Confederate Expansionism After the Civil War?

[Grimm Reaper]

benajmin, Texas was the last state to enter the Union as a slave state and it was already an independent republic practicing slavery at the time, and the proponents of slavery found it impossible to find another state to accept slavery, whether in California, Kansas or elsewhere.

There were constant noises about how New Mexico-Arizona was obvious slave state material but somehow actually getting slave owners to move to that area proved impossible. By 1858 a total of 12 slaves lived permanently in that area.

Meanwhile there was every reason to believe that states like Missouri, where immigration from the German states was flourishing, or Delaware, where the practice was extremely limited, would choose to abolish slavery in the near future. Not to mention the 1864 bombshell when Maryland chose to do so, which came as a shock even to many abolitionists.

Certainly any review of the opinions and rhetoric of the time makes clear the abolitionists felt they were winning and the other side did not disagree.


The key point is that the alleged success of slavery in the minority of states still practicing slavery would be irrelevant on the day in the foreseeable future when there would be sufficient free states to pass an amendment outlawing slavery.

 

[Tyr]

Exactly, which means you have a lower class that finds it even harder than otherwise to spend money to help grow the economy AND for the most part slaves will do the least they can get away with and won't innovate which is untrue with free workers.

The way I'd see it is costs aren't so different anyway. Dickensian workers were often paid sub-survival pay anyway. You still have to feed your workers, cloth them, house them...
Except the worikers are there willingly, they have no choice really except they think they have a choice. The room for advancment is largely a glass ceiling but still they see it. They will work hard to get at it. They will learn new ways of doing things on their own in the hope of getting a better job.
A worker is a proactive person. A slave is a big baby who has to be led around and shown how to do everything- there's a reason employers today far prefer the former sort.
In fact...slaves are property. Workers are free people. You have to look after your slaves,make sure they stay healthy and can do their job. Workers though- if they get ill and can't work or die then there's plenty more out there. Its no loss to employers in those days to just fire someone and hire someone new.

I've posted it before but though this was meant in a tone mocking capitalism it has a good point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo-1W_8otS4

 

[Admiral Matt]

all the jobs that slaves are doing for no wages aren't being done by workers for some wages. Not to mention that the slave owning aristocracy favored an agrarian plantation style economy which was not as effective as that which was practiced in the north an elsewhere.

Which makes factory and slave owners more wealthy (wealth they will invest in something else), while admittedly limiting opportunities for wage work and reducing impetus to immigration. The economic effects were mixed.

The slave-owning aristocracy invested heavily in industry at various times before the Civil War. They had little if any bias against industry, instead having a strong bias toward profit. It was simply a matter of cotton usually giving a much better return on investment. Every time cotton prices dropped, you saw slaves popping up in southern industry, where they were in high demand.

Chattel slavery does not translate easily to industrial production, not to say that it makes such a transition impossible, but it does hinder the process.

Incorrect. Historically, chattel slavery did very well in industrial settings, north and south. The early iron industry in central and western PA, for example, was heavily reliant on slave labor. Even a generation after Pennsylvania began gradual emancipation; even when the child of any slave was guaranteed to be freed and the institution could be banned within a decade (ruining those who still had slaves) - even then the slave population of central PA was booming as ironworks bought slaves from the south.

Similar patterns continued in the antebellum south's industry up to the Civil War.

 

[Admiral Matt]

Please remind me how the United States won the Mexican-American War, how long the logistical chains were then, and how much railroad support was used.

No, he's right. The USN decided the Mexican-American War. Without the landing at Veracruz and march to Mexico the war would have been a long slug-fest instead of OTL's one-two punch.

 

[benjamin]

Grimm, your contention in previous posts seemed to be that the end of the slave trade in 1808 and diplomatic pressure from Britain had a direct effect on the abolitionist movements in the Western Hemisphere. If that is so than you are wrong.

The South desperately wanted to expand slavery because they were losing control of Congress and thus power in the National government. And Delaware, Maryland and Missouri were, perhaps, moving towards possible future emancipation. These are both true, but were not in any way a result of the ending of the Slave Trade. They were because of demographics (more immigrants to the North giving the North more population and thus political power, especially in the House of Representatives), economics (Delaware and Maryland were moving more and more towards industrial economies with direct ties to the North and slavery was becoming less important economically) and environmental (much of the Southwest was not suitable for plantation agriculture, though some slave were brought into New Mexico, Arizona and southern California). The fact that American slavery became limited to just the Southern states most certainly was not because of Britain and the end of Slave Trade.

It wasn't until 1829 that Mexico really began to crack down on slavery. If the end of the Slave Trade had such a negative affect on slavery then how was it that slavery grew and prospered in newly independent Texas? Why did Britain have such good relations with the Republic of Texas if it so abhorred slavery? Why did she import so much "slave cotton"?

It's because Britain opposed slavery ideologically but diplomatically did little and economically benefited from the institution for quiet some time after ending it her own colonies.

