# Why did we free the slaves? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [May 18, 2019, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139 "2019-05-18T03:28:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/61 "2019-05-20T19:40:49Z")
> [@Moriarty](#): > > The answer, of course, is that it was obviously an odious and dehumanizing practice that was damaging to society. Anybody exposed to it would have to realize it. Slavery meant routine violence; it meant treating fellow people as property. And it meant a constant obsession with these things. OK, so if it was so obvious and all these things, how comes it wasn’t abolished earlier? How comes it was instated in the first place? There must have been something happening that made people support the abolition at some point while they didn’t before, no? You seem to assume that people had always realized how horrible it was, but I think you fail to realize how we accept easily what is a normal part of our culture. You have to make an effort to abstract yourself from this. For instance, if one century down the road PETA has won the day, someone will write about us (and you) that raising animal for meat is so obviously odious that…etc… saying exactly the same thing about eating meat as you wrote here about slavery. But you probably don’t feel this way (at least, if you do, you’re an exception) and even probably don’t spend much time even considering the moral issue of meat eating. ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Miskatonic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mr.miskatonic/32/310_2.png) [@Mr.Miskatonic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Miskatonic)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 7:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/62 "2019-05-20T19:47:01Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > It was. > > Thing is growing cotton over time burns out the soil because it doesnt replace the lost nitrogen. It was already happening across the south and accelerated later in the 1870’s and beyond. > > THEN along came the boll weevil which also wiped out the cotton crops. Yes, but The situation was made worse by the Confederacy trying to overproduce cotton during the civil war in hopes that the British would break through the blockade and they’d have huge supplies to trade. Didn’t work out that way, and more fields were damaged from cotton crops. > [@](#): > > As I understand it some plantation owners were already selling off excessive slaves or just freeing them because the plantations didnt have the income to support them. Didn’t happen. That’s Lost Causer apologetics. Sure, there was always a plantation selling excess slaves here and there because of supply or mismanagement but slavery was still rolling strong into the Civil War. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/63 "2019-05-20T19:50:21Z")
> [@Moriarty](#): > > The answer, of course, is that it was obviously an odious and dehumanizing practice that was damaging to society. Anybody exposed to it would have to realize it. Slavery meant routine violence; it meant treating fellow people as property. And it meant a constant obsession with these things. > > Slavery meant devoting considerable resources to guarding against the type of slave rebellion that marked Haiti, which creates a state of constant fear and agitation, in addition to expense. > > And the standard of “slave”’ included the proverbial “one drop”, so many many slaves were not even that dark skinned. I read recently of a woman who escaped from George Washington, and she is described as having freckles! Think Mya Rudolph, perhaps. Today, we celebrate the beauty of people like Rashida Jones, but she would have been considered inherently inferior. Lots and lots of slaves were deemed mere property by a painfully ridiculous metric. > > There were lots of slaves who were the the children of their masters; these kids would have looked like their fathers. How can that enslavemet not rot the proverbial soul? > > Slavery is like societal sanctioned abuse. The people who lived it realized it, even as some continued trying to justify it. And yet slavery was practiced in every culture. Most likely at some time in the past your ancestors either were slaves or owned slaves. But your above statements apply even to modern day cases of slavery. [Look at this article of an American family who owned a slave (from the Phillipines)](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-story/524490/) from the 1940’s to just recently. If you read the story, yes, it rotted the family. The kids grew up angry at their parents for keeping the woman. But they were in a bind because they didnt know what to do with her once they “inherited” her. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/64 "2019-05-20T19:58:47Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > That depends. > > Are you only talking slavery for farm hands? What about the need for cheap domestic labor. No difference. The famished peasant will also work as a servant for a pittance, and be all the more happy since it tends to be a permanent position, contrarily to field work that is seasonal, hence guarantying him board and food all year long. If your idea was that slavery could still have been profitable for domestic work, hence when why was it abolished if it’s mostly for economical reasons, I would argue two things : - If slaves are only used for domestic work, there’s a lot less need for them, so the cost of abolishing slavery is much lower -Your grandmother history of working for just room and board and no pay shows in fact that slaves weren’t economically useful anymore, even for domestic work. There was at this point an abundance of free manpower compared to the needs. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/65 "2019-05-20T20:11:01Z")
