A question from an ignorant foreigner - could the United States abolished slavery in all her states without the Civil War…and how early?
In an effort to avoid Whig History, abolitionist efforts were already under way in America’s infancy - The Massachusetts constitution was used way back in 1781 to abolish slavery in a state, and throughout the late 18th century numerous states began to regulate slavery and abolish the import of the trade. By 1804 all northern states had abolished slavery. Many other countries, including the British Empire, managed to abolish slavery before the United States, and relatively peacefully.
The south needed the war between the states and 13th Amendment before slavery was completely abolished in the United States, just over 60 years later.
Was there any chance that slavery could have been peacefully abolished before the civil war?
A more fatuous question - I seem to remember a quote from one of the founding fathers (I think Franklin) where he expresses his wish to see how the United States would turn out in a few centuries, but unfortunately I can’t find the quote. Suppose we could grant this wish, and show the framers of the constitution the future, including the Civil War.
If by some sorcery or counterfactual changes of heart the framers became convinced that slavery should be abolished, what would the United States look like today?
Well. That 3/5ths compromise was intended to boost the south. Without it, blacks, being slaves and property, would not have been counted at all, leaving the less-populated-by-free-men South a bit outnumbered.
Let’s say it failed, and slaves weren’t counted at all, and yet it was still accepted, if grudgingly. That gives the North a bit more of a whipping hand. What happens next? The trick is to go slowly enough not to start a war, but quickly enough to beat the British.
Contrawise… hm. Another variation is that blacks were not the only slaves. The British were literally enslaving the Irish. Somewhere between 80,000 to 130,000 were literally enslaved, not just transportees or indentured servants. If the slave trade to America had been more heavily Irish-salted, it might have been harder to keep it going, on a practical level.
I think there was a narrow window of opportunity to abolish African slavery before the invention of the cotton gin made slavery more profitable. The Constitutional Convention was able to pass a phase out of the slave trade, and maybe if someone important had pushed the issue this might have been expanded to sunset slavery itself. (Something like how it was ended gradually in the Caribbean and Brazil.) But once growing cotton became a way get rich, that was it. Without the Civil War chattel slavery might have persisted in the South into the Twentieth century.
The only realistic way have gotten rid of slavery would to have been to gotten rid of the need for slavery. If Benjamin Franklin has invented a steam powered cotton picker or a mechanical sugar cane harvester instead of flying kites, slavery would have died a natural death pretty quickly.
We still have illegal slavery. We allow millions of illegal aliens mostly from Mexico to do our fruit picking for below minimum wage. We allow 2 million people to immigate a year and they take the slave labor jobs. These legal immigrants don’t pay any taxes for the first 3 years and work like gang busters to buy a home. Then they bring over relatives and live 20 people to a house and have a lot of children. They learn how to play the American system. There is a duplex down the street that had two families living in it and it was bought by an immigrant family. Now there are over 20 people living in this duplex.
As for if we never had slavery I think the United States would have a lot less rap music and black culture. It would be as if a whole segment of our society never existed. It would be hard to imagine. I never thought Native Americans, the first settlers of this land would be so few and isolated as they are today.
Just to clarify, the 3/5 compromise was midway between two positions. The North wanted slaves not to be counted for purposes of the census, so that the South’s congressional representation would be determined on the basis of whites only, while the South wanted slaves counted as people for purposes of the census for the opposite reason. Obviously, they would not have voting rights, but neither did most whites in the South at this point. So the compromise could have failed either way, with slaves being counted completely or not at all.
Nearly all of your post is wrong. Undocumented workers are very rarely paid less than legal farm workers. There’s a good reason for this. If an employer is caught paying his illegals half what he pays other workers, he does not have plausible deniability. The fact that a employer can point to a pile of cheap copies of documentation and then show he paid them the same as everyone else is a great defense, which is why you hardly ever hear of the employer being fined. Do you have a cite that has data showing that most undocumented aliens are paid less than is legal??
Next- they pay taxes. Not income tax so much, of course (low income), but they pay Social Security, Medicare, Sales tax, etc.
Well, yes, but if the slaves had been counted completely, the South would have had overwhelming legal representation and the country would have gone Slave. So I didn’t count it.
