Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
The south had huge labor shortages all through the 19th Century and into the 20th Century. There is no way slavery would have died out on its own prior to the mid-20th Century unless there were some cataclysmic event that took it out of the hands of the slaveholders.
Morning Fellas,
I think to assume that slavery would last until the mid 20th century is completly unrealistic.On the other hand,I also think it's irrational to conclude that slavery was on the way out in 1860.If the Confederacy had won the war I believe it would have expanded its territory and slavery.I don't think the South would've reopened the slave trade across the Atlantic because of one major reason.Why in the world would slaveowners support a policy that would make their property have less value.It just wouldn't make sense.Also the Confederate constitution expressly forbid the slave trade.Lets remember that the South wasn't the only place in the world that practiced slavery.It was practiced in Brazil,parts of Asia,and in Africa that I know of.Did slavery last until the mid 20th century in any of these places?We know it didn't so that seems very improbable that the Confederacy would be so drastically different.Blacks weren't allowed to vote in New York in 1860, but to assume that New York would stay that way until the mid 20th century would be ridiculous.My point is that the views of a society change with time and aren't necessarily destined to remain the same.While a slave-owning Confederacy would've strenghthened slavery everywhere around the world when did slavery cease in these other places in the world and for what reasons.Please don't take this as a shot at the working conditions of Northern immigrants but what would be the advantages versus disadvantages of using slavery in factories.After all slaves had to be guarded,housed,fed,treated for health issues, etch...They were also very expensive.If the slaves were emancipated most would have had few employment options.They would have to eat just like the immigrants up North and they would have been in no position to dictate salary demands.So the South still could've taken advantage of the African-Americans for financial benefit without dealing with pressures from the outside world about slavery.Think about how so many things are made in China today because of the paltry pay required to hire Chinese laborers.Just some food for thought.There are also companies moving to Mexico for that same reason.
Some Southerners did quote the Bible to support slavery.Do I think that's crazy?He-- yes I do.The Bible really doesn't outright condemn the institution though.I personally think Jesus would've condemned slavery harshly as well as condemned the exploitation of immigrants in Northern factories,sex outside of marriage, and on and on and on etch....In my mind slavery was worse than exploitating immigrant labor ,but to God taking advantage of anyone is wrong.
Incidently he had purchased only women and would often invite friends and investors over to "contribute to the investment." In short a novel and disgusting approach to dealing w/ the ban on slave imports.
I don't think the South would've reopened the slave trade across the Atlantic because of one major reason.Why in the world would slaveowners support a policy that would make their property have less value.
Because it would make the purchase of new slaves cheaper? Would farmers object to the going price for tractors being cut in half because it would make their existing tractors worth less on the used market? Not when it comes time to buy a new tractor - which explains the many sales of imported tractors from China. YanMar, anyone?
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Also the Confederate constitution expressly forbid the slave trade.
Yeah....there was far less chance of bringing Virginia on board if the African slave trade was reopened, and no chance of ever being recognized by Britian and France. Its not hard to tell why the Confederacy had to give in and prohibit the African slave trade to all its states.
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Lets remember that the South wasn't the only place in the world that practiced slavery.It was practiced in Brazil,parts of Asia,and in Africa that I know of.Did slavery last until the mid 20th century in any of these places?We know it didn't so that seems very improbable that the Confederacy would be so drastically different.
Had it (the natural condition of subordination of the negro) lasted in the Confederacy, it might have lasted longer in those other places you mention. It was prohibited in Mexico and its re-establishment was partially responsible for the Republic of Texas, demonstrating that it can even gain headway in a region that had outlawed it.
I think to assume that slavery would last until the mid 20th century is completly unrealistic.
What would have ended it? The technology to reduce the dependence on labor in agriculture didn't exist until the mid-20th Century, plus slaves could be used in any number of industrial settings. Add to that it was a system of racial control in addition to an economic system and you have a highly entrenched system that would not be rooted out for generations. Mid-20th Century may even be an optimistic estimate.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
I don't think the South would've reopened the slave trade across the Atlantic because of one major reason.Why in the world would slaveowners support a policy that would make their property have less value.It just wouldn't make sense.
