RE: Mexico, while I enjoyed the series “Lone Star Rising”, it’s telling that the question was never asked, “why do you want to secede?” because Texas revolted because Mexico had just abolished slavery, which you hear about in history lessons, only courage at Alamo
Plantations were more efficient, according to Time on the Cross, total factor productivity for large plantations using gang system slave labor was 39% higher than on free farms. This massive advantage meant that the large plantation could outcompete any other type of farm.
Cotton was by far the most important crop in the slave economy. More of the slaves in the US by the 1850s were being used to grow cotton than every other purpose combined. The world demand for tobacco was declining in the early 19th century and prices were going down so less tobacco was being planted. Likewise, rice can only be grown in a very particular type of land which was only on the coast and thus could only ever be a small part of the economy. Sugar was so difficult to harvest and produce that more slave died producing it then could be replaced naturally. Since importing slaves was banned this meant that there would have been no way to get enough slaves to maintain large sugar production.
Disease in the south was much worse than in the rest of the country. British soldiers stationed in Charleston during the Revolution said that the Carolinas were a heaven in the spring, a hell in the summer, and a hospital in the autumn. Around 50% of union troops in the south came down with malaria and about 10,000 died from it every year during the war despite the availability of quinine. Because of the amount of disease immigrants shunned the south and by 1900 only 6% of immigrants lived in the entire south. It just made no sense to move to a part of the country where malaria was endemic and it is a horrible disease even when not fatal. Thus population density was very low, in 1900 North Carolina had 39 people per square mile while Pennsylvania had 140 people per square mile.
Maybe slavery was just plain wrong, on any number of levels. There’s nothing quite like trying to build an economy on:
kidnapping,
rape,
torture,
murder, and
a theft of fruits of labor that would have embarrassed Heinrich Himmler.
But other than those, maybe it wasn’t so bad, eh? And the people defending this mostly claimed to be Christians. A curious concept, that. “Mostly” since I do include Judah P. Benjamin - who, being Jewish, might have thought back to how Yahweh reacted when the Jews were slaves. A double cognitive dissonance over ice and a sprig of mint, please.
Yes, but it’s somewhat off topic so I’ll keep it short. The tariff issue sort of indirectly caused the Civil War by a set of odd coincidences.
The Tariff of Abominations (Tariff of 1828) was ridiculously punitive and seriously threatened the economy of the South. This sparked South Carolina’s original headstrong plunge into the Nullification Crisis. In and of itself, it would just be an oddball historical episode, but that in turn saw John C. Calhoun reinvent himself as the Father of Southern Sectionalism. And basically right at the top of Calhoun’s agenda until his death was protecting plantation slavery.
Calhoun bears a lot of the blame for the Civil War. He spent something like twenty years persuading Southerners - or at least the elite - that the slave system had to be protected at all costs whatsoever. Calhoun was in many ways an Apostle of Freedom, or at least Jeffersonian principles, but he was seemingly incapable of recognizing that the African-American forced to serve him deserved it no less. His interests depended on him not understanding it. As far as I know, he never advocated Secession and probably thought it would have been a disaster, but it’s hard to escape the fact that an ocean of blood was spilled protecting his ideas.
As far as it goes, the Tariff issue wasn’t 100% dead by the time of the Civil War, but it also wasn’t a massive deal. More-agricultural states usually wanted a lower tariff; manufacturing states (definitely Pennsylvania) wanted a higher one, and there was enough electoral give and take that they weren’t bad. IIRC, the Confederate Constitution had a clause that the Tariff was for “revenue only” and not for Protectionism, but there wasn’t much to force that in practice. Slavery, not tariffs or any of the other minor issues, was the big concern North and South.
I disagree. That was one reason for it, but a much, much bigger one was that the Mexican government sort of went mad and managed to piss off so much of the country that around a third of it (not including California) went into revolt practically overnight. Parts broke away and never rejoined, including Texas. There was way more to it than just slavery, although I don’t deny that was an element.
