A couple of points about Britain abolishing slavery:
There were few areas of Britain that considered itself economically reliant on slavery to survive.
The areas that might have rebelled were too small to put up a fight against the British military and have a hope of winning.
I kind of like these what if questions because they really bring up an interesting point. If we’re saying it was impossible for slavery to have ended in the South without a Civil War then we’re denying freewill. The United States wasn’t fated to have a Civil War, it’s just how things worked out because of the actions of people.
That said, it is certainly possible that moral suasion might have done the trick in the South. Southern legislators went through a lot of great pains to keep abolitionist and their materials away. I suspect they feared not only slave revolts but of turning the moral opinion of southerners against the slave system.
Odesio
And the British kept buying Southern cotton. It’s arguably more accurate to say that the British outsourced slavery.
I seem to recall reading the concept that slavery would have been gone by the 1880s or so if the Civil War hadn’t happened. It just would have become economically unfeasible by that time.
I’ve heard the same theory. The country was becoming more industrialized, more technical. We were going from an agrarian society to a more factory based one. You can’t put slaves in a factory and expect them to magically know how to run the machines. You can’t hand a slave a steam locomotive and say “go take it for a spin”. Sooner or later, the advancing technology might have meant the end of slavery. Also, with the opening of the territories, slaves no longer had to run the gauntlet to the northern states or Canada, they could head for the Oklahoma territory or western states and stay there. The U.S. was behind the curve in abolishing slavery, compared to other countries, and that’s nothing to be proud of. But the U.S. would have eventually followed the lead of other countries. Still, ending it sooner was better than letting it drag out more.
They’re paying property taxes anyway, unless they’re living on the streets. When you rent, part of your rent is used by your landlord to pay property taxes.
:rolleyes: Whitey does this too, you know. From age 13 to 15 I washed dishes in a restaurant for $4/hr, under the table. IIRC the minimum wage at that time was $5.15. And if you think waiters/waitresses, pizza delivery guys, and other tip-based income workers are paying anywhere near their realistic share of income tax, well then, LOL!
To answer the OP: Having grown up in the south, I’m not sure they would’ve changed yet, if they still had hundreds of years of legal justification behind them. They were always going to have to be forced at some point. The Civil War was one of the very few justified wars in US history.
I’m not going to say “Cite?”, but instead agree. That’s the main reason why I have problems with alternative histories where the South wins the civil war, and slavery continues in the Confederacy into the present.
Perhaps mass agricultural slavery would have been economically unfeasible by later in the 20th century. But they were using sharecroppers until WWII, and kept and paid in nigh slave labor conditions until just a couple decades ago. They still have agriculture jobs that could be done just fine by slave labor today. I know, I work with/investigate Farm Labor Contractors at times.
But house servants and sex slaves? Still a market today. “Economically unfeasible” will not get rid of an institution as deeply implanted as black slavery in the South. Unless you add outside economic pressure to “economically unfeasible”. How long did it take South Africa to get rid of apartied?
I have more problems with alternate histories where the South wins and immediately frees the slaves. :dubious:
Sounds like the same apologist bullcrap I heard my entire life in the south. “Oh those big mean old bully yankees and their big mean bully War of Northern Aggression*! We woulda freed the nigras by the 1880s or so! Swear it, we woulda! Whyyyy is everyone always bullying us? We’re just simple people who want to be recognized as the superior breed that we are!”
I can easily see slaves staying in the fields for a good many more decades, and then building 20th century infrastructure, munitions for our wars (which they’d be volunteered to fight in, of course), automobiles, etc etc. At some point, pressure from the rest of the world would probably becoming overwhelming, but I cannot see the south ever giving up without a bloody fight.
*That is literally what many self-proclaimed “proud southerners” call the Civil War, for those who think I just made that up.
Economically, the south was a basket case and even if the Confederacy had been allowed to leave peacably, it probably would have collapsed within a generation.
First, the south had almost no middle class. There was a small minority at the top that owned most of the wealth. Most of the rest of the people in the south were poor whites or slaves. And you need a middle class to sustain a modern economy.