Did you even read your own cite?? It doesn’t say anything close to what you claimed, and in fact it says the exact opposite. It talks about the importance of their spending power to the economy, and how banks, communication companies, car dealerships etc are all benefiting from their presence in America.
It even mentions how many are legally buying houses even though they are not legally permitted to be in the United States since their is no law against selling them a house. If they are buying houses, they are even paying property taxes.
Basically, you cite affirms everything that DrDerth said. It even mentioned how illegals are applying for their Individual Taxpayer Number (like a SSN) which allows them to pay taxes. So according to your cite, they are paying all the same taxes as you and I (well not me… I dont pay taxes right now) and they are even financially stable enough to buy houses and property. Slavery indeed. How many slaves can buy houses and property? Maybe you should take the time to actually read it.
The only mention of wages anywhere in the article is that their presence has a downward drive on wages. That’s just because seem to be willing to work for less than legals. But it says nothing about them working for less than the minimum wage.
Interesting topic. The problem was that:
-the one-crop economy of (most of) the South needed cheap labor to be profitable
-immigrants avoided the South-it was regarded as unhealthy, and poor
-the crop that preceded cotton (sugar) was a vital part of the northern economy (it was distilled into rum)
The USA probably would have developed a bit slower, but without tyhe horrors of slavery? Plus, we would have avoided the terrible Civil War.
I think slavery would have disappeared over time by it’s own volition. It’s hard to imagine it lasting much into the 20th century as the United States increased it’s place in the world market.
Many illegal workers most assuredly do earn wages below the minimum wage. I’ve personally seen it, mostly when I was younger working in the service industry. Illegal immigrants working in the kitchen or washing dishes. Working “under the table.” The fact that employers will get in trouble for paying people “under the table” doesn’t stop it from happening. I’ve also known people who own construction companies, who hire exclusively from Mexico, and pay them again “under the table.” They would go home over the winter (with the vast majority of their earnings) and come back in the spring with more family and friends for the tax free work. This does happen, a lot. Looking for references, statistics, and cites? They’re illegal, undocumented, and working “under the table.” Think about it. It is a big problem that needs to be addressed. Willfully closing your eyes to it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Of course, this is not slavery. And it’s not the point of this thread. I just thought I would correct this interjection.
From a purely political standpoint, the Federal government did not have the power to make slavery illegal without a constitutional amendment, which would have required some of the Southern states to agree to. This is why the South (and the North) was so concerned about new states being Free or Slave states–if enough Free states joined the union they could push through an anti-slavery amendment. (The South seceded from the Union because Lincoln was known to oppose slavery in new states).
Abolishing slavery probably had no chance of succeeding at any point after 1776 without some sort of bloody civil war. Too much political power in the South belonged to slave owners (mostly because of their wealth). A peaceful, government-backed solution would have required re-compensation which probably wouldn’t have been passed by the North (unless it was purely token compensation).
Back when the United States was founded, there was a lot of moral uncertainty about slavery, even among southern slave-holders. People like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison regarded slavery as a necessary evil or as an unsolvable problem. Then about two generations later, there was a wave of southerners who changed that attitude - they said that slavery was a positive good. You can take John Calhoun (1782-1850) as a repesentative spokesman for this change.
But suppose there had been instead an anti-Calhoun - a southern political leader as influential as Calhoun but one who pushed in the opposite direction on slavery in the 1830’s and 40’s? Instead of hardening the south in defense of slavery, he might have loosened them in the direction of compromise. Slavery could have been abolished by a national program of gradual manumission with compensation (and probably resettlement of freed slaves ot Liberia).
The problem was, the Fifth Amendment would have required the government to compensate slave-owners for their slaves*, and the aggregate value of the slaves in the antebellum South was many times the federal budget.
*Lincoln got around this on the theory that it doesn’t apply to property seized pursuant to a military commander-in-chief’s traditional authority to dispose of the property of conquered enemies, which was also the theoretical basis for his authority to issue the Emancipation Proclamation at all. He got away with it, but only because he was acting in an unprecedented constitutional crisis. Hard to see how it could have been sold in peacetime.