How much longer would slavery have lasted if the South won the Civil War?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
We’re products of our environment, we’re no more or less monstrous than the average Roman.
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Even if that was true ( it’s not ), that makes no sense. Monstrous behavior is monstrous behavior; it doesn’t get any less monstrous due to being from the environment, genes, “free will”, or mind control rays from Antares.

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
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.
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So let’s let Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and so on off the hook. Or is it only past people who get this blanket forgiveness ?

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
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.
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No, I wouldn’t; if “I” was that different, “I” wouldn’t be me.

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
People are products of their culture, nothing more, nothing less.
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If that was true the Soviet Union would still exist. They tried for generations to shape their populace; like you, they believed culture was all that mattered. They were wrong, as are you.

If you were right, there would never have been any progress; we’d all be the slaves of the first Stone Age leader to invent propaganda. The idea that culture is everything is a political one, not a factual one.

22

I’ve long held that the Industrial Reviolution did in slavery worldwide. It would’ve doomed it in the South before the end of the nineteenth century. That’s not to say that blacks would’ve been immediately emancipated and given full rights.Something much like what we have now would’ve happened – lots of economically-disadvantaged blacks living on low wages or sharecropping. but you can’t maintain as expensive and vigilant an enterprise as wholesale slavery without the economic justification, and slaves don’t do well at running complex machinery – too easy to sabotage. Other nations would pressure the South into freeing slaves, as well. But they’d have the KKK (or something like it) and lynchings, still, to keep blacks under control.
Rad Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. It’s alternate-history fiction, of course, and Turtledove’s own speculation, but I think he’s right in showing a victorious South beginning to lighten up the bonds of slavery after the war.

23

[QUOTE=MGibson]
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.
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Essentially, a victorious CSA would have eventually found itself in the position of apartheid-era South Africa – run by a ruling class torn between its desire to preserve the existing order and a need to be seen as a part of Western Civilization. Increasing rebuffs in attempting to maintain the latter would gradually eat away at the former.

The notion that the CSA culture would be comparable to National Socialism or Stalinism (as Der Trihs foamulates) is absurd on its face.

24

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Even if that was true ( it’s not ), that makes no sense. Monstrous behavior is monstrous behavior; it doesn’t get any less monstrous due to being from the environment, genes, “free will”, or mind control rays from Antares.
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My point is, what’s monstrous now, isn’t monstrous then. In using the word monstrous I was not expressing my view on the Romans or anyone else, just using your terminology in an attempt to highlight the ludicrous concept that everyone who isn’t of the 20th century is a monster because they weren’t raised with modern morality.

There’s not blanket forgiveness, just judging people based on the mores of their time. King Henry VIII was pretty badly behaved even in his own time, for example. As was Emperor Nero–men who were both morally reprehensible when judged in the modern sense and by the mores of their time.

Precisely, because “you” are a product of your upbringing and the society in which you were raised.

No, they are right that culture is what matters and they were unable to shape it. Trying to shape culture is akin to trying to manipulate a hurricane or a tidal wave. Also, when people are starving and the government is swimming in financial problems it’s kind of a moot point what the cultural feelings are in regards to Communism. In fact, culturally the Russians were pretty accepting of Communism and many continue to look to the USSR as a glorified past.

No, it’s not. You’re totally leaping to spurious conclusions. A society’s cultural mores are what determines what is right, what is wrong. What is taboo, what isn’t.

Most human cultures view cannibalism as taboo. But even that isn’t universal, some peoples historically have been okay with cannibalism. Me stating that cultural mores are well, culturally influenced and that determines a society’s moral outlook on things is just common sense. No where do I say that these mores cannot change over time, the fact that they are not universal across all cultures shows that of course they change, they change gradually as new cultural traditions get inherited. Look at how long it took before there was consensus on slavery being wrong, for example.

Your opinion that propaganda defines culture is ludicrous. Propaganda cannot completely shape culture. Although the Catholic Church certainly shows it can have a profound effect at just that, but not an absolute one.

