How long would slavery have lasted in the Confederacy?

Great Debates
81

[QUOTE=jake1964]
Lincoln had been elected on a pledge to increase the economic prosperity of the country and his proposal involved tariffs. Lincoln had indicated that he would sign the Morrill Tariff bill should it not be passed before his inauguration on 4 March 1861.
[/QUOTE]

He was also elected on the platform:

This is from a speech made by Sen. Wigfall of Texas. You can find it in the December 18, 1860 edition of the New York Times:

If you look at the Congressional debates of the time, if you look at what’s coming from the southern states, they’re not talking about the tarriff. They’re not saying that they’ll leave unless the Tarriff is kept low. They’re saying they’ll leave unless there are amendments protecting slavery, unless the fugitive slave law is given teeth. Read the primary sources, and see what people are actually saying.

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Please tell me you’re not bowing out just after I just manualy transcribed fairly long excerpts from a speech from a poorly scanned version of a faded newspaper with a really small font. :slight_smile:

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jake1964, those are some great quotes. As I said upthread, and in every thread about the Civil War I’ve participated in, Licoln was willing to allow the Southern states to keep slavery, but was not willing to allow slavery’s spread into the territories. Douglas knew (and called Lincoln on it) that this would eventually mean the demise of slavery, because at some point there would be enough free states to make any federal law necessary, or even to amend the Constitution to abolish slavery.

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[QUOTE=saoirse]
Douglas knew (and called Lincoln on it) that this would eventually mean the demise of slavery, because at some point there would be enough free states to make any federal law necessary, or even to amend the Constitution to abolish slavery.
[/QUOTE]
There was no need to “call Lincoln on it”, as Lincoln was quite open in saying that his goal in keeping slavery out of the territories was to put it on a “course of ultimate extinction”:

Douglas argued the territorial ban could only work, not by law or by constitutional amendment (even today the 15 former slave states could block an amendment!) but by starvation:

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[QUOTE=jake1964]
However, if opinions as to what actually caused the War Between the States weren’t agreed upon in the 1860’s, how can we know for sure today?
[/QUOTE]
“What caused the War Between the States” isn’t the same as “Why the South Seceded”. The South seceded because of slavery. The North went to war to preserve the Union. We know this because people at the time said so.

Most Northerners didn’t go to war as a crusade to free the slaves. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t an abolitionist, nor a proponent of racial equality, before the war. I don’t know why you had to provide a dozen quotes to prove this; we already knew it. All that proves is that a President didn’t have to be an abolitionist to provoke Southern secession.

The South seceded because of fears over the future of slavery. Deal with it. I have no idea why people continue to argue about this.

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[QUOTE=Freddy the Pig]
“What caused the War Between the States” isn’t the same as “Why the South Seceded”. The South seceded because of slavery. The North went to war to preserve the Union. We know this because people at the time said so.

The South seceded because of fears over the future of slavery. Deal with it. I have no idea why people continue to argue about this.
[/QUOTE]

People at the time also said the following…

A plantation owner with 2,000 slaves declared, “Most of us planters are in debt; we should not be if out of the Union. We should have a direct trade with Europe. We should get a better price for our cotton, and our goods would cost us fifty per cent less than now… We must do it now or never. If we don’t secede now the political power of the South is broken.”

South Carolina Governor Robert Barnwell Rhett had estimated that of the $927,000,000 collected in duties between 1791 and 1845, the South had paid $711,200,000, and the North $216,000,000. South Carolina Senator James Hammond had declared that the South paid about $50,000,000 and the North perhaps $20,000,000 of the $70,000,000 raised annually by duties. In expenditure of the national revenues, Hammond thought the North got about $50,000,000 a year, and the South only $20,000,000.

Mississippi Governor John J. Pettus, wrote that Lincoln’s election demonstrated that men eager to “destroy the peace, property, and prosperity of the Southern section” had gained control of the government, and that Mississippi must provide surer safeguards for life and liberty than could be hoped for.

In spite of the rhetoric of the time, the North went to war not to “preserve the Union”, but to preserve their cash flow.
Southern agricultural exports accounted for at least 3/4 of the total federal budget. For the fiscal year ending June 30, 1850, cotton alone accounted for nearly half of the nation’s foreign shipments, $71,984,616 out of $144,376,000. The exportation of domestic produce in 1860 was $333,576,000 of which raw cotton represented $191,807,000.

