Paradox Studio Thread

[Slap47]

What would happened if the US government came out fully in favour of African repatriation to Liberia/Africa/Haiti? Would that have prevented the civil war or would southerner planters still sperg out over not having free labour? Would the average Southerner support it? This path would obviously be wayyyyy too controversial for Victoria 3 but it is in the HPM mod for Vic2 if the US has a fascist government.

The plantation class wanted slaves because they got power and wealth from their free labor. They were not just being racist.

 

[Snekposter]

The plantation class wanted slaves because they got power and wealth from their free labor. They were not just being racist.

In 1860 cotton exports were the equivalent of over five billion dollars and made up 60% of our total exports. Not only did the USA have a population a tenth of what it is now in 1860, but since the plantations were run in the manorial style it was almost entirely pure profit to the slaveholders. The amount of personal wealth and power the plantation owners were able to amass is simply staggering, making them feudal lords in all but name.

 

[JJLiautaud]

In 1860 cotton exports were the equivalent of over five billion dollars and made up 60% of our total exports. Not only did the USA have a population a tenth of what it is now in 1860, but since the plantations were run in the manorial style it was almost entirely pure profit to the slaveholders

Is that counting cotton cloth made in Northern factories?

 

[Snekposter]

Is that counting cotton cloth made in Northern factories?

No, that was just raw cotton headed to England and France for processing. The vast majority of the South's cotton was simply baled up and shipped overseas (according to Wikipedia, 70% of all the cotton on the global market at the time was of Southern origin) to the point a massive chunk of the UK's textile factories just simply shut down due to a lack of input sources during the early months of the Civil War when the South refused to export any to try and show the Europeans just how vital Southern cotton was to them.

Not all that much as it turns out considering Egypt exists and was the original source of European cotton as far bad as the Classical era. The South never, ever regained that lost market share, either, even after the end of the Civil War.

 

[Computer God Autism]

The amount of personal wealth and power the plantation owners were able to amass is simply staggering,

Yesn't. Cotton was a massively profitable cash crop, but the plantation owners were rarely the ones transporting and selling it themselves; this was done through intermediaries, often Northern agents who would take a generous share, and being perpetually cash-poor and dependent on credit is a recurring theme with a lot of the South's leading antebellum families. Profits tended to be immediately reinvested as well, be it in more slaves or better agricultural equipment/supplies, meaning that while the overall value of the goods the planter class possessed made them immensely rich on paper, it was rarely liquid and vulnerable to external caprice; it's why, for example, Mississippi went from the richest state per capita antebellum to the poorest state following Reconstruction.

Manorialism isn't really a good comparison either; serfs weren't property and the seigneurs weren't obliged to directly pay for their upkeep, and owing to how the distribution and subdivision of land typically worked manors were not conducive to cash crops either.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

The plantation class wanted slaves because they got power and wealth from their free labor. They were not just being racist.

I agree but I do think there would be resistance even with a generous payout. Slavery came about from greed (I will always stand by that, "hatred" makes no sense as an explanation at all, "racism" is a propaganda rationale, "greed" is the actual motivator) but it came to be a full way of life for them. Grew into an ideology and culture over time, and one that was very distinct from the Colonial world (that also had slaves, but also had White indentured servants, and wasn't overly dependent on either). It was a self-image (the paternalist planter wasn't really a thing like they claimed, but the self-image mattered), it was a culture. By the end it was morphing, at the fringe of Southern intellectual thought, into a complete rejection of the Enlightenment world, something symbolized to me by jousting competitions and George Fitzhugh.

https://harpers.org/2007/07/how-walter-scott-started-the-american-civil-war/

https://mises.org/mises-wire/george-fitzhugh-honest-socialist

More than anything I believe, from what I've read of the era, that planters genuinely LIKED having Black slaves around. Which is why i say "hatred" is absurd. They specifically preferred living in a world with Black slaves. They wouldn't have expressed it in these terms, but it was almost like they viewed the races as existing symbiotically. Or, keeping to their way of speaking, you could talk about it as them having a culture that was as much based on African domestication and chattel as the Sioux on horses or Aryans on cattle. But at the fringe of Southern thought it had gone full on past necessary evil into open pride in the institution with desires to spread it to other groups (like General Sibley aiming to enslave the Apache/Navajo in the Arizona Campaign) and promoting it as outright preferable to other cultures even on its own terms (and not just as a situational thing).