Second, the plantation owners were not very economically astute. At a time when the industrial revolution was taking off, they were resolutely turning their backs on industry. And while they insisted on basing their economy on agriculture, they weren’t very good at that. Plantation agriculture wore out the soil and maintaining crop levels require constant western expansion into new land - most eastern plantation owners kept themselves afloat by breeding slaves and selling them to western markets.
The plantation owners also had little interest in the managerial aspects of agriculture. They usually hired overseers and managers (who were often northerners) to run their financial affairs. The owners felt culturally superior to these “moneygrubbers” but they were nonetheless dependant on them. The goal for people was to become successful enough to buy up a bunch of land so they could live off the profits and stop working. Again, not the basis of economic development.
Third, the southern states may have complained about how unfair tariffs were but that’s where governments got their revenue back then. Income and sales taxes were mostly unknown. So while the southerners had complained before the war about how they had to pay artificially high prices for industrial goods due to tariffs, they would have had to have enact the same tariffs and found these goods cost even more.
Fourth, in what was a really bad idea, one of the early acts of the Confederate government was to withhold cotton from sale to Britain. Their intent was to show the British how dependant they were on Confederate cotton and put pressure on the British to support them diplomatically. Instead, the British responded by developing cotton production in Egypt and India. So the Confederates managed to kill off the market for the main product that was the basis for their economy.
Whitey? Of course, there must be a racist component here. How could there not be? :rolleyes: I never said that Americans don’t get away with avoiding taxes. And it’s not just the service sector employees. It includes the employers who hire in this fashion. And some of the worst offenders are some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations who rob the government of billions. But that wasn’t my point. I was only pointing out that illegal, undocumented workers are not the boon to our economy and tax base as some would like you to believe. The attractiveness of illegal workers for employers is not that they are super hard workers willing to do undesirable jobs at reasonable wages. Our country is currently overflowing with legal, documented Americans (of all races, and born all over the world) begging for these jobs. But wait, these millions of unemployed Americans must all be too lazy, and don’t look now but they might even demand a fair wage. Maybe even enough to feed not only themselves, but even their children here in the United States. :smack: You’re right. We better illegally sneak some more people across the border and get them employed right now. We still have too many lazy, greedy Americans with jobs.
OK, back to the actual OP here.
Yesm, it could have happened. In fact, it nearly did back in the 18th century. However, several things happened, which have been alluded to but not explained.
First, the cotton economoy boomed and brought new “life” into slavery. The cotton gin made labor-intensive short-staple cotton very profitable. That led to new demand for slaves, and as a point of fact, Southern slaveholding was comparitively less brutal than Caribbean or Brazilian slaveholding (the population growth figures unequivicably prove this). So the slave population boom happened. This also meant that people had to seriously confront the concept of what they would do with a population of free, uneducated people of a different race, uncertain national loyalty, and ambiguous cultural background. That was not a trivial question, and essentially was never specifically answered even after the Civil War. It was simply booted down to later generations. (Then it died out as a question entirely until that damn fool Great Society wrecked things up again.)
Second, the more prominent antislavery figures among the Founding Fathers like Franklin and Adams were northerners. Southerners who abandoned slavery weren’t specifically spokesman against it, although they have the moral advantage of putting their money where their mouths were. Antislave movements existed especially in the north, and succeeded there, but they didn’t spread to the south and made few attempts to seriously penetrate the south.
Third, The antislave movement got aggressive. It’s practical a law of human nature than anybody who starts out with moral suasion (anti-smoking, anti-fat, anti-liquor) will end up becoming a tyrannical bastard dedicated to brutalizing their perceived scum-sucking enemies. The South was a little irritating, so the Abolitionists yelled louder. The South didn’t listen, so the Abolitionists got aggressive and angry. Southerners got their feelings hurt and responded in kind, etc. Basically, the American traits of pride and name-calling started to clash in a very, very unhapopy way on both sides. But there was a long time before this when things were happier.
Fourth, it became a political tool. Both free-soil and slave states believed that whichever spread would come to dominate the national life. Combine this with Bleeding Kansas (one of the foulest things ever done by Americans to other Americans), and what was once merely a matter of political businesses became a brutal hot-button issue.
