Timeframe-wise, at what point would the South have freed the slaves on their own? Before 1900? After?
My guess; given how ideologically committed they were, they’d still have slaves, even while the institution drove the South into the ground in modern times. Although I could see them aligning themselves with Nazi Germany and getting invaded by the North, assuming the rest of world history was the same.
Their entire reason for seceding, the center of their culture and religion was slavery. By the time of the Civil War, the South WAS slavery for most purposes; it defined them. They’d never give it up without force.
Good question, and one that has intrigued me for years. My personal belief is that the industrial revolution would have rendered the slavery debate moot. But even before industrialization had permeated the South’s economy, I believe that slavery would have been abolished. If the South had managed to win the war, or achieved a stalemate, their next President would have been Robert E. Lee who, as far as I can tell, was no staunch advocate of slavery. He would have probably initiated his own emancipation agenda and the slaves would have been freed well before 1900.
I can’t see de jure slavery lasting past 1900. I can see a system of sharecropping or indentured servitude lasting a few decades past that. A more interesting question is what happens to blacks after emancipation. Segregation is bound to continue in some form, but are blacks given citizenship? Are they enfranchised? Unless the CSA passes something like our 14th amendment even the pretence of “seperate, but equal” wouldn’t need to be maintained.
No longer then it was economically viable. Between the Civil War and the 20th century, machines and other devices were introduced that made agriculture less labor intensive. Economically speaking, it just wouldn’t make much sense to to keep feeding and clothing a bunch of people who aren’t making you any money.
The south probably would have had to work on building their own forms of industry since the USA would have been unlikely to be good trading partners. Why not put the slaves to work in factories if they’re not needed on the farms? Well, that’s possible, but with the introduction of machines your’e going to have a lot of white folks leaving the farms to find work in factories. They’re going to raise some political hell if they can’t find a job because the slaves have taken them all.
On another note, the Confederate States of America would be in desperate need for international recognition, allies, and trading partners. They would be under a lot of pressure to end slavery by England, for one, and others. Ask the United States, it’s tough being a pariah when you’re just starting out.
I wonder, as I often do, whether or not race relations in the United States would have been different had the Republicans not caved in to the Mississippi Plan. If, during Reconstruction, the Republican government had not caved in to those terrorizing Republican voters we may have been able to avoid Jim Crow. I also wonder if the hostility towards blacks in the south would have been as great had they won the war. I’m not saying it would have been all sunshine and lollipops had the south won, I’m just wondering if the hostility would have been lessened.
Marc
That would just reduce the number of slaves; they would still keep them for servants, sex toys, and the remaining unskilled labor. It’s not like we don’t still use slave labor these days; just less of it, and we don’t call them slaves, usually.
A nice thought. Personally, I think they would have simply killed the people they no longer needed as slaves.
The CSA probably would have held on to slavery for at least a couple of decades. Having gone through a secession and/or a war, they weren’t going to concede the point for a while. But slavery was a bad basis for an economy as well as a liability in foreign relations, so at some point the CSA would have had to emanicipate its slaves, at least on paper. Cuba did so in 1886 and Brazil in 1888, so the CSA probably would have done so around the same time. I’m guessing the CSA would have replaced outright slavery with a legal system that would have been a more extreme version of Jim Crow/sharecropping. Blacks would have been free in theory but so heavily restricted in their options that they would have continued doing the same kind of work they did as slaves.
Why? Easier to just turn them out to starve by freeing them in an economy where you know they’re going to have a really hard time getting a job.
Except that they might have armed themselves and either started stealing to stay alive, or killing for revenge, or both. The last thing any slaveowner wanted was for the slaves to have a chance to arm, organize and come after them.
I think some are making a presumption that had emancipation not occurred in 1865 technological advances would have still kept apace with the now historical chronology of events, but there’s no reason to presume that.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Emancipation, and the threat thereof, more than likely spurred advances that may not otherwise have happened, or would have happened much later had slavery not been abolished by force, and I’m not talking a mere fifty years.
