AHC/WI: Minimized American Slave Population?

During the development of England's colonies in North America, those lying to the south like Virginia or the Carolinas developed economies that were based on slave-labor production of agricultural products like tobacco, rice, indigo, or wheat, while the northern colonies developed economies based on trading, fishing, and more limited agricultural production. Because of the large population of slaves in the South and the presence of many wealthy masters who could dominate politics regionally and, to a lesser but still significant effect, nationally, slavery was able to survive independence until, of course, the Civil War.

So, what I was wondering was how this bifurcation could be avoided? Many of the northern colonies also had slavery just before independence, but none of their economies were so (directly) dependent on it, and all of them had much smaller proportions of slaves in their population than the southern colonies. How could this also have been true in the southern colonies, so that slaves are relatively uncommon and not used in wide-spread agricultural labor?
 
The basic problem you're facing is that the south is climatically right for plantation agriculture. Plantation agricultural is a highly profitable industry, so rich people are going to want to do it. However, for it to work, it needs a large supply of labour. In the American south, the frontier meant that labour supply was limited, because workers would always want to move there. That means there will be an incredibly high desire for forced labour of one sort or another.

Perhaps you can get enough of a moral movement to oppose lifelong chattel slavery, and instead maintains indentured servitude.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
For one thing, slavery in what is now the United States was actually not nearly as widespread and prevalent as some would have you think in comparison to economies truly did have huge amounts of slaves, like in Brazil and most of the islands in the West Indies.

But to truly minimalize it, you need to have simply way more migrants to the South to work the land, and more of a yeoman farming tradition near the coasts and good land. Having extremely small early populations meant that there were huge land grants, and therefore, slaves to make them work.

Now while you might see what happened in Ancient Rome happen eventually and the rich take the farms of the small, having lots more small landholders in the Carolina and Georgia coastal farmland would help.
 
The basic problem you're facing is that the south is climatically right for plantation agriculture. Plantation agricultural is a highly profitable industry, so rich people are going to want to do it. However, for it to work, it needs a large supply of labour. In the American south, the frontier meant that labour supply was limited, because workers would always want to move there. That means there will be an incredibly high desire for forced labour of one sort or another.

Not just that, but also the manner in which the colonies were established. New England and Pennsylvania were both established as religious havens, and attracted more educated immigrants, and families. In fact, quite a few Massachusetts towns wouldn't allow bachelors to immigrate, as they were considered possible threats to the public peace. New Netherlands (the Hudson Valley, mostly) was colonized through a pseudo-feudal system of land grants that ended up also encouraging immigration of whole families.

In contrast, the Virginia Colony was largely settled through second sons of English nobility who saw the lands as a means to wealth, not a new life. They were mostly interested with making money as quickly as possible, which, together with the much larger size of the average holding, led to large cash-crop plantations (note that tobacco was and is still also grown in the North, including as far north as southern Vermont (!), but was done more on small family farms). Young, single, largely poor, largely single men were brought in, both as free laborers and as indentured servants (many of them were also seeking to make wealth and often planned to eventually return to England), before the transition was made to large-scale importation of slaves. Plus, the incredibly high rate of disease meant that many children especially that did immigrate would die.


The frontier was actually largely settled by a different group, from northern England and southern Scotland, who largely came as whole communities organized by their churches in order to start a new life.

These arguments are all more or less paraphrased from Albion's Seed, by D.H. Fischer, a book that I cannot recommend strongly enough.

Perhaps you can get enough of a moral movement to oppose lifelong chattel slavery, and instead maintains indentured servitude

Perhaps, though I doubt that indentured servants will continue to come, especially as industrialization offers another theoretical path to upward mobility for the rural poor.
 
Not just that, but also the manner in which the colonies were established. New England and Pennsylvania were both established as religious havens, and attracted more educated immigrants, and families. In fact, quite a few Massachusetts towns wouldn't allow bachelors to immigrate, as they were considered possible threats to the public peace. New Netherlands (the Hudson Valley, mostly) was colonized through a pseudo-feudal system of land grants that ended up also encouraging immigration of whole families.