Because it gives more middle-class and lower middle-class citizens access to slaves, bringing them into the slaveholding class and expanding the scope and reach of slavery even more. What they feared most about slave states like Delaware and Maryland was that with relatively few slaveholders in the population slavery's existence in those states was tenuous. The felt that if enough slaveholders gave up their slaves then those states would actually abolish slavery. Make it easier for people to become slaveholders and to gain the wealth that came with that and you strengthen slavery within each state.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
Also the Confederate constitution expressly forbid the slave trade.
That was done to lure Virginia, which had a surplus of slaves, into the confederacy. The confederate constitution could always be amended to remove that restriction.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
Lets remember that the South wasn't the only place in the world that practiced slavery.It was practiced in Brazil,parts of Asia,and in Africa that I know of.Did slavery last until the mid 20th century in any of these places?
Slavery exists today in Africa and the Middle East.
Slavery as practiced in the United States was different from slavery as practiced anywhere else. Brazil was the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to give up slavery. The reason it was done peacefully was there was a tremendous amount of sexual mixing between the slaves and the masters, leading to a very large number of offspring of the slaveholders, much more than in the United States. This eventually broke down the racial barriers and allowed a peaceful emancipation. See Thomas Sowell, The Economics of Politics and Race.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
We know it didn't so that seems very improbable that the Confederacy would be so drastically different.
We know it exists today. Prior to this point we haven't been postulating the existence of the confederacy, merely that absent a war the United States wasn't on the verge of losing slavery. If you want to bring the confederacy into the mix, there was an additional very strong motivation for keeping slavery. It was the cornerstone on which the confederacy was built. Take away slavery and you take away what the founding fathers of the confederacy built their revolution on. Would the United States ever amend the US Constitution to allow for taxation without representation?
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
Blacks weren't allowed to vote in New York in 1860, but to assume that New York would stay that way until the mid 20th century would be ridiculous.
Absent a war and a Reconstruction which allowed the 15th Amendment, how does it happen that blacks get the vote? Sure, blacks were allowed to vote in New England in the 1860s, and New York could certainly vote to allow blacks to vote, but what is their motivation? Just claiming it's ridiculous to assume they would stay that way is even more ridiculous, because it assumes a change in attitude with no evidence that such change would come about.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
My point is that the views of a society change with time and aren't necessarily destined to remain the same.
The basic views of the United States on its political structure haven't changed much in over 200 years. Absent some type of cataclysm, how does slavery end in the United States?
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
While a slave-owning Confederacy would've strenghthened slavery everywhere around the world when did slavery cease in these other places in the world and for what reasons.
In some places it hasn't ceased yet.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
Please don't take this as a shot at the working conditions of Northern immigrants but what would be the advantages versus disadvantages of using slavery in factories.After all slaves had to be guarded,housed,fed,treated for health issues, etch...
In 1860, the average slaveholder paid an average of $20 per slave per year to keep them alive. The cost of keeping a slave was fairly low. Slaves could perform any labor, including factory labor. Slavery as a labor system was a more efficient system than free labor. You don't pay slaves, whereas you have to pay a free worker not only enough for him to be able to live but also enough for his family to be able to live.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
They were also very expensive.
Not if you had female slaves who were having babies, thus increasing your number of slaves automatically. And if they reinstituted the slave trade, the price of new slaves bought on the market would fall as well with the increase in supply.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
If the slaves were emancipated most would have had few employment options.
Not at all. There was always a labor shortage in the south. They would have had plenty of employment options. The question is would the former slaveholders have wanted to pay them for their work or would they have done what was done during Reconstruction and instituted what amounted to almost a return to slavery?
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
They would have to eat just like the immigrants up North and they would have been in no position to dictate salary demands.So the South still could've taken advantage of the African-Americans for financial benefit without dealing with pressures from the outside world about slavery.
But there is still the element of racial control. In some counties blacks actually outnumbered whites, unlike in the North. In the North, white supremacy could be easily maintained through numbers alone. In the south, however, white supremacy would have to be maintained by a system of institutionalized oppression, which was what slavery was. With the memory of the Haiti slave insurrection, the motivation is to keep the system that is working for you rather than take a chance on some other type of system. They were forced to do without slavery after the Civil War, but absent that war there is nothing to force them to do so.
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Originally Posted by MobileBoy
Think about how so many things are made in China today because of the paltry pay required to hire Chinese laborers.