In my opinion, if there’s no impetus for change there’ll usually be no change, and if there is change it’ll be to refine existing processes, not chuck them. In fact, given human ingenuity, I contend that slavery would probably have expanded and mechanisms devised to make it increasingly profitable.
I don’t have access to a mythical machine that can show alternate historical timelines, so there’s nothing for me to cite, but this makes much more sense to me than the assumption that the abhorrent practice of slavery in America would have just, in essense, petered out through inertia.
I know it’s hard to understand, but apparently many, maybe even most, thought that killing slaves was immoral.
Then too, there were the scalawags.
It’s a reminder that most of the men who fought for the Confederacy did not own slaves. The Scalawags, however, were from the more mountainous areas of East Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas (for example) – areas that remain Republican to this day.
From what I have read previously, the abolitionists were very active in the South early in the 19th Century, but had to work in secret for the last thirty years before the war or work in the Border States or staff the Underground Railroad.
You are right, but not in the way intended.
Read some of the stories. It’s not just in the South. Cite.
Although Tennessee isn’t listed specifically, a child – a little girl – was recently found only a few blocks from my house. She was being used as a sex slave. I read that some of the children are rented out for the purpose of being torture toys.
If they were anything but monsters, they would not have held slaves. I see no reason to believe that they wouldn’t have cheerfully killed the slaves and made leather goods and other products out of them; that’s the style of such people. And told themselves it was all God’s Will and that the slaves should’ve been grateful.
Irrelevant; they were fighting for slavery.
I’m well aware of that sort of thing, and mentioned it in Post # 6.
Which would lead to mobs of starving ex-slaves roaming the South, committing all kinds of crimes just to keep alive, to say nothing of crimes committed out of hatred, frustration, or a life time accumulated post-traumatic stress syndrome from being flogged in the cotton fields. Now, considering how real-world ex-Confederates reacted to having free blacks legally able to move about the country at will after the end of the war, imagine how they would have reacted to a situation in which these former slaves were a legitimate threat to the common welfare, and were not under the protection of Reconstructionist Northern laws. You’d effectively have a KKK that was a legally recognized arm of Confederate law enforcement. It would be a massacre. It would be a holocaust.
If that were true, then the same would be true for all other states that held slaves.
Did the states that abolished slavery on their own have people who changed from being monsters into people who were good people?
What about the people in the states who used a slow process of emancipation over perhaps a forty year period? Were they monsters or good people?
Good or evil: Thomas Jefferson, George Washington? Were they likely to murder slaves?
Were Southerners who were abolitionists monsters?
Can a monster do anything good?
Do you believe all peoples before a certain date in time were monsters?
Were the Romans greater monsters than the Southern plantation owners because the Romans forced their slaves to fight to the death in grand spectacles?
Were the Romans all irredeemable monsters because they conquered much of the Mediterranean world and Western Europe by force, enslaving large swathes of the populace?
Is there any point where we can ever say, “the culture of the times was so different it is ridiculous to judge them by the morality of the day?”
Hitler massacred 6 million Jews, in a period where massacres were condemned (at least on paper) by most of the major powers in the world.
According to Cassius Dio the Romans massacred 585,000 Jews (most civilians) in suppressing the Jewish revolts. They razed nearly 1,000 villages and destroyed Jerusalem and its temple, a central religious place for Jews all over the ancient world. Proportionally, the Roman destruction of the Jews is not much out of scale with the proportion of the Holocaust (the raw numbers in the Holocaust were larger, but so was the Jewish population.)
Are the Romans and Hitler equally monsters? Or the Romans less so?
Is it all Romans who are monsters? Or only the ones who actively supported the massacres, or only the generals, or only the Roman governors of Judea?
Some of the Jews killed most certainly owned slaves, so was it okay for Rome to butcher those monsters, but not the non-slave owning Jews?
We can certainly, in any case, assume the Romans were monsters, any slave-owning society is of course nothing but monstrous, there’s no gray area here (in your own words.) Yet the Romans, being the monsters they were, never massacred all their slaves. For that matter, when the South knew it was losing the war, why didn’t the slave owners massacre their slaves?
