Strong circumstantial evidence supporting piracy as a cause of the Civil War.

[Solvedit]

What you are saying is that mybe a couple of hundred pirates that moved into the Southern United States were any influence at all in the cause of the Civil War. I just don't see it.

There may have been more of them than that.  

Suppose some of them had learned to operate like a protection racket where they simply "skim off the cream without breaking the bottle."  

Besides that, there may have been a human trafficking culture. 

Then there were the people they supported.  

Their sudden absence could have caused an economic collapse in their host country.

[Solvedit]

England and France officially stayed neutral but unofficially France supported the South. How exactly was this holding the Americans responsible for anything?

Elements in France may have been disappointed that the US did not halt the piracy and human trafficking, then treated the South with great generosity and leniency after the war.

Think about the statue they sent us.  A miserable looking woman, wrapped in a sheet, wearing a fancy hat, holding a light over her head, and holding what may be a ledger.  

I'd say it's a snide jab at the USA for not halting trafficking culture.

People may read that and say I am mixed up but I don't think everyone in a given country thinks like everyone else.

[Solvedit]

I think I see your problem. There were never a lage number of pirates historically. What we know of the stories of them occured over a few hundred years. You are thinking they were all ocuring once and therfore had to be tens of the thousands of pirates if you count all the land support traiders, the small nations that supported the practice, etc.. At any given time in the classic era of piracy, there were possibly up to a very few thousand individuals. The famous, known of ones were possibly between 10 and 50 at a time period.

You may be conflating the existence of piracy with how many pirates were caught red-handed on the high seas or left enough credible witnesses that they could be convicted and hunted down.  

There may have been that few big name, full time pirate captains at a time.  A few hundred?  There were probably that many on some of the larger crews.  Especially if they let the pirating life corrupt them a bit and they got slack with whatever their normal job was, which is possible. 

Just because there aren't that many Al Capones or Baby Face Morans or Bugsy Siegels doesn't mean everyone else obeys the law.  It is possible people with working boats were able to switch over to pirating from time to time.  Suppose they could row out to raid becalmed ships while normally using their craft for fishing or some other work. 

Suppose they had oceangoing craft hidden upriver.  Such oceangoing pirate ships were already stripped down.  If the pirates removed the cannon, the ships probably required very little water to float.  Perhaps the pirates could drag them up shallow rivers and either remove the masts or tilt the ship on its side.  

Steam power meant such oceangoing pirate ships could not escape as easily if the steam powered navy ships came out to check the suspected pirate coves in calm weather. 

If there were occasional pirates, it would have been more difficult to prosecute them than capturing a pirate on the high seas.  The authorities may have favored a strategy of destroying the ships, docks, and shore facilities of places which harbored pirates who were evading capture. 

Exploding shell guns were introduced in the 1820s.  They were longer ranged than many previous naval cannon in addition to firing an exploding, powder filled shell.  This refinement made shore bombardment more effective because they could blast a ship or a dock or an onshore building into splinters instead of holing one or two of the planks covering the hull or deck.  

If some of the people practicing piracy were barely scraping by and supplementing a meager income through piracy, then the exploding guns served another purpose: they kept the pirates from reusing the cannonballs because the cannonballs would be blown to shards.  This factor would have vastly reduced occasional pirates' firepower.  

Such pirates need not have been supporting a small number of people onshore.  They may have been good at making each coin pass through as many hands as possible.

They could have been swept into the Southeast in successive waves, not merely after the development of the screw propeller.  The Royal Navy had a major campaign to clear piracy off the Atlantic in the 1710s for example.

[Solvedit]

England and France officially stayed neutral but unofficially France supported the South. How exactly was this holding the Americans responsible for anything?

Again what does any of your reasoning have to do with the American Civil War?