This was how I thought this might work: Jamestown goes under before figuring out how to grow tobacco (this did almost happen OTL), and the Virginia Company with it. The Puritans, instead of emigrating to Massachusetts Bay, emigrate to the Chesapeake, which is now unsettled (by whites, anyways). They aren't, initially, interested in plantation agriculture, so they build up for a few decades without it. When the first generation dies off, they move into industry more similar to what they did in New England IOTL, especially shipping and trading. The Chesapeake isn't exactly the worst base for that...

Thus, plantation agriculture is not established in, at least, Virginia. Possibly this causes Georgia to maintain its anti-slavery stance, assuming it is still founded, and possibly the Carolinas are either established differently (i.e., not as a profit-seeking enterprise by Barbados slave-holders) or not at all (both attempts to set up profit-seeking colonies on the mainland have failed ignominiously...)
 
Still doesn't eliminate the Caribbean sugar islands which used slave labor to generate large amounts of profit. So with these examples why would someone in the climates where plantation agriculture is possible not have the idea that this would be a very good way to make money.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
You'd need the cotton gin to never be invented.

If you do this, I think you'd see slavery in the US at least die out by about 1830, which is around when New York banned it. New York had no real need for slavery but had a few die hards who wanted to keep it, and I think that you'd see this trend across the country happen in areas where slavery loses its purpose.

Contrary to what some may say, it truly was about the economic needs of the planter aristocracy rather than just a form of social control towards a mismatched group. You take that away, and slavery just isn't that profitable.

This is not to say that black people are going to be enjoying full rights everywhere, as they wouldn't, but slavery in and of itself without the cotton gin collapses in the US.

Now, if the US was to gain land in the Caribbean for some reason, this might change. There is a reason why the Spanish, French, and even in some cases the British turned a blind eye towards slavery in sugar colonies. It just doesn't work otherwise.
 
This was how I thought this might work: Jamestown goes under before figuring out how to grow tobacco (this did almost happen OTL), and the Virginia Company with it. The Puritans, instead of emigrating to Massachusetts Bay, emigrate to the Chesapeake, which is now unsettled (by whites, anyways). They aren't, initially, interested in plantation agriculture, so they build up for a few decades without it. When the first generation dies off, they move into industry more similar to what they did in New England IOTL, especially shipping and trading. The Chesapeake isn't exactly the worst base for that...

Thus, plantation agriculture is not established in, at least, Virginia. Possibly this causes Georgia to maintain its anti-slavery stance, assuming it is still founded, and possibly the Carolinas are either established differently (i.e., not as a profit-seeking enterprise by Barbados slave-holders) or not at all (both attempts to set up profit-seeking colonies on the mainland have failed ignominiously...)

So what happens further north? You can still establish large-scale operations for maximum profits in Massachusetts, they just have to be appropriate to the environs. Slave-crewed fishing boats, perhaps, or logging crews, or vineyards, maybe.
 
You'd need the cotton gin to never be invented.

The cotton gin greatly postdates what I'm talking about. The cotton gin was able to revitalize slavery because slavery already existed in large scale by the time it was invented, in Virginia and points south. If slavery doesn't exist in the first place to any large scale, then its invention won't do that, though doubtlessly some oppressive method would end up being used to grow the crop (tenant farmers, perhaps, a la sharecropping?).

So what happens further north? You can still establish large-scale operations for maximum profits in Massachusetts, they just have to be appropriate to the environs. Slave-crewed fishing boats, perhaps, or logging crews, or vineyards, maybe.
I assumed that pre-Puritan colonies in the area, e.g. the Pilgrims, would predominate. Most of those were religious (...e.g., the Pilgrims), so I imagine it would end up looking like New England actually did. Here you'd have a mega-New England stretching from Maine to Virginia, with the exception of New York (assuming it is still colonized by the Dutch, anyways).
 