But then, if your a person who enjoys “Everyday Low prices” on things like food and clothing, your also probably supporting something made by a slave. If that is a lowly child worker in India working for Nike to a Florida fruit picker picking oranges for Tropicana, your benefiting from the low cost of a person who’s life and labor conditions are little better than a slave. [HERE](https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Nobodies-Modern-day-slavery-in-the-United-States-2537643.php) is an article on it. ---
**Author:** ![fedman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fedman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fedman)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/66 "2019-05-20T21:00:50Z")
> [@MEBuckner](#): > > Oregon was fundamentally a free state, and its [constitution upon admission to the Union](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Oregon_Constitution/Article_I) had the provision that > > But the next section read > > Discussed in more detail at [the _Oregon Encyclopedia_’s article on Black Exclusion Laws](https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/). and Oregon at one time had KKK legislature ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/67 "2019-05-20T21:07:02Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > And yet slavery was practiced in every culture. Most likely at some time in the past your ancestors either were slaves or owned slaves. True. But most societies eventually figured out that slavery was wrong and ended it voluntarily. The south was pretty much the only exception; they kept slavery right up to the point where other people forced them to give it literally at gunpoint. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2019, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/68 "2019-05-20T21:37:50Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > True. But most societies eventually figured out that slavery was wrong and ended it voluntarily. The south was pretty much the only exception; they kept slavery right up to the point where other people forced them to give it literally at gunpoint. Actually no. Please refer back to my posts above where I discuss modern day slavery in the US. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 1:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/69 "2019-05-21T01:36:27Z")
So, I’ve been working on a Civil War history and I do have some things to say. One of the really complicated issues that comes up a lot is that everything about the Antebellum and Civil War Eras was that they were insanely complicated. There’s no simple answers to anything if you look beyond the surface, and it’s more than just the usual level of complication in historical events. So, to be up-front, I apologize if I confuse anything here. I want to avoid talking out of both sides of my mouth, while being succinct about the facts. And some statements made in this thread are wrong in more than one way at the same time. If I get any facts wrong, I am more than open to correction. But I think my arguments can stand up to scrutiny. I want to also emphasize that while I chose the quotes below as a starting point to disagree with, I am not attacking any posters and respect that it’s a complex issue. I could have easily picked others but I think the issues raised below are important enough to comment and expand upon. > [@puddleglum](#): > > This is not correct. The plantation system was very efficient. Cotton was so valuable that the land which could grow it was very valuable as well. The larger the plantation the greater economies of scale could be which could produce more cotton. The economic problem was two fold, first it was very hard work in a horrible climate and so most people would not want to do it if they had an alternative, the second was that tropical diseases killed most of the immigrants who would have made up the workforce. African slaves solved both these problems because they had no alternatives because they were not free to choose and they had resistance to tropical diseases. Part true, part nonsense. The climate of the South is (shockingly) pretty warm, and historically I think one of the greatest boons to the Southern economy was Air Conditioning. But disease wasn’t so much worse in the South and it _isn’t_ tropical until you get down as far as Miami. Slavery was, however, more or less copied and imported from early British colonies in the Caribbean, where those statements were more accurate. The question about plantation efficiency is much more complicated. It most definitely would _not_ have been as efficient _for the planters_ in the absence of slavery, however. You could, and some did, hire free laborers. But free men demanded far higher wages compared to the pitiful food, shelter, and clothing afforded to slaves by most plantation masters. After the War, freed slaves were effectively able to get at least three times as much for their labor as beforehand - even in a very racist society that wanted to stamp down on them. Slavery basically allowed planters to pay an up-front amount to virtually zero-out their labor cost, AND enforce cruel discipline upon those laborers at the same time. One other issue (not just directed at you) is that we are often only thinking of the cotton plantations since they featured so prominently. But the early slave system was focused on tobacco