You could do graduated emancipation easily in the Colonies if there was enough money for it and things went a little better. Avoid Haiti and (very hard, technological advances come along when they do for a reason) the cotton gin for a little longer and I genuinely think you can get it banned in the Jefferson Administration. It came close in some Southern states.

By the 1850s or earlier, gradual emancipation like that is probably a lost cause.

The big symbol to me of the Southern planter class's dependence - not just material but emotional - on slavery was their manservants. Now, without the Blacks they could have used Whites, Europeans and Yankees did have servants to. All aristocracies have servants. But Southerners had a level of access to servants that even the European aristocracy could only dream of. Southern men and women were given somewhat younger boys/girls as servants as children who would initially be playmates and then later be lifetime companions. Of course there were mammies, to, that for all practical purposes were the real mother of the planter child (taking care of material needs day-to-day).

Picture a big boy with a little boy that tags along, plays games and fishes with him, grows up to be his butler, serves him until the day he dies. Picture more or less the same with a big girl that treats a Black baby like a living doll, then grows up to command her as a maid. Picture the servant being in their presence almost their entire life and sleeping at the food of the bed like a dog (not that that's what they want, but that's what's expected) or in a corner of the room/side closet to be ready to attend to them at night. Imagine the complex range of feelings the master has for the woman that breastfed him, changed his diapers and served him his earliest meals as a toddler.

I often think that this is what the Confederate leadership really fought for. The money would have been there regardless; their land and for the most part their labor force turned out to be intact even after the War (though capital was destroyed and a hostile government imposed). I think they didn't want to give up the feudal LARPing fantasy they had let themselves been caught up in, and the Blacks were the "cornerstone" of that (I'm sorry, I'm feeling very indulgent today).

If you want a good example of this mentality, the movie Class of 61 has two good scenes in. One contrasts the lordly Atlantic mentality against the ruthless/brutal Mississippi River Valley mentality by having a dinner conversation between a Virginia (?) family that plays the game, like Jefferson used to, of pretending to be le enlightened gentle lords, and then getting quietly offended/upset when their boorish Mississippi guest talks, while eating, about the best way to breed more niggers. The other is a planter finding out his manservant wishes he was free and being genuinely hurt. Which I think many of the aristocrats were, their self-delusion ran deep enough that the house slaves were just different from the field slaves, and often they found that was not the case.

The yeomen, of course, would have gladly taken a deal that got the Blacks out of the country. They didn't live around them and they felt a sort of fear born of distrust.


Edit: For the Black side of it, I sometimes picture Andrew Jackson's manservant, whose name I don't remember. Stories about him are probably tainted by that Gone With the Wind romanticizing stuff that people were doing around the time he died. Stuff he would have played into, he ran the Hermitage as a sort of museum on behalf of the Middle Tennessee aristocracy. But regardless, Uncle Whoever-the-Fuck asked to be buried by the Jacksons in the family cemetery. The Jacksons themselves, there's no fucking way they would have accepted that in their lives. Slaves were never buried in family plots. But this guy wanted it. They called them uncle and aunt, by the way, because they needed some polite form of address for older Black folks. Another one of those things that shows that most people are decent even if society leads them to mindlessly support evil. You couldn't call a Black man/woman sir/ma'am, but Whites instinctively felt it was wrong to address elderly Black people by the first name alone.

I strongly recommend reading old slave WPA interviews. You get tons of this kind of stuff about the feelings, in a non-propaganda way, around people who lived and worked around each other their whole lives.


Edit: In some way I sometimes think the masters really did love their house slaves. But they loved them like you'd love a horse or a cowdog or a barn cat. It's a love of the purest selfishness that admits no role for choice in the other party, and these people were not horses, dogs and cats and the vast majority of them could only will themselves to pretend for the role that the master forced on them. The planters cared about nobody but themselves (an attitude that also bled into how they ran their country) and I've often thought that many of them were probably deeply lonely and miserable people deep down inside in a way that the yeomen and the Black freedmen would never be.

 

[Computer God Autism]

The yeomen, of course, would have gladly taken a deal that got the Blacks out of the country. They didn't live around them and they felt a sort of fear born of distrust.

