If the south had won the civil war or even just held off the north...

Great Debates
21

Simply put, slavery existed because it provided the only way to get sufficient labor supply. However, it was no really that efficient, though you could and would probably make an absolute positive amount of money at it.

Southern Cotton was the best quality; the only real competition was found in India, which had inferior quality. It was not notably cheaper, per se.

One never knows whether Asia would have competed with the South thereafter, and even if they had, the cost would have been much higher via the shipping, improved transit or no.

In any event, there was a certain lack of motivation among slaves. DOn’t underestimate this; the goblin song of “Where there’s a whip there’s a way” only goes so far…

hawthorne, it may surprise you, but “moral repugnance” actually did have a large effect on the slaveholding society at times.

Now as top the OP, I say that slavery would stilll be around. Not common, but existing. Why?

First, the South would have had “brother slave nations”, as I expect Brazil and some other South American places would not have banned it. Second, don’t underestimate the power of tradition. Third, slaves are proabbly very useful as tightly controlled domestic servants.

22

I have to put in my 2 cents on this…

Read “The Peculiar Institution”; it’s pretty good. I understand from it that slavery would not have died out over time as so many believe; in fact, as time went on (up to the Civil War) some southerners were introducing slave labor into industrial enterprises (Such as the famous Tredegar Iron Works), displacing free white labor. Imagine if you will what the subsequent effect on labor, industrialization, economics, and American and world history in general would have been had the trend continued.

Hawthorne said: “But if slavery’s inefficient, why hadn’t it already been abolished?” The book “Albion’s Seed” hypothesizes that the Southern plantation tradition comes from the “dispossed caviliers” of the English Civil War (royalist minded English nobility or wanna-be nobility) that settled Virginia and later the rest of the South. The idea of the great landholding Lord with a huge gulf between him and his many inferiors goes a very long way to make slavery a “natural” order of things in the mind of the slaveholding gentry.

RexDart and Derleth: The cotton gin didn’t inhibit slavery, it greatly encouraged it. Slavery might have died out in the early 1800’s were it not for the cotton gin, which makes the separation of the cotten from the rest of the plant practical on a large scale. It thus made cotton growing on a large scale profitable. Slaves were not used for separating (processing) the cotton, but for picking it. Prior to that, slave labor was used in tobacco-growing, but tobacco is very hard on the land and canot be grown in nearly as many places as cotton can. Sugar and rice also were slave-labor-intensive industries, but they could only be practiced in places with suitable climates for those crops. Cotton growing was something that could be done almost anywhere in the southern states, and the invention of the cotton gin made cotton economically very attractive.

23

And later Egypt, at least temporarily when the Confederate supply was disrupted.

  • Tamerlane
24

What I posted seems to be unclear. It wasn’t to question the notion that slavery was inefficient, but rather to question the notion that inefficient practices disappear in the presence of competition from other jurisdictions.

25

Once the industrial revolution got really rolling in the CSA slavery’s days would be numbered . Just my humble O

26

I’d like to propse a variant question, one that I meant to write as alternative history fiction but never got around to:

What if Robert E. Lee had decided the other way, and taken control of the Union army instead of the forces of his home state, Virginia? Under his superior leadership, the Union army squishes the rebels in less than two years and the U.S. is reunified before the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment are ever written. Slavery continues but so does southern discontent, since Union army garrisons are in every southern city. Slavery will eventually be phased out as uneconomical, but can a second civil war be held off until then? Would a post-slavery and technologically advanced South rebel again in the early 1900s?

27

Well, 20 years after, because the British wouldn’t come into the Second Mexican War if they didn’t. They didn’t exactly end it by their own volition.

28

Well, Derleth- I disagree about the Brit navy- the Ironclads would have blown the entire 'wooden wall" away with a minimum of fuss, and a large # of “jack tars” meeting Davey Jones. Remember, we didn’t just have the Monitor, we had dozens & dzoens of Ironclads- of which the Monitor was one of the first and the weakest. The “double-turrented” monitors were espec powerful. The Virginia, which was poorly built, had a field day against the Union wood navy.

Note also- there is really no way the “South could have won the War”- militarily that is. If Lincoln had not been Prez, maybe a diplomatic compromise might have been reached- but I think that would have had the South re-joinig the Union, but with Slavery guarenteed.

Bryan makes a good point- there are literally thousands of 'what if the South had won" stories out there- but few “what if the North had won a fast clean victory”? - which was FAR more likely, and hasn’t been discussed much.

Rex- phrases like “universally considered the greatest book on Slavery, written by the greatest historian of the period to draw breath”- absolutely cry out to be challenged- especially as I have not heard of either, and I am quite well read. Esp since the author is a “marxist”, you might think that some of the dudes on the right, or some of the Southern Apologist critics & historians, might just disagree a mite.

I am afraid Mr Turteldove, being somewhat of a Southern Apologist, is wrong about Slavery ending soon after. It was in their damn Consitution for gods sake. If the Confederate Central Government had tried it- many of the Southern States would have seceded from the Confederacy.