It was legal to hold Roma in chattel slavery in Romania until - not so coincidentally, 1863 (I might be off by a year or two). This is also about the time that Russia started looking at serfdom (which is functional slavery, though tied to land and therefore doesn’t have the horrors of buying and selling people and splitting up families). From the mid 18th century there was a movement in Europe and the Americas that slavery in all its forms was immoral - and where it didn’t have a lot of economic impact, it was abolished. But where it did (like in Czarist Russia, the American South, the Caribbean and South America or the Belgian Congo) it took a LOT longer.
Tubman was a slave in Maryland, which is literally below the Mason-Dixon line.
Export taxes are illegal in the United States. It’s in the Constitution. You can only tax imports. So cotton never had an export tax placed on it.
I disagree with your analogy, largely because the conditions in which modern animals are kept, and the circumstances of their slaughter, is not front and center in the lives of modern people who consume meat.
Slavery, on the other hand, was a cultural institution whose adherents were immersed in its circumstances. And, as I tried to lay out, that meant being constantly aware of its barbarism. If you live in a slave holding America, you are readily aware of the success of Haiti, where slaves revolted; there is always an undercurrent of potential rebellion in the air, leading to the need for constant vigilance and suspicion. If you live in a slave holding society, you are readily familiar with the use of the “lash” to maintain discipline and order. If you live in a slave holding society, you are readily knowledgeable of the degree with which men committed infidelity by raping their slaves, and readily saw men disown their progeny because of their ‘mixed blood’.
In a slave holding society, slaves and free people mixed together, albeit in a strict social hierarchy. So, everybody in a slave holding society could see that slaves suffered, both physically and emotionally, under bondage. Those who supported the practice either did so out of cruelty or out of pity; I think you may be surprised to see how often the slave society tried to explain that they “had” to keep slaves in bondage and that it was “necessary”, as opposed to believing in it as a moral virtue.
Consider the “cornerstone speech”, when Confederate VP Alexander Stevens explains the basis for the confederacy. First, it is worth noting that he concedes the great weight of pressure to end the practice
Then, after criticizing those against slavery, he attempts to justify it. But not as virtuous, per se, but necessary, as ordained by God.
See? Slaveholding was clearly a moral quandry. The slave holders had to contort themselves into absurdities in order to justify the practice. In fact, they were deathly afraid of counterarguments, even in the form of passive abolitionist writing. Slavery was abhorrent, and people regularly remarked that it was so.
So, how come it wasn’t abolished earlier? How come it was instituted in the first place? Because greed and wealth regularly overcomes morality. And, at some point, the institution itself became a commodity that was hard to untangle - much of the consternation about abolition was about compensating the loss of “wealth”, for example. So, entrenched greed helped get it started, and ongoing greed, couple with inertia, fought its demise. But its demise was the elephant in the room for decades before it came to pass.
You are correct (I can trace my lineage on my father’s paternal side to a pre-revolutionary American who included a slave in his will; a great* uncle later died fighting for the Confederacy), but I am not sure your point. No country to my knowledge openly practices slavery anymore; while the incentives to practice it (e.g. the greed of relying on undervalued labor) persist, the horrors are so obvious that nobody even tries to justify it with twisted logic anymore. Where it is found, it is underground and hidden.
Well look at England itself where you had peasants working the land of an overlord and a wealthy class who exploited the common people. That all changed with books like “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine who argued that people were really all equals and wanted representative government. Look at the British navy at the time where men were rounded up and forced to serve with brutal discipline applied. That only stopped because of numerous mutinies and changes in policy. I believe that’s what lead to the creation of the House of Commons which was supposed to represent the will of the people as opposed to the House of Lords which members had inherited titles. I think also the British government were afraid the French revolution which overthrew the monarchy might spill over.
Well my point is many people thought their lives were little better than slaves and wanted change.
When you eat meat, you don’t realize you’re consuming the flesh of a dead animal? You don’t see all the dead chickens in the supermarket?