While I agree with most of this, unless if by yeomen you mean daytalers this particular part simply wasn't the case. Southern yeomen still lived around and interacted with blacks on a daily basis, especially since they were the ones making up the 1-5 slaveholder category, and the majority of support for African repatriation in the south came from the large planters who were the most emotionally attached to enlightenment thought and were the ones who could most afford the costs and hassle involved in actually supporting manumission and repatriation.

The planters cared about nobody but themselves (an attitude that also bled into how they ran their country)

Can you qualify or quantify this?

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

While I agree with most of this, unless if by yeomen you mean daytalers this particular part simply wasn't the case. Southern yeomen still lived around and interacted with blacks on a daily basis, especially since they were the ones making up the 1-5 slaveholder category, and the majority of support for African repatriation in the south came from the large planters who were the most emotionally attached to enlightenment thought and were the ones who could most afford the costs and hassle involved in actually supporting manumission and repatriation.

Can you qualify or quantify this?

May be an anti-planter strawman, but putting no money into "internal improvements" (often argued by pro-early-Democrats to have been a circus of corruption and not very useful in the South), very little money into schools for the general public, buying up land in auctions instead of setting it up with these sorts of proto-Homestead Acts that most Great Lakes states did.

The South was supposedly "Jeffersonian," but the Great Lakes/Ohio River Valley states wound up creating a society that looked far more Jeffersonian than the Deep South did. They tended to have this torpor about any kind of spending or government activity that could develop the area or promote the lower classes' well-being. Again, they had ideological/economic theory to justify that, I just take a more cynical view of it lately.

While I agree with most of this, unless if by yeomen you mean daytalers this particular part simply wasn't the case. Southern yeomen still lived around and interacted with blacks on a daily basis, especially since they were the ones making up the 1-5 slaveholder category, and the majority of support for African repatriation in the south came from the large planters who were the most emotionally attached to enlightenment thought and were the ones who could most afford the costs and hassle involved in actually supporting manumission and repatriation.

Can you qualify or quantify this?

Pardon me, and you are right, a huge chunk of that third of families with the one or two slaves were yeomen (which I use yeomen as I've always seen it, small farmers with few or no slaves). I've tended to hear the non-slaveowners characterized as hostile to the slaves when they were near, indifferent (like in Appalachia, Unionist, didn't really resist emancipation but was not abolitionist by any stretch of the imagination) when far.

The part about repatriation sounds interesting. I may just be straight up wrong here. Share if you remember where you came across that.

 

[Computer God Autism]

The South was supposedly "Jeffersonian," but the Great Lakes/Ohio River Valley states wound up creating a society that looked far more Jeffersonian than the Deep South did.

True, but that's also why most ethnographers of American history distinguish between the tidewater states and the Deep South. Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, etc. were settled by Virginians along with large portions of the Northwest, and the Deep South tended to be settled by those from Charleston and Savannah.

Not putting money towards internal improvements isn't entirely correct either. Planters were absolutely more resistant to it as a Federal initiative, since those funds tended to be raised at their expense and they didn't really benefit from digging up the Great Lakes, but didn't object when their own states did it; for example, the first passenger steamtrain company in the US was the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company and it ran the whole of the state. This isn't to say that the south's internal improvements were comparable to the north's - they weren't, the less diffuse population, failure of states to coordinate and abundance of rivers saw to that - but just that there were no efforts for it.

The part about repatriation sounds interesting. I may just be straight up wrong here. Share if you remember where you came across that.

It was a common criticism against repatriation by the abolitionists (whose opposition was a big reason why it sputtered out); that it was just a scheme by the planters to increase the value of the remaining slaves or delay abolition. Whether or not that was the case is up to interpretation, but the American Colonization Society did include amongst its members Henry Clay, John Randolph, Francis Scott Key, Richard Bland Lee (R. E. Lee's uncle) and Bushrod Washington (George's brother), amongst others, and received support from all of the Virginia Dynasty presidents.

 

[Snekposter]

Not putting money towards internal improvements isn't entirely correct either. Planters were absolutely more resistant to it as a Federal initiative, since those funds tended to be raised at their expense and they didn't really benefit from digging up the Great Lakes, but didn't object when their own states did it; for example, the first passenger steamtrain company in the US was the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company and it ran the whole of the state. This isn't to say that the south's internal improvements were comparable to the north's - they weren't, the less diffuse population, failure of states to coordinate and abundance of rivers saw to that - but just that there were no efforts for it.