or sugar; cotton came later. This was one reason that Virginia lost a lot of its economic importance and Kentucky outright rejected the Confederacy - they were not as significant in the cotton economy compared to states along the Black Belt\* and the Mississippi River. South Carolina, either a coincidence or not, happened to have both some of the richest sugar and rice plantations along the coast and a rich central strip of land suitable for cotton plantations. \*The name is a description of the soil, not the poor souls who were forced to work it. However, cotton plantations could absolutely be run with free labor - it just wasn’t anywhere near as profitable. This was economically a big part of the why the Civil War occurred. Those planters were becoming increasingly elite and took home the lion’s share of the wealth produced in the South. They had the leisure and education to dominate the political system. Smaller farmers were increasingly pushed off valuable land as planters reinvested in land and slaves. > [@](#): > > The economy of the south could not have replicated the economy of the north because the concentration of people needed for a manufacturing economy could never have been achieved because so many people would have died of disease. Also the cotton growing land was too valuable to be used by subsistence farmers. This is partly true, but mostly irrelevant. The South as a whole didn’t need to _replicate_ the Northern economy to diversify, and some regions did so to some degree. Also, the idea that disease was such a dire threat that other people couldn’t possibly survive is just… silly. Slaves and planters alike lived along areas rife with Yellow Fever epidemics, but that failed to kill everyone off. Even the centers of the southern economy would have probably been the same regardless, because they sprang up at major transportation loci, just as the in the North - and these as often away from swampy land as not. Finally, there was never a question of just :subsistence farming:" because Americans were, and are, a highly commercial people. Just about the first thing we ever did when moving into a new area was to try and hook into global trade networks. Even if all we were growing was corn, we’d find a way to turn it into liquor and sell it somewhere. > [@Little Nemo](#): > > True. But most societies eventually figured out that slavery was wrong and ended it voluntarily. The south was pretty much the only exception; they kept slavery right up to the point where other people forced them to give it literally at gunpoint. I think this is a very optimistic appraisal of history. The major slaveholding states in the New World mostly only saw it abolished during massive Civil Wars of their own, and as often at gunpoint as not. See Haiti or Venezuela. States which abolished slavery more or less peacefully tended not to have a lot of slaves in the first place, and/or the slavery was kept on under the table for decades thereafter (see Mexico for the former and Cuba for the latter). > [@ftg](#): > > In Ken Burns’ Civil War, there was a quote given about traveling on the Ohio River. The towns on the North side were bustling while the ones on the South side were moribund. I believe you may be correct in describing the quote, yet I am not certain this is accurate. Northern Kentucky along the Ohio was not itself stronghold of slavery or the cotton trade. Louisville, for instance, was apparently the 10th most populous city in the entire nation in 1850, and already a center of horse racing and trading. It is true that slaves being sold down the Mississippi often went through Louisville - but that was because it was already a major commercial entrepot. > [@ftg](#): > > The North attracted most immigrants and boomed economically. Immigrants couldn’t compete well with the existing slave economy in the South so they avoided it and the South stagnated compared to the North. (This all contributed to the South’s anti-immigrant stance, something that continued with the KKK and into today.) I believe this is incorrect; if I understand right you are conflating the early organization with its later revival. The anti-immigrant groups around the Civil War were very much Northern in character (I was literaly writing on this yesterday.) In the North, the Know-Nothings were a major rival to the Republicans in the early years, but eventually the slavery issue led to the former being wiped out and their voters jumped to the latter. There was a tiny, powerful rump left over in the South, true, but I don’t think it was a major factor in the original. There weren’t very may Catholic immigrants in the South at this time, but as far as I’m aware they were arguably more accepted than in the North. Certainly the major anti-imigrant leaders were very much Northern and the major riots against them also in the North. The later revival in the early 20th century of “Those Not Very Nice People”\* was a bit different and incorporated both racism and xenophobia. Indiana, for instance, did not have a significant African-American population, partly because of early racism, but it did have a lot of Catholics. “Those Not Very Nice People” were as happy to target Notre Dame as anything. \*They did some Not Very Nice things to relatives of mine and I won’t even name them in public, out of disgust. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 2:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/70 "2019-05-21T02:10:08Z")
