No Plantation Slavery

America had a thriving slave trade since early colonial days, and in OTL, the US was one of the last western nations to abolish slavery. As a POD for this scenario, let us suppose that the European abolishment of slavery happened earlier, in America's colonial days, so that by the time of the ARW, slavery is long gone. I'm not looking at just why this POD comes about; let's look at the affect on the southern states.
Without slavery, there is still a need for mass labor on the plantations of the south (it's hard to imagine that tobacco and cotton wouldn't still be major crops). With no slavers working in Africa to bring shiploads of slaves to the US, how would this demand for labor be met? Would indentured servants be used, or would the demand be too high for this rather cumbersome system? Would the plantation owners scour England for people looking to emigrate, guaranteeing them work overseas? Could England even provide enough laborers for the plantations, or might the available work attract more Germans, Scandinavians, and Irish a lot earlier than in OTL? Would there still have been an ACW?
Without slavery, the ethnic makeup of the US would be radically different. While the black population wouldn't be absolutely zero, it's hard to see them as a significant minority; perhaps they would be comparable to the small numbers of those of Polynesian ancestry today. Without blacks, would Asians be targeted with the racist violence that struck blacks in OTL (granted, they had it pretty rough as it was, but would it have been worse)?

Peonage

Maybe gone over to a central and South american peonage type system, although to be honest I don't know what this would entail. Maybe bring in a lot of mexicans and deliberately keeping them ignorant.

Hmmm. Interesting. I would have to speculate that an earlier form of industrial revolution would have been necessary. Without access to slaves plantation style agriculture may not develop. One could consider that much smaller plots of land will be given out, tho in general that will result in more subsistance level farming. I think at some point the idea of large scale farming will still develop, its just cheaper and better suited to cash crops.

What would have doomed slavery in the South, from my consideration, would have been access to cheap labor from Mexico, or in this time period New Spain. This will be the introduction of migratory workers, tho I must admit that I don't quite know if this would work with cotton. Perhaps there would be a small core of farm workers at all times that are reinforced by migratory workers when necessary.

Regarding the ethnic composition of the United States with such a POD, I think in general that things will pretty much be the same. Africans will come here for the same reason other do, economic oppurtunity, freedom etc. Their own countries are miserable failures, well at least since they all became independent. It is possible that blacks would be far more integrated than in OTL, they will be marginalized, and certainly a distant second minority behind the Latinos. At least in this ATL they will firmly be aware that they are a minority behind the Latinos, they appear to be completely oblivious in OTL.

I shouldn't be surprised that some one doesn't come up with the idea of bringing Africans over to work as indentured servants. Sign them up for 10-15 years of work, bring them over, put them to work and after a few years kick them out and let them make their own living. Or give them land in the new territories to get them to move out west. One will just keep looking for the cheapest labor force available. On the West Coast, which the United States will probably reach by the late 19th century given the tremendous blow not having slavery will have on its economic development, the Chinese will be brought in.

I think there would still be some sort of War Between the States, since the issue would still be states rights. The difference in mindset between New England and Dixie is great.

There's a very interesting book called American Slavery, American Freedom which points out that during the 17th century in Virginia, most labor for tobacco farms and plantations was provided by indentured servants, both white and black. Outright slavery was limited to blacks and Indians, but it constituted only a small portion of the labor force. In the early 18th century, indentured servitude declined and slavery increased until it became the dominant labor system (there were still substantial numbers of indentured servants, but there were fewer of them than slaves and they tended to be used in slightly more skilled work as opposed to plantation labor). Indentured servitude became almost entirely for whites, while slavery was almost exclusively black (except for a few Indians). These changes allowed for a much more egalitarian society among whites, but condemned a large black population to hereditary slavery doing the least skilled jobs.

What if this transformation had never happened? Perhaps for one reason or another it becomes more difficult for European traders to obtain slaves in west Africa around 1700. Or, perhaps some natural disaster, economic catastrophe, or really massive, destructive war leaves western Europe with a larger number of poor, desperate people willing to try indentured servitude in the New World even on harsh terms. If both of these things happen, indentured servants could end up being noticeably cheaper than slaves, so the old system remains in place. By the mid-18th century, tobacco plantations (and the smaller # of cotton plantations) are mostly worked by indentured servants of European extraction, though there are some black indentured servants and a few slaves. Later, the short-staple cotton boom happens as in OTL, but the expanding labor force requires more indentured servants. A variety of legal tricks are devised to keep some indentured servants stuck in their positions for life, and even to have their children become indentured. At the same time, the search for indentured servants goes further afield. Peasants from Mexico, Central America, Cuba, Columbia, and other areas to the south become a greater and greater source of indentured servants. The terms are harsh, and the prospects of succeeding (or even becoming free of the indentured status) are smaller than they once were, but many people are still willing to try when their life at home is guaranteed to be poor and without any opportunity. Those indentured servants who become free are sometimes able to purchase land of their own and become small farmers, but many become poor hired farmworkers whose working conditions are about the same as when they were indentured, except that now they can leave if they want to. Many end up going north to work in factories as the Industrial Revolution booms in similar areas to OTL. The industrial areas have much less immigration from Europe, since ex-indentured servants from down south are such a good source of cheap labor. The majority of Irish refugees from the famine end up as indentured servants in places like Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama rather than factory workers in New York, Boston, or other northern cities.

