Fear of thing sort of was by the 1850s an obsession in the South. Slave rebellion was a fear at the front of the Southern mind.
The Haitian rebellion was a particular reference point for this paranoia; the war in Haiti was horrifying in its brutality and was played up in the U.S. press. Slave rebellions were busting out all over in Spanish America, and Southern slaveowners were terrified of ending up at the noose end of one.
In fact the likelihood of Haiti breaking out in the South was basically zero - Nat Turner’s revolt, while bloody, was really more of a murder spree than an insurrection - but the paranoia was there. It is difficult to overstate how sickened Southern society was; like South Africa circa the 1970s, it was an ideology so self-contradictory and in opposition to the way the world was changing that the entire society began to take on the characteristics of a paranoid schizophrenic.
Fear of a black revolt was the subject of the Birth of a Nation, popular nationwide - half a century later. And the undertext of the civil rights backlash in the Sixties - half a century after that. And a half a century after that, the fear still exists.
Hell, I guess you’re right. Every time there a protest the media goes straight to the one corner there’s violence, ignores the 20 there’s not, screams “RACE RIOT” and puts panicked white people on to bemoan it.
Most of the Spanish Empire was climatically unsuited to plantation economy (warm and wet year round) so it practiced slavery in the 19th C only in (warm and wet) Cuba and Puerto Rico, and not at all in the Phillippines.
The pope had given Portugal the warm and wet lands, so slavery went on in Brazil.
America became a world power because it adopted a boom and bust cyclical development that could only be done with free labor. “Sorry boys, this mine is played out. I hear there’s a strike in Colorado” or “Well, that finishes that railroad. How you guys feed yourselves is your problem now.”
There were a small number of plantation owners who went to Brazil after the war. they tried to set up shop as they were in the antebellum period. Brazil itself abolished slavery in 1888, so I wonder what accommodations these people made.
Much of the nations wealth was tied up in the value of human beings bought and sold. If cotton prices crashed as they did after the Civil War, you would have seen bankruptcy, liquidation, and a lower price of slaves.
Slavery might have become uneconomical for an individual plantation owner – he may have gone bankrupt. But for slavery as an institution to be nonviable the price of the slave would have to drop to zero. And that day was a long time away. This distinction was first made by economic historians in the 1950s (Conrad and Meyer), as I understand it. It’s pretty clear that slavery was a viable institution.
I’m not sure I’m following your argument. I don’t see why the price of a slave would have to drop to zero for slavery to be uneconomical. A slave would only be a good investment if you reasonably expected to get more value out of the work he did then the expense you put into taking care of them. When you had high-value agricultural products like tobacco and cotton, that wasn’t a problem. You could buy slaves, feed and house them, and put them to work growing crops that you could sell for more money than the slaves cost.
But if the market for these crops collapsed, the market for slaves would quickly follow. The slaves could still do the same amount of work but now there wouldn’t be enough profits made from that work. But you still have to feed and clothe and house your slaves. In a situation like that, why would anyone want to own a slave?
Because the market would adjust. If there’s any demand for cotton at all - that is, if it does not literally drop to zero - then what would inevitably happen is that as the demand drops to a lower non-zero price, some plantations would go belly up. They wouldn’t all die at once, they’d die sequentially, beginning with the worst-run ones. That would reduce cotton production - this driving its price up - and increase slave supply - thus driving their price down (which would, horrifically, probably also result in widespread mass murders of slaves as slaveowners who couldn’t unload them simply hanged or shot them.) As plantations went under one by one the surviving plantations would be in better position to be profitable.
I was around for the rise of cliometricians. I minored in history in a department with Fogel and Engerman, whose 1974 Time on the Cross is the ur-text for the value of slavery. I took a course, though not with them, on Civil War revisionist history, which of course had research on the viability of slavery from before their book. The very phrase “revisionist history” comes from young scholars re-assessing the Civil War. (Eugene Genovese was also there and his Roll, Jordan, Roll came out when I was a senior.)
I phrased it cautiously because historical economics is almost a different subject today. Huge databases of information not available then are being mined with computers and tools unknown at the time. I’m not as familiar with those, but I do know that battles have been fought for the past 40 years. If you have some cites about present-day consensus I’d definitely like to see them.
This part I don’t agree with. The South was already testing the use of slaves both in factories and on infrastructure like railroads. Plantation owners could have switched crops fairly rapidly - tobacco was a rising market because the war had made cigarettes widely popular for the first time. Slaves could have been dispersed among smaller farms as well. The question is whether using them as free but low-paid laborers would have produced better returns than the costs of housing and feeding them. We can’t use the results from the war to gauge this because that artificially destroyed the South’s capital reserves. Any answer depends on your willingness to believe in a change of attitude among the plantation oligarchy and that’s necessarily subjective.