The United States was founded and built on a bedrock which included slavery, and not just in the South. And yet slavery was wilting; relative to the free population, the slave population was in decline almost from the first days of independence. In 1790, the number of slaves equaled 24% of the free population; by 1860 the ratio had fallen below 14%.
Very few Northerners would have been interested in doing that. Even most abolitionists of the day were racists by modern standards, and theoretical opposition to slavery didn’t imply an interest in having free black people around (there were honorable exceptions, such as Garrison after his epiphany). Often it was exactly the reverse: if slavery should be abolished, it would be with the intention of shipping them away, and reserving the bounty of the new lands for white people. Or, others said, colonization could be carried out in parallel with continued (declining) slavery. Either way, there is no evidence to suggest that there was any great interest among Northern white people in bringing former slaves either to their communities in the North, or to new settlements in the West.
No, I imagine such efforts would amount to no more than a continuation of the Underground Railroad, freeing only a few hundred slaves per year (a noble cause, to be sure, and of great import to those involved, but not much more than that). Persons who were discovered engaged in this enterprise would likely be treated as common criminals, not agents of foreign powers.
Really I don’t see why a peacefully-seceded Confederacy would be particularly at odds with the remaining United States at all; the sectional politics would be resolved in most eyes, and each side would have a major interest in peaceful trade.
Not the same thing. The US was not founded for the sole purpose of defending slavery. The Confederacy giving up slavery would have been like the US petitioning to become a subject province of Britain.
The “peaceful trade” would just have created more tensions, since the dependence on the South of slave labor relegated them to stagnation and economic reliance on providing unprocessed resources; the 19th century version of a Third World nation. They found themselves falling farther and farther behind and the continuing industrialization of the North would only have made it worse. They would having fallen under the domination of the North economically instead of militarily, but they would still have been dominated.
Mechanization of agriculture wouldn’t necessarily destroy slavery, provided there was other work to be done that could be tightly monitored. In the North, freemen would discourage such practice as nobody wants to compete with slave labor. But things might differ in a state that is ideologically committed to the practice.
If the South had successfully split off, it’s entirely possible that they would have put themselves on a Mexican growth path, while the US continued to grow into a world power.
I don’t agree with the argument that slavery would eventually become economically unfeasible. Perhaps it would on a large scale of widespread industry or or agronomy, but not on a more personal level – house servants, small businesses, etc.
How can it be uneconomical to have a personal servant who sleeps in a corner, eats your leftovers, wears a burlap sack, and who you can work to death if you want? I’ll bet a small restaurant with slaves as cooks and wait staff could turn a tidy profit.
Of course, this would be assuming that your slaves were cooperative and you didn’t have to go to bed at night concerned that one would slit your throat.
Even today we have service animals for the handicapped, and working animals fit into niches in many economies. Your PETA types would say these animals ARE slaves – all I’m saying is that many of them could be replaced by slaves.
That seems really unlikely. Even leaving aside any left over animosity, having two expansionist powers side by side on the continent, racing to lay claim to largely the same territories, would have led to innumerable small wars, leading (probably inevitably) to a big one.
Into the 20th century? Sure. I think cultural reasons would have kept it going for some time even after it was economically impractical on a large scale - for example, perhaps the government would have subsidized it for a time - and that would have been followed by longer and probably worse sharecropping and Jim Crow periods. And Boyo Jim makes a good point that industrialization would not have put domestic slaves out of work.
There’s also sexual slavery, which still exists despite being illegal. If it was legal in a society that enshrined slavery as a virtue it seems reasonable it would be widespread.
I always wondered about that. How does sexual slavery (or any kind of slavery) continue to exist in America? Are they kept shackled in a dark dungeon somewhere?
Well, there are a few variations. One of the more common is a form of immigration scam:
Some poor girl, often from the former Soviet bloc, is told “Hey! You can go to the States! And get a job! You’ll have a better life, and be able to support your family at home - doesn’t that sound swell?”
Girl: “Why, yes. Yes, it does.”
Of course, the nice man with the plan to spirit Our Heroine to freedom and prosperity in the US is a thug, working with other thugs. When the girl gets to America, she’ll be told she’s incurred some staggering debt that she’ll need to work off. Then she’s relieved of her passport, told she’ll disappoint her family and be arrested if she goes for help (or her family will be hurt, or she’ll be hurt, or whatever). And then it’s off to a dodgy stripclub, nightclub, brothel or whatever for a life of violence, sexual exploitation, and general wretchedness. An ugly business.
By the way, the threat of deportation/arrest is a particularly powerful one that the traffickers have at their disposal - it’s why we ended up implementing “T” visas: http://www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/obtainlpr/oblpr039.htm
If you want to read more about human trafficking, I recommend the Polaris Project, Human Rights Watch, or the Protection Project. http://www.protectionproject.org/ You’ll also want a stiff drink.
