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

Great Debates
61

I am sure that the backgrounds of the interviewers had an affect on the outcome, including the possibility that some/many white interviewers would have flinched from asking tough questions. (See Little Nemo’s post.) I am less sure that “sanitizing” would have been a motive, (particularly when an awful lot of the people recruited to make the recordings were out of work, left-leaning, college students and graduates–not Margaret Mitchell, who probably had a vested interest in preserving the memories that she was creating (often out of whole cloth), or the Hollywood folks who wished to cash in on her filtered memories).

And, as one may infer from Little Nemo’s comments, the narrators, themselves, tailored their responses according to how they perceived a black or white interviewer would react to them.

62

What evidence do you have that it was common practice to work a slave to death young and then replace him? Cite, please. The movie focus is generally on only two plantations.

I was left with the impression that the overseer at Tara (played by Victor Jory) was not without his brutal moments, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen the film and I can’t be specific. I do remember him in an unfavorable light. Field hands were mentioned – usually by Mammy who looked down on them. “Loving old Mammy” is a strange way to describe that character.

It was the Civil War that dragged the South down. Whole areas were burned out and the crops were gone. Houses were raided for anything of value. To the victor go the spoils. I recall being told that Reconstruction with its “Carpetbaggers” was very hard on the South and kept it down. The stupidity of Jim Crow laws did more damage in my opinion.

I do know that the South has not completely recovered yet (as evidenced by the poverty of its school systems). Industrially, it is much better than it was fifty years ago. I remember seeing shacks and dirt floors in my childhood. (I sometimes wonder if those people live on the streets now.)

Share-cropping was bad, but it was better than starving and that seemed to be the alternative for many during the Depression. All of the sharecroppers that I knew were white.

63

There is one problem with your theory. Most Southerners didn’t own slaves.

Yes you can. Just look at the Modern mindset. Gender discrimination is still not considered as important as racial discrimination by many people.

In many households, the female will do more cooking, cleaning and nurturing of children. That often leads to longer hours of work.

The female is often asked how she juggles a career and a family. Do you know of men who are asked this question?

When I graduated from high school, at least half of the students were automatically disqualified from applying to the military academies. They were considered undesireables. They were women. Harvard didn’t want them. Yale didn’t either.

Women are still not paid the same as men. We are told right here at SDMB that that is because we just take the lower paying jobs. :rolleyes:

I use these examples because some of you seem to be somewhat comfortable with these differences – the same way that Southerners were blind to the unfairness of slavery and reluctant to change Jim Crow laws. It doesn’t require a monster to be blind when you are used to something. As Bridget Burke put it:

Der Trihs, you are as bigoted about Southerners as some Southerners have been about Blacks. You are ignorant about them. You are not an authority on the motives of every eighteen year old kid who went to fight with his brothers in the rural South of the 1860’s.

You don’t know what librul is till you turn down United Daughters of the Confederacy money at Peabody in the 1960’s. Oooh-whee! I was so proud of my dad for enabling me to do that. That was a Centennial year too.

Yes, DT, there are liberals in the South. We voted “purple” in 2004. Nashville voted blue. I have eighteen liberal friends and one conservative. She’s very brave. Typically, she is from East Tennessee.

Do you live in a mission or on a ranch? Do you eat mesquite? :cool:

64

And this contradicts what I said how ?

Humans are perfectly capable of being monsters. You don’t need cliche red glowing eyes and fangs to be a monster.

And are you claiming that no one in the South was anti-slavery ?

Don’t be silly. I said nothing at all about the South of today; if they had won the Civil War, they wouldn’t be what they are today.

So ? That doesn’t mean anything. That’s like saying that sports or the military or wealth can’t be important in modern America because most people aren’t athletes or soldiers or rich. They fought a war to sustain slavery; many of them died for it.

Also, your first quote is from me, not Sailboat.

Debatable; I’ve heard both claims that women work longer because of housework, and that men actually work longer because most studies just don’t count the chores men tend to do at all ( like mowing the lawn, cleaning outside the house, washing the car ).

What’s to ask ? A man who puts family above work will likely lose his job and be divorced by his wife. He doesn’t have the options a woman has.

