The Divided South, Democracy’s Limitations And The Causes Of The Peculiarly North American Civil War

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The Divided South, Democracy’s Limitations, And The Causes Of The Peculiarly North American Civil War
HT @cash from his blog. A good read.
Excerpts

Nor did their nondominant position in their respective political power structures embolden Cuban or Brazilian slaveholders with the illusion that they could win a civil War. Latin American slaveholders also lacked illusions about their worldwide economic power. No Caribbean or South American planter imagined that his European customers would intervene on his side in a New World civil war. Fantasies that European customers would bolster King Cotton’s army, however, rarely dominated the secessionists’ thinking. Rather, U.S. slaveholders’ unique political power inside a peculiarly advanced republic above all else instilled in them the illusion–and for a long while the reality–that they could control slavery’s fate.” [pp. 127-128]

Professor Freehling also discusses how slaveholders were protected from antislavery ideas. “Within the republican Union, advanced Anglo-American antislavery ideas could especially flourish–if abolitionists could mobilize the majority of nonslaveholders. Yet within the Union, the minority of slaveholders had a special New World power to protect themselves–if they could mobilize the masses. Nowhere else in the New World did slavery’s fate hang on popular mobilization. A second peculiarity in colonial settlement of the future United States ultimately threatened slaveholder mobilization of southern public opinion. Just as a higher proportion of nonslaveholding whites peopled the original thirteen colonies than could be found in other New World locales with large numbers of slaves, so only North American colonists planted slavery primarily in nontropical areas.” [pp. 129-130]

In tracing the history of slavery as it grew, Professor Freehling also traces the drain of slaves away from the Middle and Border South states. “Between 1790 and 1860, some 750,000 Middle and Border South slaves traveled downriver to the Cotton Kingdom. The Lower South, which had had 21 percent of U.S. slaves in 1790, had 59 percent in 1860. Maryland and Virginia, with 60 percent in 1790, had 18 percent in 1860. Some 37 percent of Lower South white families owned slaves in 1860, compared with only 12 percent in the Border South, down from 20 percent in 1790.

At the same time that the more southerly U.S. slaveholders expanded toward Latin American-style tropical locations, the more northerly U.S. slavocracy contracted toward Latin American-style antislavery ideas. The Latin American slavocracies lacked the power to defy worldwide antislavery currents in the manner of Lower South slaveholders. Latin slaveholders instead gave ground grudgingly, stalling for more time to reap profits, mostly through the passage of so-called free-womb laws. These edicts freed only slaves born after a given law’s enactment and only after they reached a distant target age, usually eighteen or twenty-one. These laws set a clock ticking toward the end of slavery. The clock ran slowly, satisfyingly so from Latin American slaveholders’ perspective. A slave born even a day before a law was passed would never be freed, which meant that slavery could profitably persist for at least fifty years.

As for lucky slaves born at the right time, they were lucklessly doomed to involuntary servitude throughout their youth; and by the time they were twelve years old, black children toiled hard in the fields. A series of Latin American regimes with relatively few slaves, including Chile, Peru, and Venezuela, first tried delaying emancipation through free-womb laws. Then in the two Latin American countries with large slave populations, Cuba’s Moret Law (1870) and Brazil’s Rio Branco Law (1871) brought the free-womb tradition to climax. … Abolitionists and slaves pressed for a faster end to the system. Slaves born only a short time before passage of a free-womb law deployed especially angry resistance. In response, slaveholders often bargained individually with their slaves, scheduling freedom for each before the law freed any. Slaves, in return, promised to labor willingly during the interim. … The combination of free-womb laws, expanded manumissions, intensified abolitionist attacks, and more widespread slave resistance finally toppled the regimes in Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888–or before these slavocracies’ respective free-womb laws had freed any slave.” [pp. 131-132]​
 
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