but had to form one. It had not a soldier but had to call out an army, clothe, arm, and discipline it. It had no treasury and not a dollar to put in it. It was without factories to make munitions or arms and without adequate facilities to clothe or feed the troops, for we had relied for years upon the North for manufactured articles and upon the northwest for meat and corn and flour.
[The] Confederate Government….persistently refused, in the summer of 1861, to negotiate a loan of six hundred millions of dollars which was tendered by capitalists in Europe, and President Davis gave positive instructions that in no event should more than $15,000,000 be accepted.
If the loan had been taken, of the magnitude offered, the Confederacy would early have been supplied with ammunition, arms, provisions, and a navy, and the blockade later, to which we owed our defeat, would have been impossible. It is quite clear that it was the failure of Confederate officials to take this step of preparedness, even at that late date, which rendered vain the valor of our troops and the genius of our generals.
Indeed, aside from the preparedness which we could even then had made, the European governments would have intervened, if necessary, to have preserved the investment of their capitalists in the $600,000,000 loan which would have been taken if secured on cotton.”
(Raising, Organizing, and Equipment of North Carolina Troops During the Civil War, Walter Clark, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Session of the State Literary and Historical Association, Edwards & Broughton, 1918, pp. 104-105)
The American Confederacy could have won foreign recognition and independence by taking proffered loans from European capitalists – in the very same manner that American capitalists who extended loans to England and France in the early years of World War One would clamor for eventual US intervention to save their investments.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Confederate Independence and the Lure of Profit:
“When the South went in [to the war], she had no government but had to form one. It had not a soldier but had to call out an army, clothe, arm, and discipline it. It had no treasury and not a dollar to put in it. It was without factories to make munitions or arms and without adequate facilities to clothe or feed the troops, for we had relied for years upon the North for manufactured articles and upon the northwest for meat and corn and flour.
[The] Confederate Government….persistently refused, in the summer of 1861, to negotiate a loan of six hundred millions of dollars which was tendered by capitalists in Europe, and President Davis gave positive instructions that in no event should more than $15,000,000 be accepted.
If the loan had been taken, of the magnitude offered, the Confederacy would early have been supplied with ammunition, arms, provisions, and a navy, and the blockade later, to which we owed our defeat, would have been impossible. It is quite clear that it was the failure of Confederate officials to take this step of preparedness, even at that late date, which rendered vain the valor of our troops and the genius of our generals.
Indeed, aside from the preparedness which we could even then had made, the European governments would have intervened, if necessary, to have preserved the investment of their capitalists in the $600,000,000 loan which would have been taken if secured on cotton.”
(Raising, Organizing, and Equipment of North Carolina Troops During the Civil War, Walter Clark, Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Session of the State Literary and Historical Association, Edwards & Broughton, 1918, pp. 104-105)
posted by PoP The Southern American at
1:43 AM
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