Most alternate-history discussion of the civil war starts with the premise that the South won, or at least avoided total defeat somehow. What if the war had been avoided altogether without the South seceding?
According to Wikipedia, the South seceded not because the North was threatening to outlaw slavery where it already existed, but rather because the North wasn’t allowing slavery to spread into the new territories. What if the South had just accepted that slavery would be confined to the old South? How long would it have taken for slavery to be outlawed in the South itself? Could it possibly have happened at the state level, or would the Federal government have had to intervene eventually? Could this have been done in a way that avoided war? For example, could slavery have ever become so obviously economically infeasible that there would have been less resistance to its abolition?
I wish I knew enough to stake out a position of my own, but for now I will just open the floor to those more knowledgeable than I.
I don’t think the South could have held onto slavery much longer. Britain, its biggest market for cotton, had an active and growing anti-slavery movement./ Slavery had died out elsewherree in the world and was rapidly disappearing. It’s actually a costly and difficult system to maintain. It had lasted a long time because it was once very cost effective, but it was now an anachronism, and only conservatism (I mean the tendency of people to remain in ruts they’ve wiorn well and not do new things – not a political philosophy) and the considerable costs of changing to new technology kept them from changing. I think Harry Turtledove got it right in Guns of the South when he showed a victorious South turning away from slavery after the war’s end.
I’ve long believed that slavery ended when it did because of the rise of steam power and thereafter of other alternate, highly portable sources of power to replace forced manual labor. Water power was good, but restricted to where the presence of reliable flowing water and a height difference made it practicable. But a sdteam engine could be placed anywhere. I think it wasn’t at all accidental that slavery ended just as steam made its appearance.
The British Empire was about to find other places to get its cotton, making the soouthern US’, and slavery, largely superfluous. Add in another ten years for inertia.
I’d say that the south, either state by state or through federal action, would have bowed under pressure from abolitionists and the adoption of a new economy by 1880. Longer, if a compromise somehow gradually reduced the number of slaves instead of total emancipation.
Now the real question is whether African-Americans in 2006 would be better off if slavery ended on a note other than total war and messy reconstruction.
I don’t agree that slavery was doomed to collapse of its own weight by 1880. Sharecropping, which largely replaced slavery, persisted into the 1950’s–with farmers generally growing the same crops, and using the same technology, as under slavery. The world still needed farms, and farms of that era still needed a lot of labor.
It’s true that slavery would have been less insanely profitable in later decades; cotton growers faced more competition, and land owners never regained their wealth or social status after the war. Then, too, restriction of slavery to its existing domain would have made slaves less of a “growth asset”, and thus less valuable. From a slaveholder’s standpoint, the above would have reduced the differential between owning a plantation with slaves and without slaves, and left slaveowners less inclined to fanatically defend the system . . .
. . . and more open to some sort of compensated emancipation. I do agree that that probably would have happened by 1900. The growing population and wealth of the North, international embarrassment as the United States became more involved in world affairs, and the declining profit differential of slavery would have made it more feasible.
There’s no question that such a scenario would have been better for slave owners. They would have avoided the destruction of the Civil War, gotten compensation in return for emancipation, and continued to operate their plantations under sharecropping or peonage. It almost certainly would have been worse for the enslaved—another three or four decades of bondage, then a transition to some form of American apartheid that might have been even worse than the actual Jim Crow.
Yeah, de jure slavery would have ended by 1900, but de facto slavery could’ve persisted until the 50s or 60s. And would about citizenship and voting rights? Blacks got both (in theory) a few years after the Civil War. Nothern states might grant blacks the right to vote, but wouldn’t citizenship still take a constitutional amendment? How could Dredd Scott be overturned?
I don’t see any reason for slavery to have died out without the war.
I have no reason to think that Britain, with it’s long history of promoting human rights abroad (snark), would have exerted any pressure.
There’s no reason to assume that a fall off in cotton exports would put pressure on the institution of slavery. It would put pressure on the southern economy to find other goods to produce or other markets to trade with, but the existence of essentially free labor would remain a competitive advantage. Obviously, we are still trying to get labor that’s as close to free as possible, with no particular regard for the working and living conditions of the laborers (particularly as many of them are in foreign countries).
Yes. Nothing like having a colony that’s both a captive supplier and a captive market. But I was actually responding to CalMeaham mention of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. I don’t think that would have been much of a factor.
Cuba abolished slavery in 1886 (while still part of Spain), and Brazil in 1888. One could make the argument that without the Civil War the US would probably have abolished slavery around the same time period.
OTOH, one could also argue that had slavery persisted in the US, this would have set up a “negative feedback” loop amongst the slave-holding countries of the Americas, allowing slavery to persist for much longer in all three locations.
