Who says the recently emanicpated slaves would even be made citizens much less given the franchise?
Regarding sharecropping, it was definitely an unfair system that was as hard-to-impossible to get out of as the company-store traps of other places (some in the south), and in some ways sharecroppers arguably had it harder: the slave narratives have several accounts of former slaves who said that they didn’t know what real hunger was until sharecropping. Another huge disadvantage was that the south’s soil had just given out after a century of cotton planting and so people were breaking their backs to earn less money (adjusted for inflation) than their ancestors on the same soil ever had. It did have one advantage though, and that was that workers did have an incentive to work as hard as possible, whereas under slavery there was no incentive to work any harder than “enough so you don’t get a beating”, and some people did work their way out of it and become landowners.
Really good book recommend: All God’s Dangers*: The Life of Nate Shaw, the oral autobiography of a black sharecropper in Alabama whose real name was Ned Cobb. Cobb/Shaw was barely literate if at all literate, but he worked his way up to landowner (never rich by any means, but free of fealty) and after he learned about labor unions from northern relatives he was one of a party of men who attempted to unionize Alabama’s sharecroppers, which resulted in his being shot and imprisoned (though he died free and very old). It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read about the bottom rungs of Alabama society. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, written mostly from interviews with white sharecrobbers, is a more famous book- in part for its pictures- though the non-dialect parts are in a somewhat florid style that can be offputting, but still deservedly a classic.
*The title comes from Cobb’s observation on drought and the boll weevil: “All God’s dangers ain’t white men.”
Historian Bruce Catton wrote “Lincoln had been doing some figuring himself,” and went on to detail Lincoln’s calculation that buying the slaves outright would have been cheaper than fighting the war.
In 1862, Lincoln appealed directly to the slave-holding border states with a plan of compensated emancipation, noting the rising pressure for emancipation and making the logical points that since they were sticking with the Union, slavery would be doomed if their side won, and that selling their slaves to freedom now would net more cash than inevitably losing them by fiat later, with the added benefit of appearing to have taken the moral high ground (well, the moral medium ground at least, in accepting cash).
It went nowhere at all – the border states never considered it seriously.
Lincoln at first hesitated when contemplating the Emancipation Proclamation, because although the Proclamation specifically excepted the border states, everyone knew it meant the end of slavery ultimately, and he didn’t want to lose border state support.
But they helped Lincoln’s cause less than he expected, and at times seemed to be trying to coast through the war as “neutrals.” Shortly before releasing the Proclamation, he said to one of his advisers that the border states had lost their chance and he was going to proceed without regard for their sensitivity (I have looked for the direct quote on this online but have not found it so far).
Lincoln was absolutely right, of course. The border state slaveholders lost their slaves and got not a dime in recompense, as well as passing up the chance to be seen as the good guys. Another of history’s lost chances.
While the South would most likely have given up slavery, I don’t think they would have just freed them then repressed them. They would have gotten them out and pronto.
Where exactly is “out”?
The South showed that an absolute defense of slavery was not the purpose of the war.
States from the South, either through Congress or as a State refused to vote on the Corwin Amendmentwhich if passed would have protected slavery at the state level. Admittedly they had already seceeded but had slavery been the overriding concern, I’m sure they would have figured out a way to vote on it.
The Constitution of the CSA heavily restricted the slave trade.
Later in the war, slaves volunteering to serve in the CSA army were freed and blacks were paid equitably with whites unlike in the (racist?) USA army.
I think that most in the South realized that slavery was on its wa out and for many it was more of a obstinance that the Yankees won’t tell us what to do than anything else. The real question for the OP is is there a distinction between slavery as an institution or a de jure banning of slavery. As an institution, I say slavery is gone between mid-1880s and 1900 with isolated pockets (like polygamy in Utah). As for actual laws? IIRC, dueling was specifically legal in Louisiana until 1957 although I’d have to hunt up a cite for it to be sure.
