1861 papers on the American Civil War by Karl Marx. Karl Marx followed every minute detail of the war with the incredible detail. There is the total lack on any moralistic rhetoric about the slavery. He dissects every political and economic detail of the conflict and he is exasperatingly thorough. Here is a quote that caught my eye:
“The cultivation of the southern export articles, cotton, tobacco, sugar , etc., carried on by slaves, is only remunerative as long as it is conducted with large gangs of slaves, on a mass scale and on wide expanses of a naturally fertile soil, which requires only simple labour. Intensive cultivation, which depends less on fertility of the soil than on investment of capital, intelligence and energy of labour, is contrary to the nature of slavery. Hence the rapid transformation of states like Maryland and Virginia, which formerly employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states which raise slaves to export them into the deep South. Even in South Carolina, where the slaves form four-sevenths of the population, the cultivation of cotton has been almost completely stationary for years due to the exhaustion of the soil. Indeed, by force of circumstances South Carolina has already been transformed in part into a slave-raising state, since it already sells slaves to the sum of four million dollars yearly to the states of the extreme South and South-west. As soon as this point is reached, the acquisition of new Territories becomes necessary, so that one section of the slaveholders with their slaves may occupy new fertile lands and that a new market for slave-raising, therefore for the sale of slaves, may be created for the remaining section. It is, for example, indubitable that without the acquisition of Louisiana, Missouri and Arkansas by the United States, slavery in Virginia and Maryland would have been wiped out long ago. In the Secessionist Congress at Montgomery, Senator Toombs, one of the spokesmen of the South, strikingly formulated the economic law that commands the constant expansion of the territory of slavery. “In fifteen years,” said he, “without a great increase in slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves.”
So Marx recognized that there are slave producing states and states where the slaves could be used (Mexico and Arizona?). And when a territory is saturated “either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves.”
Further reading:
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This book goes into quite a bit of detail of the history of US soil exhaustion, and how it fueled expansion, not just of the slave states,but to the midwest as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Dirt-Civilizations-David-R-Montgomery/dp/0520258061
Many details on the soil history of ancient civilizations, with concentrations on the fertile crescent and Rome.
I realized that you could make a parallel to the boom and bust cycles of agricultural exhaustion to the Austrian economic boom and bust cycle of credit expansion. What is a deep layer of fertile topsoil, but the stored energy credit of photosynthesis and the mineral richness of mountain erosion and glacier tailings?