As it says on the tin. In the aftermath of such an event, how would Britain respond? And would the colonies eventually revolt again? If so, when? And who would the leaders likely be in this Second American Revolution? Thanks fellas.
In the aftermath of such an event, how would Britain respond? And would the colonies eventually revolt again? If so, when? And who would the leaders likely be in this Second American Revolution? Thanks fellas.
To clarify, this is after the Declaration of Independence. So there has been a somewhat protracted war.
The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and grain ("corn") enforced in Great Britain between 1815 and 1846. The word "corn" in the English spoken in nineteenth century Britain denotes all cereal grains, such as wheat and barley. They were designed to keep grain prices high to favour domestic producers, and represented British mercantilism.[1] The Corn Laws imposed steep import duties, making it too expensive to import grain from abroad, even when food supplies were short.
The Corn Laws enhanced the profits and political power associated with land ownership. The laws raised food prices and the costs of living for the British public, and hampered the growth of other British economic sectors, such as manufacturing, by reducing the disposable income of the British public.[2]
The laws became the focus of opposition from urban groups who had far less political power than rural Britain. The first two years of the Irish famine of 1845–1852 forced a resolution because of the urgent need for new food supplies. Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, a Conservative, achieved repeal with the support of the Whigs in Parliament, overcoming the opposition of most of his own party.
Economic historians see the repeal of the Corn Laws as a decisive shift toward free trade in Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
One definite thing you'd see is separate administrations of the colonies. There won't be a single Continental Congress.
And while there will be a crackdown on rebels there will also be some minor concessions to remove support.
Slavery would be far stronger, both in the colonies and throughout the British Empire.
In the lead-up to the Revolution many of the colonies were attempting to heavily regulate if not outright ban the Slave trade, which was denied by the Crown due to the influence of the merchants involved in the trade:I am not sure how it would be stronger or why?
Before the American Revolution, both the colonies and Great Britain regulated the African slave trade to what became the United States. The British government gave special protection to the Royal African Company, which brought more Africans slaves to the American colonies than any other single entity. The slave trade was an important part of Britain's mercantile policy: it collected taxes on the slaves while colonial governments both taxed them and occasionally sought to limit their arrivals.
After the Stono Rebellion (1739), South Carolina suspended the trade for a few years because its leaders believed that large numbers of freshly imported Africans would undermine the safety of the colony. Then in 1751 South Carolina imposed a special tax on foreign slaves to slow the trade and, nine years later, once again banned it altogether because leaders of the colony still feared the growing number of African-born slaves. The royal authorities disallowed the law. But in 1764 the colony levied new taxes on African-born slaves because, as the legislature noted, their rising number "may prove of the most dangerous consequence."
Shortly before the Revolution, Virginia also tried to ban the trade, not for prudential reasons but to prevent the outflow of capital from the colony. Virginians attempted to use prohibitive taxes to discourage the trade, but the Crown overruled this law, because the slave trade was vital to the British economy and because the Royal African Company had powerful patrons in the government.
Post Revolution many State level laws were passed even before the 1807 ban which, due to the continued influence of the same merchants without the body blow of the Revolution, will lead to even greater influx of slaves from the 1770s onwards. Slavery likely becomes entrenched in New Jersey and New York, as well as spreads into what IOTL became the Midwest; it was already pretty heavy on the ground, in a sense, in Illinois and Indiana historically.
Without something like the Missouri Compromise to control which states were pro or anti-slavery, how much of Britain's North America colonies would be pro-slavery?
Probably most of them; New England shipping was heavily tied into the slave trade, for example. New York and New Jersey, as well as most of the Midwest, would likely become outright Slave-allowing colonies.
So every colony on the East Coast could turn pro-slavery. What about the inner west?
As to slavery, might that change after Britain bans the slave trade itself (possibly earlier ITTL?), and perhaps citing the cases of Somerset vs Stewart and Knight vs Wedderburn (or ATL equivalents) - basically, if it's ok for slavery to be (effectively) banned in Great Britain, why can't it also be banned in individual colonies?
In 1973, a business historian named Robert Sobel published a highly entertaining book entitled For Want of a Nail. It is an incredibly detailed faux history book from a world where the British defeated the American revolution, all the way down to a plethora of fake footnotes. It is a fun read, enough to inspire me and some friends to make a long foray into fanfic back in the early 2000s.
One of us, Johnny Pez, has received the rights from the Sobel estate to rewrite the book. Johnny intends to fill in a lot of gaps in the original as well as bring it up to 2016. He is off to a great start, which you can read here. The problem is that major parts of Sobel’s alternate history are simply broken.
Take, for example, the way his imaginary British North America. At first, in his world, things are different because the slave trade is not stopped: rather, it continues until the 1830s. Then, in 1835, he has a financial crisis hit London. Cotton prices drop and slave prices go down with them. As a result, with an unspecified amount of financial support from the British government, the Southern Confederation (coterminous with our slave states of the same period) bails out the planters with a payment of £35 per slave in 1840, twice their market value.
Well. There are a few problems with this scenario. First, take Sobel’s slave population compared with the real actual United States:
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How does a world where the slave trade remains open — itself a most improbable development — wind up with fewer slaves than in real history? Sure, the victorious British manumitted a bunch, but not that many.
Then there is the price of those slaves. When Sobel’s financial crisis hits, the slave price he lists is roughly the same as the price of a young male slave in New Orleans in the real world. They then crash by an incredibly implausible amount by authorial fiat. He just waves his hands. The below chart shows the extent of the hand-waving; I have deliberately included data from the real 1840s to show what a punishing price decline actually looked like:
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Sobel does not say how the manumission bonds are paid for. There are two possibilities. First, that the U.K. government bore all the cost. That seems weird, as he has the bill being passed by the Southern Confederation. But it could be. Only if it was, then you have a situation in which the U.K. just agreed to transfer roughly 11% of its GDP to the Southern planters with no political concessions in turn. I suppose that is possible, but it seems unlikely.
More likely is that the Southern Confederation agreed to finance the bonds itself and then managed to transfer the cost of paying those debts to the Northern Confederation after the British agreed to unite the two small dominions into one big one in 1842. In return, the Northern Confederation gets a big protective tariff around all of North America. I can imagine that ... although one imagines a slightly more interesting convention than the one Sobel describes. After all, the new united North America is going to be born with a manumission debt worth 17% of its GDP.
But that is fixable. What seems unfixable, at least at first glance, are the following:
How you can square all of those circles, I do not know! If you can find cases of reputable books from the 1960s with equally bullshit numbers, then you can say the numbers are wrong and give a story for why they are wrong. (Although ... man, the number of slaves is not a state secret, even if slave prices were hard to find. Ditto the statements about the slave trade being open seem pretty damn clear.) But that puts you in a situation where the new country has to finance a manumission cost that is more on the order of 48% of GDP and convince the planters to take the deal.
- Keeping the slave trade open until 1840 is very implausible;
- If it remained open, there would be a lot more slaves in North America, with unknowable effects on the price and even larger fights over the spread of the institution into Indiana (our Northwest Territories);
- If it was closed, then the slave population should still have been much larger;
- It is hard to imagine why the slave price would have declined so much and be seen by the planters as a permanent decline. A temporary depression is not going to convince slaveowners (or any asset holder, for that matter) to sell at the bottom. You need to create some sort of contrived situation involving bankers and bankruptcies and even then Sobel has painted a situation in which all the Southern banks are going under, so who cares whether you can repay your debts?
In short, Mr. Sobel pulled a magic price decline out the air to tell his optimistic story about the British Empire. Take that away and it gets much dicier.