CSA Gradual Emancipation

VirginiaHistoryTeacher

What would it take for a victorious CSA to start emancipation in 1875 and have it wrapped up (most optimistically) by 1885 or (more realistically) by 1900? "A miracle" is not a valid answer. :p What approximate percentage of the Southern economy would have to be shifted away from agriculture to accomplish this?
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
God himself descends from Heaven and tells them to do it or he starts burning the Confederacy to ashes from one end of it to the other. Nothing else will suffice, given the CSA IOTL never fully scrapped slavery even when Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee were begging them to do so to add to the CSA's manpower at the point it was on the verge of collapse. And this is when it existed for all of four years and was virtually conquered at that point, after Nashville, with its largest remaining army annihilated, with Sherman marching into the Carolinas, and Grant about to send three armies past Petersburg to capture Richmond.

A peacetime CSA will be no more willing at all than the OTL one that was born and died in a war would be.
 

VirginiaHistoryTeacher

So the slavocrat cartel would be too powerful for Confederate politicians to ever overcome...partly because Confederate politicians participate in the cartel to begin with?
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
So the slavocrat cartel would be too powerful for Confederate politicians to ever overcome...partly because Confederate politicians participate in the cartel to begin with?
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No, because the Slavocrat cartel was starting in the antebellum era with amassing totalitarian power. Give them a state of their own and in ten years the CSA will start looking increasingly unlike anything even approaching the Segregation-era South. The CSA has no democratic foundation whatsoever to build off of, and its reactions to Southern abolitionists IN THE USA BEFORE THE WAR were to expel them. In a CSA, the reaction will be to organize lynch mobs, and maybe even pass postcards of the hangings.
 

VirginiaHistoryTeacher

So the CSA wouldn't even have the potential to undergo a fundamental revolution to shake off the shackles of slavery and industrialize at the same time because the slavery system is too embedded in their ethos?
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
So the slavocrat cartel would be too powerful for Confederate politicians to ever overcome...partly because Confederate politicians participate in the cartel to begin with?
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Not only did they participate, they utterly monopolized the show.

Remember, these are the same people who were willing to embark on a suicidally self-destructive civil war because they believed that losing one election would threaten their preciously peculiar institution.
 

Killer300

When it has a Communist revolt Russian Revolution style, with what hits cotton in 1875 being the POD, and what causes the lower classes utterly demolish the plantation class. What ocurrs in the long run? I don't know, but there's your end to slavery, among other things.
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
So the CSA wouldn't even have the potential to undergo a fundamental revolution to shake off the shackles of slavery and industrialize at the same time because the slavery system is too embedded in their ethos?
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Yes, as any criticism of slavery will be considered treason to the Confederacy, and the CSA will in any scenario, even a short war, have one way and one way only to deal with traitors, especially how its political development will see actual Southern abolitionists at home: shoot them all and let God sort them out. What industry would exist in the CSA would be constrained by this reality, and the CSA will have politically done a very good job of prohibiting itself from ever industrializing.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
So the CSA wouldn't even have the potential to undergo a fundamental revolution to shake off the shackles of slavery and industrialize at the same time because the slavery system is too embedded in their ethos?
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It could have had a revolution, but that means that the CSA is unrecognizable. Slavery was the cornerstone of the society, and racism was so embedded that it is almost ASB to think of poor whites being willing to join up with them to throw off the planters.
 

Johnrankins

Killer300 said:
When it has a Communist revolt Russian Revolution style, with what hits cotton in 1875 being the POD, and what causes the lower classes utterly demolish the plantation class. What ocurrs in the long run? I don't know, but there's your end to slavery, among other things.
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I agree it would take a revolution of some sort but whether it would be Communism, Proto-fascism or something else entirely is subject to debate.
 

VirginiaHistoryTeacher

Thanks for bursting my optimistic Confederate utopia-ish bubble haha. I'm so used to characters like Lee and Jackson who had at least a polite distaste for slavery. I guess I've read too much Turtledove. :(
 

Snake Featherston

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
Thanks for bursting my optimistic Confederate utopia-ish bubble haha. I'm so used to characters like Lee and Jackson who had at least a polite distaste for slavery. I guess I've read too much Turtledove. :(
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Lee didn't have enough distaste for slavery to avoid fully implementing his government's terminate with extreme prejudice policy toward USCT men and officers, nor did he have enough distaste for slavery to avoid curtailing the POW exchange cartel when this favors the CSA, not the USA, over that same policy. Jackson, of course, was a religious fanatic who believed very strongly that God loved slavery and viewed slavery as a civilizing force for the slave.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
Thanks for bursting my optimistic Confederate utopia-ish bubble haha. I'm so used to characters like Lee and Jackson who had at least a polite distaste for slavery. I guess I've read too much Turtledove. :(
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Dinnae worry; we all have ;)

I'll give you loads of credit for accepting these intrinsic contradictions about the CSA, though; a shit-ton of folks reject them out of hand because it doesn't fit with their own narrative.
 

VirginiaHistoryTeacher

I'm really not ashamed to admit that I'm a Southern patriot, much to the groan of scores of people in here I'm sure. You'd never know it was 2012 by hearing me talk. My issue is that I try to create a CSA sans slavery by 1885 or at least 1900. I'm working on a TL for that very purpose that isn't ASB at all (unless I'm happily delusional).
 

Lord Grattan

VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
Thanks for bursting my optimistic Confederate utopia-ish bubble haha. I'm so used to characters like Lee and Jackson who had at least a polite distaste for slavery. I guess I've read too much Turtledove. :(
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John C. Calhoun, who was called the "cast iron man' because of his ridged ideology and who viewed slavery as a "positive good" worth defending to the death, didn't burst your optimism?;):(
 

VirginiaHistoryTeacher

The TL that I'm working on currently has the CSA giving up slaves by 1900 via industrialization. I'm trying to make it (or force it) to be as realistic as possible and not ASB at all. I've got a map, and the idea for a flag that works off of combining the Bonnie Blue and the Third National.
 

Johnrankins

VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
The TL that I'm working on currently has the CSA giving up slaves by 1900 via industrialization. I'm trying to make it (or force it) to be as realistic as possible and not ASB at all. I've got a map, and the idea for a flag that works off of combining the Bonnie Blue and the Third National.
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Way too early for either emancipation or mass industrialization. Try 1920 or so.
 

Reggie Bartlett

Banned
VirginiaHistoryTeacher said:
The TL that I'm working on currently has the CSA giving up slaves by 1900 via industrialization. I'm trying to make it (or force it) to be as realistic as possible and not ASB at all. I've got a map, and the idea for a flag that works off of combining the Bonnie Blue and the Third National.
Click to expand...

I don't know about widespread emmancipation by 1875, I have doubts about it.

However, if you wait until the Boll Weevil hits the CSA much like it did OTL's South in the 1890s (possibly earlier than OTL given butterflies) it is concievable for several important CS states to have dropped slavery by that time on an individual state-by-state basis, such a thing will only be sped up by the destruction of the Cotton economy, which slavery was dependent on.

If I had to put a timetable to how slavery ends in the CSA I see it like this:
1880s/1890s: Boll Weevil crosses into Texas.
1890s/Turn of the Century: Upper South states abolish slavery.
1900s/1910s: A few Deep South states (Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Georgia perhaps) abolish slavery.
1910s/1920s: South Carolina and Mississippi are the only remaining CS slave states, and economically they aren't doing well. Something could prompt them to abolish it as well.
 
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