Forgive me for nitpicking such an interesting post, but having worked with the slave schedules of the 1860 U.S. Census, I can say I’ve never seen such a large household staff anywhere in the South. Thirty slaves was a large number on an entire plantation, and most of those were field hands.
What percentage of the free population even owned slaves? What was the average number of slaves per owner? Wasn’t it really low except for the large plantation owners?
Damned if I know. I was plucking numbers out of the air based on a rough guess of how many people it would take to maintain a mansion with nineteenth century technology.
But thanks for the compliment that it was interesting, Walloon! My default assumption is that, if people read my posts at all, they are bored silly!
I have to disagree. Once it became fashionable to have paid servants (and things which require obvious expense are always fashionable) the upper classes would have been quite content to free their slaves.
I’ve read a lot of diaries and letters of southern women before the war. They bitched about the incompetence of their slaves just as much as they bitched about hired servants later. Secondly, some of the favored slaves stayed on with their former owners after the war as paid servants. It would not have been that difficult of a transition.
You’re right that the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world. Women were the primary pushers of the temperence movements and other moral causes. Once slavery ceased to have economic support they would have turnd against it, just like northerners did.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was still around today, though maybe they wouldn’t be able to import any more. Really, imagine if Southerners could say, “Hey, Grandaddy Jackson fought a war to preserve this life – you can pry my slaves out of my cold dead hands.”
Look at Jim Crow, South Adrica, Saudi Arabia. Isn’t it Ghana where they still have some form of debt system that can be tantamount to slavery?
We are not so far removed from the bad old days as we like to think. It was just a couple years ago that slavery was officially outlawes in … was it Mississippi? Michael Moore did a piece on it in TV Nation. Very very funny. 
I can’t imagine that.
They were fighting a war, claiming that individual states had the right to change their mind and unilaterally revoke their admission to the United States. (Despite the US Constitution, which did not specifically allow for this.*) To then turn around and claim that individual states could not choose to leave the Confederacy would make the whole war rather pointless.
- P.S. Oddly enough, their ‘Articles of Confederacy’ were no more specific about this than the US Constitution.
Importing of slaves from outside the Confederacy was already forbidden in the ‘Articles of Confederation’ that the states signed.
The constitution of the CSA was the Constitution for the Confederate States of America; the Articles of Confederation was an entirely different thing. (There was also a Constitution for the Provisional Government before the adoption of the permanent C.S. Constitution.)
The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution –
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Why, thank you for asking! About 31% of families in the Confederacy owned slaves, and about 26% of families in all slave states owned slaves. As of 1860, 88% of slaveholders in the U.S. held fewer than twenty slaves, and nearly 50% held fewer than five slaves.
But I don’t think the non-slave owners would have been any more eager to see slavery abolished than slave-owners were. Freed slaves would have been economic competition, plus this was one set of folks that, no matter how poor and “low” they were, they could feel superior to. And, like today, there was always the hope that a poor white non-slave owner could someday become a rich white slave-owner. (I don’t mean that today there are slave-owners, just that the middle class often votes in favor of things that benefit the wealthy, because they project themselves into being wealthy at some point in the future). Also, morality movements like abolition typically take root initially among educated people, and I’m willing to bet there was a very close correlation between education and slave-owning in the ante-bellum south. Not to say that all slave-owners were educated, but I’ll bet you that the vast majority of educated people in the south were slave-owners.
Lissa, English women complained incessantly about “The Servant Problem” for hundreds of years, but I think you could have gotten their old family retainers away only by prying them from their cold, dead pantries. I’m not saying that upper class southern women couldn’t have adjusted perfectly adequately to a freeing of the slaves; I’m simply saying that I think they would have strongly resisted the idea of having to do so. People usually do find a way to deal with massive change that minimizes the actual effect on their lives, but it doesn’t mean they’re one bit more willing to undergo that change in the first place.
The economic factors would have taken quite a while to percolate to that level. For one thing, the southern “aristocracy,” like the English aristocracy, considered thinking about money beneath them. Many a fortune was lost that way, in real, real land, as wealthy aristocrats spent and/or gamed their way into poverty. (this, of course, did not apply universally - any group of wealthy aristocrats is going to contain some financially savvy members, even if they don’t discuss it at parties) And this would have gone double for the women, who in the Southern upper class culture, were far more sheltered from anything resembling business than in the north (Why, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, Miss Lissa!). Plus, running a household isn’t an economic proposition as running a plantation is. It’s not expected to show a profit, and the point isn’t usually to get the most money out for the least money in - it’s to maximize your family’s comfort and status, not necessarily in that order.
I don’t see that all being true. There was no need for much formal education to prosper in plantation agriculture; schooling to 14 years of age would be sufficient. The more education a person had, the more likely he was to leave an agricultural background and move to the cities to practice a professional that required formal education.
It seems to me that the 'reconstruction" period (1865-ca. 1900) was a period in which the South basically went to sleep. The old planter aristocracy went extinct, and most of the ex-slaves immigrated to the North. Its also interesting that the great wave of immigration from Europe (which started about 1870) largely bypassed the south-you didn’t see Swedes/Norwegians moving to new Orleans.
I think slavery could not have lasted-it was inefficient, and modern farm machinery made most of the slave’s jobs redundant.
Sure, it’s quite possible that Slavery wasn’t “economic”. So? You can still have legalized slavery without a “slave economy”. The South secceded 'cause of Slavery, the South was going to hold on to that “Peculiar Institution” for decades. Some where during the early part of the 20th century, they have perhaps passed a law that made all new children born to slaves= free. But if before then, the Confederate Government had tried (no matter how much senes it made economically or politically) to Ban Slavery- several of the Confederate States would have simply seceeded from the CSA.