The South was not receiving, proportionally, what they were contributing to the federal government. Unfair tariffs placed the South in a financial situation that forced them to trade their agricultural goods, primarily cotton, with Northern factories. This allowed Northern factories to purchase Southern agricultural goods inexpensively. The factories could then sell their manufactured goods, made with those Southern agricultural products, to the South at inflated prices that were protected by federal tariffs on imported goods. The North used these tariffs to protect their industries from what they felt was excessive foreign competition. The true reason for the war, wrote Richmond and Charleston newspapers, was that the North placed unequal burdens on the Southern people. The protective tariff, the fishing bounties, the charges of brokers, bankers, and shippers, all wrung a vast tribute from the South.

United States federal tariff revenues fell disproportionately on the South, which paid for 87% of the total collected. While the tariff protected Northern industrial interests, it raised the cost of living and commerce in the South substantially. It also reduced the trade value of their agricultural exports to Europe. These combined to place a severe economic hardship on many Southern states. Even more galling was that 80% or more of these tax revenues were expended on Northern public works and industrial subsidies, thus further enriching the North at the expense of the South

Add to that the following facts…

According to the 1860 census, there were 385,000 slave owners in the United States. If they were all Southerners, (which they weren’t), that would only be around 5% of the white population of the South.

The Confederacy mobilized between 750,000 and 850,000 men, which translates into 75 to 85 percent of its available draft-age white military population
(Granted, the presence of slaves, to keep the economy moving, allowed this, but so did the work of women on the yeoman farmsteads).

The Confederate troop strength, not 100% accurate because of missing records, was from 750,000 to 1,250,000. Its estimated losses:
Battle deaths: 94,000
Disease, etc.: 164,000
Total 258,000
Death Rate 24 percent
Wounded 100,000

So, it’s your contention that the South seperated itself from the Union and sacrificed a huge percentage of it’s population so that less than 5% of it’s people could keep their slaves? :confused:

You can’t see the possibility that a substantial portion of the Southern population could have reasons, other than slavery, for wanting to secede? :frowning:

87

[QUOTE=jake1964]
According to the 1860 census, there were 385,000 slave owners in the United States. If they were all Southerners, (which they weren’t), that would only be around 5% of the white population of the South.
[/QUOTE]
A misleading statistic generated by using all white men, women, and children as individuals, instead of using all white families.

In 1860, about 31% of families in the states that would soon become the Confederacy owned slaves, and about 26% of families in all slave states owned slaves.

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Upon further research, I must concede to you on that.
But that still leaves approximately 70% of the Southern *voting * population as non-slaveholders.

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[QUOTE=jake1964]
So, it’s your contention that the South seperated itself from the Union and sacrificed a huge percentage of it’s population so that less than 5% of it’s people could keep their slaves?
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Absolutely. As we saw earlier, 31% of white families in the seceding states owned slaves. Many who didn’t aspired to own a slave one day, or supported slavery and secession anyway because of racial and regional loyalty.

You haven’t responded yet to the South Carolina Declaration of independence linked here and quoted in post#74. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and this was their opportunity to tell the world why.

Since slavery wasn’t popular in Great Britain, and since the authors knew the survival of the nation they were about to found might depend on British support, they had every incentive to downplay slavery as a cause of secession. And yet “slavery” and “slaveholding” appear 17 times in their document, and tariffs zero times.

Why do you think they wrote this if secession was about tariffs?

Nope. I can see that they had other grievances, which could have been addressed through the political process like they have been on every other occasion in American history.

The most acute conflict over tariffs occurred in 1832, when the Tariff of Abominations set rates far higher than they were in the pre-war era. Even under that provocation, South Carolina only attempted to nullify the tariff, not to secede, and no other Southern state supported her. States don’t secede over tariffs.

Not only was secession about slavery, but so was every political battle of any consequence in the 1850’s: the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, bleeding Kansas, the Dred Scott case, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the Speakership fight of 1859, John Brown’s raid, and the break-up of the Democratic Party at the National Convention of 1860. People didn’t suddenly sweep all of that under the rug and start a war over tariffs.

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[QUOTE=jake1964]
Upon further research, I must concede to you on that.
But that still leaves approximately 70% of the Southern *voting * population as non-slaveholders.
[/QUOTE]

Nevertheless, you’re looking at slavery as entirely an economic institution. Slavery was the most efficient means for preserving white supremacy, since it assumed that any black man had no rights, and required him to prove that he did.

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I am not trying to prove that slavery was not an issue. Or even that it wasn’t an important issue. I’m only saying that I do not believe that it was the sole or main reason most Southerners had for secession.

