what year do you think slavery would have ended in the south, if at all?
1886
Moderator’s Note: There obviously isn’t a factual answer to this question, so I’ll spare the GQ mods the trouble and go ahead and move this over to Great Debates.
The south did win the civil war, just not until the mid-1980’s.
Well, according to Robert E. Lee, “in the sweet bye and bye” when everyone would eat pie in the sky. More concretely, anywhere from “as soon as these meddlesome Yankees will just stop pestering us about the whole dreadful business” to “2,000 years”.
According to the state of Texas, as far as they were concerned slavery would exist there “for all future time”; and according to Confederate States Vice President Alexander Stephens, the CSA would have slavery “forever”.
I suppose it would depend on just how the South won, which in turn would influence how other powers related to it. Is the South going to peacefully secede without a war, or only after a nasty fight with the North, which might encourage the United States to do everything in their power to foment insurrection among the slaves?
It took sixty-odd years for Soviet Communism to collapse, and Communist Parties continue to rule hundreds of millions of people (although arguably without much left in the way of real communism in most of those places).
Seventy-odd, even. You know, sixty plus some number greater than ten.
According to Turtledove’s Guns of the South - pretty much immediately after the Civil War IIRC
However one might possibly have to take the conclusions of any book whose plot depends on time-travelling Afrikaners with AK-47’s with a small grain of salt as far as the real world goes.
I’ll give you a few of my own brief thought, then give you a cite to the best source to get an answer…
The influence of Northern intellectuals would not have been absent just because the South lost the war. Slavery would become increasingly intolerable, morally, to successive generations.
Furthermore, since the slavery system is economically inefficient, I doubt it could have supported the Confederate economy for very long. Add to this the fact that an agrarian economy of any sort was doomed by the beginning of the 20th century. Class structure would also have become a growing problem, as the years leading up to the war had seen the gap between the planter class (defined as 20+ slaves held) and the rest of the people grow more distinct. The seaboard planters were stagnating, and the 1820’s saw a mass emigration to the Black Belt of Alabama and to Texas that revived slavery briefly…an emigration limited by the area controlled by slaveholding states. There was definitely an upper boundary to the number of years slavery could sustain itself. Slavery would not have survived into that century.
It may have ended quite differently though. The abolitionists’ plan to end slavery was most certainly not emancipation and racial integration prior to the war. They intended to either ship the slaves back to Africa, or give them land somewhere else. Integrating them as freemen equal with the white population was not the leading solution.
Frankly, I could write about this all day. The antebellum South was my area of emphasis in undergraduate school, I read a great deal about it, and wrote my senior thesis on slave laws. If you want a thorough answer read Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese, universally considered the greatest book on slavery ever written by the greatest historian of the period ever to draw breath. Genovese was a Marxist, but to historians that merely means a social analysis rather than the cultural analysis now popular with postmodernists (which I find largely silly and useless, IMHO.) The precarious state of the so-called peculiar institution of slavery is readily apparent, it’s fall clearly inevitable.
I just finished reading an essay called If Lincoln had not freed the Slaves in a counterfactual compilation called What If? 2 that addresses this very question.
The gist of it is that if the south had gained the upper hand in the Civil War, the war likely would have ended with a negotiated peace. History and economics would lead us to speculate that slavery would have ended in the south, but in a much more gradual manner.
In his annual message to Congress in 1862, Lincoln proposed a consititutional amendment providing that states which abolished slavery before 1900 would be compensated in U.S. Bonds. So, something along those lines would’ve happened–slaves would be freed–but the slaveowners would be reimbursed by the U.S. government. Sounds plausable, no?
Yes, I have this What If 2. If things happened that way, I wonder if they would have emancipated more gradually. Maybe offlaying the economic and social shock of freed blacks instantaneously. Who knows, segregration might not have set in the way it did.
Perhaps I can procure you some ginger to change your mind.
Well, in his other “If the South Won the War” book, How Few Remain (which didn’t involve Afrikanners and AK-47s), the South ended slavery shortly after the war.
Zev Steinhardt
More properly referred to as The War of Northern Aggression.
Buck: Who attacked Fort Sumner, again?
RexDart is spot-on. Slavery is expensive, inefficient, and morally repugnant. Machinery is none of the above. The cotton gin had already caught on before the war and, like it or not, the South would have had to compete with the North in Europe and, in a few decades, Asia.
Europe brings up an interesting topic not often touched on in history classes. Europe wanted to come in on the side of the CSA to protect the cheap textiles the South produced, but couldn’t for fear of being seen as supporting slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which only freed slaves in states then in a state of rebellion against the Union, was a masterstroke in this theatre of the war. It made the American Civil War seem like it was about slavery, forcing Europe, with its vast fleets (England could have eaten the North’s lunch nautically, ironclads or no), to the sidelines as the North gradually outproduced and outmechanized their Southern foe.
Yeah, what Derleth said.
The war was about preserving the Union or rather the right to leave the Union.
That slavery thing was propaganda.
Very good propaganda, as it is still widely believed today.
But would there have been AK47’s if the South had won?
Probably not.
The AK47 was based on the German MP44 (Sturmgewehr).
The Soviets would likely have lost without a united United States.
Thus, no AK47.
The secession of the South was in order to preserve slavery. The North opposed the secession not in order to destroy slavery, at least not at first, but in order to preserve the national unity of the United States. (Although the national government of the U.S. at the time had been elected on a platform of opposition to slavery, which is what precipitated the secession of the slave states to begin with.) Those things are matters of historical fact. If the slave states had been successful–either peacefully or by victory in war–in their drive to found a new nation dedicated to the principle of slavery, how successful in the long run would they have been in maintaining their founding principles? That, obviously, being a historical counter-factual, is a lot more debateable.
Man, MEBuckner is gonna stomp all over you for that :p.
Actually, you are both right and wrong, but more wrong IMO. Slavery was indeed the primary and ultimate cause of the Civil War. That’s fact, not propaganda. Where you are correct is in the sense that the grade-school refrain that “the Civil War was fought to free the slaves” is nonsense. However the instituition of slavery, both as it as it related to economics and also in terms of political culture, was the single most significant source of the regional tensions that led to the political split.
I do tend to agree that slavery would have died out eventually. But I am not so sure it would have done so quickly. Especially if we are talking an independant CSA that had fought a bitter war in which the slavery issue had been ( one of ) the rallying cries. I predict a more lingering instituition, that largely ceased to be economically viable ( though I’d bet even money on the attempted use of slave labor as cheap factory labor ), but lingered on at a lower level as a cultural artifact late into the 19th century or even beyond. And after ( eventual ) abolition we would probably still continue to see a South African-style apartheid system.
- Tamerlane
MEBuckner: Heh. I swear I wrote that before I saw your post :D.
- Tamerlane
But if slavery’s inefficient, why hadn’t it already been abolished? Presumably because the constraining effects of international competition are slow to show and some people may be willing to pay the price (and others have little influence). Supposing that a practice will disappear because it’s a bad idea is pretty optimistic.