Two factors may have led to war.  First, the US may not have done enough to prevent some of its own people from victimizing international shipping, which offended other countries and may have led them to goad the South to rebel.  Second, the government sold formerly native land after relocating the of the Southeast and purchasers may have found it already occupied by various people who didn't always obey the laws of established nations. 

Suppose the nations which traded across the Atlantic decided the US wasn't doing enough to prevent piracy by people within its borders.  Suppose they decided to flatter the South's ambitions to be independent and sold them just enough weapons to hang themselves with but not to win.  The South had the top generals of the former Union; why do Southerners say the war was a genocide for having gone on for so long?  Didn't they know when to quit?  Could it be the South was waiting for support which they expected but which never came? 

Plantation owners East of the Proclamation Line (which the US respected for a time) may have been disappointed to find the land they bought West of the Proclamation Line was already occupied by heavily armed people.  Can it be they bankrolled the war enough to thin out and bankrupt the people who had been living on the land the plantation owners felt they had rightfully purchased?  

The upheavals in Europe in 1848 may have been influenced by European aristocracy speculating on Southern land, then finding it occupied and losing their investment, and no longer being able to pay their security forces or secret police.  Private citizens may have lost their investment as well which contributed to malcontention.  Can it be they contributed to flattering the South's ambition for independence, then giving them just enough weapon sales to get in trouble but not to win?  Perhaps some of the Europeans were financially ruined and had to move to the North to get work and wound up agitating for war?

[Solvedit]

I take exception to your phrasing of "Southeastern tribes had vacated". They were forced off their land by the government and that shows you know little of the history of that area and period.

If the pirates were in Hispaniola running a successful business, then their numbers would have increased.  

There may have been enough demand for preserved meat that they overhunted the place.  Could they really support all the ships trading across the Atlantic by foraging game on a few large islands without collapsing game populations? 

It is possible some of them moved when that happened.  

Besides, France developed a colony with a strong military presence on Hispaniola and would have driven out pirates so they didn't hurt the sugarcane business or steal slaves.  Where did they go?

You make it sound like they abandoned pirating.  If they were under pressure from overhunting and population increase, they may have continued to find surreptitious ways to do a little pirating.  

Some of them may have secretly moved to the lands west of the Proclamation Line of 1763, perhaps even before it was established.  

They may have contributed to the removal of the natives in at least two ways. 

First, suppose the successive governments in charge of the Southeast (England, France, Spain, and later the US) had agreed with the natives that the natives would be responsible for their own internal security?  Suppose the government of the US began to insist they either do something about the pirates building up within their borders or allow Federal troops and a tax levy to pay for policing the Native land?  

Suppose the US didn't want to talk about it because they knew occasional piracy was occurring and they didn't want a diplomatic situation between the US and the nations which did commerce on the Atlantic?  Better to let the world think the pirates were coming from the Caribbean or South America.  

Second, Suppose they overhunted the Southeast as well as Hispaniola?  Suppose their population increase contributed to the overhunting, not just their preserved meat business?  Suppose the natives complained about the overhunting of their lands and got reminded they were responsible for their own internal security?  

Why were the natives starving on the Trail of Tears?  Couldn't they bring a little preserved meat and dried corn with them?  Were they living so close to starvation that they couldn't withstand a few weeks' long overland trek?  Perhaps because they were affected by pirates overhunting the natives' land?

Why did the natives only get Oklahoma?  Perhaps because they had already lost control over most of their land and only got the same amount of land they still held, because they had been responsible for their own internal security?

Why did Spain practically give Florida to the United States?  Can it be because it was slowly filling up with people they'd have to fight a transatlantic war to control?  Perhaps the people mostly wanted to forage and were heavily armed and untaxable, because they had grown in numbers enough to consume what they produced, and were heavily armed?  As well as used to the diseases of the tropics? 

What if Spain didn't want to be in charge of a pirate haven which didn't pay?  Other countries would complain.

Perhaps the same factor affected France's decision to sell the Louisiana territory to the US.