Robert E. Lee wrote, “The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution [of slavery], and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to this subject is a serious question today. Unless some humane course, based on wisdom and Christian principles, is adopted, you do them great injustice in setting them free.” (Thomas Nelson Page, Robert E. Lee: Man and Soldier [New York, 1911], page 38.) Lee did not own slaves (he freed his in the 1850s), nor did a number of his most trusted lieutenants, including generals A. P. Hill, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, J. E. Johnston, and J. E. B. Stuart.

Lincoln called up an army of 75,000 men to invade the seven southern states that had seceded and force them back into the Union. At the time, only seven states had seceded. But when Lincoln announced his intention to bring these states back into the Union by force, four additional states – Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas – seceded and joined the Confederacy. Slavery was not the issue. The issue was the very nature of the American union. If the President of the United States intended to hold the Union together by force, they wanted out.

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term.

It also prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9).

Which brings it back to the OP’s question.
“How long would slavery have lasted in the Confederacy?”

The Confederates posed no military threat to the North. Perhaps it would be better to let the southern states go, along with their 4 million slaves.

Was it really necessary to wage a four-year war to abolish slavery in the United States, one that ravaged half of the country and destroyed a generation of American men? Only the United States and Haiti freed their slaves by war. Every other country in the New World that had slaves, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela, freed them in the 19th century peacefully.

With no fugitive slave laws in neighboring states that would return fugitive slaves to their owners, the value of slaves as property drops owing to increased costs incurred to guard against their escape. With slaves having a place to escape to in the North and with the supply of new slaves restricted by its Constitution, slavery in the Confederate states would have ended without war. A slave’s decreasing property value, alone, would have soon made the institution unsustainable, irrespective of more moral and humanitarian considerations.

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Sorry for the double post.

[Quote=Freddy the Pig]
You haven’t responded yet to the South Carolina Declaration of independence linked here and quoted in post#74. South Carolina was the first state to secede, and this was their opportunity to tell the world why.
[/QUOTE]

I shot my mouth off before I had read far enough. :smack:
Although I’d like to, I can’t argue with you. That would appear to be the major grievance for the drafters of S.C.'s Declaration of Independence.

However, in “The Address of the people of South Carolina, assembled in Convention, to the people of the Slaveholding States of the United States” link written by Robert Barnwell Rhett, other issues were addressed.

“The Southern States now stand exactly in the same position toward the Northern States that our ancestors in the colonies did toward Great Britain. The Northern States, having the majority in Congress, claim the same power of omnipotence in legislation as the British Parliament. “The general welfare” is the only limit to the legislation of either; and the majority in Congress, as in the British Parliament, are the sole judges of the expediency of the legislation this “general welfare” requires. Thus the Government of the United States has become a consolidated Government, and the people of the Southern States are compelled to meet the very despotism their fathers threw off in the Revolution of 1776.”

“The Southern States now stand in the same relation toward the Northern States, in the vital matter of taxation, that our ancestors stood toward the people of Great Britain. They are in a minority in Congress. Their representation in Congress is useless to protect them against unjust taxation, and they are taxed by the people of the North for their benefit exactly as the people of Great Britain taxed our ancestors in the British Parliament for their benefit. For the last forty years the taxes laid by the Congress of the United States have been laid with a view of subserving the interests of the North. The people of the South have been taxed by duties on imports not for revenue, but for an object inconsistent with revenue – to promote, by prohibitions, Northern interests in the productions of their mines and manufactures.”

“There is another evil in the condition of the Southern toward the Northern States, which our ancestors refused to bear toward Great Britain. Our ancestors not only taxed themselves, but all the taxes collected from them were expended among them. Had they submitted to the pretensions of the British Government, the taxes collected from them would have been expended on other parts of the British Empire. They were fully aware of the effect of such a policy in impoverishing the people from whom taxes are collected, and in enriching those who receive the benefit of their expenditure. To prevent the evils of such a policy was one of the motives which drove them on to revolution. Yet this British policy has been fully realized toward the Southern States by the Northern States. The people of the Southern States are not only taxed for the benefit of the Northern States, but after the taxes are collected three-fourths of them are expended at the North. This cause, with others connected with the operation of the General Government, has provincialized the cities of the South. Their growth is paralyzed, while they are the mere suburbs of Northern cities. The bases of the foreign commerce of the United States are the agricultural productions of the South; yet Southern cities do not carry it on. Our foreign trade is almost annihilated.”

“No man can for a moment believe that our ancestors intended to establish over their posterity exactly the same sort of Government they had overthrown. The great object of the Constitution of the United States, in its internal operation, was, doubtless, to secure the great end of the Revolution – a limited free Government – a Government limited to those matters only which were general and common to all portions of the United States. All sectional or local interests were to be left to the States. By no other arrangement would they obtain free government by a Constitution common to so vast a Confederacy. Yet, by gradual and steady encroachments on the part of the North, and submission on the part of the South, the limitations in the Constitution have been swept away, and the Government of the United States has become consolidated, with a claim of limitless powers in its operations.”