How about multiple early slave revolts? If the Europeans start to view Africans as wild savages that cannot be tamed without a 1:1 ratio of guards to slaves, then they'd probably give up on the whole idea of importing Africans to work the plantations.

If the Africans keep revolting, and the Native Americans keep dying of disease, then that leaves only two options I can see:

1. Find a way to attract more workers from Europe. As others have suggested, that probably means the South (and the Caribbean) would look more like New England with an added influx of European religious minorities. The most interesting idea I can see would be a larger Jewish population in the South, maybe even a couple of Jewish settlements (someone like the Abrabanels funds a colony and recruits lots of poor Jews). Instead of New York being the center of American Jewish culture, it might be Charleston or Atlanta. Another major source could be Ireland, possibly resulting in a Catholic South.
2. Some system of mass importation of European peasants. Essentially, this would entail re-establishing the feudal system in the New World. Without any real difference of race or religion between the overlords and the workers, class would be the only option. I don't see the Dutch doing this, and probably not the English, but maybe the Spanish. The consequences of a genuine Spanish aristocracy with real roots in the New World could be interesting, assuming the US or an analogue doesn't decide that someone needs some freedom.

I think that both of these scenarios might come into play. The American South would either resemble New England, or be British Ireland writ large and with Jews. Most of the Caribbean would be something out of the Middle Ages, with lords ruling over serfs, except that the knights now carried muskets.
 
That ignores the major reason that African slaves were brought over in the first place which is higher resistance to malaria and other such tropical diseases. Many of the Europeans brought over died quickly even more so than the Africans in incredibly brutal conditions. No one would want to come over to work the sugar islands if you are going to die of malaria before the year is out. So the answer is slaves which are more resistant. Also how incompetent do they have to be to need a ratio of slaves to guards of 1:1. Slavery has existed for the entirety of human civilization up to this point in every one of the colonial nations so they generally know how to keep it going without too many problems.
 
That ignores the major reason that African slaves were brought over in the first place which is higher resistance to malaria and other such tropical diseases. Many of the Europeans brought over died quickly even more so than the Africans in incredibly brutal conditions. No one would want to come over to work the sugar islands if you are going to die of malaria before the year is out. So the answer is slaves which are more resistant. Also how incompetent do they have to be to need a ratio of slaves to guards of 1:1. Slavery has existed for the entirety of human civilization up to this point in every one of the colonial nations so they generally know how to keep it going without too many problems.

I was using hyperbole. The thing is, slavery wasn't common in Europe, and the mass enslavement of Africans was done specifically with regards to the New World plantations. I think that if there had been multiple bloody slave revolts, the Europeans would have abandoned large-scale slaving as not worth the trouble.
 
Wipe out the African malaria parasite, and white labor on the plantations would be much more feasible. As it is the Mason-Dixon line lies right on the northern boundary of the disease's historical range.
 
The cotton gin is a grossly overrated feature of alternate history.

If you want to minimize the slave populations, why not just have the court cases that legalized slavery in the first place go the other way? Boom, 0% slave population. You're still going to get some sort of plantation economy, but it will be based on indentured servitude, and likely much less dominant.
 
The basic problem you're facing is that the south is climatically right for plantation agriculture. Plantation agricultural is a highly profitable industry, so rich people are going to want to do it. However, for it to work, it needs a large supply of labour. In the American south, the frontier meant that labour supply was limited, because workers would always want to move there. That means there will be an incredibly high desire for forced labour of one sort or another.

This actually reverses cause and effect. You get plantation agriculture because you have slavery; people didn't turn to slavery because the climate was suitable for plantation agriculture.

Slavery worked in part because race-based slavery was more resistant to tropical diseases (especially malaria), but there were still viable slave plantations in areas where malaria was negligible (e.g. in upstate New York along the Hudson).