And tend to work fewer hours - and still have more money than men; about 65% of the country’s financial assets were female owned, last I heard. Rolling eyes smilies won’t make it any less true.

I don’t need to know why they fought; I don’t care why they fought. They fought for something just as evil as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union; that’s what I care about. They were monsters or fools, ALL of them. Without exception.

65

The British abolished trafficking slaves in 1807

Around 1835 they abolished the ownership of slaves, which especially affected the West Indian plantations. The ‘owners’ were paid compensation - curiously one of the recipients was the Church of England which has recently raised a bit of controversy.

However the West Indies had moved from a plantation based slave economy to one where people were paid, long before the US Civil War.

There has also been a bit of fuss about Barclays Bank, here is some of the response :-

http://www.amsterdamnews.org/News/article/article.asp?NewsID=76197&sID=34
To the contrary, “our” David Barclay formed a committee of London Quakers to oppose the slave trade, and later became involved with the committee in taking the Quaker anti-slave trade message nationwide within the United Kingdom. David Barclay’s position on slavery is shown in the instance when, after calling in a debt in Jamaica, he became owner of a farm which had, included in its operations, 32 slaves. After trying unsuccessfully to free the slaves in Jamaica, David Barclay made arrangements for them to travel to Philadelphia, where they were freed.

I think I heard about this on the radio, but what stuck in my mind was the list of the names and skills of the slaves he released. They all seemed to have trades like ‘apprentice wheelwright’.

I’m not familiar with the American South, but I’ve run into a few things that make me wonder. For example slaves were valuable - very valuable - and you don’t normally take a sledgehammer to an SUV because it fails to start one morning.

I heard about a recent archeaological dig on old slave quarters, they were surprized by the quantity of ‘store bought’ goods that they found, suggesting that there was some sort of parallel cash economy.

With a reasonable understanding of human nature, I find it hard to believe that the kids of plantation owners did not slope off to the kitchen and go and pester people like the farrier or the carpenter.

It is possible that in 1860 slavery was closer to English feudalism around 1300 - not pleasant but fairly tolerable. I don’t think as a plantation owner I would like selling someone I had grown up with, and as a slave I would have my own network for getting grievances sorted out.

Another thing I picked up was that the Spartans, a pretty tough bunch, had one day in the year when Helots (slaves) could be killed with impunity - which suggests that they were somehow protected for the rest of the year.

Incidentally a Roman slave was more likely to be a Greek tutor than a gladiator, and the gladiators had high status - their sebum scrapings were supposedly prized by women.

While I consider slavery abhorrent, it is possible that it has been demonized after the Civil War - and that a smoother transmission to a more desireable setup could have taken place. Part of the problem was that the Civil War shafted the South’s economy which made the ‘company store’ approach pretty nasty.

My guess is that things were not that bad in 1860 - and that a West Indian style transformation would have been easy and desireable.

If as others have said, the majority of those fighting for the Confederates did not own slaves, then the real motivation would have been ‘Nationalism’.

66

So, “silly” = reading exactly what you wrote? Here’s the first thing you posted:

When challenged about the economic viability of the slavery, you responded with:

67

Your point ?

68

How can you say they it’s “part of the norm of the time”? The world was appalled at what the Axis did during WWII. People react in horror when they find out what a few individuals are doing to children or forgieners. To say “our current society” does it is inaccurate, individuals within our society do it and the society as a whole disapproves strongly and punishes those that are caught doing so.

Do you truly think that Kenneth Glenn Hinson is going to be able to go about his normal life after being aquitted? He’s going to be ostrascised and marginalized by the local populace. Would you say that our society supports canabalism just because Jeffery Dahmer was eating people?

69

Working slaves to death young for maximum profit: I did not specifically say it was common practice. I used it as an example of some of the more horrible apects of slavery that one would never suspect existed from reading or viewing GWTW.

The trouble is that many of the facts I give in my posts are stuck in my mind from as long as 30 or 40 years ago, and while I am fairly certain they are valid, I would be hard pressed to give you an exact internet link.

