Southern
Complaints
(a) The Imperial North Vicksburg Whig January 18 1860
By mere supineness, the people of the South
have permitted the Yankees to monopolize the carrying trade, with its immense profits.
We have yielded them the manufacturing business, in all its departments,
without an effort, until recently, to become manufacturers ourselves. We have
acquiesced in the claims of the North to do all the importing, and most of the
exporting business, for the whole Union. Thus, the North has been aggrandized,
in a most astonishing degree, at the expense of the South. It is no wonder that
their villages have grown into magnificent cities. It is not strange that they
have “merchant princes”, dwelling in gorgeous palaces and reveling on luxuries
transcending the luxurious appliances of the East! How could it be otherwise?
New York city, like a mighty queen of commerce, sits
proudly upon her island throne, sparkling in jewels and waving an undisputed
commercial scepter over the South. By ways of her railways and navigable
streams, she sends out her long arms to the extreme South; and, with avidity
rarely equaled, grasps out gains and transfers them to herself – taxing us at
every step – and depleting as extensively as possible without actually
destroying us.
(b) The Colonial South Hinton R. Helper “The Impending Crisis
of the South”
It is a fact well known to every intelligent
Southerner that we are compelled to go to the North for almost every article of
utility and adornment, from matches, shoe-pegs and paintings up to cotton
mills, steamships and statuary; … that … the North becomes, in one way or
another, the proprietor and dispenser of all our floating wealth, and that we
are dependent on the Northern capitalists for the means necessary to build our
railroads, canals and other public improvements … and that nearly all the
profits arising from the exchange of commodities, from insurance and shipping
offices, and from the thousand and one industrial pursuits of the country,
accrue to the North …..
The North is the Mecca of our merchants, and
to it they must and do make two pilgrimages per annum – one in the spring and
one in the fall. All our commercial, mechanical, manufactural, and literary
supplies come form there. We want Bibles, brooms,
buckets and books, we go to the North; we want toys, primers, school books,
fashionable apparel, machinery, medicines tombstones, and a thousand other
things, and we go to the North for them all. Instead of keeping our money in
circulation at home, by patronizing our own mechanics, manufacturers, and
laborers, we send it all away to the North, and there it remains; it never
falls in our hands again.
In one way or another we are more or less
subservient to the North every day of our lives.