CthulhuFhtagn
Banned
With a PoD anytime after 1789, have the United States abolish slavery before 1900 without having to fight a civil war.
i don;t think the Southern slavelords would allow ANY kind of end to slavery that wasn't forced. and what would be the difference, anyway? they'd just move on to sharecropping and bitch and moan about it for a hundred and fifty years like IOTL
The POD has to be earlier than the proliferation of the Cotton Gin or it won't work.
If Virginia and Kentucky emancipated slaves early on, you could get an emancipation amendment passed. It would take a while. And might require the creation of e.g. East and West Dakota as well as North and South, say, but it's certainly possible. The amendment would be much, much looser than OTL's, probably freeing everyone born after the ratification of the amendment, and not legislating anything like equality.In 1862, Lincoln offered Delaware slaveowners compensated emancipation. Delaware, of course, had the smallest enslaved population of any state commonly recognized as such.
The slaveowners turned it down.
The issue is, of course, that absent a war over slavery, the US (federal) government could not "abolish" anything, either as a war powers act or as constitutional amendment in the aftermath of such a war.
Abolition had to be a state by state movement in the US (as it was in the New England and mid-Atlantic states, historically); once the wealth generated by slavery and mechanized cotton production began to become apparent in the early 1820s or so, there was no way the southern elite was going to part with it.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe is a very good, and very accessible, synthesis of the era; well worth reading.
Best,
If Virginia and Kentucky emancipated slaves early on, you could get an emancipation amendment passed. It would take a while. And might require the creation of e.g. East and West Dakota as well as North and South, say, but it's certainly possible. The amendment would be much, much looser than OTL's, probably freeing everyone born after the ratification of the amendment, and not legislating anything like equality.
Why do you think it requires a war?