Aside from the minor technicality that they had seceeded… they wouldn’t have had the votes anyway, would they?
The only restriction I see is that they couldn’t import new slaves. The US had done the same earlier, and there were so many slaves by then that it wasn’t necessary to import them anymore.
But not until it was too late to help, right? I believe Sampiro has posted about this in great detail, for one.
Yesbut- racism, “separate but equal” and bigotry aren’t productive, but it took until the 1960s to put a end to the various forms of *institutionalized racism *in the South, and it still continues.
“Oh, hey, y’all are totally promising cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die that y’all are gonna stop all this slave-stealing and inciting servile insurrections among us, and this time you really, really mean it? Aw, heck–let’s just forget this whole ‘secession’ thing ever happened.” (Of course the Corwin Amendment would have done nothing against state level personal liberty laws, did not address the issue of slavery in the territories, and obviously could not prevent Northern abolitionist terrorists/freedom fighters from staging attacks on the South. But hey, a last ditch effort to avert the Civil War failed–that proves it wasn’t really about slavery! Though one wonders, them, what the hell Congress was thinking of, proposing an amendment to protect slavery from federal interferance, given that slavery wasn’t the cause of the conflict or anything. Maybe the Yankees really secretly liked slavery, and were upset that the South was seceding and taking all those slaves with them.)
The Confederate Constitution prohibited foreign slave trading (with an exemption for any slave states or territories remaining in the United States), which is to say, it banned the African slave trade, which had been prohibited for for about fifty years at that point, and which the Royal Navy (the most powerful navy in the world) regarded as tantamount to piracy on the high seas. The C.S. Constitution explicitly protected the “right of property in negro slaves”, protected the right of citizens of the several Confederate states to “transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property”, and provided that “the institution of negro slavery” should be protected in any territories the Confederacy should acquire.
By “later in the war” is meant “a couple of weeks before they lost”; a few hundred black Confederate soldiers began training (but never actually fought) before Grant’s troops closed in. Emancipation for slaves was dependent on the consent of their masters. I don’t know if any of them were ever even paid at all, let alone on an equal basis with whites. By contrast, over 180,000 blacks fought for the Union.
Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. In 1860, whatever they may or may not have thought in their hearts of hearts, they sure weren’t talking like they thought slavery was on its way out. Rather, they were talking of slavery as something that should exist “in all future time”; of slavery as the “cornerstone” of their government and of black subordination and white supremacy as principles of nature comparable to those discovered by Galileo.
As to the O.P.:
“If there were no Civil War” covers several scenarios:
If the South simply doesn’t secede in 1860…well, it’s just hard to imagine a.) the South giving up their slaves without a fight or b.) the North accepting slavery. Even if, say, Lincoln loses in 1860, that just puts off the war until 1864 or 1868 or whenever the Republicans finally do win the election (or something else triggers the conflict). The South had too much invested in the institution, socially, politically, and economically, to make option “a” at all likely (at least in the Deep South; Maryland and Missouri and perhaps Kentucky might well have ended slavery soon–and gotten rid of their slaves by selling them further South–if there had been no secession and war); and the North’s opposition to the “Slave Power” was becoming too hardened to make option “b” realistic.
If the South secedes, and the rest of the country just shrugs and says “Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out”–the Confederacy might have been smaller (only the first seven states, but maybe not all of Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, or Virginia would have joined up, as they only seceded after war broke out, let alone the pro-Union or disputed slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, or Maryland) and both the Confederacy and the Union would have likely been a lot weaker, with states or groups of states (Texas, New England) seceding from one or the other federation at the drop of a hat. One imagines the big European powers (Britain, up in Canada; and France, then embroiled in Mexico) would be the big winners in that scenario, playing divide and conquer games with the squabbling American republics. What that would mean for slavery is hard to say. There would certainly be no native American federal government strong enough to abolish slavery where it already existed, North or South. Possibly the British Empire would move to end slavery in those slave states where they wound up in control (the Boers will testify the 19th Century British were not above beating up on ex-colonial white regimes when it suited them to do so).