The hypothetical 2119 guy would have no issue showing that you “have to contort themselves into absurdities in order to justify the practice” and could easily quote many people acknowledging that meat eating is “a moral quandary” . Any argument you could advance would be seen as as bad as the ones you’re denouncing wrt slavery. And of course, the fact that many of your contemporaries, like the heroic members of PETA, have easily discerned how terrible the practice was show that you have to be willingly blind to deny it. You can’t even hide behind ignorance.
All your life you’ve been told that slavery was wrong, you’ve heard only arguments against slavery, you’ve seen all arguments in support of slavery being dismissed out of hand, ridiculed and presented as horrible. Slavery has only be shown to you in its worst aspects. White people in the south were raised with the exact opposite discourse. They had learned that all arguments you find excellent were flawed, and all arguments you find terrible were valid. They had learned that black people weren’t at all like white people, and that slavery benefited them.
You can’t assume that these people were perceiving slavery, from a moral point of view, in the same way you do. Not anymore than you perceive meat eating in the same way my hypothetical 2119 guy would. I mean, you had the blood of these murdered animals dripping from the corner of your mouth and you deny that it’s in your face? In fact, you don’t even deny that eating the flesh of innocent animals killed horribly just to satisfy your perverse appetite is a moral problem. Clearly you realize it, and know what an horrible, heartless and immoral person you are, and know that your pathetic arguments are just a fig leaf to hide your shame.
Yes to both questions. But the meat is inert and cleanly packaged. Buying it at the store, cooking it, and eating it doesn’t evoke the realities of its harvesting.
That’s not possible with regard to slavery. It’s not as if slave society only saw slaves after they had been removed from the objectionable aspects of their lives. To the contrary, to interact with slavery was to interact with its most horrid parts.
To extend the analogy, it’d be like if anybody in 2019 who wanted to eat chicken had to go to a slaughterhouse and wade through the cages before getting their bird. At that point, it becomes undeniable what conditions are being used, and what sacrifices are being made, to provide the food. The way we have it now lets those things be forgotten, or not even considered.
Perhaps this is where we fundamentally disagree. My argument is that the people raised in a slave society, in fact, heard arguments against slavery and saw it in its horrid state. Your comments suggest that they had not been exposed to such things.
In actuality, there was plenty of access to abolition arguments (Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a huge bestseller). And (again, I repeat myself) being immersed in slavery was, on its own, evidence that slavery was brutal. People were regularly abused; families regularly split up; people regularly dehumanized. You seem to suggest that the people in slave society didn’t see these things, or weren’t aware that they happened. I would say that this was impossible.
First, I don’t eat animals when their blood is still dripping. Maybe that’s just me.
More pointedly, I just don’t think the morality of slavery was as ambiguous as you suggest. If we were to analogize it to eating meat, we would need to up the amount of people anguishing over being a carnivore, such that every person had to reconcile personally with their opinion on the subject.
Common Sense was published in 1776. The French Revolution began in 1789. The Royal Navy mutinies occurred in 1797. None of these were factors in the creation of the House of Commons, as that body had been around for centuries before this.
Don’t you know the reality of harvesting? For instance would a slave owner who never set food in his plantation but knows that slaves are working there, never seeing a flogging but knowing people are flogged be off the hook according to you?
You’re too focused on the realities of harvesting, probably precisely because of our current views. Most people are bothered by how animals are raised, and object to that, or pass laws about that, while they aren’t really bothered by the fact that we eat meat in the first place and kill animals for this purpose. But my hypothetical 2119 guy would see it as just another horrid aspect of the whole killing animal to eat them thing.
The equivalent for slavery would be : “buying slaves, and forcing them to work doesn’t evoke the realities of their capture and transportation”. But of course you won’t think for an instant that the only problem with slavery was their transportation. Or imagine that slaves were slaughtered and eaten. Would you think for an instant that not actually witnessing their slaughter and just eating them would be an excuse?
And anyway it was just an example. It doesn’t need to exactly reflect any aspect of slavery. My point is that you absolutely don’t view things in the same way my 2119 guy does. Eating meat doesn’t appear to you as something horrid and unthinkably evil as it is “obviously” to him. And someone born in 1850 wouldn’t see slavery as something horrid and unthinkably evil, either.