The Nazis actually did in many cases try to finish off as many Jews as they could before the Allies overran the camps. Why would the Nazis do this but not the Southern plantation owners?
I assume we’d still have slavery now, barring further well-organized opposition. I’m not sure why advances in agricultural technology mitigate against slavery. There are plenty of labor-intensive, dirty, and dangerous tasks to be performed in factories and warehouses; would it not make economic and social sense to a culture that had slaves to continue the institution? Think Charles Dickens. Or the assembly line, intended not only to make identical parts, but to make humans interchangable. It might be easier to keep a group enslaved on a line than in a field where they have to move around.
That depends on why they abolished slavery. Although I have trouble imagining anyone who owned slaves ever progressing from “monster” to anything better than “scum”.
Monsters; at least the ones who didn’t want immediate emancipation.
Monsters. Genocidal slavers. And if they were willing to slaughter Indians, why not slaves, if doing so was profitable ?
No; or if they were it was for different reasons.
The ones who supported slavery and other evils, yes. It is evil now; it was evil in the Old South; and it was evil millenia ago.
I’d rate the Old South as somewhat more evil in regards to slavery; as a more advanced culture, they had less excuse.
Yes; the ones who supported that behavior at least.
No. They are all human cultures. Slavery is always wrong. Rape is always wrong.
More or less equal; Hitler was not the special case people make him out to be.
Most of them, for one reason or another. It was a monstrous culture; brutal, aggressive, tyrannical.
There are plenty of grey areas; it’s just that owning slaves is deep, deep, deep into the evil side of the spectrum.
There was no profit in it for the Romans; they certainly didn’t hesitate to slaughter slaves who rebelled or irritated them. As for the Southerners, I expect they feared the Northern troops might return the favor.
Slavery was never good for the economy; free people outperform them. That was known even before the Civil War. Slavery benefits the slaveowners economically, but it’s bad for the society as a whole, economically and otherwise. It’s no coincidence that the South lagged so far behind the North.
Of course; by accident if nothing else.
Understand this; I am a strong believer in human progress. I do consider the vast majority of people in history to have been morally inferior to most modern people; not just technologically. Slavery is so much less common than it was long ago because on the whole we have improved; we are better than our ancestors were, and hopefully our descendents will be better than us.
You’re as wrong as it gets. We’re products of our environment, we’re no more or less monstrous than the average Roman. Roman culture was way harsher than ours, no doubt. Any sane person would be a fool to want to be born in the Roman Empire, even the Patricians could end getting offed for almost no reason because of all the political intrigue. Emperors were routinely killed by their guards in power plays.
Our culture is less harsh than the ones of 2,000 years ago because we have made progress as cultures, that progress takes millennia and to give credit (OR blame) to any one individual for the general progress of society or the general barbarisms of the past is an attempt to apply a totally ridiculous set of standards to humans in general.
We’re social animals, who in large part are products of that socialization. I know without any doubt that you personally would be happily reaping profits from your slaves if you were born into a wealthy Southern family c. 1750. Would you also beat and rape your slaves without mercy? That, I just can’t know. Because you can’t say all people are the same just based on one aspect of their lives. But we can certainly make generalizations (you do it all the time, in fact.)
People are products of their culture, nothing more, nothing less. There’s little chance you would believe in things like equal rights or gender equality had you been born a yeoman in 12th century England just as there is little chance you’d really have any reservations about reaping the profits of slavery if you were born into a slave holding family in the 18th century.
Perhaps future historians will look back at the USA in the early 21st century & consider some of us “monsters.” (Well, the real historians won’t. But the popularizers might.)
Unfortunately, normal people have the capacity to do monstrous things.
Slavery continued in the South-just under a different name (sharecropping). under sharecropping, the "freed’ slaves worked for zero wages-they got money when they sold the crop to the plantation owner at the harvest. in many ways this was worse than slavery, because a sharecropper could be evicted at any time. The whole archaic system dragged the South down and kept the region poor-and the taxpayers in the south didn’t want public education-it was more profitable to keep the ex-slaves stupid and poor. This sytem held sway till the late 1950’s-and it kept the South a place of ignorance and poverty.