The main advantage of slave labour was that North America was a place were land was cheap but labour was expensive. It was easy enough to obtain new land, but hard to get enough labour to work that land. When settling the western territories in the nineteenth centuries, Northern (i.e. free soil) farmers found that they could not expand a farm beyond the size that could be worked by their own families plus a little hired help. Go larger than that, and it just wasn't viable to run a farm, since the labour was too inclined to quit and start their own farm rather than working for someone else.

Slave labour changed all this, since a successful farmer could buy a slave, who couldn't choose to start their own farm. The extra labour from one slave allowed the farmer to become even more profitable, and buy a second slave, and so on.

This allowed slave-using farms to expand into plantations. Which crops were on those plantations essentially didn't matter. Wheat (and other small grains) was perfectly suitable as a slave plantation crop, as was demonstrated in Virginia, Kentucky and New York (until eventual abolition), and in Indiana and Illinois despite being illegal. And wheat can be grown over most of the OTL Northern states without difficulty.

The problem with preventing slave labour is that there is a very, very strong incentive to be able to control the supply of labour. Indentured labour is not equivalent, because there is a much more limited supply of indentured labour, and because indentured labourers were freed after a few years (and then quit, naturally). So the desire to turn to slave labour is extremely strong.

Whatever PoD is come up to minimise the slave population of the USA needs to overcome this very strong attraction to controlling the source of labour. It could probably be done, but it isn't easy.
 
This actually reverses cause and effect. You get plantation agriculture because you have slavery; people didn't turn to slavery because the climate was suitable for plantation agriculture.

Slavery worked in part because race-based slavery was more resistant to tropical diseases (especially malaria), but there were still viable slave plantations in areas where malaria was negligible (e.g. in upstate New York along the Hudson).

The main advantage of slave labour was that North America was a place were land was cheap but labour was expensive. It was easy enough to obtain new land, but hard to get enough labour to work that land. When settling the western territories in the nineteenth centuries, Northern (i.e. free soil) farmers found that they could not expand a farm beyond the size that could be worked by their own families plus a little hired help. Go larger than that, and it just wasn't viable to run a farm, since the labour was too inclined to quit and start their own farm rather than working for someone else.

Slave labour changed all this, since a successful farmer could buy a slave, who couldn't choose to start their own farm. The extra labour from one slave allowed the farmer to become even more profitable, and buy a second slave, and so on.

This allowed slave-using farms to expand into plantations. Which crops were on those plantations essentially didn't matter. Wheat (and other small grains) was perfectly suitable as a slave plantation crop, as was demonstrated in Virginia, Kentucky and New York (until eventual abolition), and in Indiana and Illinois despite being illegal. And wheat can be grown over most of the OTL Northern states without difficulty.

The problem with preventing slave labour is that there is a very, very strong incentive to be able to control the supply of labour. Indentured labour is not equivalent, because there is a much more limited supply of indentured labour, and because indentured labourers were freed after a few years (and then quit, naturally). So the desire to turn to slave labour is extremely strong.

Whatever PoD is come up to minimise the slave population of the USA needs to overcome this very strong attraction to controlling the source of labour. It could probably be done, but it isn't easy.

Interesting. So would you theorize that the thing ultimately limiting the spread of slavery was an insufficient supply of slaves from Africa? As in, slavery was perfectly profitable for growing wheat in states like New York, but since growing sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton was so much more profitable than growing wheat, the limited number of slaves were concentrated where those crops could be grown, and meanwhile the profitability of selling slaves to grow wheat in New York was not enough to justify purchasing and transporting slaves from Africa to there?
 
Interesting. So would you theorize that the thing ultimately limiting the spread of slavery was an insufficient supply of slaves from Africa? As in, slavery was perfectly profitable for growing wheat in states like New York, but since growing sugarcane, tobacco, and cotton was so much more profitable than growing wheat, the limited number of slaves were concentrated where those crops could be grown, and meanwhile the profitability of selling slaves to grow wheat in New York was not enough to justify purchasing and transporting slaves from Africa to there?

