Was Slavery Dying in 1860?

[wausaubob]

The 1st Amendment, free immigration, and railroad development in the Midwest and Pacific West, were all anti-slavery policies. The weight of economic growth in the US would have put unrelenting pressure on slavery.
Secession does not solve the problem, it only makes the Confederacy like a northern Brazil. The British continue to suppress the slave trade, and they eventually find correct alternatives to American cotton. The alternatives could be as simple as silk, linen and wool. They could be Egyptian of Indian cotton. It may be more complex as in encouraging one or more states in North America to convert to free tenancy to grow cotton for the world market.

 

[KeyserSoze]

How long do I think? Well, it is hard to predict but it probably would have been before the 21st century.

The 21st century? Almost certainly. But I could see it lasting into the 20th.

 

[wausaubob]

If one aggregates the situation in the 15 slave states and ignores the rest of the world, slavery looks OK. But if one recognizes that slavery in Brazil had been isolated from Africa in approximately 1856, that Britain was turning toward the Cuban slave trade, that and the US was starting to enforce its laws against the international slave trade, then the stage is set for a sell off southward, towards Texas and Louisiana.
The two places that have no natural geographical barrier preventing flight by the enslaved are Missouri and Maryland. Slavery is already fading there, because it is difficult to manage. Railroads are multiplying in the northern states, which leads to cheaper means to disperse fugitive slaves.
The Republicans do not quite have a majority in Congress in 1861, unless the Southern Democrats leave their seats. But on the other hand, its difficult to see how the national Democrats are going to automatically reunify to support slavery. And it probably would not matter once the 1863 reapportionment occurs.
If you accept the secessionists' view that slavery in the United States can survive as an isolated state, with Britain against the expansion of slavery, with a fast growing United States as its rival, its OK, and slavery then is fine.
However the balance of power in the United States Senate is shifting rapidly towards Republicans and free soil Democrats.
If there had not been a secession crisis in 1861, by the centennial year, the northern areas were overwhelmingly powerful.

 

[wausaubob]

Internationally, time was on the side of Britain and the end of the slave trade.
Within the US time was on the side of the section that encouraged immigration and the section that was allowed to count its workers as full people.
The south could secede, and they are still using a labor system which is not favored by the world's naval power, and they are still adjacent to an emerging industrial power.