The Confederacy introduced a draft before the Union did as I recall.
Blockquote
ok. Fair enough.
“said” and “did” …“at the time”.,
The rebuttal to your argument would be;
- You never said anything before.
- You never did anything before.
The ‘before’ is before the Souths plans of secession started to become apparent or a very real threat.
That is, the very real threat of the loss of territory.
Only then, were events driven to their conclusion of military conflict. It’s this potential loss of territory that is at the front of the minds. of those with a vested interested and able to shape moves towards military conflict.
At this point in time, the 1860s, society is still relatively reliant on muscle power; human or e.g horsepower. However, muscle power is rapidly becoming increasingly inefficient when compared to e.g steam power, electric power and future oil resources. This puts pressure on any society, system or service that literally does not use engines. Engineering; the engines of power.
It’s probably this pressure that would really get rid of slavery.
If the South had seceded it would have found it very difficult to survive as an entity without industrializing the process of production and manufacture.
Apologies for my re-editing. Still getting used to this posting.
It is my opinion that the South would never get rid of slavery, that the film “CSA” is pretty correct as far as that goes. It wasnt a economic thing with them. It was pure racism.
In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free
While God is marching on!
I’m sure that not everyone was “dying to make men free”, but it was still a rather popular sentiment.
I won’t dispute that the racism existed. But I don’t think slavery was an inevitable result. Slavery required racism plus an economic system that made forced labor profitable.
The industrial revolution was going to eventually arrive in the CSA regardless of how much the plantation owners hated it. At some point plantation agriculture would stop producing enough money to justify the cost of maintaining a bunch of slaves. The Confederate government almost certainly would have developed a system like what historically emerged in the southern states after the war; black people would have been nominally free but would have been heavily restricted with black codes and debt peonage. Basically they would have been close to slaves in status but they would have been expected to support themselves.
I acknowledge your post.
I agree, as you say, pure racism. Horrific.
Not to mention the cotton crops would and were being hit by the quality of the land going down and boll weevils. This would have forced them to switch to other crops and diversify their economy.
And then their was the unemployment and wage problems caused by slavery with the poor whites. Whites couldnt get alot of jobs because it was cheaper to have a slave. It was creating alot of abolitionists in the south itself.
Really? We have hundreds of thousands of migrant farm workers here in America, mostly from South of the Border, who work by hand in the fields. Here in 2020. Tell me again they wouldnt need field workers.
Tell me they wouldnt need house slaves, and pretty young slave girls to rape, not to mention the chance to express their sadim by whipping slaves.
Blacks werent human to them, how to do you free animals?
It wasnt economics, it was racism.
There was also foreign competition. European countries responded to the loss of American cotton during the war by developing their own cotton sources in places like Egypt, India, and Central Asia. If the CSA had gained its independence, it wouldn’t have regained its traditional market. And without being able to sell cotton to Europe, the CSA would have been doomed to be a failed state right from its start. Ironically, losing the war is what saved the southern states; it kept them attached to the rest of the United States, which had a strong economy and provided support to the southern states.
Are those field hands enslaved? Your argument proves you don’t need to have slavery to have a supply of field hands. Or house servants.
You also don’t rape people you see as animals.
And unless you think racism ended in 1865, history has shown us you don’t need slavery to have a system of institutionalized racism. The post-war system that forced black people to work for white people out of economic and legal coercion without the white people having any responsibility towards their black workers when they weren’t needed didn’t lack for racism.
No, you dont. But you still need field hands, and then- why not slaves? If you are a total black hearted racist, that is.
Of course not.
For the reasons I’ve pointed out. If you own a slave, you have to spend some of your money keeping that slave fed and sheltered enough to keep him alive and able to work; and you have to do that for years before the slave is old enough to work.
It’s cheaper to tell people they’re “free” and expect them to fend for themselves and then hire them for a pittance when you have some work that needs to be done.
It maybe cheaper, but the South has had two hundred years of showing us they dont give a rats ass if it there’s a more fiscally sounds way of doing it, if instead they can have their precious racism.
They clung for decades over have states flags being copies of the CSA battle flag )not even the CSA national flag), even tho it was hurting business in their states. They finally have gotten rid of the last Obvious CSA state flag- in 2020. Maybe, Miss. has approved dumping the CSA one, but hasnt Oked a new one.
North carolina still flies the nearly same flag it flew during the Civil War. Georgia flies a flag designed to commemorate the CSA, as is the Flag of Alabama.
They refuse to give up their CSA "roots’, despite the fact it cost them money. So, why would they give up their “peculiar institution”? Besides you cant rape and torture free farm workers. They arent as much “fun”.
No, the South is still deeply rooted in racism.
But you’re still persisting in the argument that racism equals slavery. And obviously that’s not true.
I never made that argument, so I can hardly “persist” in it. And it is rather rude to put words in other peoples mouths.
I feel you have made this argument. You have said several times that slavery was inevitable in the CSA because it had racism. That argument is based on the premise that racism equals slavery.
My counterargument has been that racism can be manifested in ways other than slavery.
Going beyond that, there was this exchange.
I made an argument about why the Confederate states might have abolished slavery. You responded with an argument saying they would never give up their racism. That’s you explicitly equated slavery and racism.
I can kind of see where he’s coming from. The North was plenty racist, and still is. But the South had their peculiar version of racism, which for much of its history was manifested as chattel slavery. The reason the South rebelled is because they felt their peculiar institution was under threat, and their cultural heritage and regional/national identity was wrapped up in that institution.
I could definitely be persuaded that the South would still have slavery today if it was never abolished. No matter how much of an economic disadvantage that would be. Hell, it was an economic disadvantage in the 18th Century before the cotton gin was invented, but it showed no signs of petering out. That doesn’t mean that racism = slavery, but that slavery was the particular form racism took in the South. And cultural inertia could believably have maintained slavery long after its economic benefits dried up.
An analogous situation might be Russia freeing the serfs centuries after the rest of Europe did so. And it took a bold Emperor to abolish serfdom, so it’s entirely possible that Russia could still have serfs today if the Czar had never freed them. (And you know, if the whole Russian revolution never happened.) Russia was economically backwards for a long time, and held onto their serfs for cultural reasons more than economic reasons.
The problem with thinking the Confederacy would give up their slaves is ignores that the CSA was not a monilithic organism run by a hive mind focused on the overall health of the nation.
Most slaves were owned by major slaveholders whose single greatest asset was their slaves. Slaves were mortgaged and leveraged as colleteral. The chattel slavery system may have hampered economic growth of the nation as a whole and even been better for the majority of slaverholders over time as it transferred the costs of controling the black population to the state, it would have cut the fortunes of many of the powerful members of the government and their backers in half.
If there is one thing that we see repeated in the history of capitalism, it is that most capitalists will gladly trade the health, happiness, and lives of their descednts for a short term advantage over the course of their own lives.
I think slavery would have ended eventually from a combination of mechanization and societal pressure.