The BBC produced a history of the British Empire in the 1970s that pulled no punches. When they got to the part about the “sugar islands” of the Carribean, the narrator said quite plainly that as long as the slave trade existed and kept the supply of slaves abundant, many planters considered it more economical to work a slave so hard that he died young – since the declining years (after 40) were years of decreasing “profitability” – and replace him.

Around 1966, Life Magazine ran a special on black history. I remember the author was a black history professor who was head of the history department at the U of Chicago. I specifically remember that he dealt with the myth that slaves were well treated if only because they were valuable property. He quoted a planter in the Sourthern US saying something along these lines: "Time was when you could work a nigger to death young and buy another, but now that the slave trade has been stopped. . . . "

I am sorry I cannot be more specific. But the idea that you could maximize profits by working a slave extra long in his/her years of youthful stength, even if that caused him to die young is obviously a business consideration that must have come into the minds of some plantation owners. It is also obvious that abolition of the slave trade probably did a lot to improve the lot of existing slaves by making them more valuable (supply and demand) harder to replace and therefore more worth keeping healthy and well fed.

On the other hand, I realize we cannot generalize, and assume that every single slave-owner was an inhuman monster. A modern example is Oscar Schindler, a Nazi capitalist who was literally a slave master, but who is beloved by his “victims” because he evidently had a human heart.

A middle-class family in the south might have had one “auntie” slave woman who helped the mistress of the house with the 10 children, housework, etc., for whom the family may have had a genuine affection.

GWTW: I have a copy of GWTW that I have watched frequently, and I do not recall any reference to the overseer at Tara brutalizing slaves. Mrs. O’Hara despised him because he had gotten a young (white) woman pregnant and refused to accept his responsibility, and later in the film he becomes sell-out to the northern carpet-baggers.

As for the other plantation, Seven Oaks, you have only to look at the scenes where it is shown to understand what I mean by “sanitizing”. You see Melanie and Ashley out on the terrace looking at the arcadian calm and beauty of the place. Once again, I ask you, would an alien from another planet viewing this scene even suspect that all this wealth and beauty was financed by a system in which abducted human beings were kept in captivity and forced to work for free their entire lives, under threat of violence and torture if they failed to comply?

Concerning Mammy, I see no reason NOT to describe her as “loving”. It is pretty clear that a loving relationship exists between her and Scarlett. She is like a second mother.

“If’n you don’t care what folks thinks about this family, I do!” she snaps at Scarlett, implying that she is sort of a secondary member of the O’Hara family.

As I said, such affectionate relationships may have existed between masters and house slaves. But what would have happened if Mammy had announced before abolition that she was quitting and moving up north? What do you call a place from which you may not leave?

70

There is no difference between saying:

Their descendants would still have legalized slavery today.

-and-

Their descendants would vote to re-institute slavery if they could.

71

I think it would have died a slow death, but it would have died. I also think, though, that if the Civil War had not begun in 1861 it would have begun in 1862 or 1864 or 1872. It was just flat-out inevitable.

A problem that’s been addressed in some posts above but I’ll remention here is that most southern planters were up to their nads if not their eyeballs in debt. They couldn’t free their slaves because they had to have all hands in the fields to pay the mortgage on their land and on their slaves. (Please remember that the lienholders were usually English or Northern banks who knew perfectly well that their money was being paid back with proceeds from slave labor, incidentally, but how likely do you think they would have been to say “free your slaves… we’ll forget the $40,000 you owe us”?)

In fact, the war would probably have been bloodier and more determined had it happened later. The Suez Canal was an idea that had been in development since Napoleon, but when it was completed in 1869 the prices of southern cotton plummeted as England and European mills were able to get their raw materials much cheaper from Egypt and India and Asia. This meant that the southerners would still have probably had their huge debtloads, but absolutely no way of paying them, and the non slaveowners would have been indigent (which they were by this time) and even more resistant to the idea of competing with free blacks, so without a financial bailout to slaveowners (which the Union didn’t even begin to have the money for) war would have been even more desperate.