[Solvedit]

When I first wrote this thread, I assumed most DI members who cared about history had been following my related threads on ATS.  

The second post before this one contains a concise summary of what this has to do with the Civil War.

[Byrd]

When I first wrote this thread, I assumed most DI members who cared about history had been following my related threads on ATS.  

The second post before this one contains a concise summary of what this has to do with the Civil War.

I don't think you realize just how small an impact pirates had and how few they were.  Yes, they disrupted some shipping and often acted as mercenaries under "Marques" but aside from the occasional port blockade and treasure ship raid, they weren't that much of a threat.

They had about as much an impact on America as pirates do today.  

Here's the "Declaration" that started the secession.  Note that there's no mention of piracy and there IS a mention of slavery: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/prima...ing-states

[Solvedit]

On Tortuga (Haiti), the pirates became know as buccaneers. This is because they went into the barbecue business. They raised and smoked meat for the ships that called to port. Buccaneer is a mispronouncing of the French word for barbeque. They found selling food to be more stable and more profitable than attacking ships.

I did some research on pirates after becoming a Dead Pirate last year at their convention. While they don't raid, they do party quite well.

 

I don't think you realize just how small an impact pirates had and how few they were.  Yes, they disrupted some shipping and often acted as mercenaries under "Marques" but aside from the occasional port blockade and treasure ship raid, they weren't that much of a threat.

Is BeyondKnowledge wrong that they moved to Hispaniola and did quite well?  Where did they go when France turned the place into a sugar plantation?  Did their numbers stay fixed? 

On ATS another member opined that many fishermen were and probably are occasional pirates.  I am sure the number of dedicated full-time pirates was almost as low as you both imply but as you said yourself, they had a legitimate day business.  It doesn't rule out piracy as a side hustle.  Can it be the appearance of their impact was minimized because they learned to only take a little from captured ships, so as to "skim a little cream off the milk without breaking the bottle?"

Can it be that, being slavery supporters, some of the people onshore appreciated as well as aided and abetted the pirates, perhaps with regard to human trafficking?  

Did you know that "Utman" is Arabic for "Ottoman?"  I have read somewhere on the highly reliable internet that people actually in Scotland never say "Utman." Please consider reading the Wikipedia page on Ottoman slavery.  

Some of them may have come not from Ireland or Scotland but the Barbary States.  It is said the Ottoman Empire had more European slaves than America had African slaves.  Your theory regarding pirate numbers may not account for the effect of modern warships on Barbary pirates.  They surely had some West European looks among them, for descendants of Ottoman slaves in North Africa may have been consigned to pirating if no one in North Africa wanted to give them a job. 

And don't forget about the collards.  Traditional Southern recipes for greens have been found to bear almost no resemblance to West African recipes but some are nearly identical to recipes found in a 10th century cookbook from Baghdad.  Google it, it's been in the news.

[Solvedit]

I don't think you realize just how small an impact pirates had and how few they were.  Yes, they disrupted some shipping and often acted as mercenaries under "Marques" but aside from the occasional port blockade and treasure ship raid, they weren't that much of a threat.

They had about as much an impact on America as pirates do today.  

Copied from HistoryNewsNetwork:  (Can it be, despite their conclusions, their work at least partially may support my theory?)

The Strange Origins of Thomas Sowell's Theory of Gangsta Rap Cultureby Marc Wiseman

Mr. Wiseman is an assistant editor at HNN.Tartans and Bling: Thomas Sowell’s Tracing of Urban Black Culture to the Grady McWhiney’s 'Celtic Fringe'