In large part, although there were a couple of other factors depending on which parts of North America you're talking about. Geographical factors also play a part in determining the viability of plantation agriculture. That is, there needs to be enough good flat land near decent transportation links (natural like rivers, or artificial like railways) to allow plantation agriculture.

For instance, in New England, early farming was viable, but small-scale. The geography was not conducive to large farms of any description; too much uneven ground, not as many long rivers, rocky soils, and so forth. When the West was opened for US agriculture, farming in New England largely collapsed in competition with farming futher west, whether with free or slave labour (though mostly free).

Geographically, the Northwest was fine for plantation agriculture; plenty of open flat land and (in many areas) transport links. But because slavery was limited for political reasons and not enough slaves, it didn't get established in the wheat areas where it would have been otherwise viable.

Gavin Wright has a good article on the potential viability of wheat slave agriculture (and related matters) here. This article also provides some interesting (if disturbing) fodder for counterfactual speculation about how slavery might have been even more widespread (and abhorrent) than it already was in OTL North America.
 
The basic problem you're facing is that the south is climatically right for plantation agriculture. Plantation agricultural is a highly profitable industry, so rich people are going to want to do it. However, for it to work, it needs a large supply of labour. In the American south, the frontier meant that labour supply was limited, because workers would always want to move there. That means there will be an incredibly high desire for forced labour of one sort or another.

Perhaps you can get enough of a moral movement to oppose lifelong chattel slavery, and instead maintains indentured servitude.

Perhaps we can start with a slightly more successful Bacon's Rebellion? It's failure, as many of us probably know, did play a not insignificant role in cementing more hardline racial attitudes in at least the Southern colonies, including the fact that it strengthened caste-based slavery.

For one thing, slavery in what is now the United States was actually not nearly as widespread and prevalent as some would have you think in comparison to economies truly did have huge amounts of slaves, like in Brazil and most of the islands in the West Indies.

But to truly minimalize it, you need to have simply way more migrants to the South to work the land, and more of a yeoman farming tradition near the coasts and good land. Having extremely small early populations meant that there were huge land grants, and therefore, slaves to make them work.

A different Immigration Act of 1790 might go quite a ways to helping get at least more European immigrants to come to the South; but, also, what if some of the revolutions of 1848 had happened some twenty years earlier? A victory by France in the Napoleonic Wars could prove to be really helpful in achieving this.

Now while you might see what happened in Ancient Rome happen eventually and the rich take the farms of the small, having lots more small landholders in the Carolina and Georgia coastal farmland would help.

If you do this, I think you'd see slavery in the US at least die out by about 1830, which is around when New York banned it. New York had no real need for slavery but had a few die hards who wanted to keep it, and I think that you'd see this trend across the country happen in areas where slavery loses its purpose.

That's true, and even in Missouri, although slavery was modestly profitable(to a significantly larger extent than N.Y.), but not wildly so like in the Southeast; the same also went for Illinois, Indiana, and even some parts of Kentucky to some extent(namely, the northern areas) as well.

Contrary to what some may say, it truly was about the economic needs of the planter aristocracy rather than just a form of social control towards a mismatched group. You take that away, and slavery just isn't that profitable.

There is some truth here, although, unfortunately, slavery did also end up being a tool of social control as well, where the South is concerned; it's a huge part of the reason why so many of the Southern elite were willing to go far as to break the Union over it, when Lincoln's time came about.

This is not to say that black people are going to be enjoying full rights everywhere, as they wouldn't, but slavery in and of itself without the cotton gin collapses in the US.

Probably so, maybe by 1840 or so.

Now, if the US was to gain land in the Caribbean for some reason, this might change. There is a reason why the Spanish, French, and even in some cases the British turned a blind eye towards slavery in sugar colonies. It just doesn't work otherwise.

There is some truth here as well, although it certainly helped that Britain was significantly humbled by the loss of the 13 Colonies in the aftermath of the American Revolution; this allowed the abolitionists to gain a much stronger short-term footing than they very well could have had otherwise.
 
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