When California gets settled, indentured servitude has a good chance of flourishing there, too, except that the bulk of the indentured servants will be Chinese and Mexican, with fewer Europeans than back east.

Overall, you probably get a society that is much less polarized along racial lines but much more polarized along class lines.

I was wondering if perhaps some kind of wage system might develop earlier. Cotton and tobacco were valuable, but required lots of land; did the small farmers of the south grow either product in quantity? I'd always thought they were grown mainly on the big plantations, while the small farmers grew the foodstuff crops. Is that right?
Indentured servitude seemed to die out fairly early in American history... I'd always thought it was because it was kind of a clumsy system that failed to take in account the opportunities to be had as the US rapidly expanded. It might work for a while in the south, but when western lands start opening up, why would anyone want to be an indentured servant when he could go west instead? Thus, I thought maybe the plantation owners would simply hire anyone willing to work and pay them wages, rather like factory owners in the north....

Well, it depends on what you mean by "early" - it was a fairly common practice in many areas until the end of the 18th century. In the 20 years or so after the American Revolution, it largely died out.

It's true that the inviting presence of a frontier might mean that indentured servitude couldn't become as dominant as I suggested. On the other hand, for much of the 18th century there were still enough Indians to make going out to the frontier alone a pretty dangerous proposition in many areas. It's possible that if indentured servitude continued to be the norm then there could be increasingly strong "servant codes" which gave harsh punishments for trying to run away. They were pretty tough in 17th century Virginia - I think that your term was often doubled if you tried to run away, and it could be lengthened by several years for very small debts, idleness, being AWOL, and things like that. In this timeline they might be even tougher - indentured servitude could become almost like temporary slavery. There could be "servant patrols" and teams of "servant catchers" to get runaways. Frontier lands might be carved up among large plantations from the beginning, with any "squatters" rounded up and returned to their masters if they were runaway servants. On the other hand, I don't really know if this would be possible to sustain throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, or whether colonial society could erupt in outright class warfare.

Indentured Servants.

Getting rid of indentured servants required a change in the laws. Otherwise some place like New York would still keep bringing them in, and after their term was up they would migrate every place else. No Articles of Confederacy and no way to stop industrial or frontier states from importing labor.
No cotton and the South can't afford to import slaves for field hands. Boll weevils and no cotton gins means no cotton.
Discovery of a superflax crop discourages cotton picking and weeding? Some rare grass in Siberia that doesn't require hand labor and so is adaptable to combine harvesting?
Synthetic fibers discovered earlier because of earlier development of electricity means faster development of carbon disulfide as a cellulose solvent, so we get cellulose fibers like rayon?
Major slave revolts and massacres in the Caribbean if the Napoleonic wars keep going on and the French subsidize the revolting slaves instead of attacking them. A French fleet shows up and 20,000 armed slaves show up in Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil, etc. This discourages importing slaves.
A volcanic eruption causes mass starvation in Europe. North American farmers would migrate south and otherwise adapt, like going more for pastoral than grain farming. We would get lots of immigrants by indenture. Maybe the earlier invention of the coherer would let us know that the population of Iceland was starving to death after Hekla blew, and we evacuated them befor the mass starvation of the late 1700's?

This is rather similar to my previous board thread discussing more equitable situations for blacks in the colonial South, where some ppl discussed the possibility of indentured servitude being retained over both whites and blacks from 1619, thereby preventing the slave trade from being generated.

SHAMELESS PLUG

My United States of the Americas TL Has Forced emigration of the Highland Scots following James Defeat in 1715, Sold as indentured servants. With Farmhands replacing Plantation Slaves,

Would More Farms And less plantations in the early years lead to the end of plantation slavery.

A little past your projected timeline but, What you'd see is America annexing mexico down to mexico cityduring the mex/us war, and having non english speakers as the second class citizens in addition to blacks.

There is also the posibillity of Serfs, NY had them up till 1848. with a different settlement pattern and more New {European Country here }s, You may have more states willing to try Serfdom.

DuQuense said:

My United States of the Americas TL Has Forced emigration of the Highland Scots following James Defeat in 1715, Sold as indentured servants. With Farmhands replacing Plantation Slaves,

Would More Farms And less plantations in the early years lead to the end of plantation slavery.

Click to expand...

SHAMELESS PLUG #2...Read THE GUNS OF THE TAWANTINSUYA. Britain abolishes slavery in it's colonial possessions in 1690, causing dramatic changes in the population and social structure of the South, leading to a radically different American Revolution.

My answer was a mixture of indentured servitude of whites and blacks, an illegal slave trade of native Americans, and a rebirth of something resembling the old manorial economic system of the middle ages, where, in exchange for their agreement to labor on the plantation owner's fields on certain days of the week, the former slaves and/or indentured servants are given title to plots of land of their own which they can farm for their own subsistence and profit on those days of the week where they are not committed to work the plantation owner's fields.