This isn’t right. The Republican Party was founded in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and eschewed abolitionism and focused on slavery in the territories from the moment of its foundation. The party platform of 1856 makes this clear.
It’s true that the platform of 1860 discusses tariffs, while that of 1856 did not. The reason was not so much changes in the composition of the party as the fact that Congress and the Buchanan administration had lowered tariffs in 1857. Republicans of 1856 generally found existing tariffs to be satisfactory; after 1857, they did not.
Note that the platform of 1856 does address other economic issues such as internal improvements and the transcontinental railroad.
As you can read in American Colonies, by Alan Taylor, in the early history of the Caribbean sugar islands, owners usually found it cheaper to work their slaves to death and buy new imports than to breed them.
In thisthread there is talk of Andrew Napolitanos opinions condemning the civil war as unnecessary and a war of choice.
I don’t agree with him, but if there were no civil war and no political pressure on the south, when/how would the south have abolished slavery?
I’m assuming it would’ve been abolished in the early-mid 20th century when agricultural mechanization started becoming affordable and developed. Slaves are not necessary when you have large machines. Weren’t the vast majority of southern slaves agricultural slaves? I know the cotton gin led to an increase in slavery, but cotton pickers as an example should’ve led to a decline. Slaves would’ve stopped being economical compared to machines sooner or later (esp considering that slaves could cost $1000 in the 19th century, when average wages were $1 a day or less).
Has this been debated before? I’m guessing it has.
I think the civil war or something like it was inevitable, regardless, but if we posit that somehow the slave states were willing to increasingly lose power in return for being able to keep their slaves (which was what the original plan was), then I’d guess they would have slowly faded away. The rest of the world was moving towards abolishing slavery, and as the non-slave states increased in power there would have been mounting pressure on the South. In addition, as you noted in your OP, automation and industrialization would have rendered it moot eventually. I doubt it would have hung on until the 20th century, regardless (of course, I don’t think the South WOULD have been willing to continue it’s decline in power and the mounting pressure, and that eventually, one way or the other there would be a civil war to resolve this fundamental divide).
Well, remember, white Southerners always resisted talk of emancipation because:
Slaves were useful, valuable, and sometimes represented most of their owners’ capital.
If you own slaves, there’s a noneconomic psychological satisfaction in being surrounded by people who have to anything and everything you say. Especially if you’re male and some of your slaves are comely wenches.
If you don’t own slaves, there’s still satisfaction in having neighbors you know are your inferiors.
They were afraid of their slaves. After the Haitian Revolution, in which, at one stage, the slaves simply killed every white person they could catch, all white Southerners – regardless of whether they owned any slaves themselves – lived in daily fear of a slave uprising. So they didn’t dare let up on them one little bit or let any slaves get above themselves, and they didn’t want any abolitionist preachers coming around and giving them ideas.
They sincerely believed the blacks to be so mentally inferior by heredity that it would be both cruel and dangerous to let them go without caretakers.
Even the economic conditions change so that 1) no longer applies, 2) and 3) and 4) and 5) still apply.
I don’t know. Would the South be an industrial powerhouse if it had free labor? Why stop at agriculture? Sweatshops, mines and factories could certainly benefit from slavery.
Given how racist the South is now, I could certainly believe they would hold on to slavery as long as they could.
In our timeline, the South did not become an industrial powerhouse until it had scrapped (or been deprived of) not only slavery but Jim Crow. Perhaps that was what was holding the South back all along?
Eric Foner, who’s easily one of the most well-regarded historians in America when it comes to slavery, pointed out that far from dying off in the South, at the time if the Civil War was expanding and there were more elves than ever before and also IIRC they were a larger percentage of the population than before.
It wasn’t dying off anything soon and if the South ever reached the point where slaves became the majority in more states than just South Carolina and Mississippi I can’t imagine them giving up slavery short of the barrel of a gun .
Also, if this question is presuming an independent Confederacy, the Confederate Constitution forbade slaves from abolishing slavery.
And yes, you read that right, the government that went to war for “states rights” granted States fewer rights than the US government.
There’s a difference between millions of slaves no longer being necessary due to mechanization and banning slavery. Why ban it if you don’t have to and feel no shame? It’s not like slavery stopped being useful. Who couldn’t use a couple slaves? Instead of millions of immigrants picking fruits and vegetables and working the meat plants we could have slaves. Sex slavery will always be a thing too.
It’s hard to imagine a scenario where the Fed never gets involved. Eisenhower sent federal troops to help with school integration, he’ll be cool with slavery?
Plus, everything I’ve heard about sugar farming in the era is even if you were a “benevolent” slaveowner it’s just simply brutal work. People aren’t made to work in those conditions forever without dire consequences. I think I’ve heard that American sugarcane plantations had the only slaves in the U.S. that actually didn’t have a net positive population growth rate and thus sugar cane plantation owners would periodically need to buy new slaves at a greater rate than say, a tobacco or cotton farmer who had a self-perpetuating population of slaves.
It’s not that absurd, a war would never come of it but if the Scots vote for independence from the United Kingdom should they be required to host British military bases on their soil for all time? When would they have the right to say “yeah, you need to leave” ?
It also granted them rights U.S. states didn’t have, such as the abilities to impose duties on ships from other states, impeach federal judges and officers, and issue bills of credit. Compared to U.S. states, they lost some rights and gained others.
That’s a pretty poor analogy. The United States didn’t sail into Charleston Harbor and build a fort. The fort was already there when South Carolina seceded. If you declare your country around an existing military base, you have no right to claim you’ve been invaded.
And that issue is moot anyway. The presence of a military base is not a declaration of war. We have a military base in Cuba. Castro’s not happy about it but we’re not at war.
As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own set of opinions but you’re not entitled to your own set of facts. There is no room for debate on which side started the war. You can have the opinion that the Confederacy may have had a good reason to declare war against the United States. But you can’t have the opinion that they didn’t declare war against the United States.
Economic pressure from other countries- maybe. For example you can imagine Confederate citizens deciding they don’t think slavery is really bad, but there’s an international boycott that is damaging their economy and it’s just not worth the cost. So at that point perhaps slavery is replaced by the near-slavery conditions of sharecropping and everything that went with that. The anti-apartheid boycotts of South Africa lasted 30+ years.
No, if Scotland becomes an independent country they can ask Britain to withdraw its military bases. And if Britain refuses, Scotland can declare war on Britain. But Scotland can’t claim Britain was the country that declared war.
To be fair, the original thread was started way, way back on monday. I can be forgiven for not taking the time to investigate if I was just rehashing old threads.