But you have been exposed to the realities of meat eating. You’ve seen the carcasses, handled the meat, cooked it, eaten it. You know perfectly well that they were living creatures and that they’ve been killed just so you could eat them. You very probably have heard the arguments against meat eating. You just dismissed them, thinking that it wasn’t really a serious moral issue and that it was just normal to eat meat.
Once again it’s not an exact parallel to slavery, just an example. My guy thinks that killing animals to eat them is horrible, in the same way you think that enslaving people is horrible. He probably couldn’t stand the thought of having a piece of meat in the plate in front of him, let alone eat it. He’s going to wonder : “how could they do something like that? No sensible person would stand eating meat, knowing it comes from murdered animals. They had to know that what they were doing was horribly wrong. People were saying so already, so they knew. They just were evil.”
I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you know that animals are killed so that you eat their meat and it doesn’t bother you much because you have been raised this way and can think of plenty of arguments that justify this. Maybe you think that there are some excesses but if we could fix them and make sure that animals are treated a bit better and slaughtered more humanely, it will be fine. But the 2119 guy will have none of this : you’re fucking killing innocent animals!
And similarly the 1819 guy might think that there are some unfortunate aspects to slavery, like the one you describe, and maybe if we could fix them, things will be fine. Slavery will be humane. What else can you do? I mean it’s not like black people don’t need guidance and supervision. What do you want? Let them free when they’re unable to control their animal passions, and are so prone to violence and rape? They wouldn’t even be able to direct their own life, anyway. What next, let them vote when they don’t have the intellect to understand even basic issues? Slavery benefits everybody, including them. They’re servile by nature (your previous even mentioned that). And that’s as god ordered. And frankly…you think you know better than god?
It’s not just excuses. People really believed that. They believed that it was in the order of things for black to be slaves, as you think it’s in the order of things to kill animals for meat. You really shouldn’t assume that they found obvious that slavery was undoubtedly wrong. They absolutely weren’t raised with the same values, beliefs and assumptions you have. Think of the American founding fathers who were neither uneducated simpletons nor unfamiliar with the enlightenment ideals, nor devoid of moral sense and who still thought that slavery was acceptable. And owned slaves themselves.
When I eat a steak, there’s still blood in it. And anyway my 2119 guy never eaten one, so his mental image of it might not be perfectly accurate. Especially since he has probably be exposed to material depicting the most repugnant aspect of it. If you know it, there’s a scene in “the return of the king” when one of the character is eating, and it’s depicted as repugnant and rather frightening, even though he’s only eating a fruit. No doubt that movies set in the 2010 will show repugnant and evil eaters with bloody juices dripping on their chins while they laugh maniacally and discuss about how they enjoy thinking of the animal terror and suffering.
Are you sure that ordinary people in the random southern town were anguishing much? And anyway, once again, it’s not supposed to be a perfect parallel in all aspects. There are always “differences”. For instance when people made comparisons between gay marriage and miscegenation laws , they too were told it was “different”. My point was to try to show you that moral views are highly dependent on culture, hence that you can’t assume that 1819 people had the same views as 2019 people.
Most people assume that there objective morals (and of course, that their current morals are the correct ones). So for instance, they think that slave owners were objectively, not subjectively, wrong. But you push that further by believing that not only they were objectively wrong, but also that they knew it. You’re assuming that they had not only your morals but also your knowledge (black people are no different from white people, for instance) and your world views (for instance : who cares what god says?). You have to assume that everybody who was supporting slavery (and that’s a lot of people) was lying, and didn’t believe a thing of what they were saying or writing. Does it really seem credible to you? It’s easier to assume that people who do things that you don’t like are just evil, but typically they aren’t.
my bad, should have Sojourner Truth
I just want to point out about your arguments, yes, most people didnt know the reality of slavery. Abraham Lincoln didnt know the reality until a trip to New Orleans where he witnessed a slave auction and saw a slave family torn apart that he realized the true horrors of slavery. Up until then while he had seen many slaves, he thought they were just poor people like himself.
Similar the book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was the first book that told people of the horrors of slavery. Many think that book started the abolitionist movement and thus the war.