25

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
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.
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I have to agree with both of you, after a fashion. We are socialized, yes, but we can change as a result of new information. Society changes, and the way it socializes people changes.

May I tell you a very personal story? Around 1970, before I came out to my family as a gay person, my Father, who loved me greatly, once said about “queers” that he would like to go to a gay bar and invite one of them out to the alley and beat the crap out of him. My future brother-in-law, who was dating my sister and was anxious to score points with my father, laughed, clapped his hand and agreed with him. I said nothing.

Two points:

  • Neither of them would actually have done so. They were after all law-abiding people. But in the 1950s, I have not a shadow of a doubt that my Father would have supported the continued criminalization of homosexuality. Never realizing that the little son he held on his lap could one day in theory be liable to imprisonment for consensual adult sex if such laws remained on the books.

  • Within a year or two after my coming out, around 1974, both my Father and my Brother-in-Law were loudly arguing against anti-gay bigotry among their friends and defending and upholding my rights.

Society socializes people. People change society. I did not see anything wrong with “Help wanted - Men” and “Help wanted-women” columns in the want ads in the 1960s. Was I a monster?

26

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
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.
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Eh, got a cite for that?

And you’re working to support a war in Iraq.

27

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
I’ve long held that the Industrial Reviolution did in slavery worldwide. It would’ve doomed it in the South before the end of the nineteenth century. That’s not to say that blacks would’ve been immediately emancipated and given full rights.Something much like what we have now would’ve happened – lots of economically-disadvantaged blacks living on low wages or sharecropping. but you can’t maintain as expensive and vigilant an enterprise as wholesale slavery without the economic justification, and slaves don’t do well at running complex machinery – too easy to sabotage. Other nations would pressure the South into freeing slaves, as well. But they’d have the KKK (or something like it) and lynchings, still, to keep blacks under control.
Rad Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South. It’s alternate-history fiction, of course, and Turtledove’s own speculation, but I think he’s right in showing a victorious South beginning to lighten up the bonds of slavery after the war.
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South Africa was not defeated in war but abandoned Apartheid due to moral and international pressure.

28

CSA wins the war by successfully seceding.

Their cotton empire is at risk due to the emergence of Egyptian long-stemmed cotton, however. King Cotton is now losing its grip. The English textile mills, however, are happy to have competition from their raw material suppliers and look the other way.

The CSA articles maintian high levels of state’s rights, and some Southern States begin their own form of emancipation. Smart slaveholders start selling their slaves to pay for the industrial equipment. The Northern-most states of the CSA probably eliminate true slavery, while only allowing blacks minimal rights (as posted earlier - a South Africa type situation). A potential schism within the CSA, resulting in even more secession movements may occur.

Slaves continue to run away to the North, and now there is no returning them to slave catchers. The underground railroad continues to run.

As blacks are freed, they either become 2nd class citizen workers or they migrate to the Union. Ethnic Cleansing operations of any freedman ghettoes occur - chased out of the South and sent to the USA.

Texas becomes its own nation, neither a part of the Union or the CSA.

Over time the CSA fractures along various lines. They fought for secession, and each time the right politician rises up another state leaves the CSA.

The USA continues its expansion Westward, but has to be careful with new territories or they will take advantage as well of the new right to secede as now established in precedent.

The Deep South becomes the equivalent of South Africa, granting rights to blacks as slow as possible into the 20th century.

29

[QUOTE=kidchameleon]
And you’re working to support a war in Iraq.
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Actually, unless you are speaking of the inadvertant “support” provided by having one’s income taxed, it is pretty clear that Der Trihs is not “supporting” the war. If you want to launch a new thread to discuss the responsibility of people to take what sort of steps to oppose actions–with or without disrupting their lives and the lives of their families–open a new thread to do it.

Anyone who has been in any discussion on this board with Der Trihs should be well aware of his absolutist (and rarely supported) pronouncements, so there is no reason to try to take this to a personal level, hijacking this thread.