The main things that would have hastened the demise of slavery was the expansion westward for new cheap land and the flood of immigrants. It was already a lot cheaper in Savannah and New Orleans and Charleston and other port cities and population centers to hire a servant for $1 per week (which you probably don’t have to borrow) than to pay $800 (that you probably don’t have without borrowing) for a slave who you are going to have to continue to feed and clothe when they’re old and unable to work or if they become ill or who are at risk of running away or dying and then you’re out the investment you still owe on. Once an economically more feasible means of spreading cheaper labor to the fields was employed it would have gained momentum for the abolitionists.

Slavery should have been abolished gradually and with Federal oversight. It should have been staggered- children born to slaves on or before the 1st day of January 18__ will be free (but their parents owners are entitled to their servitude until they are 14 years of age) with a tiered plan of release for others until finally on a certain day 25 years or so in the future all slaves are free. This would have allowed time to develop the infrastructure of schools to give them basic literacy and monetery skills.

Cuba had an interesting program by which slaves could purchase their freedom. Cuba was a far better and incomparably worse place to be a slave than the U.S., but for that another thread, but because the Spanish archbishops and cardinals were usually ardent abolitionists a number of measures were set in place to assist abolition. One was the 21 installment plan.
In Cuba the Catholic Church oversaw the self-purchase, so that if a slave was worth the equivalent of $1000 USD he could buy himself in $50 installments. The first installments were by far the most difficult to raise as the slave had to earn the funds on his own, thus most came from philanthropists or from free relatives who supplied the money. Upon purchase of 25% of himself it became easier: a slave was allowed to spend 25% of his time (1.5 days per week) away from his plantation, then upon purchase of 50% of himself he was allowed to spend 3 days per week away, then at 75% he was allowed to spend 5 days away, etc., so that the last installments were raised far sooner. The slave would ultimately pay $1050 (using the $1000 figure) with the extra $50 going to fund the cost of overseeing the program AND to loaning other slaves the money on initial installments. Slaves freed under this (and while certainly not most of Cuba’s slave population, there were many) usually then began the purchase of their families.
A plan like this could have been implemented with the government and private philanthropists providing funds to assist with the “downpayments”. Some debt forgiveness measures and subsidies should have been implemented, because as mentioned- if I inherit 10 slaves and $20,000 in land from my father BUT I also inherit his $25,000 debtload, my hands are tied: I CAN’T free the slaves. (In fact this is exactly what happened to Robert E. Lee: his wife inherited 140+ slaves and huge amounts of land (10,000s of acres) from her father with the order all slaves were to be freed w/in 7 years of the old man’s death, but the problem was that the estate had over $100,000 in debts that had to be paid off before this could happen, so Lee took a leave of absence from the army for years in order to restructure the estate so he could free the slaves, the last ones being manumitted in 1862 as that was when the estate was finally solvent.)

72

A not terribly charming but interesting (if only to me) family anecdote:

My great grandmother Rhoda was born on a farm in Chilton County, AL, in the early 1870s. As a girl it was a popular sport for young boys to gallop through the countryside cracking whips and firing pistols and screaming "The nggers are rising! Run for your lives!" It was a challenge to see if you could make it convincing. She remembers several times being taken to hide in the cornfields along with her brothers and sisters and, ironically, the two black children (orphans of a former family servant raised with the family- it really is true that on the individual level there were always incidents of real love and real humanity between the races) who lived with them and were the most terrified of all.

This paranoia explains the rise of the Klan a bit. In counties where the black and white populations were roughly equal or where blacks outnumbered whites, there was a very real terror of a race war happening. (Please note that explain and exonerate are not synonyms and I’m not in any way minimizing or pardoning the terrorist tactics of the KKK- even Forrest, who probably massacred black troops in the war, was sickened by them.)