Also, threats of secession go all the way back to 1803. Not all southern and not all about slavery.

MASSACHUSETTS 1803: The state of Massachusetts threatened secession in 1803. They were protesting the Louisiana Purchase. Massachusetts said that this purchase would dilute their power within the Union.

HARTFORD CONVENTION: In 1814 all of the New England states, who had earlier demanded that the United States enter the War of 1812, became dissatisfied with the war when it cut into their potential for making a profit. New England states held close mercantile ties to Great Britain.

SOUTH CAROLINA 1828: The first protective tariff was passed by Congress in 1816, which was then increasing in 1824, and again in 1828, the Tariff of Abominations. In 1828 the state of South Carolina threatened secession. Sectional differences including financial issues including unfair taxes and tariffs towards the southern states were already a significant issue. The United States Federal government was collecting most of its revenues from the South but was not spending a proportional amount of the revenue in or for the South.

[Quote=Freddy the Pig]
I can see that they had other grievances, which could have been addressed through the political process like they have been on every other occasion in American history.
[/QUOTE]

The population of the North and the South was comparatively equal at the time of the ratification of the Constitution.
Within the next 70 years the nation’s total population increased 800%, up to a total of 31 1/2 million people. New York’s population had grown by 1,140% and had grown to 2 1/2 times that of Virginia.
This growth in the North shifted representation in the House of Representatives, which is where all federal government appropriations were created. This gave the North total control of federal government spending.
Of the eight and a half million increase during the decade, the states of the future Confederacy claimed only about two million. By 1860 twenty-one new states had entered the union but only 9 were Southern states. This gave the North advantage in the Senate.

This doesn’t really give them the option to address their grievances politically other than through secession.

I realize that “right thinking” people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Such is not the case.

93

Yes, Rhett does talk about tariffs, attempting to link the Southern cause to the Revolutionaries of 1776. After the section you quoted, he goes on to talk about slavery for several paragraphs.

So, what about it? Other than the resolution of the secession convention, how can we decide whether slavery or taxes were more important?

One way might be to look at what other controversies agitated the sections in the twelve months before South Carolina seceded.

  • In December 1859, the House of Reprentatives ground through 44 ballots over two months before electing a Speaker. Was the argument over tariffs? It was not. It was over the fact that John Sherman, the Republican candidate for Speaker, had endorsed an anti-slavery book called The Impending Crisis by Hinton Helper, an anti-slavery native of North Carolina.

  • In April 1860, the Democratic Convention argued so violently over its platform that most of the Southern delegations withdrew from the convention and nominated their own candidate for President. Did the platform fight concern tariffs? It did not. It concerned a Southern demand for a plank guaranteeing slavery in the territories.

  • In February 1860, Senator Jefferson Davis introduced a series of resolutions designed to articulate the Southern point of view for the upcoming election into the United States Senate. Did they concern tariffs? They did not. They concerned slavery in the territories.

Finally, after the deep South had seceded in the winter of 1860-61, and Congress desperately struggled to formulate a compromise which would preserve the Union, did they adopt restrictions on tariffs? They did not. They proposed a Thirteenth Amendment, thankfully never ratified, which would have guaranteed against the abolition of slavery by the federal government.

Now, doesn’t it seem odd, in the midst of all this agitation over slavery, that Southern states suddenly chose to secede over tariffs?

[QUOTE=jake1964]
I realize that “right thinking” people equate anyone today who thinks that the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union as secretly approving of slavery. Such is not the case.
[/QUOTE]
No, it’s possible to believe that the South did the right thing for the wrong reasons. It’s simply wrong, however, to believe that the reason at the time was anything other than fear over the future of slavery.

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[QUOTE=jake1964]

The Constitution of the Confederate States of America forbid protectionist tariffs, outlawed government subsidies to private businesses, and made congressional appropriations subject to approval by a two-thirds majority vote. It enjoined Congress from initiating constitutional amendments, leaving that power to the constituent states; and limited its president to a single six-year term.