30

It was pretty clear to me that kidchameleon was only using Der Trihs as an illustrative example. Der Trihs argued that anyone who fought in support of the CSA was “fighting for slavery”, regardless of their conscious intentions. So far as he has explained his reasoning, it would seem to imply that anyone whose work supports the United States also works to support the war in Iraq. Using Der Trihs specifically is just a rhetorical technique to make the apparent conclusion of his reasoning as distasteful to him as possible. If kidchameleon had instead used, say, a business man in his dilemma, Der Trihs might have happily grasped the horn kidchameleon had offered.

[sub][sub]…which sounds dirty but isn’t meant that way.[/sub][/sub]

31

[QUOTE=Tyrrell McAllister]
It was pretty clear to me that kidchameleon was only using Der Trihs as an illustrative example. Der Trihs argued that anyone who fought in support of the CSA was “fighting for slavery”, regardless of their conscious intentions. So far as he has explained his reasoning, it would seem to imply that anyone whose work supports the United States also works to support the war in Iraq. Using Der Trihs specifically is just a rhetorical technique to make the apparent conclusion of his reasoning as distasteful to him as possible. If kidchameleon had instead used, say, a business man in his dilemma,
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For the most part, you’ve got it. I also wanted to point out the rediculousness of the black/white inference he makes. Just as someone working and paying taxes in this nation is in someway supporting the war in Iraq, it is not the entirety of the situation nor does it mean that is the focus of their travails.

Hey, we’re like that.

32

[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Slavery: Turning Conservatives Into Moral Relativists Since 1865

33

[QUOTE=Tyrrell McAllister]
It was pretty clear to me that kidchameleon was only using Der Trihs as an illustrative example. Der Trihs argued that anyone who fought in support of the CSA was “fighting for slavery”, regardless of their conscious intentions. So far as he has explained his reasoning, it would seem to imply that anyone whose work supports the United States also works to support the war in Iraq. Using Der Trihs specifically is just a rhetorical technique to make the apparent conclusion of his reasoning as distasteful to him as possible. If kidchameleon had instead used, say, a business man in his dilemma, Der Trihs might have happily grasped the horn kidchameleon had offered.

[sub][sub]…which sounds dirty but isn’t meant that way.[/sub][/sub]
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And to try to bring this back to an interesting Debate…

Slavery was the primary issue of a few very wealthy (and powerful) plantation owners. They were the ones with the biggest issue of both debt on their farms and the need for slaves to stay afloat.

The common man of the South either did not own slaves or only had 1 or 2. That person could easily survive emancipation without significant economic hardship. The larger plantation owners, however, risked a complete fiscal meltdown if their slaves were freed overnight.

This is why we find writings from people like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington where they show their distate for slavery while still owning slaves. They could not afford to end their own use of slaves (by afford I mean afford and still keep their standard of living).

A family member of mine saw the writing on the wall and sold her small plantation and slaves and moved to Iowa to keep farming. However, she could do that while slavery still existed and only take a small hit. Once those “assets” no longer had value, the plantation owners were in for a world of hurt economically.

Sorry to be crass in calling a human an asset, but follow the money.

It would take the South a long time to find a way to end slavery without bankrupting the most powerful members of their society. It took a war in our world, it would take time in a world where the war ended with the CSA intact.

34

[QUOTE=Algher]

The CSA articles maintian high levels of state’s rights, and some Southern States begin their own form of emancipation. Smart slaveholders start selling their slaves to pay for the industrial equipment. The Northern-most states of the CSA probably eliminate true slavery, while only allowing blacks minimal rights (as posted earlier - a South Africa type situation).
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That would be unconstitutional, though. The Confederate Constitution made abolition, even at a state level, unconstitutional. So you’d need an amendment for those laws to be passed.

35

My guess is that the major slaveowners would have come out ahead in a CSA led emancipation program. Most of the Confederate political leaders were slaveowners after all. Any emancipation program they enacted probably would have included generous compensation payments for people whose slaves were freed - I wouldn’t have been surprised if most slaveowners would have made a profit on the deal.