I read a book on Patrick Henry (my personal favorite Founding Father) and his attitude regarding slavery. He wrote about his concern regarding having so many slaves, and what would happen if they were part of the general population. One thought of the time was to stop bringing in Africans, and instead allow more of those Catholic Spaniards and Italians come in to do the hard work.
However, there appeared to be a greater fear of the Pope and what it would do to the Republic if we had a bunch of Southern Europeans - than continuing to add slaves.
So one alternative would have been to increase the use of indentured servants from Southern Europe as workers to replace the outright slave trade.
I agree with your other points but I have to question this one. I think it was the slavery side not the abolition side that “got aggressive”. Up until very late, abolition was simply not a big issue in the north - there was a small minority of abolitonists who thought it was a major issue but they were unable to move the majority of northern opinion. Most northerners thought about slavery the way most Americans think about Tibet - they were against it when they thought about it but they usually didn’t think about it.
But while the abolitionists were ineffective, they were loud - the south overestimated their influence. They thought there was a general opposition to slavery. And with the growing population in the west, they foresaw a time when slave-holding states would be a minority. So the south got aggressive in what it saw as necessary defense - but in reality there was no serious threat. And by their actions they created the threat they were worried about.
It was the southern states that opposed popular sovereignty. It was southerners that pushed for the fugitive laws. It was southerners that wanted the federal government to overrule states rights in order to protect slavery. It was southerners who were trying to create new slave states in the west. Meanwhile in the north, as late as 1861 you had Lincoln saying that there was no plan to abolish slavery in the any southern state. So while the north was not trying to abolish slavery where there was local support for it, you had the south trying to establish slavery where there was local opposition to it.
Most northerners were willing to accept the idea of a nation being half-slave and half-free (or even a third-slave and two-thirds-free). It was the south that insisted everyone had to be on one side (and that side had to be pro-slavery). Northern states, which hadn’t been telling the southern states what to do, resented it when the southern states tried to tell them what to do.
I don’t know - that assumes that the driving force behind slavery was a “need” for it. In the first instance, the fact that the industries were labor rather than machinery intensive doesn’t inevitably lead to slavery - other models of labor participation are possible. Slavery wasn’t particularly efficient, IIRC.
It also ignores the huge social aspect of slavery. The existance of a bottom rung of society was important to the social structure of those parts of the Americas where slavery was central. Even if slavery was less efficeint than hirign labor, which many people have argued it was, it could be maintained for other reasons.
I’m not sure I buy the economic need argument as being all there was, either. There were plenty of slaves used as household help in the South, but somehow many Northerners managed big houses without them. Slave craftsmen were common in the South too, but stuff got made in the North without them somehow. Peer pressure and the need for status symbols no doubt existed then in the South as much as anywhere else. Plus, being constantly preached at about their immorality by the abolitionists certainly must have hardened their attitudes.
It could well be that, once slavery became established in an economic area, even including farm labor, the ability of free whites and free blacks to compete economically became undermined to the point where they left, and thereafter only slave labor was available as a solution.
PS: The Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act did have the effect of making the entire country “slave territory”.
Of course, if the Confederacy had been allowed to leave peaceably, then they probably wouldn’t have made that particular mistake.
Let’s not be too sanctimonious about Northerners, either, btw. There were quite a few shipowners whose mansions still stand in New England that were paid for by the middle leg of the Triangle Trade. Some others made a nice living catching runaway slaves, or kidnapping free blacks and selling them as runaways.
Maybe, but the embargo was directed against England, a country which the CSA was not at war with. If anything, a more peaceful relation with the United States would have given the Confederacy less incentive to try to stay on England’s good side and more reason to flex what it saw as its economic power over England.
So many other countries abolished slavery peacefully, it’s tempting to assume that America could have done the same thing.
Unfortunately, our unique political system made it much harder than in any other country. In places like Britain, Brazil, Mexico and Spain, when in became in the interests of the majority to end slavery, they ended it, and the slave-owning planters couldn’t do much about it but moan. But the American political system had been specifically designed to make it difficult for the federal government to force its will on a minority of states, even when the bulk of wealth and powerin the country had come to be concentrated in free industrial Northern states. This is good for avoiding centralized oppressions like Louis XIV’s dragonnades; not so good for destroying nasty local customs like slavery.