Assume for this thread that the Civil War never happened in the United States. That the Emancipation Proclamation never happened. Imagine the country continued on with slavery allowed as an institution.
How long do people think slavery would have continued as an “accepted” institution in the United States (or at least parts of it)? How do you think change might have occured? For the sake of argument the only method prohibited in this thread as a mechanism to end slavery is military intervention ala the Civil War (although you can present a slave insurrection if you like which of course would have elicited a military response).
I cannot imagine the United States could possibly have made it through the 20[sup]th[/sup] century with slavery intact. Then again I cannot see how slave owners would have ever willingly given up their slaves except at the point of a gun.
Any ideas?
[sub]Note: I have a very dim feeling that this may have been discussed before but if it has I missed it on a GD search. If it has already been done I apologize for the repeat.[/sub]
I don’t see how the situation could have remained stable much longer. If Lincoln hadn’t been elected president and we would have gotten another idiot Democrat as the last few had been (not talking about modern Dems here btw) who just wanted to keep the status quo, we might have made another 4 or 8 years…maybe even a few more. But the situation was rapidly coming to a head with border slave/non-slave states beginning to take matters into their own hands and a growing dissatisfaction in the North with continued Southern slavery. It was a powder cage with the fuse all ready and waiting for the right spark. It could have actually blown earlier if the previous presidents hadn’t bent over backwards to keep the status quo in fact.
I’m sure someone with more indepth knowledge will be along to shoot all this down, but thats how I remember the situation. So, to quickly answer the OP the situation wouldn’t have remained as it was much longer…eventually there would have been war. The only way slavery was going to continue was if the South won the civil war. Even then I’m guessing slavery wouldn’t have survived into the 20th century. There would have eventually been too much pressure, from Europe if nothing else, to end slavery.
They south may have become more open to letting the slaves go when the process of mechanization and new farming techniques sank below the costs of keeping and using slaves. I have no idea when that would have been…
Of course, anything that cuts into the bottomline would have made them think differently, I imagine.
I don’t think that would have been the reason mstay. You can always make more money from a person’s work than it costs to feed, clothe, and shelter him.
I seem to recall an economic analysis that showed slavery to be a rather inefficient system economically speaking. IIRC the idea was that although the slaves were not paid they did represent a cost to keep and their output was rather poor (not because of any inability but due to lack of motivation). With technological advancements making people even more efficient it may be that a paid laborer would make an employer more money than a slave would. Looking for a cite for that now but no luck so I may be way off base.
A fairly interesting subject, really, but I’m not sure the question is framed correctly. Do we assume secession of the slave states and formation of the CSA or not?
I don’t think I’d care to set a fixed date in either case, but would guess anywhere from the mid (18)60’s to maybe 1880 at the outside if no secession, maybe as late as 1910 or so with secession and an independent CSA. Even without a war it seems likely there would have been a large, active and vocal anti-slavery movement in the northern states, which would have assisted in freeing considerable numbers of slave workers through the underground railroad or some equivalent. I choose the 1910 figure as an absolute limit mainly because, as mstay mentioned, the system would be coming under increasing pressure from industrialization and mechanized farming methods.
I’m not sure about how much pressure there really would have been, as, IIRC, Great Britain and some other European nations provided some materiel support to the CSA, and purchased CSA goods, or at least whatever made it through the Union blockade, thoughout the Civil War.
I won’t take it badly if anyone points out any factual errors in the above, as I am typing this without having any references handy.
Well, the book Time on the Cross written by Stanley Engerman and William Fogel was a supposedly more rigorous reburral to the aceepted thought at the time that slavery would have dies out eventually on it’s own do to it becoming economically not viable.
However, this book was written in 1974 and surely does not represent the cutting edge of research into this topic.
Looking for cites I came across that book too. It seems they ignited a firestorm of criticism with that book and the results were called into question. I have not read any of the books to give an opinoin one way or another. Some clearly think slavery was a lousy economic model and others seem to think it was pretty effective.
I will say I think it had to be economically effective enough to exist as it did in the US. Simple economics should seek to maximize efficiency and profit and I doubt the slave owners were too stupid to simply adhere to slavery regardless of profitability. It may have been a close thing and as others have mentioned I think mechanization would have changed the dynamics considerably but I cannot see it being wholly worthless from an economic perspective in that day and age.
I’ve had more than one boss claim that if employees were paid their actual value, a lot more people would be unable to afford food or shelter.
Civil War or no, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing even before 1861. Had slave labor competed head to head with industrialized farming, they’d have had to let a lot of slaves go. And getting slaves to run the tractors and harvesters would involve training them, paying for their training, and investing in some kind of incentive system to keep trained slaves from running away and working for competitors or Northerners.
