Now *that *I did not know. Thanks for that info.
Why was that?
No, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September 1862 (after the Battle of Antietam) and went into effect in January 1863. The Battle of Gettysburg was fought in July 1863.
Antietam, which was in September of 1862. Gettysburg was in July of 1863. But he first planned to issue the proclamation in July of 1862. He waited because Seward pointed out that it would seem desperate, and suggested that Lincoln issue it after a major victory.
Lincoln felt his authority to free slaves was based on his powers as Commander-in-Chief. He freed the slaves ostensibly as a means of waging war. He therefore had no legal justification to free slaves in areas that were not in rebellion.
Partly it was political…Lincoln couldn’t afford to offend the slaveholding states not rebelling, and it would also be a carrot/stick to the states rebelling…sort of a “You have until January to surrender, or else we’re going to take your slaves.”
The other part of it was legal. The Emancipation Proclamation was only dubiously legal…it was the federal government just declaring an entire class of property illegal to own without compensating the owners. But, in places in active rebellion, he could at least extend the logic of the Confiscation Acts for the sake of military necessity. But how could he legally or Constitutionally do that to places not rebelling? That would just be an abuse of power.
Already answered: no one can possibly know what “would have happened if” there were some historical change. What if George Washington had been shot by a sniper at Brandywine Creek? There is simply no possible way for us to know.
However, others have pointed out that, in other countries, slavery did die out without the need for a war. England outlawed slavery in 1833, and Brazil in 1888. The U.S. might have held on longer. Or it might not have. Your guess is pretty much as good as anyone else’s.
I know this thread is focusing on legalized slavery in the United States. Of course persons are held in conditions of slavery even today.
The last country to end legalized slavery was Mauritania in…
1981. There were no penalties for holding slaves until 2007. Cite.
IMHO, were there no Civil War the institution of slavery would have continued to modern times at a much reduced level in the United States.
This is very difficult to believe. Slavery as a formal institution wasn’t even practiced in South Africa in modern times. Why the United States would have held out against the rest of the Western world that long is baffling to me, especially when the issue was, by 1860, such a huge, divisive controversy in the United States.
It’s weird Mauritania held out that long but Mauritania isn’t a good comparison to a large, Western, industrialized nation.
The Confederacy was obviously a mistake.
Issued two years after the war started. How does that show the Republicans ever meant to force a war?
In Mauritania there is still a lot of de facto slavery, upwards of 20% of the population. But when I’ve read about it in the past it’s probably more akin to a type of feudalism than what Americans think of as slavery. It isn’t so much the plantation system, but instead powerful families in Mauritania may have owned an entire village for generations, and no one is willing to stick up for the villagers or even tell them “hey, you aren’t property any longer.” Most international aid workers who have spoken to these villagers find the villagers are completely unaware they are not legally slaves any longer and find the whole concept suspicious/unrealistic.
But because they aren’t being used as regular labor in a plantation system, their servitude tends to be more feudal in nature, in that the slaveowner will periodically send an agent out who basically takes as much as he can from the villagers and after skimming some for himself sells it and gives the profit to the slaveowner. Some slaveowners don’t even bother with that.
There’s still a lot of domestic servant slavery in Mauritania that is more akin to what we think of as slavery, though.
Mass agricultural slavery would have eventually become inefficient, yes.
However if we posit a peacefully separated Confederacy, one wonders how long domestic slavery for the wealthy would have continued. It’s completely speculative of course but my own speculation is “potentially a long time.” Slavery was a pretty deeply imbedded feature of the culture of the wealthy oligarchy that dominated the south.
Does slavery eventually end altogether? Probably. Does it end by the late 19th century? I’m less sure of that. Regardless I think everyone is an agreement that any Confederate society left to its own devices, strict legality of slavery aside, would have been a human rights nightmare for a very long time.
One mistake in a lot of these arguments is that folks assume that slavery was the only cause of the Civil War. It wasn’t.
If you go back a bit (first half of the 1800s) what you find is that in the south, only the big plantation owners favored slavery. The little farmers were more than happy to get rid of slavery, because they were too small and poor to own slaves, and their lack of free slave labor made it difficult for them to compete with the big guys. In the north, you have this anti-slavery movement gaining ground, but it’s nowhere near popular on its own for anyone to go to war over the issue, and this remains true all the way up until the Civil War starts.
But then the country starts to split. You’ve got the northern industrialists wanting to move the country towards an industrial economy, and they see the southern agricultural economy as slowing them down and hindering progress. The southerners see the northern attempt at industrialization as a threat to their way of life.
Instead of working together to solve their differences, they instead solved their differences by whoever had the most seats in congress shoving their agenda down the other guy’s throat (250 years later we still do the same thing - we’re slow learners I guess). So when the industrialists have more power, they enact trade tariffs that benefit industry but hurt agriculture. When the agriculturalists have power, they go the other way. Each accuses the other of ruining the country, and as time goes on, each group gets more and more pissed off at each other. This buildup of anger is important. Without it, folks aren’t so willing to actually shoot at each other. One of the main contributing factors of the Civil War is the several decades of anger that built up over each side politically fighting each other.
As all of this is going on, the poor small farmers in the south (the ones who originally didn’t care for slavery) see the northern industrialists as trying to destroy all of agriculture, which means the small farmer along with the plantations, so they join forces with the slave owners, because if they don’t, then they lose their way of life too. In the north, the industrialists join forces with the abolitionists, because the enemy of my enemy is my friend and that gives them enough political power to fight the unified southern farmers.