Thomas Sowell is perhaps the most unexpected heir to the legacy of recently deceased historian Grady McWhiney. Outside of their shared, conservative political leanings, they are quite different. Thomas Sowell is an African-American economist, columnist and historian born in the South (North Carolina), raised and educated in the North (Harvard, Columbia and the University of Chicago) who admittedly found going back to the South painful and awkward. The recently deceased Grady McWhiney, on the other hand, was an influential and controversial historian of the South, both in residence and in specialty, who in his book Cracker Culture referred to the Civil War as the “War of Southern Independence,” and who was the former president of the League of the South, a neo-confederate organization that desires a ‘free and independent Southern republic,’ and has been accused by some as a hate group. Yet from different sides of the continental, racial, and social divide, Sowell chooses to rely on McWhiney to argue that urban black culture developed from antebellum, southern white culture. In Sowell’s essay “Black Rednecks and White Liberals,” which is included in a collection of essays of the same name, he refers to McWhiney’s Cracker Culture more than two dozen times and many of Sowell’s other resources are the same ones McWhiney used in his own research. To say that Sowell uses McWhiney as a source is an understatement: in fact, Sowell’s entire thesis is based on the statements made in McWhiney’s Cracker Culture and would fall apart without it.

In Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, McWhiney postulates that southern culture is in fact a derivative of the culture of the pre-Anglicized, Celtic-dominated regions of the British Isles, which he calls the “Celtic fringe.” People from this region brought this culture to the southern United States primarily in the 17th and 18th centuries, with trappings of their clannish, pastoral lifestyle fitting easily into the sparsely peopled southern backwoods (as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon dominated urban North). McWhiney supports his theory by comparing surnames from various Celt-dominated regions of the British Isles to those mentioned in immigration documents, legal settlements and US census data taken from the antebellum south; and by comparing cultural ‘traits.’ The traits McWhiney uses are broad, inexact terms about Celts and southerners which have been rendered by hostile third parties: they are described as pleasure seeking, distrustful of education and institutions, proud to the point of being violent, sensual, and lazy.
Sowell builds upon McWhiney’s theory about the Celtic origin of southern culture and takes it a step further. He hypothesizes that the southern “crackers,” or as Sowell refers to them, “rednecks” (a term which McWhiney never uses), are the source of urban black culture. He then deems this culture as" chaotic, counterproductive, dangerous and self-destructive" pointing particularly to the"gangsta rap" subculture. In the turn of 20th century, southern blacks, the vast majority of whom were freed slaves or their descendants, moved to the northern urban centers. These “black rednecks” brought their counterproductive culture with them which, Sowell believes, may have suited the Celts back in Scotland and Ireland, but only proved to hold blacks back. Upon the mass migration of southern black to northern cities, relations between blacks and whites deteriorated. When the black rednecks moved north, whites there became hostile to all blacks. Sowell cites cases of residential segregation and an increase in white racism coinciding with an influx of southern blacks into northern cities; and laws that were enacted in northern cities, such as Portland, that were not there before southern blacks moved up. This, Sowell claims, is evidence that white racism was not based on skin color but rather on cultural differences and that many of the woes that African-Americans currently suffer come not from racism or slavery, but from a deluded sense of what is"authentic" black culture. Since the 60’s and the Civil Rights Movement, states Sowell, various “white liberals” have valued black redneck culture as the only authentic black culture. This in turn has left successful blacks stigmatized as unauthentic. Sowell believes that in order for blacks to progress in American society they need to shed the illusion that the ghetto culture of “black rednecks” is authentic when in fact, to him, it has its origins in white culture.

Sowell relies on McWhiney for two primary reasons. First, McWhiney’s formula, namely that if culture A is similar to culture B then culture B is based on culture A, lends itself well to Sowell's argument: connecting what he considers a negative aspect of black culture to white culture, thereby eliminating its “authenticity” as a form of African-American self-expression. The Celts were described (in logs of English visitors to Ireland and Scotland) as violent, slovenly, lazy, and hedonistic, which McWhiney compares to similar descriptions of dirty, slothful, belligerent behavior in southerners made by northerners. The problem is that derogatory terms are often used by any group in power when referring to a group under their thrall (compare how some Japanese characterized Koreans or how some white Americans currently speak about Mexicans). By the logic put forward in Cracker Culture Mexicans too are the inheritors of Celtic Culture. When McWhiney encounters exceptions to his formula he neatly steps around them. When people with English surnames displayed cracker-like behavior, they were just conforming to the dominant Celtic culture of the south. Likewise people with Celtic surnames who do not conform to the stereotype were Yankee wannabees and exceptions to the rule. Sowell resorts to the same formula: southern blacks, since they too are defined by the same negative traits, are in their turn inheritors of Celtic culture. In saying this, Sowell is denying that slaves retained any of their own culture or that subsequent generations of African-Americans, whether free or slave, did not develop a culture of their own.

