Thank you for the information. Unfortunately only the first paragraph is free
for non-subscribers.
I do think the single paragraph is enough to identify the episode as a minor
one having no chance to make an impact.
The former slaves?
The quality of the posts on this site is impressive. I can only add a couple of small thoughts.
First, in Russia in 1861, the Tsar issued an Imperial Proclamation freeing the serfs (another slightly modified version of “slaves”) – after a five-year effort that began following Russia’s embarrassing defeat in the Crimean War. Tsar Alexander II had started the process in 1856 by turning to the landowners and saying ‘the existing condition of owning souls cannot remained unchanged. It is better to begin to destroy serfdom from above than to wait until that time when it begins to destroy itself from below. I ask you, gentlemen, to figure out how all this can be carried out to completion." The result was that the landowners made the serfs pay for their own freedom and a little land – through 100% mortgages on the land and a new burden of taxation from the local government.
This was done primarily to quell unrest (there had been about two peasant uprisings a month for the previous thirty years). It produced a result politically and economically acceptable to the privileged classes (nobility, landlords, slaveowners) and freedom of a sort (combined with poverty) for the serfs.
One might argue that the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 (both associated with losing wars) were the result.
Second, while the US Civil War did produce some beneficial results (emancipation, Ken Burns), the condition of the freed slaves remained dismal. They found themselves in a much worse condition than the underclasses of today – impoverished, uneducated, viewed as inferior by nature by most people (as Lincoln had seen them) – a bit like Russia’s freed serfs – with no food stamps, unemployment compensation, free public education or the like.
Perhaps losing a war is the only way to begin the process of ameliorating conditions for the poorest and weakest among us.
The idea that without the Civil War the U.S. would have practiced slavery in perpetuity is absurd. All other Western countries abolished slavery by the turn of the century and there is no doubt (at least in my mind) that slavery in the U.S. would have ended on a similar timetable.
I believe that the Civil War actually hardened attitudes about African-Americans and set back the goal of racial harmony by decades.
How do you harden attitudes so that they are worse than supporting slavery?
Well, if it comes to that, the Jim Crow era saw many things worse than slavery.
Worse than slavery? I don’t want to minimize the evilness of Jim Crow but the only thing I can think of that’s worse than slavery is genocide.
In one of the cruelist ironies of history Alexander II, one of the most reformist Tsars to reign in modern times, was assassinated by an anarchist in 1881, leaving the throne to the reactionary Nicholas II. Destroying probably the one chance that Russia had to reform short of revolution.
Some black historians characterize late reconstruction as the nadir of African American history. Somewhere in the Nadir of African American History, 1890-1920, Freedom's Story, TeacherServe®, National Humanities Center
As an economic institution, slavery could have continued indefinitely. True, Southern plantation owners would have faced a crisis with declining cotton prices after 1865. But that merely would have implied bankruptcy, liquidation and the resale of slaves at lower prices. Economic historians who have studied the numbers see no evidence that slavery would have become economically nonviable. Heck I understand that there were parts of the South where slaves did a little factory labor, though I’m not sure how that worked.
As for world comparisons, the US does have a tradition of exceptionalism. The US has uniquely lax gun laws in the Western world, as well as an absence of universal health care, at least through 2014. Our military spending as a share of GDP is also unusually high. So I don’t doubt that slavery could have persisted into the mid 20th century, but whether it would have is unclear to me.
They could always recapture and enslave freed blacks. There was no law to prevent this, and it happened many times.
You are confusing groups with individuals. Slaves, at least, were not liable to be murdered for smiling at the wrong time. If they were perceived as less than human, at least they were perceived as possessing value.
I dunno John, slaves were forced to work longer hours with substantially higher intensity than free men (leading to a ~1/3 drop in output after the Civil War, IIRC), were subject to whippings and beatings, and could have their families broken up by sale on the slave market. Their diet was bland and nutritionally poor even if it has sufficient calories. Admittedly, slaves in the Caribbean had appreciably lower life expectancy. Still, high infant mortality and poor treatment of mothers led to a life expectancy at birth of 21-22 relative to 40-43 for whites.
That was the holding in Dred Scott, which the South supported: that even if a slave managed to make it to another state, one which did not permit slavery, the slave continued to be a slave. The slave states did not want the free states to be able to make all men and women free within their own boundaries. Slavery thus could potentially expand into all states, even into states that banned slavery, so long as the original master-slave relationship was created in a slave state.
As well, the slave states favoured federal powers over states’ rights in this regard. They wanted the federal government to intrude in the affairs of free states, by catching fugitive slaves and returning them to their masters, even if the slave was in a state which had banned slavery. The slave states wanted a strong federal government, one which could override states’ rights, provided the federal government did so in support of slavery.
I challenge the factual correctness of this. The US Constitution from the beginning denied states the right to harbor fugitive slaves (Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3). What got so many people riled up was the passage of a new Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Because so many northern states had become scofflaws with regard to an older 1793 law, the new Act beefed up enforcement and added provisions which took the side of the slave owner over an accused fugitive slave. Onerous though it was, the new law simply enforced the letter of the Constitution, which denied that free states could nullify slave owners’ property rights, horrid as that sounds to us today.
As for Dred Scott v. Sandford, I am unaware that any part of the ruling that denied states the right to ban slavery within their borders. The whole ruling had been in response to Scott’s extended stay in a territory which had previously been declared closed to slavery. Again, the whole brouhaha was over slavery or the lack of it in the territories.
ETA: I find myself in the peculiar and uncomfortable position of defending the South’s actions, which were technically fully within their right to be utterly selfish and evil.
How could the Fugitive Slave Act operate in a free state, unless the slave continued to be a slave, regardless of the laws of that state?
I don’t disagree that the Act was constitutional and within federal powers under the Constitution as it existed at that time. But that’s my point - the whole concept of a federal Fugitive Slave Act is that regardless of the laws of a free state, if a person was a slave under the laws of a slave state, and moved to a free state, that person continued to be a slave and there was nothing that the free state could do about it. And, the federal government was expected to use its powers to retrieve that person from the free state, and return that person to the slave state - a clear instance of federal power overruling states rights, in favour of slavery.
By the way, Lumpy, I agree that I shouldn’t have said that Dred Scott related to a slave in a free state - it was a territory, as you rightly point out. Posting too late at night on my part.
However, the clear implication of the decision was that the same logic applied to the states, as Lincoln stated in the House Divided speech:
[QUOTE=Mr Lincoln]
Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits. …We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.
[/QUOTE]
Part of the horror at Dred Scott, of course, was the obitur dicta that a slave was not a legal person and therefore had no right to bring a suit at law in the first place, and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been unconstitutional. It was a rare breach of the SCOTUS tradition of judicial parsimony, and a good example of why that tradition exists.
Northern Piper, thank you for clarifying for me. My history isn’t as fresh as it once was, and I couldn’t parse the meaning of that comment. But now I can see that interpretation.
[QUOTE=Constitution]
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due
[/QUOTE]
The clause only provided for slaves who escaped into a free state. So, Mr. Slave Holder couldn’t decide that he wanted to move to Vermont, bring his slaves, and thumb his nose at VT anti-slavery laws.
Although many worried how “temporarily” someone accompanied by their slaves could stay in a free state, if the slaves knew that deportation back to the South was always an option.