> [@puddleglum](#): > > This is not correct. The plantation system was very efficient. Cotton was so valuable that the land which could grow it was very valuable as well. The larger the plantation the greater economies of scale could be which could produce more cotton. The economic problem was two fold, first it was very hard work in a horrible climate and so most people would not want to do it if they had an alternative, the second was that tropical diseases killed most of the immigrants who would have made up the workforce. African slaves solved both these problems because they had no alternatives because they were not free to choose and they had resistance to tropical diseases. > > The economy of the south could not have replicated the economy of the north because the concentration of people needed for a manufacturing economy could never have been achieved because so many people would have died of disease. Also the cotton growing land was too valuable to be used by subsistence farmers. No, the plantation system was not very efficient. Yes, it produced cotton. But people found that other non-plantation system produced greater yields of cotton. And other forms of agriculture produced more crops and higher profits. And cotton production was terrible to the soil so it wasn’t sustainable. As an investment it was poor; plantation owners would have made more money by selling off their plantations and investing the money in some better industry. And as I noted, plantation agriculture damaged the overall economy. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/71 "2019-05-21T02:13:44Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Actually no. Please refer back to my posts above where I discuss modern day slavery in the US. Are you aware that slavery is now illegal? ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/72 "2019-05-21T02:22:27Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > The slave turned scientist George Washington Carver’s mother was bought as a slave to be a domestic for an elderly couple. In his case little George was later adopted by his owners/parents. No, he wasn’t. Moses Carver bought George. When slavery was abolished, he kept George. There is no indication that Moses regarded George as his son or that George regarded Moses as his father. George just worked on Moses’ farm for food and shelter (essentially the same way he would have worked if slavery had remained legal). The only difference is that George had the legal right to leave, which is what he did when he was eleven. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 9:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/73 "2019-05-21T09:36:37Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > So, I’ve been working on a Civil War history and I do have some things to say. One of the really complicated issues that comes up a lot is that everything about the Antebellum and Civil War Eras was that they were insanely complicated. There’s no simple answers to anything if you look beyond the surface, and it’s more than just the usual level of complication in historical events. Very true. Very complicated. Could you also discuss trade tariffs and export taxes? As I understand, the federal government was financed thru tariffs and import/export taxes. The south sold cotton but those sales had export taxes placed on them which mostly went to the federal government in Washington DC. The north also produced many goods but those were not shipped overseas and therefore were not subject to export taxes. The benefits of those taxes mostly went to northern states. Wasn’t Fort Sumter’s function to not just protect the harbor, but also to collect taxes on exported goods? Sorry I dont have a cite. I will look for one later. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 9:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/74 "2019-05-21T09:48:06Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > No, he wasn’t. Moses Carver bought George. When slavery was abolished, he kept George. There is no indication that Moses regarded George as his son or that George regarded Moses as his father. George just worked on Moses’ farm for food and shelter (essentially the same way he would have worked if slavery had remained legal). The only difference is that George had the legal right to leave, which is what he did when he was eleven. Well as I understand it, the Carvers bought Georges mother and George was only a baby at the time. Shortly after slave catchers kidnapped Georges mother and baby George so Moses paid another slave catcher to go find them. He only returned with George. The Carvers indeed raised George (and taught him to read and write). Yes, George left when he was 11 but that was because no school in his area (southern Missouri) would allow black children in the upper grades so he moved to Kansas and later went to college in Iowa where the domestic skills he learned under the Carvers (cooking and cleaning) was how he paid his room and board thru the upper grades and even into college. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 9:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/75 "2019-05-21T09:59:14Z")
