This logic, this “point,” only holds if we endorse or otherwise uniquely privilege the perspective of slave masters over slaves. Because inasmuch as it’s easier to condemn slavery when your society doesn’t depend on it so directly, it seems even easier to support slavery when you and your descendants, as a minority even of the white population, will be the ones to benefit from it.
Absolutely. And the fact that the majority of people at that time in our history were blind to it makes it an interesting discussion point. As a point, they also didn’t care what women or Indians thought either, and most of the northern states that were against slavery certainly didn’t want blacks to vote.
I think that the North would have nibbled slavery away.
First no more slave states. Then repeal the Fugitive slave law. Next limits on slave auctions. Kids would be born free. Maryland would have gone along with those.
Well, some CSA states would have gone their separate ways, like Texas for example- IMHO.
Then, sure technology would have rendered mass slavery less and less cost effective. But still, today we use Migrant farmworkers for a lot of our Ag work. I dont know why people think that slaves wouldn’t be around. There is slavery today- not quite the same, true, but still slaves- in AG work, and as sex workers, etc. There were brothels of slaves, many of which were “high yellow”, I suspect there’d still be a need for them.
Racist to the core, at least House slaves would have continued. They were a status symbol, something for rapists to rape, and for sadists to beat. And when you are a illiterate redneck, you had someone to feel superior to.
At the end of his life he did:
I think what would’ve happened would’ve been what happened during the Civil War. There would’ve been a lot of disagreement between Congress and Lincoln and they would’ve worked out an agreement. They would’ve worked out a policy that all Republicans could support. And it probably would’ve looked something like what was passed in 1866, the Civil Rights Act, which gave basic civil rights to the former slaves; the 14th Amendment, which put that principle of equal citizenship into the Constitution, maybe limited black suffrage.
You know, at the end of his life, Lincoln publicly called for giving the right to vote to some blacks in the South, particularly the former soldiers. And this wouldnt have been as radical as the way Reconstruction eventually developed with full black suffrage, but maybe it would’ve stuck longer.
This “agrarian” versus “industrial” notion is used all the time when talking about the Civil War. Large areas of “the North” (especially in the Old Northwest, what we now call the Midwest) were “agrarian” (and still are, for that matter). What the South had was an “agrarian” economy, yes, in the sense that it involved growing things; it was a plantation economy, with slave labor being used to produce commodities (especially cotton, secondarily tobacco) for sale on global markets. For what it’s worth, “the North” did also produce agricultural commodities for sale on the global market; Northern farms exported substantial amounts of grain to Great Britain. That form of agrarianism did not require declaring any human beings to be someone else’s property.
Also, this statement “Slavery became a flashpoint issue in this struggle” implies that somehow the real issue was something else, and slavery was just what “set things off”: This odd notion that there’s some fundamental conflict between “agrarian” regions and “industrial” regions (as if industrialists and factory workers don’t need to eat–or don’t want cloth, for that matter–and farmers don’t want to buy manufactured goods).
The issue was the conflict between an economy (both agrarian and industrial) using free labor, and a political system based on republicanism (and even increasingly democracy); and an economy heavily dependent on using slave labor for a specific form of plantation agriculture, with a political system that could not help but tend towards aristocracy or even autocracy. The “flashpoint issues” were more specific aspects of this fundamental division over slavery vs. freedom, like the issue of slavery in the territories and the Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and an anti-slavery party winning a national election.
Happy Appomattox Day, y’all.
Today (June 8) is the 157th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s nomination by Republicans to be their 1864 Presidential candidate. Among the party resolutions:
- Resolved, That it is the highest duty of every American citizen to maintain against all their enemies the integrity of the Union and the paramount authority of the Constitution and laws of the United States; and that, laying aside all differences of political opinion, we pledge ourselves, as Union men, animated by a common sentiment and aiming at a common object, to do everything in our power to aid the Government in quelling by force of arms the Rebellion now raging against its authority, and in bringing to the punishment due to their crimes the Rebels and traitors arrayed against it. [Prolonged applause.]