Boll weevil infestation in southeast USA from 1800? Effect?

raharris1973

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What if around 1800 some infected bales of Mexican cotton end up in at Augustine and the boll weevil spreads within a decade to devastate the Georgia cotton crop? What are the agricultural, economic and geopolitical effects?

could the weevil thrive in the 1800-1810 Southeastern USA?

If it makes cotton crops highly vulnerable to loss, how do southern plantations crop choices and slavery change?

What does this do to English and New England textile manufacturing development? What about broader commercial consequences for those areas and NYC?

is the advance of white and black settlement west of Georgia and south of Tennessee affected, for example, slowing down?

What are the consequences for the global economy, worldwide tech levels and us westward expansion and relations with Mexico by 1880?
 
Slavery was on its way out (very slowly) until the invention of the cotton gin made slavery suddenly profitable again.

If cotton is, again, rendered uneconomic, slavery will decline again, and the moral arguments against it will be allowed to surface.

Around 1800, slavery was still considered generally to be bad, just economically necessary, the massive defence of the morality of slavery didn't happen until cotton really took off. So, short-circuiting that would make a huge difference.

iOTL, the boll weevil crossed the river at Brownsville TX in 1892, and it took ~30 years to infect the entire south. If you introduce the weevil a century earlier, it will infect all the contiguous growing areas in a similar time. (If there's not much cotton grown in Mississippi yet, that might act as a fire-break and allow continued cultivation in Louisiana and Texas for a while.
 
Slavery was on its way out (very slowly) until the invention of the cotton gin made slavery suddenly profitable again.

If cotton is, again, rendered uneconomic, slavery will decline again, and the moral arguments against it will be allowed to surface.

I agree that slavery would take a hit but I think it was a long way from abolition. Tobacco alone couldn't sustain it. I suspect a slow abolition by 1850ish, state by state.

Probably an early prohibition on extending the institution to new territories.

I don't know what it would do to the population as a whole. The black population did increase some by additional, largely illegal slave trading, but the US may go the way of Brazil. As it become less economical, more and more would be freed until, at some point, there would be more free blacks than slaves and the a hard date would be set for emancipation of the rest.
 

raharris1973

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Do we think this leaves in place the forces resulting in American acquisition of Florida by 1819, and American settlement in Texas from the 1820s?

If there is still American migration into Texas, would cotton and/or other plantation crops become such a "thing" that a stereotype of southern pro-expansionism and northern territorial restraint comes into being?

Or might we have a reverse stereotype, with most of the country being pro-expansionist, but with the southeastern states feeling every additional gain of territory further marginalizes them?
 
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