Clairobscur, let me begin by noting that I understand and appreciate your point that a person must be aware that other cultures (and other eras) may have different viewpoints and perspectives which cause them to reach different conclusions about what is moral and just. And it is a mistake to presume that all people, across all places and times, would be uniform in their thinking.
Where we disagree is in the culture of antebellum America. To extend it to the meat eating analogy, we’d need to be in a society whose founding documents wrestled with the issue of eating meat (such that famous compromises had to be made to get the document even executed), about half of the country would have outright outlawed meat consumption, popular media was all about the issue of how meat was being prepared, there were regular news reports of sabotage and vandalism of farms and factories where meat was harvested, and people were so fearful about freeing livestock that vegetarians were brutalized, attacked, and discriminated against.
Point being, the antebellum south was simply did not exist in a world where the morality of slavery was merely a fringe concern of radicals; it was the leading issue of the day. It’s value and efficacy were undeniably at issue.
I think the reason I continue this debate is because I used to believe as you’ve stated, which is that the antebellum south was a place and time where people were not confronted with the moral questions about slavery, and so people accepted it because they had not yet considered whether it was just or sustainable. That’s just not true - go back to the founding of the country and you’ll discover that, by the Civil War, this issue had been percolating for over 80 years.
In retrospect, I should have been more careful with my words. It’s not that slavery was ‘objectively wrong’, and they knew it. Rather, it was ‘objectively brutal and barbaric’, and they knew it. That’s my point, as the OP had asked why slavery ended. There are obviously a lot of reasons behind it, but one (the one I raised) was that slavery was quite tenuous, because it was undeniably cruel and inhumane. Even if people believed it was ‘just’ (usually because it was ordained by God), it was marked by a need for constant enforcement.
I don’t think these statements are remotely accurate. Lincoln’s father moved the family from Kentucky to get away from slavery. The idea that Lincoln didn’t know the reality until he want to Louisiana suggests that he was never exposed to the abolitionist rhetoric of the very places he was reared. Yes, it is true that his early perspective was that of a poor person competing with slave labor, and he has remarked that the sight of a slave auction was memorable for its inhumanity, but I think that merely proves my point; any American of the era was impacted by slavery such that he had to consider it, and when in a slave holding part of society the sight of slave treatment was jarring and unsettling.
And, while Uncle Tom’s Cabin was certainly a national bestseller, and spurred the discussion, it is crazy to suggest that it started the abolition movement. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. The Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper, started publishing in 1831. Nat Turner led a revolt that same year. The American Antislavery Society was started in 1833. Frederick Douglass started publishing his anti-slavery journal The North Star in 1847. That’s without even getting into the states that had already outlawed slavery or the groups that had been pushing for abolition for generations.
Bruce Catton used a wonderfully evocative phrase to describe this constant fear of uprising by the enslaved people:
Feudalism in England was very different than serfdom in Russia in 1840 or slavery in the U.S. in 1860. In England, your tenant farmers had a right to leave and find another farm to work, or go to sea, or into the army, or take up a trade - and often did. The English peasantry was, by standards of the time (and time being from the Early Middle Ages on to today), relatively mobile. Working for a bad landowner meant that your workers left, and went to work for a guy on a nearby estate, or a few estates over. By the late 1700s, with the Industrial Revolution, England completely changed and you had no ties to the land at all.
Most of Western Europe was far more in the English model than the Russian model - serfs were tied to the land and had no right to leave it. Moreover, in the Russian model, you didn’t have a choice - in the English model, you could apprentice your son out to a blacksmith and free him from the land - in the Russian model, the Boyer who owned the land gave you, and your children, your roles.
Yes, for English peasantry, life was difficult - but it wasn’t slavery at all. They could get up and leave for a better situation - and did. Which made it actually a fairly fine example of capitalism.
I think Sudan only recently abolished slavery; African countries like Liberia didn’t abolish slavery until 1970
What percentage? Because from all the documentation I’ve seen on the attitudes of poor southern whites (letters, diaries), the vast majority were not abolitionists.