Both Sowell and McWhiney use their terms ambiguously. McWhiney’s Cracker Culture is sometimes identified with a specific group of backwoods-dwelling southerners, sometimes with southerners as a whole. Sowell is unclear as to who exactly make up the “black redneck” contingent, for at times he seems to target “ghetto thugs” and “gangsta rappers.” He also criticizes any black who questions racial policy in America as somehow participating or least encouraging in “black redneck” culture. In identifying southern culture with that of Celts, Grady McWhiney was trying to create a southern heritage that preceded the Civil War and even colonialism, and to instill a sense of pride and legitimacy. He took the negative stereotype about southerners (which still exists today as attested by the weight that the term “redneck” still carries) and Celts and put them in a more positive light: they were leisure-loving, independent minded, proud people who were loyal to their clan and family. Unfortunately, McWhiney's obvious lack of objectivity and tendentiousness (his self interest as a Celt and a southerner is obvious throughout the text) undermines his analysis. Sowell's work is equally slanted but in a different direction. McWhiney’s noble cracker becomes Sowell’s backwards redneck. Sowell strives to create a redneck boogeyman to scare African-Americans away from a culture he believes will hamper their emergence into the middle class.

[Byrd]

 Is BeyondKnowledge wrong that they moved to Hispaniola and did quite well?  Where did they go when France turned the place into a sugar plantation?  Did their numbers stay fixed? 

On ATS another member opined that many fishermen were and probably are occasional pirates.  I am sure the number of dedicated full-time pirates was almost as low as you both imply but as you said yourself, they had a legitimate day business.  It doesn't rule out piracy as a side hustle.  Can it be the appearance of their impact was minimized because they learned to only take a little from captured ships, so as to "skim a little cream off the milk without breaking the bottle?"

Can it be that, being slavery supporters, some of the people onshore appreciated as well as aided and abetted the pirates, perhaps with regard to human trafficking?  

Did you know that "Utman" is Arabic for "Ottoman?"  I have read somewhere on the highly reliable internet that people actually in Scotland never say "Utman." Please consider reading the Wikipedia page on Ottoman slavery.  

Some of them may have come not from Ireland or Scotland but the Barbary States.  It is said the Ottoman Empire had more European slaves than America had African slaves.  Your theory regarding pirate numbers may not account for the effect of modern warships on Barbary pirates.  They surely had some West European looks among them, for descendants of Ottoman slaves in North Africa may have been consigned to pirating if no one in North Africa wanted to give them a job. 

And don't forget about the collards.  Traditional Southern recipes for greens have been found to bear almost no resemblance to West African recipes but some are nearly identical to recipes found in a 10th century cookbook from Baghdad.  Google it, it's been in the news.

Yes, they "did quite well"... in the micro sense of it.  Pirates weren't rich, as a rule, and spent heavily (and most had shore lives.)  The "golden age" of piracy was from about 1650 to the 1720's... which is before the US became the United States (Blackbeard died about 1718.)  Many of the 19th century pirates were street gangs in New York (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1...ry_pirates) --and the China Sea was the area that legendarily had major troubles with pirates at this time.

Around our neck of the woods, international waters were patrolled by the navies of various countries, and the US had a decently strong naval force.  That's why thefts (such as they were) were more organized local gangs and not international traders.