I think the British looked to India and Egypt when at the outbreak of the Civil War the Confederacy started the Cotton Embargo believing, with some good reason , that Britain couldn’t replace Cotton, and would have to, and so would have to come in on the South’s side or at the very least recognize the Confederacy
I think what hasn’t been mentioned yet in this thread filled with good point after good point is that what largely was pushing abolition on the street was enlightened self interest – Free labor in the emerging/growing Industrializing markets feared slavery and believed (probably correctly) that slavery was depressing wages for free labor in some markets. Further non-slave holding free farmers widely believed that free slave labor put them at a competitive disadvantage. These were real and dangerous forces opposing slavery - I don’t say the “moral issue” (or declining economics) wasn’t as/more important than these forces but they were close to its equal.
There’s a vast difference between feelings about things in Britain and the US and Britain and elsewhere. Explouting the natives is one thing, but I suspect that when your temperater-climated business partner has imported slaves and you don’t, you’re going to feel uneasy about it. And it wasn’t just British society that had abandoned slavery (and would look down on a trading partner who still had it). Britain, by the way, had India over a century before the Civil watr, but was still the biggest non-American market for the South’s cotton. (Not to mention othefr Southern trading goods – cash crops, tobacco, indigo, and especially timber) I think ther opinions of britain and Europe would carry a considerable amount of weight.
Given that, after Reconstruction, the Southern bloc in the Senate was able to block any civil rights legislation until the late 1950s, I think they would have been able to hang on to slavery for a very long time.
The industrial revolution, especially in terms of agriculture, would have made that vast plantations less economically viable as time goes on.
Machines make working the land you have easier, and faster, and require less expense in upkeep.
However, there was still a status symbol in slave owning, so butler’s, maids, cooks, horse stewards, and the like would be retained.
So the slave states might only enact antislavery laws in order to normalise trade with those nations (or states) that have embargoed the south on the pretext of slavery.
Without a Constitutional amendment banning slavery, than it was still a state issue.
Possibly through boycotts of southern goods. Possibly through the spreading of “human rights” awareness in the people of the south. (Some southern leaders were against slavery, but felt it should be a choice left up to the state.)
But if the slave states thought that they were being forced by some outside group to abandon the use of slaves, say through a Constitutional amendment that got voted on down slave/antislave state “partisan” lines, then force of arms may have been required.
Which is exactly what happens in Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 series of AH novels – though that series depends on the more usual scenario of the South winning, rather than avoiding, the war.
This is where you get into some really difficult counter-factuals, because without the Civil War there would be no Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. With respect to African Americans, these were honored mostly in the breach for 100 years, but still, they provided the constitutional framework by which the NAACP was able to chip away at Jim Crow.
And of course, the impact of a missing Fourteenth Amendment would go way beyond race relations. There would be no Equal Protection Clause, no due process appeals in federal court, no Miranda rights in state prosecutions. Or would there? Would the Supreme Court have found penumbras and emanations saying these same things in any case? I do not know.
Or might the addition of new states, in which, by hypothesis, slavery is illegal, have eventually formed a sufficiently large group to pass a Fourteenth Amendment, even with a South still in the Union opposing it? I assume that this is one of the reasons that the South wanted some of the new states to be slave states.
The question that interests me most about this counter-factual is whether slavery could ever have been abolished in a way that respected “states rights” as envisioned at the founding of the Union. There are still people who argue that the federal government never needed to get involved in the civil rights movement during the 1960s. They claim that things would eventually have been straightened out at the local level. Does anyone make that claim with respect to slavery?
Except that there was no demand, even in the North, for anything like the Fourteenth Amendment until the Civil War (and emancipation) made it necessary. Nor is it clear when or why such a demand would have arisen (with sufficient support to pass a constitutional amendment) at any other time in American history.
One must be careful about reading the conflict over slavery as federal versus state power. It only acquired that cast after secession. Before 1860, one could just as easily cite emancipation as an assertion of “states rights” against a Southern-dominated federal government that supported slavery.
In the end, of course, because of secession, the federal government did become the engine of emancipation, and because of the conflict over Reconstruction and the postwar amendments, it did so at the expense of state power.
Could it have been otherwise? Yes, my hypothesis above is that it could have been–by 1900 conditions might have been right for the federal government and the states to abolish slavery by mutual consent. There would have been no Reconstruction, and no Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments, and this would not necessarily have been a good thing.
I cannot see slavery-based agriculture lasting past about 1890-too ineffiecient. Of course, sharecropping was a form of slavery, and that went on for a LONG time. :o
I’d say by taking the majority of both houses and out-voting the North they could have legally gotten away with it. Then things could get really interesting. Imagine the North breaking away instead and forming its own renegate anti-slavery republic