If there is a war, but the South somehow actually wins: Stipulating for the sake of argument slavery was uneconomical and on its way out for that reason, and that there would be intense foreign pressure for at least formal emancipation, I would still say no formal abolition of slavery any earlier than the early 20th Century. South Africa had an official and avowed policy of apartheid for nearly 50 years (in the face of eventually massive foreign pressure); Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union made a go of communism (now widely regarded as making no sense at all economically) for over 70 years. When a people conceive something to be central to their identity, they can be awful stubborn about hanging on to it. So, maybe official abolition in the Confederate States somewhere between 1910 and the 1930’s–but that doesn’t mean the C.S.A. passes their versions of the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments (equal rights and suffrage for the freed slaves), just the Thirteenth (de jure end of slavery), possibly followed by some (maybe lengthy) period of second-class citizenship (or worse), even “non-citizen” status for the freedmen and perhaps some kind of quasi-slavery (“apprenticeships” or something like that).
You’ve been sold a bill of goods. the Corwin Amendment went nowhere because the states it was designed to appeal to had already seceded – it was quite literally too late for talk. It did not fail because the South had some higher motive than slavery or anything like that. Southern politicians and founders are on record before, during and after the war as saying preserving slavery was their overriding priority, in some cases their sole priority. It’s so lopsided that to say that the South seceded almost solely because of slavery is almost to understate the case.
The “slave trade,” meaning the importation of Africans via the “Triangle Trade” or “Middle Passage,” was dead before secession. The United states had outlawed it in 1808, 52 years previously. Sale of slaves born in captivity in the South, of course, was NOT restricted by Confederate authorities. For reasons perhaps murky to the modern mind, people of the day made sharp distinctions between being born into slavery and being captured into it.
Late in the war, it was proposed to pay equitable wages to slaves who might in theory be freed to serve the CSA as soldiers. None did serve in battle, however, outside of the few fringe individuals here and there, like female soldiers. By war’s end, insignificant numbers had volunteered and almost no organized preparations were carried out. It was pure pie-in-the-sky desperation and had been soundly rejected a year earlier (January 1864) when Patrick Cleburne had suggested it – and it was probably too late then. The South never seriously contemplated black soldiers until reduced to grasping at straws.
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(wiki) Much of the Confederate States Constitution replicated the United States Constitution verbatim, but it contained several explicit protections of the institution of slavery, though it maintained the existing ban on international slave-trading.
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The Corwin Admenment was proposed in March 1961. The CSA was formed in Feb 1861, several states having seceeded as early as Dec 1860. Those 7 states did not vote on the Admendment, thusly.
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There were no more than 200 such soldiers (perhaps as little as 40) , and they were raised so near the end, I doubt if they were ever paid anyway (about that time, few CSA soldiers could depend upon pay, and what pay there was was of little real value). In any case (wiki) The emancipation offered, however, was reliant upon a master’s consent;“no slave will be accepted as a recruit unless with his own consent and with the approbation of his master by a written instrument conferring, as far as he may, the rights of a freedman”[47] I see nothing where their pay was equal to that of Whites. Cite? Note that in the Union Navy, Blacks and whites rcvd equal pay, and Blacks only rcvd lower pay for less than two years, and in actual practice only served one year under lower pay. In other words, the USA quickly realized unequal pay was wrong and fixed it.
What hasn’t been mentioned, is the real cause of the Civil War-the refusal of the Northern-dominated house to allow slavery to be extended to the new, far-western states.
The truth is, the large plantation owners faced economic ruin, if they could not acquire lands in the west (and work them with slaves). The culyivation of cotton (in the deep south) wore the soil out-and the big planatation owners wanted to move west. The old “tidewater” staes (Virginia, N and S Carolina, Georgia) were almsot bankrupt by 1860-their backward cultivation methods were built around slavery, and thier poverty prevented them from mechanizing their farming methods.
