A South WITHOUT Black Slavery/Oppression?

You could always have the South Carolinan slave owning squatocracy declare for Torydom right or wrong and put smaller, less slave dependent Whiggish South Carolinans up against the wall? Cue war of the orders in the mid 18th century in SC.

yours,
Sam R.
 

iddt3

Donor
The reason importing African slaves and keeping them in slavery (rather than gradually emancipating them on an individual basis) happened on such a massive scale in the Americas is that it was immensely profitable. There was no way to persuade free workers to do all the work slaves did (though once established as an institution and on such a large scale, slaves did also do work that free workers could be enticed to do for decent wages).

Another thing to remember is that in the 18th century, the British American continental colonies that eventually formed the United States were actually pretty peripheral to the main action of exploiting American resources, which was mainly in the sugar islands of the Caribbean. There, slaves were brought in in truly massive numbers, and the infallible logic of the humaneness of the market fails yet again--those sugar plantation slaves often were worked to death within just a few years. Yes, a slave worth a thousand dollars is an awful lot of capital to write off--but if in the interim of a few years that slave generated a lot more than 1000 dollars in revenue by being worked to death, the plantation owner and his financial backers are ahead of the game.

The continental colonies were, from the point of view of British officials and other such powers that be in Britain, auxiliaries that helped stock the plantations in the islands with food and other essential goods, were good places to get naval stores and so on (but of course the British had lots of such resources all over the world) and by the way there were a few plantations here and there, making on the whole chump change compared to the main action in the islands to the south.

This is part of why the question of emancipation could at least be considered seriously in the Revolutionary and Articles of Confederation years. To be sure, some Southern colonies/states were more deeply committed to slavery than others; South Carolina in particular had some serious investments in plantation crops (the place being fairly tropical in climate).

Without the cotton boom, there's a chance slavery might simply have withered as a core institution and thus eventually have been abolished.

But all these boom markets in plantation crops are a core part of the development of capitalism; it's conceivable that the USA might not have been involved but someone somewhere would be, unless the whole European-dominated Atlantic economy were to stagnate and collapse. Given that the opportunities existed, it would be a massive deviation from both OTL events and the American character if Americans didn't try to cut themselves in to the deal. (And I'm not sure how many other places in the world could have suitably provided the European markets with cotton if the US didn't).

Slavery is offensive to me for many reasons, but a major one of them is that it does indeed tend to be associated with brutal work (and poor living conditions) and if by some historical meander the concept of legally owning other human beings outright were to be omitted or banned from the American colonial/republican history, some other way of coercing some large group of people to work hard for very little gain for themselves would have been found--or much of the wealth of the USA OTL would have been developed very slowly or not at all. Given that a nation is going to have a large class of people doing this hard work while someone else collects the profits, slavery does make a lot of sense compared to the alternatives. More indentured workers, for instance, involves a larger throughput of imported workers to make up for the ones who serve out their indenture and walk away legally. And all those former indentured workers are quite likely to politically side with the current batch. Of course the colonial society might be stratified so that former indentured workers don't have full political rights and can't vote, for instance--but even so they have plenty of informal political power, as a potential mob if nothing else. The alternative to slavery is not to have the same nation with similar people but all the work being done by free hiring--the alternatives are either slavery by another name or something darn close to it, or a much slower pace of economic development, with much less capital available in the colonies.

Emancipation, by the way, came to those sugar islands a lot sooner, for the most part, than it came to North America. The reason being, once the islands were well populated, free labor does indeed become more competitive with slavery as a way of getting the crop in--because now there are many potential workers living on a finite island where there is no easily reached frontier. Wage labor beats slave labor when first of all, there is a well-established population that, if free or freed, would have a hard time maintaining itself on what little land is freely available (if any) and must perforce hire themselves out.

Plantation booms, on the other hand, had a strong tendency to offer the best prospects for quick profits on the frontier. For one thing their land husbandry was as brutal and prodigal as their labor policies were--they tended to exhaust soil and otherwise ruin once-prime land. So they needed a labor force right where a free labor force would have many more appealing opportunities available to them. Somehow or other, the labor force needs to be coerced to stay and work on the profitable plantation, rather than freely walk away to the open land surrounding them.

Another problem with the OP challenge is, if the British colonists in North America were not going to be bringing in Africans as slaves, why else would Africans migrate to North America? Even if we suppose a fair number of people living in Africa heard rumors of some earthly paradise in the west where they could start a new life with some hard work on their own behalf, why would any British sea captain offer to transport them there? Or recently self-liberated American one?

If slavery were somehow weakened, I guess European traders would have simply stopped trading with Africa very much.

So if slavery is frowned upon or even banned, I'd suppose far fewer Africans, if any at all, would have come west of the Atlantic; the US in general and the South in particular would be a lot "whiter."

Pretty much anything that avoids the atrocity of US slavery also would tend to make the USA a much less rich, more slowly developing, and probably geographically much smaller nation. And much whiter too.

There would be somewhat less profit sure, but perhaps the south would be more attractive for immigrants under those circumstances?
 
There *is* a way that this might be done, namely avoiding the invention of a cotton gin, but this has far more butterflies than just the South alone, including at a bare minimum averting the emergence of US industry until the early 20th Century at the earliest. Slavery *was* degenerating in the era of the Founders in the South, but when Eli Whitney and the others invented a cotton gin that could make North American cotton profitable, it revitalized and emboldened the institution. And it was precisely this new form of slavery that developed its own, more perverted version of a commercial orientation by comparison to the pseudo-aristocracy of the Tidewater and the Carolinas.

The great planters of the cotton boom *were* different from the ones that had gone before: to the ones of the 1830s-1860s, slavery *was* commerce. To the older version it was a "civilizing" :)mad::rolleyes:) influence first and foremost, as tobacco, indigo, and rice were seen as more "gentlemen's" crops than anything else.
 
There *is* a way that this might be done, namely avoiding the invention of a cotton gin, but this has far more butterflies than just the South alone, including at a bare minimum averting the emergence of US industry until the early 20th Century at the earliest. Slavery *was* degenerating in the era of the Founders in the South, but when Eli Whitney and the others invented a cotton gin that could make North American cotton profitable, it revitalized and emboldened the institution. And it was precisely this new form of slavery that developed its own, more perverted version of a commercial orientation by comparison to the pseudo-aristocracy of the Tidewater and the Carolinas.

The great planters of the cotton boom *were* different from the ones that had gone before: to the ones of the 1830s-1860s, slavery *was* commerce. To the older version it was a "civilizing" :)mad::rolleyes:) influence first and foremost, as tobacco, indigo, and rice were seen as more "gentlemen's" crops than anything else.

Okay, so say Eli Whitney dies in utero or never gets his cotton gin patent, we can still get interchangeable parts (and thus, the start of modern industry) from other pioneers in the field like Simeon North, or Capt. John H. Hall. After all, his 1801 demonstration of musket manufacturing was all apparently smoke and mirrors; assuming this is the case, what would the implications be?
 
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