Assuming a victorious South, how long would emancipation take?

Andersonh1

Brigadier General
Moderator
Joined
Jan 12, 2016
Location
South Carolina
One of the things I speculate on when looking at slavery in the American South is just how much longer it would have lasted if either the Civil War had not helped produce the 13th Amendment, or if the Confederacy had won independence. If we look at the timeline of abolition in the 19th century, we see the last holdouts in the western hemisphere were Cuba in 1886, and Brazil in 1888, only 23 years after the Civil War ended. 1890 saw a European conference in Brussels that ended the slave trade in Africa.

Against this trend, how long would the Confederacy have been able to hold on to slavery? Would they have outlasted Brazil? Would the markets where they sold their cotton have continued to do business with them if they continued to use slave labor to produce it? Britain had switched to Egyptian cotton during the war. Would they have gone back to that in order to put economic pressure on the South? Would mechanization have had a further impact on the slave labor system, making slavery more expensive and ultimately not worth the cost?

I've also wondered sometimes what emancipation would have looked like in the South if it had not been forced. Without all the resentment and bitterness that came from the way slave emancipation was effected, would Jim Crow laws and all that came with them have been avoided? What would a Civil Rights movement in an independent CSA have looked like? Would it have happened sooner or later than it did in actual history? Obviously the further we get from actual history, the more variables there are and the less information there is to use for speculation. But the trend in western civilization in the 19th was to end slavery all across the hemisphere, and I don't think the Confederacy could have resisted that indefinitely.
 
Back
Top