The restrictions on slavery in the west may have been an incentive, but not major. The Kansas-Nebraska Act left it up to the states and repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise. In 1860 there weren’t enough slaveowners in those territories to push through a legalization of slavery BUT with enough southerners and slaveowners moving in from Missouri and other slave states that could change, and in fact the Kansas-Nebraska Act infuriated far more abolitionists and anti-expansionists than it did slaveowners (who in fact it was meant to mollify).
I think more immediately to the southern policy makers were infuriated and terrified at the notion of Abraham Lincoln winning without a single electoral vote from the south (and only about 1% of the popular vote since he wasn’t on the ballots in most slave states), which meant that regardless of whether he personally was an abolitionist (and he consistently proclaimed not to be until well into the war) the non-slave states had enough votes to end slavery at any time since the slave states couldn’t block a bill.
Good point on the looming financial disaster, which would be a good thread in and of itself. There was a huge traffic in slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas into Texas and Louisiana and even into what’s now New Mexico for this reason. Selling their slaves west gave them much needed cash AND relieved them of a reliability. The southern economy- tied as it was to nature with freezes/droughts/hurricanes/pestilence/you-name-it was terrifyingly mercurial and a couple of bad years could bring even the wealthiest families to ruin. (Of the Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were just three of the very wealthy land-slave barons who died bankrupt and that was before the south was running out of free land; Andrew Jackson died in a mansion but would have been bankrupt as those had he been forced to pay his debts in cash.)
One of the craziest things in the history of the Confederacy is the resistance of the Confederate politicians to debt considering how many of them were up to their eyeballs in debt on a personal level. Jefferson Davis (who courtesy of his brother was far more solvent than most planters before the war [though he’d taken some gut-punches from floods]) managed, through his professional friendship and association with John Slidell (a New Yorker by birth/Louisiana planter and Democratic politician in mid-life and husband of a French banking heiress) found a market for more than $150 million in Confederate bonds in Europe but the Confederate Congress refused to allow their sale. They did issue $15 million in bonds through French banks but refused to do more saying that it would be fiscally irresponsible to build a nation on debt, never mind that the American Revolution they claimed as a template would have been lost without massive loans from France and European powers and bankers. The banking house of D’Erlanger (Slidell’s wife’s family) pleaded with Davis and the CSA after the $15 million in bond sales to “please for the love of Yahweh let us loan you $50 million or even $150 million more because with that you can win the war; the $15 million we’ve already sold in bonds are going to be toilet paper if you lose, which you will without money”.
By the time the Confederate Congress (a body Robert E. Lee said were capable of one thing that was impressive and that was chewing tobacco and eating peanuts at the same time) came around and realized they needed a lot more money the same European bankers had lost their nerve and in fact were buying U.S. bonds and interest in suppliers to the Union armies to help get back some of the fortunes they’d lost on CSA bonds.
So it’s amazing that the one time going deep into debt would have benefited them, they refused. After the war many of these people lamented forever their financial ruin (Oscar Wilde got so tired of hearing about the war’s damage on his 1882 tour that he said later “If you compliment the moon to a southern aristocrat they’ll tell you ‘oh, but you should have seen it before the war’”) but in fact many would have been paupers had the South won or the war been avoided.
Many may even have been better off for slavery having ended. Robert E. Lee’s son Custis (aka “Bunny” [his nickname was Bunny, he perfumed his hair, he never married and he shared a bedroom with a male servant- he was ‘shy around girls’ it was said]) received $150,000 for Arlington mansion and the land the cemetery is now on after the war and parlayed that into well over a million in stocks and other business interest by the time of his death. For perspective, his grandfather and namesake George Washington Parke Custis from whom he inherited the mansion died deeply in debt and cash-broke. General Longstreet was another ex-Confederate who became wealthy after the war, as did General Wheeler- Longstreet had teetered on the fulcrum of prosperity and ruin before the war, Wheeler’s family (New England Yankees relocated to Georgia) had been in perennial ruin before the war. While a special cases, these generals weren’t the only southerners who didn’t become liquid and solvent until after the debtor economy of the slave system was buried.