They absolutely wanted the transcontinental railway, and for it to be a Southern route terminating in the Los Angeles area so they could export cotton to the East and not just Europe. One of the reasons for the Gadsden Purchase was to acquire land suitable for such purposes.

 

[Computer God Autism]

On a semi-related note I've decided to start working on a V2 mod. I've taken a bit of inspiration from the long-abandoned VRRP mod in that my first goals will be to get the core gameplay overhauled and refined (to pursue the V2 modder's sorcerer's stone of having an economy that doesn't require constant influxes of cash via stealth events to keep money latency decent) before I start making a hundred caucasian cultures no one who isn't terminally browsing wikipedia would be familiar with.

 

[NvII iS 8ulLt f0R 88C]

On a semi-related note I've decided to start working on a V2 mod. I've taken a bit of inspiration from the long-abandoned VRRP mod in that my first goals will be to get the core gameplay overhauled and refined (to pursue the V2 modder's sorcerer's stone of having an economy that doesn't require constant influxes of cash via stealth events to keep money latency decent) before I start making a hundred caucasian cultures no one who isn't terminally browsing wikipedia would be familiar with.
View attachment 6908800

Can you turn Albanians into fuel though?

 

[Mound Dweller]

(to pursue the V2 modder's sorcerer's stone of having an economy that doesn't require constant influxes of cash via stealth events to keep money latency decent)

This is an ambition more cursed than the quest for eternal life itself; the road to sw*de spaghetti code hell is paved with liquidly crisis events.

Can you turn Albanians into fuel though?

The real transformative gameplay never before tried is irish into Fish.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Can you turn Albanians into fuel though?

When I get around to redrawing the map I am specifically going to redraw Albania so it can be partitioned between Greece and Serbia.

This is an ambition more cursed than the quest for eternal life itself; the road to sw*de spaghetti code hell is paved with liquidly crisis events.

For what it's worth VRRP seems to have gotten somewhere close to having working money latency (during the time I was testing it I didn't encounter a single bankruptcy event) so I'm trying to keep relatively close to its design philosophy.

 

[Neodanthril]

I am an eu4 veteran who has done a wc. It's going to crusader kings 3 going to be starting from scratch?

Update ck3 is much easier than eu4 at the time of this writing. Who knows in 13 years they might add enough complexity to make the two comparable in terms of learning curve.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Yeah CK3 is very VERY chill compared to EU4.

 

[Enginig Gaming]

Yeah CK3 is very VERY chill compared to EU4.

IS CK3 now worth Pirating at least for the mods?
Never got into it when it was just realesed but at least runned fast as hell.
Which is a miracle considering Paradox,but yeah i hope is at least piratable + mods.

 

[LovisXVI]

IS CK3 now worth Pirating at least for the mods?

The modding scene sucks, AGoT is bad, PoD is bloated. RiE is at least good.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

No, that was just raw cotton headed to England and France for processing. The vast majority of the South's cotton was simply baled up and shipped overseas (according to Wikipedia, 70% of all the cotton on the global market at the time was of Southern origin) to the point a massive chunk of the UK's textile factories just simply shut down due to a lack of input sources during the early months of the Civil War when the South refused to export any to try and show the Europeans just how vital Southern cotton was to them.

Not all that much as it turns out considering Egypt exists and was the original source of European cotton as far bad as the Classical era. The South never, ever regained that lost market share, either, even after the end of the Civil War.

And Egypt even tried to pull a Meiji under Muhammad Ali Pasha (?). But failed. Didn't have the human capital it takes to pull off such a thing, and it was state run.

Not putting money towards internal improvements isn't entirely correct either. Planters were absolutely more resistant to it as a Federal initiative, since those funds tended to be raised at their expense and they didn't really benefit from digging up the Great Lakes, but didn't object when their own states did it; for example, the first passenger steamtrain company in the US was the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company and it ran the whole of the state. This isn't to say that the south's internal improvements were comparable to the north's - they weren't, the less diffuse population, failure of states to coordinate and abundance of rivers saw to that - but just that there were no efforts for it.