IMHO, what would have happened, some 2.3 generations after the War, was a law that kept all current slaves in place, but made all new children free, and possibly stopped the buying & selling of slaves. So, around WWI, slavery would have been starting to be phased out, with most of the “peculiar institution” gone by WWII. Note that then -IMHO- there might not have been a WWII (as we know it), as the French terms of Victory in WWI mostly led to WWII, and the vast change in American involvement would have had WWI end in a bloody draw. Here, I agree with Turtledove- this might have forced the North into the Kaisers camp.

Of course, there might well have been some sort of “WWII”, but the players would have been different. I surmise a Pacific war with Japan against the French, Dutch, & Brits- which Japan would have won. In the general confusion, there could well have been some wars break out in Central Europe, also.

29

You can’t just drive by with that, Derleth. You asked for it with that one, but nobody seems to have given you a retort :wink:

Just to remind everyone, Fort Sumner was a fort held by foreign troops (Union soldiers) in a soveriegn nation (the Confederate States of America.) The Confederacy didn’t invade the United States to start the war, the expelled invaders. It was Lincoln’s choice to keep his soldiers on foreign soil. It was Lincoln’s choice to invade the Southern states and reconquer them. Starting the war and firing the first shot are not the same thing at all.

You may now to return to your regularly scheduled GD.

30

Alternatively, Ft. Sumter was a fort built by the United States of America, and owned and operated by the United States of America, which was subject to an unprovoked attack by traitors who unlawfully took up arms against their country.

31

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman wrote a book in 1974 called Time on the Cross which is an economic justification of slavery (it is not a moral justification of the institution, although some would like to characterize it as that). I have not read the book, but I do know Prof. Engerman (I was a Teaching Assistant in one of his classes) and have discussed to some length this issue with him (many years ago, now). Robert Fogel eventually won the Nobel Prize. For a summary I think this link is ok:

http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/slavery/interpretations_of_slavery_in_U.S/fogel.htm

if there is more recent contrary evidence I do not know of it.

32

Tretiak, I am somewhat familiar with Fogel and Engerman’s book. I didn’t read it during my studies, but was aware of it as one of the few landmark books on slavery written by somebody whose last name wasn’t Genovese. I cited it once in my thesis, but only for a side-issue. IIRC, there has been serious criticism of that book in recent years. I don’t know how to find those critiques, other than to check history journals for recent book reviews.

33

Just what a Yankee would say :wink:

That very topic, secession, has dominated the letters to the editor in Liberty magazine for about 5 months running now, all from one article published over the summer. Among us libertarians, it seems to be as divisive as abortion and the death penalty. And libertarians equate slavery with death, so we pretty much have to just throw that aspect of the secession away before even getting down to it.

Of course, GD has been down that road before, I’m sure :frowning:

34

According to the markers on Fort Sumter, where I visited a number of years ago, the Union forces on the island had asked for a very short additional interval in which to leave - on the order of 36 or 72 hours, IIRC. The Confederate forces chose to attack rather than give the Union forces the time they requested to leave peacably.

Given that fact, it doesn’t seem to matter how one regards the ownership of the fort in 1861 - a matter with little precedent in world affairs. The Confederates started the fighting, period.

35

there’s a book a friend of mine was reading called Guns of the South You may be interested in reading it

36

I don’t know if I’d call Turtledove a Southern apologist. Guns of the South has some of that (although, remember, it’s written from an entirely Southern perspective), but his Great War series shows a south that only abolished slavery reluctantly as a military neccessity, replaced it with a kind of Apartheid system, and where life for blacks in the Confederacy is brutal and dehumanizing.

37

Why would they have done it of their own volition, without some reason to do so? There were plenty of slave holders that felt that the system was evil, but who were trapped in it. Jefferson was one person. He did nothing but pile up debt during his life, but we criticize him for having slaves and not freeing them. Why not question the fact that he was irresponsible, rather than an evil person? Part of the problem was the economics of the situation, but in discussions like this it is: A slaveholer is a slaveholder is a slaveholder is a slaveholder, and the only reason is that he likes being a slaveholder because it is evil and he is evil. Period. Thank you, and good night. And yes I’m evil too for saying this because there is no underlying causes of slavery except evil people and obviously evil people settled in the south and enlightened people settled in the north and that is that. Thank you and don’t question it because we said so.
:stuck_out_tongue: [sup]No, I’m not bitter[/sup]
The fact is that if I had any ancestors in the conflict it would have been on the Union side, but having spent most of my life in the south, I’m sick of all this holier-than-thou attitude. My wife had a great great grandfather in the Confederate army, who died of an illness. I have never noticed any desire on her part to return to the days of having slaves. But she inherited that evil and it rubbed off on me, so I apologize and hope I can once again move north and attone for my sins. PTL