The previous poster nailed it-the South was an economic basket case.
Thomas Jefferson was heavily in debt-and his friends had to buy his house, to save him from eviction. The Southern agricultural model (slave-worked plantations) was no good-and it also kept the poor whites in poverty as well.
When Judah Benjamin (Jefferson Davis’ secretary of state) proposed floating loans in Europe, he was shouted down-but this was the only conceivalble way that the war could have been fought.
Mark Twain wrote an excellent essay about the South-and wondered why poor whites took up arms to defend a system that kept them in poverty-anybody know where it is to be found?
Something a lot of people don’t remember about the history of serfdom in Europe is that near the end, some of the biggest drivers for the abolition of serfdom were the landed nobility. Now, many of the landed nobility staunchly opposed the withering of their traditional rights and powers, but that was more out of hardcore traditionalism than it was out of self interest.
There are many stories from the end of the era of serfdom (which is anywhere from 1300-1800s depending on location) in which nobles found their enterprises becoming vastly more profitable by renting their land out to free individuals.
If you have a vast tract of land and rent it out in parcels to free farmers, who then pay you in a portion of their production, you essentially are taking advantage of entrepreneurship and human being’s natural inclination to be as successful as possible. When you’re working serfs or slaves you have people that are only motivated by fear of punishment, and since no amount of overlordship historically was perfectly efficient, even in the harshest of agricultural slavery regimes it was hard to get full productivity out of unfree labor.
The problem with slaves is they can actually be a massive liability. You have to keep feeding and clothing those slaves whether they are being productive or not, you have to feed and clothe injured or ill slaves. You have to keep slaves even if you have too many for your land, at least until you can find a buyer.
As a counter many will point out the almost total lack of legal protection for American slaves. Many would counter “you could just starve old slaves to death, or kill them out right.” This is absolutely, 100% true from a legal perspective. However, when studying history cultural and social norms are more important than looking at exclusively the laws of the time. Southern plantation owners were essentially the South’s aristocracy, these people were in a tight knit social circle and of course that comes with all kinds of gossip and jockeying for good standing with the community. A slave owner who killed off or starved old or injured slaves would not be well thought of in the community, it would be shameful and would make that plantation owner look as though he couldn’t even afford to keep his slaves fed.
If you hire a bad worker, you can fire them with relatively minor costs. If you buy a bad slave, it’s not so easy. Obviously you can whip them and et cetera, but some slaves just aren’t good laborers no matter what you do. As I said above, while legal, various ultra-barbaric options were not socially normal and would have lead to being ostracized in the community. (There was also some element of the plantation owners feeling genuine noblesse oblige to their slaves.)
Finally, for most of the history of the South, the gentry were in debt up to their eye balls. This meant that there were often legal and financial obligations that were tied up with the slaves. With a hired laborer, that is not an issue. However, if you’ve used slaves as collateral when you took out a loan to buy a season’s seeds, or if you’ve bought slaves on credit, you can’t really just get rid of those slaves on a whim. That could result in financial ruin. (Interestingly at various points in the history of the South the largest owners, at least on paper, of slaves were banks that took ownership of them when plantation owners would default on loans.)
I think it would depend on the cultural norms. During the middle ages in many countries there would have been little legal protections against a strong noble or even monarch keeping a harem of women that he had abducted from throughout the kingdom. This wasn’t done with great regularity because it was in such violation of various cultural and social norms (including of course religious taboos.)
Interestingly in Russia things were a bit different, the boyars tended to control much vaster tracts of land and much vaster numbers of serfs. Some of the most powerful boyars did in fact commonly have large serf harems (and serf orchestras, serf acting troupes and et cetera.)