IMO slavery was doomed because it’s incompatible with cultural and technological modernity. It wouldn’t necessarily have been federal action – it would have been education and cultural changes. Federal action would have certainly come eventually, but once slaves (and abolitionists) could sneak radios into their quarters, sneak messages and themselves onto trains and (eventually) automobiles, and thus much more easily communicate and coordinate with slaves (and abolitionists) the next plantation and town over, slavery couldn’t have survived.
I’m not excusing Southern slaveowners – by and large, they were rapists and torturers who were fundamentally and personally wedded to their desire for the power to continue to rape and torture. But they were right to fear for the future of slavery. They were evil and morally delusional men who recognized that the way the world was changing was incompatible with their rape and torture lifestyle. And they started a bloody, devastating war in their desperation to continue to have the right to rape and torture at will.
I don’t see anything implicit in America Brand Capitalism that is incompatible with slavery. Nothing.
As to culture… color me unpersuaded. Not to needlessly inject politics into the discussion, but consider how willing a large segment of the American population is to accommodate fascism today. If you can stomach fascism, you can stomach slavery.
But that’s not what I’m saying - I’m saying that with modern tech and culture (perhaps more tech than culture) it would be physically impossible to keep millions enslaved. Think about how much it costs to keep prisoners in prison in modern times - with that expense, it’s not remotely economically feasible to enslave millions. There’s no productivity.
I don’t think that’s true either. If anything, I suspect technology (biometrics, electronic tracking and surveillance, etc) would make it much easier to enslave millions of people. Although it would be ironic in the extreme to see overlords unionizing and fighting to protect their jobs from automation.
Consider also how extensively slavery was racialized by the 19th century. To help cement that, slave states like SC even had laws requiring visiting black sailors to report to jail upon arrival in port. Otherwise, they were liable for summary arrest and sale/enslavement. And sometimes, even the ones who duly reported to jail wore sold off without recourse.
Similarly, many states had laws prohibiting slave holders from freeing their slaves within the state without (1) some meritorious act by the slave and (2) an act of the state legislature authorizing emancipation. They also had laws against free blacks remaining in the state at all. It was all calculated to maintain a strict racial caste system: any black person was presumptively a slave, the burden on them to prove their freedom, and even if they could they might be liable for arrest just for being present as a freed black in the state.
The institution of slavery in the American south was an extraordinarily oppressive system that permeated into all aspects of daily life, often in ways that are difficult to comprehend now looking back, so far removed from that time.
But we did not get to where we are now by some inevitable arch of history: things happened the way they did because people who were committed to bring about change put in the work. And if we aren’t carefully, people who are committed to taking us back may do so. We must continue to put in the work to realize those hard-fought gains and to continue to build off them. Social progress is not inevitable.
If not as chattel slaves, than maintaining southern blacks as a permanent underclass was formerly a necessary feature of cotton cultivation. Cotton is a commodity, meaning a premium on low production cost and therefore rock-bottom wages. Picking cotton by hand is such hard, unpleasant and low-paid work that virtually no one with a better alternative will do so. The South had to pass strict laws against vagabondage and criminalized debt because being a homeless beggar was better than picking cotton. The famous song “I Never Picked Cotton” is about a man on death row reflecting that his short violent life as a criminal was better than picking cotton.
Arguably, the lot of African-Americans in the South could never have substantially improved until the perfection of the mechanical cotton harvester, which became economically competitive only after World War Two.
On the original point raised, I wonder if it’s worth noting that executing the leaders of the Irish Easter Rising in 1916 shifted Irish public opinion decisively in their favour, by creating martyrs, and made the subsequent Troubles more violent and protracted than they might otherwise have been.
It’s had to parse actual history like this. There is no laboratory in which we can re-run history under “what if” scenarios. We have really no way of knowing if or how history would have turned out differently had the UK, far from executing the ring leaders, just straight up let them go and allowed them to foment bloody rebellion against protestants in the south of Ireland without interference.
And yet, disclaimer aside, I have to imagine that if the UK had granted full pardons to all, let bygones be bygones, and did nothing to stop ongoing violence, things probably wouldn’t have turned out a whole lot better for UK rule in Ireland.
More likely prison sentences - as happened for most of those taking part, with early release as well - and more room for other political voices, making the result of the 1918 election less decisive. Though, granted, the British reaction to events after that would need to have been much more flexible.
Hey, I’d settle for R.E Lee (and his co-conspirators) doing a stint in prison. Just so long as he was properly convicted and shamed for his treason, you know?
On the other hand, after the 1745 Jacobite Uprising in the UK, the British government executed some of the leaders, allowed others to go to exile and pardoned the rest, and then imposed their own form of Reconstruction on the Scottish Highlands for several decades. As the Scots haven’t risen since, it seems to have worked.
And one of the problems, they thought he might get off. You know, a jury trial. Then there was that whole argument about the legality of secession. Nobody wanted that brought out in a court of law, basically.
I might also note, as I am fond of doing, that the legality of secession did play out in court. In 1869. The result? Not lawful, completely at odds with the Constitution and the very notion of a “more perfection Union.” Yep. They actually cited the preamble.
I consider the lack of widespread knowledge of this holding to be one of the many failings of the US schooling system around the history of the Civil War and racism in the US.
You act like these are mutually exclusive options. The number of dissenters/potential dissenters/potential dissenters only in the paranoid minds of those in charge executed by the Soviet system and the Chinese communists makes a rather huge graveyard easily numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Individual ringleaders weren’t sent to the gulag, entire populations were. The Bolsheviks certainly weren’t shy about shooting the entire Romanov family, or for example the entire Polish officer corps.
The Emperor of China had long since ceased to have any power other than as a figurehead by the time of the Chinese Civil War. It hard to imagine Chiang Kai-shek would have been treated similarly had he fallen into Mao’s hands in 1949.
OP, have you looked at what happened to your idea historically? They had Jefferson Davis in prison and they intended to put him on trial for treason in Richmond. Ultimately the prosecutors decided they weren’t sure they could get a conviction, and a possible acquittal might have implied secession was constitutional, which would have been a worse outcome than no trial. So they had to drop the charges and let him go. In fact, he got bailed out and went to Canada before charges were dropped.