Historians seem to *****foot around the idea of slaves-as-a-cash-crop with the excuse that there is no compelling evidence. They will hint at it, and retreat behind the lack of evidence. One ventured so far as to say that the number of slave children born in Virginia during a certain period bore more than a casual relationship to the number of slaves sold out of Virginia during that same period.
So we can only speculate. If I were the owner of 100 slaves watching my ground go sour and raising only marginally profitable hay and cereal grains, I would certainly look to the possibility of raising slaves as a profit center. No proof. Common sense.
Seems we've gotten to the point where we recognize that the usefulness of a slave would diminish in this area and increase in others. I will maintain that This see-saw usefulness would also diminish, leading to a sharp slowdown in the use of slaves, and its eventual expiration.
Ole
How could a society that was becoming increasingly industrialized ever expected to maintain that growth on the backs of slave labor?
Even the South would have become industrialized eventually.
__________________ F. S. Powers
Union Ancersor: Pvt Arnuah Norton, 60th Ohio. (G-G-G Grandfather) Died at Salisbury NC, November 3, 1864
Confederate Ancestors: Captain Thomas A. Morrow, 29th Texas Cavalry (G-G-G- Uncle) and 2LT George W. Morrow, 31st Texas Cavalry (G-G-G Grandfather). Both survived the war
Interesting thread, with several valid points made.
A couple of aspects have perhaps been overlooked. Firstly, it is a fundamental mistake to assume that slaveholders would be concerned with nothing more than making a profit and ensuring that the local Negroes remained subordinate. This is based on the lazy assumption that they were, collectively, "bad people". They were actually as diverse a group of human beings as we are: some "good", some "bad" and the vast majority somewhere in between. Once freed from the potential meddling of Northern abolitionists, it is by no means certain that they would have remained permanently committed to the intellectual defence of chattel slavery.
Secondly, no account has been taken of an independent Confederacy's place in the larger world. A world which was in the process of turning its face decisively against slavery. With whom would they have been able to secure a defensive alliance, without which they would have been permanently vulnerable to their powerful Northern neighbour? Great Britain could never have made an alliance with a "slave power"; public opinion would never have stood for it. It may appeal to Northern sensibilities to imagine the C.S.A. as a kind of Albania, entirely isolated and cocooned in its ideological purity. But no nation rooted in British stock has ever taken that path.
How could a society that was becoming increasingly industrialized ever expected to maintain that growth on the backs of slave labor?
Even the South would have become industrialized eventually.
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Nothing says an industrialized society cannot have slave labor. A slave can perform any kind of labor that needs to be performed. Slaves can even be managers.
Interesting thread, with several valid points made.
A couple of aspects have perhaps been overlooked. Firstly, it is a fundamental mistake to assume that slaveholders would be concerned with nothing more than making a profit and ensuring that the local Negroes remained subordinate. This is based on the lazy assumption that they were, collectively, "bad people". They were actually as diverse a group of human beings as we are: some "good", some "bad" and the vast majority somewhere in between. Once freed from the potential meddling of Northern abolitionists, it is by no means certain that they would have remained permanently committed to the intellectual defence of chattel slavery.
Again, this had been concerned with the United States remaining intact and a slave society, but I'm willing to venture forward again with the assumption the slave states secede and gain their independence. In that case, the new nation, built on the cornerstone of slavery, would have even more reason to be committed to the intellectual defense of chattel slavery, since it was the position and driving force of their Founding Fathers, much as it is unthinkable today that the United States would abandon its founding principle of taxation based on representation.
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Originally Posted by bill_torrens
Secondly, no account has been taken of an independent Confederacy's place in the larger world. A world which was in the process of turning its face decisively against slavery. With whom would they have been able to secure a defensive alliance, without which they would have been permanently vulnerable to their powerful Northern neighbour? Great Britain could never have made an alliance with a "slave power"; public opinion would never have stood for it. It may appeal to Northern sensibilities to imagine the C.S.A. as a kind of Albania, entirely isolated and cocooned in its ideological purity. But no nation rooted in British stock has ever taken that path.
China uses slave labor and seems to get along quite well in the world. You have the obligatory moral outrage duly enunciated, but at the end of the day they still have Most Favored Nation status with the United States and are on good relations with the rest of the world. At the end of the day, the availability of cotton without worrying about antagonizing the United States and getting embroiled in a slavery vs. freedom conflict would rule.
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