Wouldn’t the South revived large scale importation of slaves to fuel the plantation economy?
I believe the CSA would look like a larger version of Jamaica.
No chance. Whatever their thoughts on slavery itself, the British were completely and even fanatically committed to stamping out the Atlantic slave trade. Most slave owners didn’t want the slave trade reopened, anyhow, because they wanted a market for their “surplus”.
If you read Herbert Donald’s biography of Lincoln, you’ll find that before the war, various plans for gradually ending slavery, usually with compensation to the owners, were floated. Under one of these plans, had it been adopted, the last slaves would die or be liberated sometime in the 1920s!
Presumably the reason would have been so the federal government could spread out the compensation payments.
Unlikely. Their Constitution forbade it.
Leaaving out the KKK, Forrest was more than a footnote. He was arguably the greatest cavalry leader of the war, one of the finest guerrillas in history, and messed with major campaigns time and time again. Without him, the COnfederacy probably would have collapsed in the west far earlier than it did.
Britain abolished the slave trade even though it caused a lot of economic damage to some of its trade and vigorously pursued a policy of stopping slaving on the high seas not just with words but with action and money.
And that was all done on purely moral grounds,financially Britain lost out quite significantly,politically it gained nothing except for a few more enemies.
I think what hasn’t been 100% fleshed out yet in this thread filled with good point after good point is that what largely was pushing abolition on the street was enlightened self interest – Free labor in the emerging/growing Industrializing markets feared slavery and believed (probably correctly) that slavery was depressing wages for free labor in some markets. Further non-slave holding free farmers widely believed that free slave labor put them at a competitive disadvantage. These were real and dangerous forces opposing slavery and were only going to intensify - I don’t say the “moral issue” (or declining economics) wasn’t as/more important than these forces but they were close to its equal.
I think the British looked to India and Egypt when at the outbreak of the Civil War the Confederacy started the Cotton Embargo believing, with some good reason , that Britain couldn’t replace Cotton, and would have to, and so would have to come in on the South’s side or at the very least recognize the Confederacy - so I think that those who said (in the 19th and 21st Centuries) that Britain couldn’t get along without Cotton were 100% right - but what pushed the development of Egypt esp and later Indian Cotton was the threat of the South - they would not necessarily have developed the same w/o the Civil War.
If the South had successfully seceded without war in 1860, the North would have continued to expand and industrialize, and probably control the West because the West couldn’t have defended itself against even the Northern peacetime army. The South would have rapidly declined into a Third World hellhole. There would undoubtedly be a huge amount of friction between the two states. Eventually the North would be so much more advanced industrially, and so much more economically and militarily powerful than the sleazy wreck that was the South that invasion would be an easy thing, and the Civil War would have been fought probably in the early 1900s, only this time it would end a LOT faster and a LOT more disastrously for the South.
Not to derail, but I think the U.S. would still become a world power without the South. Most of the country’s key resources (coal) and pretty much all of its industry was in the North. And a U.S. without the South would still be as big as or larger than any of the European powers (minus Russia) or Japan.
Let’s not dismiss the British support of the Confederacy so easily. They provided the CSA with bases for blockade-running (chiefly Bermuda), and even built the CSA a commerce raider, the CSS Alabama. The UK government had to pay the US some serious reparation money after the war for that one. Palmerston did just about everything for the CSA short of actually recognizing it diplomatically - both to keep the cotton coming to the dark, satanic mills and to weaken the USA.
The point about industrialization ending slavery seems to be off to me - the South was *not * industrializing significantly, despite its natural resources, and had no real reason to as long as they could keep exporting shiploads of cotton and keep the rich whites rich and white. I suspect it would have taken longer than just a few decades for slavery to dwindle - and it would have happened, if at all, for economic reasons only, as the South’s very existence was predicated on slavery’s moral necessity. The formal end of it might have taken at least the full century that ending Jim Crow laws took in the real timeline.
Then, too, the CSA had its own internal divisions, including a wide range in the extent of slavery within it. Overlay on that a political culture which had declared that secession was permitted as a state’s right, and you might well have seen states secede from it as the result of inevitable policy differences. Instead of “Balkanization”, the word for such splintering might be “Americanization”.
One of my in-laws was literally kicked in the head by a horse and was stuck a single digit mental age level. He was unable to live alone, or hold a regular job, but was a wizard with farm machinery, even restoring antique tractors.
My cousin is high-functioning Down’s syndrome. He recently retired (amazing, as DS often die young) from a job in a plastics factory where he operated various molding machines.
Not only were/are these men illiterate and lacking in conventional education, but they were very limited in mental capacity…didn’t stop them from functioning OK in a mechanized world.