36

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
That would be unconstitutional, though. The Confederate Constitution made abolition, even at a state level, unconstitutional. So you’d need an amendment for those laws to be passed.
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Are you sure? Their Congress could not, but I don’t know if that was true that individual states could not end slavery. It was true that you would be able to take your slave into a non-slave Confederate state without losing your slave. They had no provision against free states joining the Confederacy either.

Finally, three states could call a Constitutional convention and 2/3 could force an amendment.

The relevant bits about slavery:

Funny, I didn’t find in there anything about the right to secession!

37

I have to disagree with Martin Hyde and agree with Der Trihs here.

I argue that there has never been a time in human history when the enslaved did not desire that their lives and substance not be held at the whim of those who brutally exploited them. The only difference between eras is how realistic such a thought on their part would be, and as a result, how much time they spent thinking such thoughts or acting on them.

Hitler was not a special case. The very fact of the existence eliminates special status. What nation was more advanced, technologically and culturally, than Germany at the turn of the twentieth century? Arguably none. And yet within three decades circumstance brought forth in that same nation a regime as brutal as every one of those that have plagued humanity throughout its history. The lesson of Hitler is that if it could happen to Germany at that time, then no nation is more than a stone’s throw away from absolute barbarism, regardless of how cultured they perceived themselves to be.

Slavery is wrong now, was wrong in 1940, was wrong 150 years ago, wrong 150 decades ago. That people in certain eras chose to ignore its wrongness in light of its advantages for themselves does not affect its status, IMO.

With regard to the OP, I think in light of how the south treated freed slaves for nearly a century after defeat, I have no doubt that slavery would have continued for at least that long. If they reached a point where economic forces caused them to abandon slavery in industry, and they reached a point where they could not advocate killing all former slaves, they would have built prisons and locked as many up as they could on trumped up charges. The KKK would have been the national police force of the CSA.

38

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
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.
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Bingo. They’d give up their slaves at the same time they gave up their gun ownership. Ideological committment can lead one to hang on to something logical analysis cannot support.

Sailboat

39

[QUOTE=scotandrsn]
I have to disagree with Martin Hyde and agree with Der Trihs here.

I argue that there has never been a time in human history when the enslaved did not desire that their lives and substance not be held at the whim of those who brutally exploited them. The only difference between eras is how realistic such a thought on their part would be, and as a result, how much time they spent thinking such thoughts or acting on them.

Hitler was not a special case. The very fact of the existence eliminates special status. What nation was more advanced, technologically and culturally, than Germany at the turn of the twentieth century? Arguably none. And yet within three decades circumstance brought forth in that same nation a regime as brutal as every one of those that have plagued humanity throughout its history. The lesson of Hitler is that if it could happen to Germany at that time, then no nation is more than a stone’s throw away from absolute barbarism, regardless of how cultured they perceived themselves to be.

Slavery is wrong now, was wrong in 1940, was wrong 150 years ago, wrong 150 decades ago. That people in certain eras chose to ignore its wrongness in light of its advantages for themselves does not affect its status, IMO.

With regard to the OP, I think in light of how the south treated freed slaves for nearly a century after defeat, I have no doubt that slavery would have continued for at least that long. If they reached a point where economic forces caused them to abandon slavery in industry, and they reached a point where they could not advocate killing all former slaves, they would have built prisons and locked as many up as they could on trumped up charges. The KKK would have been the national police force of the CSA.
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I would argue that it is only in the modern era (post Darwin, at the very earliest) that “we” came to recognize the essential equality of all members of the species H. sapiens. I don’t think any of us can imagine what a pre-Modern mindset must have been like.

40

[QUOTE=Algher]
…Funny, I didn’t find in there anything about the right to secession!
[/QUOTE]

Of course you didn’t. The Confederate position was that the right to secession was implied in the US constitution. Since the CSA constitution was basicially a carbon copy of the US constitution explicitly mentioning secession would imply that it needed to be mentioned and that there was no right to secession in the US consitution. Speaking of secession if the South did win I suspect that the new 14th amendment would either completely prohibit secession or establish a formal procedure (“No state shall secede without the consent of Congress” etc).