How the North Strangled the South after The War

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There was no great relief efforts by the North comparable to those made by the U.S. after WWII, even though more than a million persons faced starvation in the South during the years following the war and some DID starve. Only a pittance of aid came from the North. The Government in Washington created a Freedmen's Bureau, which got $4 in taxes on cotton for each $1 it gave in relief. Funds from private charities were pathetically small in comparison to what was needed..."

"U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."

"Between 1868 and 1874 the carpetbaggers managed to build up the state debts in the South by $101,232,000.....Mississippi's tax rates for example, were 14 times higher at the end than the beginning.

"At that time (decades following civil war), the South was trying to educate a third of the nation's children in a dual school system, but it only had a sixth of the nation's school revenues."

"Northern capitalists took command of many Southern resources. A cottonseed-oil firm owned in the North controlled 88% of the production of that product. the entire supply of American bauxite, found in four Southern States, went to ONE Northern company. Control of 80% of America's sulphur was picked up by another firm....

Control of the major Southern railroads, the Alabama coal and iron industries, many millions of Southern timberlands was all held by Northern interests. Only the cotton-textile and tobacco industries, among major enterprises, remained principally under Southern control..."

Southern shippers had to pay higher freight rates than did shippers in the Northeast for sending the same goods equal distances (Everyone got that?) Rates were set by Southern railroads but the roads were controlled , largely, by Northern Capital. The rates held the approval of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Not until 1945 was this changed.

The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."

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