38

It’s important to understand (particularly in a discussion of when or if the South would have ended slavery on its own) that there seems to have been a major shift in attitudes between Jefferson’s day and the eve of secession. Whether or not he took any practical steps in that direction, Jefferson frequently wrote of the evils of slavery, and felt that the institution ought to somehow be abolished. This attitude did survive until the eve of the Civil War, as witnessed by Robert E. Lee’s writings on the subject. However, by 1860 there were many vocal advocates of slavery who did not admit it was an evil which they were unfortunately stuck with, but instead hailed slavery as a positive good–go read Alexander Stephen’s “Cornerstone Speech” again; he considered slavery to be a “great truth”, which he compared to the discoveries of Galileo or the ideas of Adam Smith, and he considered white supremacy and the enslavement of Africans to be the “cornerstone” of the new government and the foundation of “the highest type of civilization ever exhibited by man”. He explicitly repudiates Jefferson’s views of slavery as a regrettable and evil thing.

By 1837 the famous South Carolina statesman John Calhoun had said in a speech in the U.S. Senate that

In an 1861 essay, The Alternative: A Separate Nationality, or the Africanization of the South, William H. Holcombe, a Virginian-born doctor living in New Orleans admitted that

But he goes on to say that

By all the evidence the prevailing public sentiment among slaveholders by 1860 was not that the institution was a “necessary evil”, but something to be proudly defended as a pillar of their civilization and a bulwark of liberty(!)–by which they meant the liberty of white freemen.

It’s also worth noting that by 1860 slave owners weren’t just some tiny minority, either–about one-third of Southern families owned at least one slave; in Mississippi and South Carolina, the number of families holding slaves approached 50%.

39

1/3 of Southern families owned slaves, say you? Well, your statistics bear out that a mere 12% of those were planter-class (owned 20+ slaves), and that was part of the problem that I believe would have ended slavery once and for all.

Your 1/3 is higher than I have seen, and I got an undergraduate degree in history with a specialty in this area…but OK.

First of all, throw Louisiana right out. Louisiana always was the redheaded stepchild of slavery, from their laws to their conduct.

To say that 1/3 of Southern families owned slaves may end up being correct, but should be clarified by someone who knows a bit about the way families were structured. In the Eastern seaboard, families were extended groups, far beyond what we now consider an “extended” family. A family group in South Carolina might include several elderly people, their numerous children and marital partners, and their grandchildren. If one wished to inherit the property of the previous generation, one was tied into this situation through the fee tail estate, a maneuvering of legal property transfer that no longer exists today, much to the delight of first-year law students in their property classes.

To conflict with these planter-class families, there were very many of the regular folk…people who farmed with at most one or two slaves, most likely none at all, and made for themselves the traditional agrarian living of the Jeffersonian vision. My own northeastern Missouri ancestors were of this latter sort, holding their own against nature without slaves. The populist movement of the late 19th century would not have passed those folks by, as even an independant Confederacy would have had intellectual ties to its former Union. The incredible amounts of legal maneuvering which occured constantly to support the system of slavery (innumerable inconsistencies which would take me far too long to detail here) would have drawn the increasing ire of the common Southerner.

TRR Cobb gave a go at formalizing the law of slavery, but it would have been too little too late even had the South emerged victorious. Slavery was a bastardization of law, a patchwork cloak of ends and bits forced together through artifice into a system that perservered only through willful blindness. It’s days were most certainly numbered. Again, it is not something I can explain easily, but I assure to you that the rule of law was in an inevitable conflict with the institution of slavery, and the rule of law was going to win.

40

I don’t think it’s wise to put a lot of faith into a work of speculative fiction for answers to questions of when slavery might have ended if the south hadn’t lost. There’s no more way to prove what might had happened if people had time travelled and gave Lee AK-47s than it will be to prove or disprove the story I’m writing about what could happen to society’s view on children and one’s obligation to the elderly if there was a massive smallpox outbreak in the next few years that killed off a good portion of those of us too young to be vaccinated against it. **The Guns Of The South **is highly entertaining, but given it’s based on things that never happened the way the book reports, it’s a bit lacking on facts. Perhaps had the story only taken place at the tale end of the war, so it was less revisionist…

Getting back to the OP, wasn’t part of the reason that there was still slavery in the 1860’s that it wasn’t cost effective for the southern states to follow the North’s lead on industrialism? Up here there hadn’t been slaves since the century before, since it hadn’t worked out well, and there was no source of cheap labor (I suppose immigrants were a little cheaper, but they had to be paid wages- which cost more than building a few shacks and feeding people a couple of times a day- moreover they couldn’t be bred) so it made sense to change as quickly as possible to a system that allowed more work to be done by fewer people, since there wasn’t a reasonable alternative.

In the south they had a method that was working for them, and the costs of changing their system would have been huge if they’d decided to do it all at once. Factories needed to be built, new wages paid, and so on, and they’d still be paying for the upkeep of their slaves in the interm, I imagine. They’d of faced the same sorts of things as during reconstuctionism, but without the North to blame the changes on.