There's a lot of historical truth to this - the founding documents of the Confederacy express as much hostility to the North's public infrastructure projects and "internal improvements" as they did support for slavery They saw it as the same issue, their "way of life" https://twitter.com/theashleyray/status/1302024072725839872 …
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Their idea of "freedom" was based on this ideal that only someone like Thomas Jefferson could truly be free Someone who really could do whatever he wanted and have no one tell him no, because he literally owned everyone who worked for him
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Like, without trying to downplay slavery or say it "wasn't about slavery", it is fucking astonishing how much the Confederacy also hated the idea of paying taxes to build roads and shit One of the attendees at the CSA constitutional convention goes OFF for pages and pages on it
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The intricate system of canals that had been built in the Northeast, considered one of the wonders of the world at the time, pissed him off SO MUCH "We could build canals if we wanted to, we have the money, but why should I have to chip in to build something I DON'T OWN"
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"If a man wants to build HIS OWN canal on HIS OWN property that's his right but demanding EVERYONE pay to build a canal WHETHER OR NOT THEY PERSONALLY BENEFIT is THEFT, it's BONDAGE, it's TYRANNY" He just keeps getting madder and redder
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Whole history of the South is like this George Washington, who was very forward thinking for a Southern aristocrat, wanted the new capital city named after him to be a metropolis, he wanted it to be the center of a new canal system to rival New York's
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As soon as he died they abandoned all work on this and Washington DC remained an embarrassing muddy cow town with the White House and Capitol awkwardly parked in it until the 20th century The Washington Monument went up 100 feet and then stayed unfinished for decades
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Jefferson Davis met with Confederate state governors repeatedly during the war to talk about building a railroad because they really needed one, it would be a massive boost to their economy and make the war effort so much easier Never got off the ground
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Slavery, it turns out, is a great way for a civilization to be lazy You, personally, don't have any reason to give a shit about improving anything because your life remains comfortable as long as you can throw human labor at the problem The workers this affects don't get a vote
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(Hence the whole thing about ancient civilizations inventing things "early" -- the Inca only using wheels as children's toys, the Greeks inventing Hero's Aelipole, a simple steam engine, as an experiment -- but not using it for anything because why bother when you have slaves)
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End of conversation
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Probably tied in with the imagined feudalism a lot of plantation owners thought they embodied, like they were tiny self-supporting fiefdoms on their own. It's why the Waverly novels were so popular in the south.
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