What if Lincoln had lost the election and the Confederacy had never been formed, and the Civil War had never occurred? How long would slavery have continued?
Until the first President was elected who was seen as a threat to slavery… probably 1864 or 1868, and then you’d have a similar war. The issue of slavery was already splitting the country up and a Northern president was going to be the spark.
I think a Civil War was inevitable, and would have happened shortly afterwards anyway – within maybe 10 years or so, possibly much less. The Southern States were absolutely dedicated to the institutions of slavery and white supremacy (based on their own Articles/Declarations of Independence from the Union), and they (correctly) saw a non-slave and increasingly pro-abolition North as a threat to these institutions.
OK, I am asking if the Feds had *never *forced it, Civil War or no, how long would it have lasted?
Yes, the war was created by the political climate and events, not personalities or electoral results. It was probably inevitable the day the Missouri Compromise passed, and almost certainly when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed and the Dred Scott decision handed down. Reverse those and *maybe *things could have reverted back to moralizing speeches and handwringing.
ETA: Melchior, the evidence is much stronger that the slave states forced it, not the Feds.
Until the South declared independence and attacked US soldiers (or the like), which would have happened within a few years, I believe.
If a Republican presidency hadn’t happened for another 4-8 years, the main question is what might have happened differently in the interim. Something like the Corwin Amendment might have passed, preserving the union at the cost of acceding to the pro-slavery faction’s demands. Or South Carolina for example might have seceded and the circumstances were such that the federal government couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about it, setting the precedent for secession being legal.
Yeah, I’ll be contrarian and say that the war was not inevitable. Likely, but if the Republican Party hadn’t prevailed in 1860 then a Democrat - likely either a southern sympathizer or a fool like Buchanan - would have been elected.
Either of those events would have made actual secession much simpler for the southern states. It’s true that the economic forces working on slavery and the south were going to force things to a head at some point…but that could be 10-20 years in the future. If, during that time, they’d pushed secession with say Breckinridge, Bell or even Jeff Davis as President of the USA (it could have easily happened) we might have seen a President with a ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ policy towards secession.
I fear people are still not answering my question: How long would slavery have continued to be practiced if it had not been abolished by law? When would it have become economically impractical?
The last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil in 1888. That’s probably the best guess answer to your OP.
That’s a different question then in the OP. When would slavery have become economically impractical? When one of two things happened – the sabotage and violence by the enslaved (who would probably be supplied with weapons from other parts of the world, eventually) cost more than the profits of slave labor, or when the economic sanctions of the rest of the world on one of the last remaining slave societies were so crippling that it was unprofitable.
Yep, and just so you know, we’ve done this topic many times on this MB in the past and that’s usually the best answer IMO.
Yeah, my bet’s a few years sooner because the pace of industrialization in the US vs Brazil would make it uneconomical earlier, but that still falls close to my 10-20 years timeline.
The Civil War was not inevitable. A secession crisis over slavery was probably inevitable. But that crisis didn’t have to lead to war, it could have lead to a more-or-less peaceable dissolution of the United States, with states either accepting emancipation or seceding one by one. As more and more slave states left the remaining states with legal slavery would have had to either accept the end of slavery now that the Slave Power lost it’s hold on the national government, or leave.
There might not even have been a Confederacy without the war to force the seceding states into union with each other.
As for the notion that slavery would have ended in a few decades, I don’t buy it. The Civil War crushed slavery in the Americas. With the preservation of the Slave Power in North America then there’s a lot less pressure to end it elsewhere. There certainly was no hint that slavery was wobbling in 1866, slavery and white supremacy were stronger than ever and much stronger than the 1780s when Jefferson and Washington could hope for gradual emancipation.
Plus, if the South left the union over slavery, how much stomach would there be to just up and repeal it? It would be a betrayal of the founding principles of the Slavocracy. It would take the equivalent of a revolution, with the white working and middle classes of the south overthrowing the entrenched political monopoly of the plantation owners. How would that happen? Successful secession would give the plantation owners an even stronger stranglehold on political power.
But wasn’t the abolition of slavery in much of the rest of the world given much of its moral momentum by the US Civil War? Without it, and given the pro-slavery moralization they feld forced into by the abolitionists, wouldn’t the CSA and Brazil and whoever else have held onto it considerably longer than that? The CSA in particular was *founded *on the ideal of slavery, and couldn’t be expected to abjure it any time soon.
The pace of industrialization was happening a lot slower in the slave states though, wasn’t it? An agriculture based economy has a serious need for cheap labour even today. So while they might have stopped calling it “slavery” for international/domestic political reasons. some kind of indentured servitude would have continued to exist for quite some time, istm.
To be honest, the OP here reminds me of the occasionally pro-South arguments that the war wasn’t necessary because slavery was going to end soon anyways. I don’t buy it.
Hmm, I thought it was the other way around.
Well, I don’t know about that, Buchanan was from Pennsylvania. But any POTUS unsatisfactorily reliable on the slavery question, as the Southrons might have put it, would have been the spark.
The modern term is “undocumented workers”, please.
Hmm, you’re right. I had thought slavery lasted much longer in most of Latin America than it did, but it turns out it was just Brazil and Cuba after us.
The answer to this question is until 1865. The Feds never forced it; the South did. Even after the secession the Feds didn’t start the war. The South did.
The Feds were planning to force it, obviously, with the Republicans leading the way.