Look at private firearm ownership. It no longer really has the purpose of a “well regulated militia” that it was intended for. We don’t gather on the green every third Sunday and drill as the SDMB Irregulars. Pretty much, anyone group who still calls themself a “private militia” is considered a loony- at best. But still the concept of private gun ownership is a very strong one in the USA. Whittled at here and there, sure. But still “a Right, damnit!” (Let’s not start a hijack about gunrights HERE thoough, please). At least 140 years after “militias” became obsolete, and we still have Private ownership of firearms. In the CSA, where slaveowning was enshrined in their Constituion, they’d likely still have Private ownership of slaves maybe even unto today. Whittled at, with the slaves having “rights” sure. But at least until late in the 20th century.
The same issues were cited in the north,and the poor had even more competition with all of the immigrants. Nor did the fact that blacks were free in the north prevent blatant racism and discrimination against them.
You’re dscounting the influence of abolition groups. People like to feel morally superior to others. The idea that slavery was wrong was catching on even among the wealthy. If that movement had been allowed to grow naturally, I think southern women would have gladly grabbed at the opprotunity for snobbery.
Didn’t housewives in the north have the same issues with wanting to keep a nice home? Why didn’t they resist freeing the slaves?
Of course they didn’t want to openly discuss money, but they certainly wanted to show that they had it. They were into conspicuous consumption back then, too. If the abolition movement had made slavery distasteful it would then have become a point of pride to have lots of paid servants. “Oh, no, Nellie isn’t a slave.”
Southern women may have made a show of being sheltered, but if you read their letters and diaries they knew a lot more about the business affairs of running the plantation than they let on. Just to pull an example from fiction, remember that scene in Gone with the Wind when the overseer is fired for having an affair? Who was it that called him into the office and went over the accounts with him before he left? It was Ellen O’Hara who stayed behind while her husband scampered off to the barbecue.
Plantation mistresses may not have been concerned with their households turning a profit, but I bet the were interested in economy for different reasons. I do the same thing today-- I know if I manage to trim a bit off of my shopping budget, I can use that money to buy books. I imagine there were a lot of ladies who scrimped in buying things for the household to buy material for dresses and the like. Thinking like a southern woman of that time, I can imagine being pleased at not having to buy clothing for the slaves and using that money instead to buy a new rug for the parlor.
By the time of the Civil War, there were no abolition groups in the states that made up the Confederacy. Any big anti-slavery feeling in the South had been wiped out by that point. It was the pro-slavery side that was feeling morally superior.
The economy in the North didn’t include what you might call a Landed Gentry in any large proportion; neither the climate nor the land would support it, and for reasons that I don’t know, the north shook a lot of the built-in culture from England that the south did not. I’m guessing off-hand that this was because the moneyed people in the south were still very much of English or Scottish descent, while there had been a much stronger mix in of other cultures in the north. But for whatever reason, you had an economy in the north that, while it certainly included agriculture, did not view agriculture as the only “classy” basis for wealth. Commerce, finance, and industrialization played far greater roles in the economy.
I haven’t read that much about the ante-bellum south, but I have a fair idea about English upper class attitudes of about the same period. There was an ongoing assumption on the part of many members of the upper class that their inherited land, and the rents/profits that derived from it, would be sufficient to support them. Period. And creditors gave very long credit on the fact of inherited lands, so there was some basis for this. But the fact is, a fair number of people simply ignored their way into poverty, or close to it, by refusing to live within the limits their actual wealth would support, or even to find out what those limits were. Creditors were simply staved off or avoided by any means possible until the next quarterly payment. If things got bad enough, there would be an “execution” (of some kind of writ of seizure of property in default of payment), and the stupid or unlucky would go to prison until bailed out by friends/family or deportation, while the smart would grab what little they had remaining and head off to live on the Continent.
To me, this seems a better parallel for the south than attitudes in the north were. I think the socio-economic situations were more similar between England and the south than between the north and the south. Obviously YMMV.
Captain Amazing has a very valid point. By the time the Civil War had begun, the camps had seriously polarized, and I think, had the south won, it would have been quite a long time before the south was willing to revisit slavery as a moral issue. However, a lot would have depended on just how bad a beating they had taken prior to winning their independence, because that would have dictated the degree of resentment they felt toward the north. But it ALSO would have depended on how resentful the north was, and how much that translated into actions that would irritate the CSA. The worse relations were between the two nations, the longer slavery would (IMO) not have been allowed to arise as a possible issue for consideration within the Confederacy.
This is the problem with alternate history. There are just so many damn factors to consider, and it’s all a matter of “Well, this would have led to A, which in turn would have led to B” when in reality we don’t know that we even would have reached A, let alone that B would have then been the result!
So, I’ll end with the incredibly profound “Damned if I know. Your guess is as good as mine!” 
Of course the Confederate Constitution didn’t explicitly give states the rights to secede. The Conferates believed that the right to secede was implied in the U.S. constitution, to mention it the the Confederate constitution would imply that it needs to be mentioned and that they didn’t have the legal right to secede.
The oldest son of an aristocrat (and that’s how these people saw themselves) did not practice a profession other than that of land-holder. But he got an education if he had any bent in that direction whatsoever. Younger sons would have gotten some education and become, usually, soldiers, sailors, or clergy if the property was not sufficient to provide them with a respectable inheritance of land. The things we think of as professions today - doctor, lawyer, banker, etc, were not viewed as high-status professions then, and generally wouldn’t have been considered acceptable options for the sons of aristocrats. These sons would not have been land-holders themselves, but they would continue in their minds to be slave-holders, I would think. Also, they would almost certainly have personal and/or household slaves. I was certainly including such folks in with the slave-holders when making my statement about education/slave-holding.