> [@smiling\_bandit](#): > > the idea that disease was such a dire threat that other people couldn’t possibly survive is just… silly. Slaves and planters alike lived along areas rife with Yellow Fever epidemics, but that failed to kill everyone off. Even the centers of the southern economy would have probably been the same regardless, because they sprang up at major transportation loci, just as the in the North - and these as often away from swampy land as not. Malaria was endemic throughout Europe, from Spain to Sweden, until the massive dessication projects that started during the 18th century and went on until the late 20th, when they were stopped by the push to preserve wetlands for wildlife conservation. A lot of illnesses that we think of as “tropical” are so nowadays because that’s the area where they haven’t been eradicated but, back at the time of the ACW, were widespread through much-greater areas than they are today. Others which we now think of as “mild” or relatively rare were much more frequent and more deadly before antibiotics, but again not restricted to tropical areas: thyphoid epidemics were common. As **smiling bandit** says, it’s not as if the tropics were deadly and the areas with moderate temperatures were healthy. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 10:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/76 "2019-05-21T10:09:41Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Well as I understand it, the Carvers bought Georges mother and George was only a baby at the time. Shortly after slave catchers kidnapped Georges mother and baby George so Moses paid another slave catcher to go find them. He only returned with George. The Carvers indeed raised George (and taught him to read and write). Yes, George left when he was 11 but that was because no school in his area (southern Missouri) would allow black children in the upper grades so he moved to Kansas and later went to college in Iowa where the domestic skills he learned under the Carvers (cooking and cleaning) was how he paid his room and board thru the upper grades and even into college. That’s nowhere near the same as “adoption”. Two of my great-grandmothers were raised in their masters’ homes from a young age; one of them was sent “to learn her letters and numbers” by those same masters (they had a requirement that the whole household had to be able to read, write and do arithmetic). My brother’s mother-in-law, same: her masters were appalled when they found out she hadn’t attended school, which at the time was supposed to be compulsory and available for all. Their situation corresponds to the literal meaning of the Spanish word _criado_: a servant _raised_ in the household. A servant still. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 12:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/77 "2019-05-21T12:27:36Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > That’s nowhere near the same as “adoption”. Two of my great-grandmothers were raised in their masters’ homes from a young age; one of them was sent “to learn her letters and numbers” by those same masters (they had a requirement that the whole household had to be able to read, write and do arithmetic). My brother’s mother-in-law, same: her masters were appalled when they found out she hadn’t attended school, which at the time was supposed to be compulsory and available for all. Their situation corresponds to the literal meaning of the Spanish word _criado_: a servant _raised_ in the household. A servant still. Well maybe not a real adoption per se but better than just kicking him out to live on the streets. ---
**Author:** ![fedman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fedman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fedman)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/78 "2019-05-21T13:19:15Z")
> [@Mean\_Mr.Mustard](#): > > While this is true, there were plenty of abolitionists who took this stance not because they believed slavery was wrong, but because they did not want negroes of any sort in the U.S. and its territories. > > In other words, stop importing blacks, there are already too many of them about. > mmm people forget that Lincoln said Blacks are not equal of whites and supported sending them to Liberia (interesting choice since Liberia had legal slavery till 1970?) ---
**Author:** ![fedman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fedman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fedman)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/79 "2019-05-21T13:26:34Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > It was. > > Thing is growing cotton over time burns out the soil because it doesnt replace the lost nitrogen. It was already happening across the south and accelerated later in the 1870’s and beyond. > > THEN along came the boll weevil which also wiped out the cotton crops. > > As I understand it some plantation owners were already selling off excessive slaves or just freeing them because the plantations didnt have the income to support them. That’s where free/slave state debates came in for adding new states ---
**Author:** ![fedman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/278dde/32.png) [@fedman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fedman)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2019, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139/80 "2019-05-21T13:38:27Z")
> [@clairobscur](#): > > I suspect it’s a big, big reason. Chattel slavery appeared when landowners couldn’t find a crowd of famished peasant who would work for a pittance, hence began to have an economical use for slaves. It ended when slavery began to be unprofitable. > > Of course, the ideals of the enlightenment probably played a part, but it’s notable that slavery wasn’t abolished when those ideals took hold (look at the American founding fathers, who were big on this enlightenment thing, but with a blind spot for slavery), but only with the progress of industrialization and farming machinery. the reason tobacco was successful in Connecticut was slavery (remember Harriet Tubman was a northern slave) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-did-we-free-the-slaves/834139.md?page=5)