Fair enough.

It was a common criticism against repatriation by the abolitionists (whose opposition was a big reason why it sputtered out); that it was just a scheme by the planters to increase the value of the remaining slaves or delay abolition. Whether or not that was the case is up to interpretation, but the American Colonization Society did include amongst its members Henry Clay, John Randolph, Francis Scott Key, Richard Bland Lee (R. E. Lee's uncle) and Bushrod Washington (George's brother), amongst others, and received support from all of the Virginia Dynasty presidents.

Most of those guys are closer to the Colonial/Revolutionary South, though. The early South's ideology was very different from the later one. Like Twain - and I don't reference him because anything he says is right, but I think he's got a point - said, the aristocracy of the Confederacy was very different in mentality and mannerisms than their own forebears of just a few generations ago. They had radicalized in a rather unpleasant direction. So you get this bizarre mixture of genuine Jeffersonian democrats that feel trapped in their own system, Jacksonian democrats that buy into the racial supremacism but don't have the other cultural values necessary to do anything other than support slavery as a property rights matter, and then this (in my opinion) unique, disturbing and intensely-radical-in-its-reaction fringe, influenced by Romanticism, that wanted to overturn everything and retreat into the past. And the fringe were probably the minority all along, but they were the ones pushing the Overton Window of the South into Crazy Land.

BTW, to link this back to Victoria, I like (well, I did this once) playing as the Confederacy and using the console commands to colonize Africa and feed it to Liberia. One of my alternate history ideas that doesn't make sense for the real world but that I get a kick out of is Liberia as a CSA client state since it turned into a de facto Black CSA anyways with the forced labor.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Most of those guys are closer to the Colonial/Revolutionary South, though.

Not really, no. Most of those figures survived past the era of good feelings and some, Henry Clay most prominently, remained major political and ideological figures; the Jackson paradigm is closer to the events that brought about the War Between the States than the Declaration of Independence. Ultimately I think the issue is that you're looking for some hard break between the era of Thomas Jefferson and the era of Jefferson Davis and I simply don't think there is one; many leading southerners at the point of secession were the sons and nephews of Founding Fathers. While there was indeed a Carlylean fringe that began cropping up in the 50s as a response to real and imagined northern provocations, the majority of southerners and secessionists didn't see any break between themselves and their predecessors. This isn't to say that there were no generational shifts - there were, but that's a truism and could just as easily be applied to the northern elites.

I do think part of the problem is assuming that enlightenment thought could only run in one direction. The enlightenment was very much based on an uncritical admiration and historical fetishization of Rome and Hellas, both of which were unabashed slave societies (so much so the Byzantines continued to practice it even after it largely died out in Frankish Europe), and attempts to recapture what was seen as the acme of civilization, intellectually, architecturally and societally were a constant of the antebellum south. It's why Fitzhugh could on one hand be the most unabashed proponent of ideas typically associated as being opposed by the Enlightenment and on the other praise Cervantes for having "ridded the world of the useless rubbish of the Middle Ages, by the ridicule so successfully attached to it." (Cannibals All, p. 132) which is a sentiment you would expect out of the likes of Gibbon or Hume. I would even say that is why the antebellum south had these very obvious ideological contradictions to the age it was in; while the Enlightenment and its successors were heavily based on idolizing ancient Greco-Roman society, the actual social structures of that society were nonexistent in the areas where the Enlightenment did take on. The concept of nation-states, universal rights and widespread emancipation were essentially unthinkable to the Greco-Romans, and only in Dixie and Brazil, with their slave economies and state loyalties, was there any significant social resemblance to the society that was being emulated.

BTW, to link this back to Victoria, I like (well, I did this once) playing as the Confederacy and using the console commands to colonize Africa and feed it to Liberia. One of my alternate history ideas that doesn't make sense for the real world but that I get a kick out of is Liberia as a CSA client state since it turned into a de facto Black CSA anyways with the forced labor.

How a CSA survival would affect Liberia is a genuine question. Would it have spurred the USA to get involved in the scramble for Africa if they saw the CSA trying to turn it into a colony, de-facto or officially? Would Liberia have become a successful state if it had a larger portion of freed slaves/freedmen who had more technical skills and lacked tribal allegiances?