It also prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9).
[/QUOTE]

The Confederate Constitution also prohibted laws “impairing the right of property in negro slaves” (Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4), provided that citizens of each of the Confederate States "shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired. " (Article IV, Section 2, Paragraph 1); and proclaimed that in any new territory acquired by the Confederacy “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States” (Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3). The prohibition on the imporation of slaves was of course part of the U.S. Constitution; the African slave trade had been officially prohibited in the U.S. since 1808, and as I recall any attempt to re-launch it would have been regarded by the Royal Navy as essentially equivalent to piracy on the high seas. The C.S. Constitution kept the “three-fifths” clause from the U.S. Constitution, and (naturally) the fugitive slave clause (although they did call a slave a slave and drop any shilly-shallying about “other persons”).

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[QUOTE=jake1964]
Robert E. Lee wrote, "The best men in the South have long desired to do away with the institution [of slavery], and were quite willing to see it abolished
[/QUOTE]

And General Lee chose his words carefully. He didn’t say most of the men felt that way. If they did, he certainly would have said so.

Also, Lee was of course a slaveholder, who failed to free his father-in-law’s slaves despite the fact that he had been instructed to in Custis’ will. Also, Lee captured black men in Maryland and Pennsylvania and sent them back to Virginia as slaves, without regard to their actual legal status, during the the campaign that led to Gettysburg.

96

How curious that the CFA copied the “three-fifths” clause from the U.S. Constitution. That number came about during the writing of the U.S. Constitution as a compromise between the Southern states, who wanted slaves counted as whole persons for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House (because that would increase the South’s representation in the House), and the Northern states, who did not want slaves counted at all for apportionment (because the slaves had no political rights).

I can understand the CFA not counting slaves at all, or counting them as whole persons, for the purpose of seat apportionment in the Confederate Congress, but the three-fifths clause doesn’t make any sense absent the Union.

97

[QUOTE=Walloon]
How curious that the CFA copied the “three-fifths” clause from the U.S. Constitution. That number came about during the writing of the U.S. Constitution as a compromise between the Southern states, who wanted slaves counted as whole persons for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House (because that would increase the South’s representation in the House), and the Northern states, who did not want slaves counted at all for apportionment (because the slaves had no political rights).

I can understand the CFA not counting slaves at all, or counting them as whole persons, for the purpose of seat apportionment in the Confederate Congress, but the three-fifths clause doesn’t make any sense absent the Union.
[/QUOTE]
Or for that matter, the clause guaranteeing that slaveowners could travel with their slaves throughout the Confederacy. Why should that be a problem? It almost looks as if the drafters of the CSA constitution were anticipating that someday some of the Condederate states might abolish slavery. I guess they didn’t want a repeat of the conflict between slave and free states in the United States.

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[QUOTE=Walloon]
I can understand the CFA not counting slaves at all, or counting them as whole persons, for the purpose of seat apportionment in the Confederate Congress, but the three-fifths clause doesn’t make any sense absent the Union.
[/QUOTE]
The Upper South had a lower percentage of slaves than the Deep South, and hadn’t seceded yet when the Constitution was drafted. The drafters wanted to offer it every possible enticement, and preserving the 3/5 ratio ensured that the Upper South wouldn’t lose representation relative to the Deep South.

(Granted, not counting slaves at all would have been even more of an enticement, but that would have been going too far for the Deep South.)

In their more hubristic moments, the founders sometimes fancied that, if their nation was successful, one or more free states might want to join just because. Or, it was conceivable that a state like Delaware might join and one day abolish slavery.

But mostly, this clause was symbolic; the Northern states’ repeal of “personal sojourn” laws had been an irritant during the 1850’s, and transit had been an issue in the Dred Scott case, so the founders wanted to “make a statement” on the matter.

100

So how many free states would have had to join the CSA to have a majority, and then Amend the CSA Constitution to abolish slavery?

Given all the new states being formed in the west, and the vast amount of land there, you could have formed a whole lot of states the size of South Carolina.

101

Zombie thread but it prompts an interesting scenario to me.

Lets say the CSA had succeeded in becoming an independent nation and there was no war. There would have still been slaves in the United States: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri all stayed in the United States.

But at this point slave states would be a definite minority in the shrunken US. There would have eventually been pressure to abolish the remnants of slavery still remaining. And to avoid further secessions, it would have been on generous terms with the government buying up the remaining slaves from their owners.

So let’s say the Confederates struggling along economically. They were an agricultural country in an industrial revolution. Every year they’d be falling further behind other countries. At some point, the slave-owning ruling class would look across the border and think “God, wouldn’t it be a relief if our government did something like that and took these slaves off my hands.”

So I can see the plantation owners who controlled the Confederate Congress passing an emancipation program with a generous buyout program. The average southern taxpayer would be told his taxes were going to be used to pay millionaires for their slaves and then those slaves were going to be sent off to Liberia.

The Confederacy might have beat Russia to a Marxist revolution.