Now you’ve got the issue of the western territories. These are about to become states. Really, the folks in places like Alabama and Georgia really don’t give two hoots what the folks out west do. But they care how they vote. If the western states become free states, that shifts the power in congress to the industrialists and the southerners will soon find themselves legislated into bankruptcy. If the western states become slave states, then the agriculturalists will prevail and the industrialists will lose. This is why the western territories issue became so important. The abolitionists in the north are the only ones who really care about the slavery issue in the western territories. For everyone else it’s just about who controls Washington DC.
Remember, Lincoln said that the south could keep their slaves if they stayed in the Union. What he wouldn’t compromise on was the western territory issue, and that alone was enough to make the South secede.
So what if Lincoln had lost the election?
You still have this extremely polarized nation, and decades of fierce political fighting pissing everyone off. No one at that point is going to just shake hands and say hey let’s all be friends again. You’ve still got the industrialists thinking that the South is preventing the U.S. from becoming a true world power, and the agriculturalists thinking that the North is trying to completely ruin their way of life. The abolitionists still want slavery abolished, and they are still very much partnered with the industrialists. You’ve still got the little farmers in the south allied with the plantations, even though the little guys could compete better and would do better financially if slavery were abolished.
No one at this point wants a friendly settlement. I don’t see how the situation could really continue much longer without exploding into Civil War.
If the western territories become free states, the South secedes. If the western territories end up split into half slave and half free states, then the bitter political fighting in congress continues, and as soon as the votes sway to the North’s advantage, the South secedes. Worst case, the western territories become slave states, which shifts the political power to the South for a while. The abolitionists have been gaining strength all through the 1800s, and this trend continues, both in the North and all around the world. The South is going to start feeling political pressure from all sides, eventually forcing it to secede.
The only way I can see to stop the Civil War is to go back to at least 1840 and somehow stop all of the bitter fighting between the two sides for the next couple of decades. And I have no idea how to actually do that.
The South’s entire economy as well as their political structure was built around slavery. Not only did slavery provide the labor for their agriculture, slavery also prevented the working class grunts from being able to rise up politically to make things better for themselves. Their working class was completely controlled. You can’t get rid of slavery in the South without completely dismantling it and rebuilding it, and they weren’t going to do that willingly.
The world was shifting away from agriculture, and the southern agriculturalists weren’t changing with it. Civil War was inevitable. With the growing abolitionist movement and the changes in the world economy, I can’t picture slavery lasting much longer than somewhere around the 1880s to 1890s.
And really, by 1860 there was so much hatred built up on both sides that almost any little spark would be enough of an excuse for the two sides to go to war.
It wasn’t the only cause. It was just, by far, the biggest and most significant cause. It’s not true to say the Civil War was entirely about slavery. It is true to say that the Civil War was almost entirely about slavery.
That’s what they used to say about the Germans.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter how many good people with honest moral values lived in the South. They weren’t in control of the country. Political power in the slave states was concentrated in the hands of a small minority of wealthy land owners. And they had long since established that they had the legal and “moral” right to dispose of their property as they saw fit - that was, after all, the cause they fought a bloody and futile war to preserve.
When the slave economy was in full swing, and a farm failed, the slaves at least would be easy to sell off to recoup some losses. There was a bottomless demand for more slaves, particularly once the British cracked down on the Atlantic trade. But if the bottom fell out of the slave market, because every one wants tractors, instead of slaves, what does the slaveowner do with his suddenly unprofitable and unsellable slaves? He’s not going to free them. Quite apart from the deeply ingrained ideology of racial superiority that says black people are bestial subhumans unfit for self governance, where are they going to go? There’s no jobs for them, and nowhere to live. They’d have to resort to banditry to survive, and no landowner is going to want to create bandit gangs to prey on his property. The only other option open to him is to put them down, like they would any other livestock that they can’t sell and can’t keep. I can easily imagine a small, short lived “slave removal” industry. “You take the missus and the children for a nice weekend in the city, while me and my boys handle your surplus slave problem. For a modest fee.”
It’s said that the Nazis were the first people to industrialize genocide. The Slave South might have been the first people to commercialize it.
Taking the hypothetical at face value, I don’t see any reason slavery wouldn’t have continued throughout Jim Crow and into the civil rights era. So say, another century. It would end up being such a different world if that were the case, I’m not sure you could even say it would end then. Sure, maybe slaves wouldn’t be out picking cotton as much, with the machinery to do it, but I could see them flipping burgers, selling booze, and operating machinery. Basically what the “wage slaves” do today, only without the paycheck.
And then everything you say following turns out to have stemmed from slavery, except possibly “The southerners see the northern attempt at industrialization as a threat to their way of life,” – but I believe small farmers felt that way mostly because of the intense vocal propaganda* by slaveowners who felt threatened…and thus also because of slavery.
So to me, it comes across as if you’d said “…there were several subsidiary issues, all stemming from slavery and the slave agricultural system, as well.”
*Certainly slaveowners tried to stir up the rest of the populace with such arguments, you can read them today. And arguably the populace did get stirred up. The question is, I guess, was the intense propaganda effort the sole cause of people getting stirred up?
There is a distinction between ‘racism’ and slave-owning. I don’t think the vast majority of plantation owners hated their slaves. It was only after emancipation and the when the vast numbers of formerly employed slaves had nothing to do and no place to go that the troubles began.
http://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-events/lincoln-emancipation-proclamation.htm
They didn’t hate them, perhaps, but they did think that they were inherently inferior which is certainly racism.