*And of course there was always real animosity and real distrust and inhumanity as well, as there will be when things are not equal. The black boy they raised, for example, eventually had to be given some pocket money and sent away like one of the sons of Abraham’s concubines because of the rumors that began about him and one of the daughters when he was an adolescent, but he remained close to the family for the rest of his life.
The love-hate relationships of whites and blacks was a very complex and multilayered thing; one black man my father knew [a descendant of my father’s great-grandfather’s slaves just for oddity] told about how his mother and a wealthy white lady grew up as best friends. His mother’s mother had been the white lady’s mother’s maid. When his father was killed in a car accident it was the wealthy white woman who was first to their house, taking care of his grieving mother, bringing her own maid to cook for them, and she helped them financially from then on as did other members of the white community who loved this woman or her dead husband.
At one point she took up a collection of clothes and toys for her black friend’s children and this man, then a boy of about 10 or 12, was sent to her house to collect it. The white woman gave him the ass-chewing of ass-chewings because he came to her front door, THEN when he got back to his own mother’s home with the box of collections his mother whipped him for the same offense!
He had a niece in modern times who worked as a maid for a liberal white family ca. 1980 and she used their front door and always told she was “one of the family”, totally unlike his mother and grandmother had been treated (they were loved but most definitely not on the same level). When his niece had a horrible time with her pregnancy and almost died, the white family whose front door she entered and who treated her “like family” never came to see her in the hospital, never helped her financially while she was out of work, and got a new maid; the only “severance” or sympathy she got from them were flowers and a reference. He remarked “The hate’s been watered down but so has the love.” He didn’t romanticize his Jim Crow “you are not our equal” childhood, but there were cafeteria items about it he missed. Southern race relations are anything but simple.

73

Garbage. They wouldn’t be the same people; not even close.

74

What do you mean by “the same”? What would be different? Why would the CSA, and only the CSA, have legalized slavery in the 21st century? Why would it have been eradicated in every country on earth except the CSA?

75

What he said.

  • Honesty
76

Another factor was that for a lot of slave owners, slaves weren’t just a means of producing a crop - the slaves themselves were the product. Cotton took a lot of nutrients out of the soil and after a few decades could no longer be viably produced in the same fields. Other agricultural products didn’t make enough profit to support a plantation. By 1860, the profit margin in eastern states like Virginia and the Carolinas was derived from breeding slaves and selling them to western regions where they could still be used to produce cotten. These eastern slaveowners recognized that they needed new markets and this was one of the main reasons they pushed for expansion in to the west and south. For them, slavery couldn’t stand still - it needed to expand to survive at all.

77

Because unlike in our world, the slaveowners would have kept their wealth and power, and shaped the South according to their vision.

Because unlike in our world, the slaveowners would have kept their wealth and power, and shaped the South according to their vision. Because they were ideologically and religiously committed to slavery. Because eliminating slavery would mean admitting that they were in the wrong, and had always been in the wrong.

78

But only White slave owners in the south. Why only them out of all the people in the world?

79

Actually, you are wrong on both counts. With the loss of significant profits from cotton, (as already noted), they would not have held onto their wealth any more than any other group who is committed to a dying source of revenue. Without the wealth, the power also falls away. The slaveholders of 1861 would have already been aging by the 1880s when they would have lost their last possible market for exporting slaves and their children would not necessarily have bought into the same mindset. (Remember, the reason why they created rationalizations for slavery was to support their income; they did not coincidentally gain income from a pre-existing philosophical position.)

Other nations that dropped slavery did so without massive efforts to maintain it despite all arguments; when it stopped being profitable, the arguments were dropped, as well. They had no reason to “admit slavery was wrong,” as they could simply declare “slavery is no longer profitable” while still maintaining all the arguments in support of the less human or less advanced characteristics that they projected onto people of African descent. Heck, we have historical precedent for that occurring right in this country. Slavery was acknowledged as a legitimate institution in nearly every colony prior to the War for Independence. In those colonies where it was not profitable, it wasted away and was ultimately outlawed.

Your claims regarding the South are based on no actual evidence and no actual rationale. They seem to simply fullfill some need of yours to perceive the world in a particular way, without supporting evidence and in the face of contradictory evidence.

80

As Sampiro (who just happens to be recognized as a bit of an authority on the south around these parts, I think) stated above, they really didn’t have wealth. They had the trappings of wealth.

scenario: It’s 1895 here in the sunny CSA. I’m Beuregard Q Jefferson IV, while land owning slaveowner. And then the English or Yankee bank I deal with says I can’t have any more credit, and in fact they are calling in their loans, as they no longer wish to have dealings with slaveholders.

I am boned.

I think in your hypothetical “All southerners are slaveowning monsters” world, this is what would have happened eventually.

Edit: What tomndeb said.