“What If” scenarios tend to verge off the established timeline at a specific point, and the one for this thread’s OP seems to be Lincoln’s election. The Republican Party and its “No Slaves in the Western Territories” platform had currency long before 1860, and the Abolitionist movement goes even farther back. And I’m not sure Southerners would have been any more pursuaded by European abolition sentiment than they were by the North’s version; they would likely have formed more trade bonds with Mexico and South America to make up for the lost trade revenue.
And slavery persists, mainly in Asia and Sudan, but a couple of cases a year of American households (in the DC area) with a slave still come to light. Most of these are World Bank employees from West Africa with some kind of drudge labor agreement with a luckless servant girl’s family back home, but they happen and they happen inside the Beltway. This is not something the world has outgrown.
By 1861 the need for slave labor was already declining. The cotton gin and steel plow had already been developed. Tractors and mechanical harvesters would require a few more decades to be introduced. “Horse labor” continued in rural areas through the 1930s, but by 1950 mechanization had almost completely taken over.
Assuming no other factors to accelerate the process, I think slavery would have certainly faded away by the beginning of World War II.
Complicating the matter is that many of those mechanical improvements only came into widespread use when the Civil War drained a lot of the manpower from the North. That’s when there was a push to match the economic pull of those improvements. Now, it might have happened anyway, but we can’t be sure.
The Civil War itself was the major source of that decision. It provided a very good argument for peaceful abolition, and it’s unlikely, IMHO, that it would have happened otherwise.
Actually a lot of the plantations weren’t economical, a least as far as the owner was concerned. The eastern states, like Virginia and So-Carol, held a great many such plantations. The western states had more aggressive economic practices, and were the source for more violent controls.
While your analysis seems reliable, note that the cotton gin actually expanded slavery’s hold. Until its invention, there was no reason to realy have slaves; the gin made slavery economically viable in the west through the use of coton economy.
What someone’s actual value is another story. The fact is that those bosses are still keeping those employees on the payroll because they’re producing more money for the company than the emplyees are being payed. And like those bosses admit, they’re still making more than enough to afford food and shelter.
You train a slave as a machinist, he runs away, now you’ve wasted money and time, just to create a competitor.
And besides, do you really want a guy you’ve just whipped within an inch of his life watching over ridiculously expensive machines that build your entire livelihood? One ticked-off slave, and you’re in the poorhouse, and having him hanged isn’t going to change that. And if you need a foreman to watch the slave, now you’ve got a paid guy anyway. So why feed and house a worker made redundant by his failsafe?
Yeah, old time factories required skilled tradespeople, but by the end of the 19th century, that was no longer the case. By that point, in the north, the factories were mostly being manned by poor immigrants. There’s no reason the same couldn’t have happened in the south, with slaves taking the immigrants’ place. In fact, the Tredeger Iron Works in Richmond was run with slave labor for the unskilled work right up through the Civil War (when it became vital, because it was almost the Confederacy’s only source of rail and weaponry). And while I wouldn’t want a badly whipped slave working on my machine, there was brutalization in northern factories too, and, especially with the rise of the labor movement, sabotage of equiptment became a concern.
That’s an important point. If the North and South had gone their separate ways as separate countries, I don’t know how much longer slavery per se would have lasted, but it’s quite possible that we’d still have Jim Crow-style segregation and Blacks as literally second-class citizens.
Partially it is hard to answer for another reason too: The American Civil War disrupted the World’s Cotton Market, essentially 75% of it disappeared overnight. Europe, especially Britain had to turn to Brazil, India and most especially Egypt to make it up. By the time the Civil War ended, the World had other Cotton markets and was gearing up to open production to even greater levels (somewhat akin to America seeking out other sources of oil after the “oil shock” of the 1970’s). The Cotton Market never really recovered to what it had been in 1859. If the Civil War never happened … It is a different world for King Cotton.
So/But having said that, from about the 1850’s on there were more and more militant abolitionists and free blacks living in the North. There were more and more newspapers, there were railroads and telegraphs and magazines. It was a “smaller” country and getting “smaller” (not meant literally). More people were being educated. I think John Brown was the opening salvo of a long guerilla campaign that would be financed by sympathetic radical northerners and would have some intellectual legitimacy among free blacks and some northern media. Increasingly free labor in the North feared slaves even in the 1860’s for the reasons Captain Amazing hits. This would have further added fuel to the fire.
Increasing Slave rebellions were a factor in Brazil’s emancipation. My best WAG is that it would be the same here – too expensive, too much trouble, causing constant & increasing political trouble, farming’s need of slaves would have changed too much and so: some sort emancipation would take place sometime in the 1890’s with a of harsh(er) Jim-Crow style system replacing it.
Even if the use of slave labor in agriculture became economically unfeasible, does that mean the use of slaves as domestic servants would have also gone away?
Slavery in Korea only ended in 1910 under the Japanese occupation. I don’t know how much of the population was slave at that time, but I’d guess that it was something like 5-10%, down from about 30% in the early 1800s.