A continued slave trade: how high would the Southern slave population get?

If the slave trade had never been banned, how high could the slave population of the deep south get? It was 45%-55% in our timeline, but with an open market, would it get to Jamaica or Haiti levels of 90%+? Or is there a natural limit due to lack of land suitable for plantation agriculture?
 
Uh, there were still slave ships landing in the South when Lee surrendered, IIRC. Just because the highly lucrative Slave Trade was made illegal didn't mean it was stopped.
 

frlmerrin

Banned
To answer this question you have to explain why and how the slave trade has continued*. Because the big things you have to 'butterfly' away are the British rejection of the slave trade and the might of the Royal Navy. Just because the South might want to keep it does not mean they would be allowed to do so.

*it would also be nice to know if you are talking about a world in which the Confederacy wins independence or not.
 
Uh, there were still slave ships landing in the South when Lee surrendered, IIRC. Just because the highly lucrative Slave Trade was made illegal didn't mean it was stopped.
I believe the last slave ships which landed in the southern states did so in the late 1850s. I never heard of any which came after the war started. No master of a slave ship would have risked running the union blockade; if indeed there were any slave runs that late in the game, they would have tried for Cuba, and even that was risky enough, with slavery still legal there.
As for the percentage of the slave population, it would never have gotten near West Indian levels, although it could have gotten a bit higher in the deep south. A lot if it had to do with climate. Try living in a hot, humid, malarial environment year round. Not too many Europeans could take it.
 
Well you could try to have a cotton price spike (lots of crop failures and boll weevils or whatnot everywhere else?) leading to the planters have more money to buy slaves and to expand plantation economics to marginal cotton-growing land.
 
To answer this question you have to explain why and how the slave trade has continued*. Because the big things you have to 'butterfly' away are the British rejection of the slave trade and the might of the Royal Navy. Just because the South might want to keep it does not mean they would be allowed to do so.

*it would also be nice to know if you are talking about a world in which the Confederacy wins independence or not.

Just say that the abolition movement was led by less capable leaders, and Wilburforce didn't exist, so it wasn't banned on either side of the Atlantic.
 
I believe the last slave ships which landed in the southern states did so in the late 1850s. I never heard of any which came after the war started. No master of a slave ship would have risked running the union blockade; if indeed there were any slave runs that late in the game, they would have tried for Cuba, and even that was risky enough, with slavery still legal there.

That's logical, reasonable, and wrong. Nathaniel Gordon tried it in 1860 and was hung for it.

Try living in a hot, humid, malarial environment year round. Not too many Europeans could take it.

Not too many Africans could, either. Survival rates in the rice plantations were poor.
 
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Perhaps there would be a pseudo-Anglo-American War in the 1850s as US flagged slave ships are stop and seized by the Royal Navy. The question of how to respond to this could be problematic for the Union.
 
As for the percentage of the slave population, it would never have gotten near West Indian levels, although it could have gotten a bit higher in the deep south. A lot if it had to do with climate. Try living in a hot, humid, malarial environment year round. Not too many Europeans could take it.

So that goes for the white population, but why couldn't it get there through a lot more blacks. Haiti and Jamaica had a lot more population density than the Deep South ever did. I know it was different crops, but with more slaves, how much more of the south could have been converted to plantations? Or was everywhere viable already converted in our timeline?
 
I think there might be some resistance to restarting the slave trade (none if it never stopped) from slave owners looking to keep a high value on their property. I recall reading that some slave owners in Virginia went as far as to breed slaves and sold them to plantations in the Deep South for an indecently tidy sum. If you bring in more, that'll just drive prices down and the wealthy won't be so wealthy since wealth is determined by the value of property.

I've been accused of taking a legalistic stance on slavery at times, but it's the only way I can think of to keep minds emotionally neutral on the issue. I don't know about the rest of you, but the whole concept of slavery just burns my bacon.
 
I may have been off by a year or two. I remember reading a story once, about someone who took a ship over to Africa, partly to prove it could still be done; they bought a load of slaves, and sailed back across the Atlantic and unloaded their cargo somewhere around Moblie Bay; I believe the year was 1858. I don't remember anyone being hung for it, though. In any event, it didn't continue after the war began.
That's logical, reasonable, and wrong. Nathaniel Gordon tried it in 1860 and was hung for it.



For sure it was hard on everybody, but at least the Africans had been used to tropical conditions, and could handle it better than Europeans.Not too many Africans could, either. Survival rates in the race plantations were poor.
 
If the slave trade had never been banned, how high could the slave population of the deep south get? It was 45%-55% in our timeline, but with an open market, would it get to Jamaica or Haiti levels of 90%+? Or is there a natural limit due to lack of land suitable for plantation agriculture?

Jamaica and Haiti's high slave levels had to do with the wildly lucrative sugar and coffee trade, also how high the death rate was, while it was bad for the slaves (80-90%) it was even worse for the whites (90-100%) so few whites ever wanted to live there, a white might live there for 5 years or so make enough to live rich in France or Britain and let some one else run their plantation and take the risk of death for you, nothing the south grew was ever as wildly lucrative, thus always was a back water of the slave trade.
 
Short Awnser: No.

Long Awnser: Definately not.

There are two sides to this , the variable pattern of slave trading (particularly the different requirements of the carribean and North America) and demographics.

The plantations of the Caribbean were , unlike the South , always primarily interested in Sugar , with irregular diversions into Indigo , Rice and a couple of other cash crops. Sugar cultivation requires immense amounts of labour at pretty much every stage of production , from planting and harvesting to processing and shipping. Combined with the ardour of merely living in a tropical environment and the pressures of over-cultivation , this led to an exceptionally high death rate. This had many consequences , but for this context it has two main effects on the demographic picture. For a start , it meant that large numbers of slaves had to be imported yearly to maintain the system. Secondly it meant that only a bare minimum of white settlers ever came to the island , with most of the landlords being absent.For this reason , black slaves always made up the larger part of the colonies population and the slave trade was crucial in order to maintain their numbers.

Now , north america was quite different. With the exception of Louisiana , carribean style plantations were not possible due to the colder climate. As such two key things occur. Firstly , the benign climate makes the area more popular for white emigrants , and two the crops grown shift to tobacco and later cotton. The result is a radically different economic and demographic structure. Rather than massive plantations that require hundreds of slaves with a high turnover of labour you find smaller family owned farms that instead use only a relatively small amount of slaves. With a much smaller demand for labour that peaks only during the harvest , slaves tended to live much longer than their Caribbean counterparts and had considerably more time to themselves. As is human , they used this time to create their own societies and families , a phenomena rare in the plantations over the water. This is a key development , because it meant that rather than requiring constant shipments of new labour the black population in America first became self-sustaining , and later grew naturally of its own accord. As such the slave trade was already in decline by the time it was banned , as demand for fresh slaves dropped. As both the slave population and the southern economy matured the total number of slaves grew , but never approached the same proportion of the population as found in the Caribbean.
 
I may have been off by a year or two. I remember reading a story once, about someone who took a ship over to Africa, partly to prove it could still be done; they bought a load of slaves, and sailed back across the Atlantic and unloaded their cargo somewhere around Moblie Bay; I believe the year was 1858. I don't remember anyone being hung for it, though. In any event, it didn't continue after the war began.

Nathaniel Gordon tried it after the war began. Some others appear have done so as well, but not been caught.
 
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