Another variation: Embassy staffers from more repressive states occasionally bring in people who are effectively slaves using the same basic idea as your run-of-the-mill sex trafficker: Welcome to the US, give me your passport, try to leave or resist me and I’ll beat you, have you arrested, hurt your family, or all three.
And some of the “girls” I discussed in the earlier post really are girls - child sex slaves. Some of them are actually sold to the traffickers by their own families. Charming, yes?
Human trafficking is a very, very depressing issue area.
Slaves as domestics and wait staff would only have been cost effective if you inherited them. If you had to buy or lease them, not so much. While it’s difficult to compare 1860 USD to 2010 USD, I think it’s fair to say that in price a slave would have been similar to a car today; you’re going to pay at least a few thousand dollars for anything you expect to be reliable for a few years and you’re going to pay at least five figures for anything of quality.
Most people don’t have that kind of cash to lay out, and if they did then you’re taking a big risk: what if the slave dies or gets disabled or whatever, you still have to pay for them and provide for them or you could sell them and take a huge loss. OR, you can hire an Irish immigrant or even an American who badly needs a job for a dollar or two a week to clean your house/work in your restaurant/etc., and if they get sick/die/don’t work out/explode/whatever, just hire another one to take their place. Same with domestics: why pay $1200 for a maid or cook when you can pay $3 per week for a free worker who if they don’t work out you can fire?
Many slaveowners leased their slaves out and the usual formula was 10% of their worth per year, so a $1200 slave would be about $10 per month, BUT it was usually explicit in the contract that the slave was to eat x times per day and to have x number of changes of clothing and the like and see a doctor if they became ill, etc., and this was usually enforced as even if the slave owner wasn’t such a sterling guy he still wanted to protect his investment, so that would raise the price substantially.
This happened amazingly rarely, so seldom that when it did it usually became a huge story in the region. Penalties for patronicide were usually “you don’t even want to hear about it” (in Alabama the penalty for a slave or free black killing a white person was death by burning, and it was enforced at least a few times [I found a reference to it being carried out not too far from where I grew up on four escaped slaves who had become highwaymen and killed a white man]) so that was a powerful deterrent, plus most slaves weren’t naturally homicidal to begin with.
As for brothels, why buy slaves who are going to have at best a few good-looking years when there’s rarely a shortage of free women willing to do it?
Regarding this comment, I should have made clear I’m referring to the 19th century paradigm as opposed to modern day trafficking. In the 19th century most brothels didn’t get raided unless there was something really more serious than prostitution going on, and while certainly masters used slaves for their own sexual gratification I’ve never heard of a slave brothel (though one certainly may have existed). Again, you could hire girls from the farm for a LOT cheaper than you’d pay for a slave and if they get the pox, let 'em go.
I don’t see slavery lasting much beyond the 1880’s (at the latest).
The reasons:
-productivity of slave-run farms was terrible
-farm machinery was begiining to make an impact-slavery would have tied plantation owners to a failing system-and made subsituting machines for slave labor difficult
-the South was becoming an economic and social backwater-educted young people were leaving in droves
Of course, slavery was replaced by sharecropping-which had many of the features of slavery (purpetual debt, limited education, opressive legal system).
The South lagged behind the rest of the country-it never caught up until the 1960’s-the legacy of slavery was a major cause.
All of these arguments focus on the wrong thing. Yes, I think it is generally agreed that the economic viability of slavery was waning. That is to say that there wouldn’t be as many slaves in 1900 as in 1860. What I don’t understand is what mechanism you all imagine would come by to free the slaves.
Imagine a Confederate nation. It separated to defend the right of any individual to own slaves if he wished. It further separated to defend the right of every state to determine its own laws without interference from the Federal government. These are the bedrock principles that would represent the reason for the nation’s existence. I can see slavery going away in some states, but in Mississippi or Alabama it would have persisted. The right to own another person would have continued for many many years, even if it wasn’t a widespread phenomenon. After all, holding blacks in pseudo-servitude through sharecropping was common all the way through the 1960s.
It strikes me as absurdly optimistic to think that the Confederacy would have realized the error of their ways shortly after formation.
Were the slaves going to stop having children? That brings up another problem, by the way. I think slaves outnumbered free whites by the time of the Civil War, and there’s no chance Confederate whites were about to surrender political power to their former slaves.
In some places: South Carolina and Mississippi were the only two states that had more slaves than free, though many counties in other states did. Most states had more free than slave. You can probably draw a straight line from this to Mississippi being one of the enthusiastic and draconian Jim Crow states; South Carolina (like all former slave states) had its share of atrocities but generally it’s not as infamous as Mississippi and Alabama.