Following the the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), Bleeding Kansas (1856), and the Dred Scott Decision (1857) the abolitionists most certainly did not believe they were winning. This is why radical abolitionists, like John Brown, saw violence as the only way to bring about emancipation. Ironically, the South despite recent victories could read the writing on the wall. The influx of immigrants to the North and the failure to gain more slave states did produce a bit of siege mentality but it was mutual. Thus, the 1860 election and the new census became crucial. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Benjamin

 

[Grimm Reaper]

benjamin, you've gotten so many points wrong I'm not sure I see a point in continuing, least of all your analysis that abolitionists thought that they were not winning in the late 1850s, at a time when they had taken the House and Senate, saw the White House in reach and an extremely aged justice as their last obstacle on the Supreme Court.

 

[benjamin]

benjamin, you've gotten so many points wrong I'm not sure I see a point in continuing, least of all your analysis that abolitionists thought that they were not winning in the late 1850s, at a time when they had taken the House and Senate, saw the White House in reach and an extremely aged justice as their last obstacle on the Supreme Court.

Yet again, my original response was in regards to your assertion that the British and the end of the slave trade had a direct negative affect on American slavery. It did not.

As for the prevailing attitudes of the abolitionists and their opponents, the slave power,...it is my contention that both sides felt themselves to be losing the fight. Yes, the political pendulum was swinging in such a way that the North was gaining political power, but racism (especially in the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois) made the Presidential election outcome in 1860 difficult to ascertain. If the Republicans were seen as too pro-black there was the possibility of their losing the election. And as many have pointed out in other threads, Lincoln was moderate, not an abolitionist. Abolition, was not assured even with a Republican victory and slavery almost certainly would have been ended without a Constitutional Amendment. And this would not have been forthcoming until there were at least 44 states in the Union (and even then if and only if all of the border slave states had supported emancipation). So as you can see the abolitionists did not see them selves as winning. Yes, the Republican Party and Northern interests were gaining control of the National government, but this alone did not assure abolition.

Benjamin

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

The chances of the Confederacy getting ANY land outside of what they were squatting on when the peace talks happen is near zero. Why would the US give AZ and NM to the Confederacy who didn't have nearly enough population to hold it? After early 1863 the Confederacy could consider itself lucky if was allowed to hold all of TN.

It's not likely, but it depends on the nature of the CSA win. If there's a Confederate army in DC, or Philadelphia or something, there's room to talk, especially since AZ & NM are special cases.

It's a huge long-shot, but I brought it up to illustrated how incredibly unlikely a Confederate drive on Chihuahua would be.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Spain's actually twice the size of Chihuahua, so I don't know where you're getting your area measurements.

Otherwise you're right; that number's awfully small for an entire province. So I went back over my research and realized that I had misread (and therefore misposted) something: $4,500,000 was the annual yield of mining alone in Chihuahua by the end of the 19th Century, which I'd say is still impressive.

Also, random Chihuahua stats that I ran across that may or may not add to the discussion about Mexico-carving:
Pop. of Chihuahua (1895): 260,008
Pop. of Chihuahua (1900): 327,784
Pop. of El Parral mining district (1900): 14,748

Chihuahua used to be bigger.

Mining was almost the entirety of the province's output, and the $4.5M you're talking about is in 1900, not 1865. Consider that mining from S. Africa at the same time was $170M per year, and California in the 1860s was averaging $50M per year for gold, Chihuahua is not looking terribly exciting. And certainly not spending a gigantic sum on an unprofitable railway to reach.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Not according to my recollection, although I don't have sources to hand.

Even granting, for the sake of argument, that foreign capital was required to build Southern railroads... so what? I repeat my question above thread: why would Britain not invest in an independent South? In the nineteenth century, British investors were pouring money into countries over much of the world, including with more unstable regimes than the South, and including slaveholding regimes (pre-abolition Brazil). So even if foreign capital is required, why wouldn't British investors put money into the South?

Your recollection is incorrect. None of Southern railroads were built with indigenous capital.

As for the rest, Britain will invest in an independent South, but not in industry. Britain never invested in industry abroad in "colonial" places - it will only invest in primary resource extraction, and in the case of the South, that will be cotton and tobacco.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

All true, but however more vulnerable slavery may have been in Brazil, it was still around for decades when the British were investing heavily in the country.

Not to mention that if it is true that, as claimed upthread, British capital was important in investing in US railroads before the ACW, then that would mean that British investors were already willing to invest heavily in slaveholding Southern railroads. I don't see why they would change in an independent CSA, or at least not for reasons over slavery. British investors in this era (and, for that matter, investors of many nations today) didn't particularly care about the morality of what they were investing in, just the profitability.



Well, as I mentioned here, it was the slave trade that roused British anger, not domestic slavery.

The British acted against the slave trade wherever they could, including at source (ie Africa). When a country had domestic slavery but had stopped importing slaves, the British were much less vociferous. They still detested slavery, of course, but it didn't interfere with trade.

For instance, slavery in 1860 was represented in four different New World polities: the USA, Brazil, the Dutch colonies (most notably Suriname), and the Spanish colonies (Cuba and Puerto Rico).

The British acted against the slave trade by naval intervention in Brazil in 1850, and by repeated efforts to stop illegal slave imports into Cuba. (Which mostly failed until they cut the trade off at source in Africa, but that's another story). But in terms of action against domestic slavery itself... not enough to notice, whether in the USA, Brazil or Suriname.

That's not really true. It was the concept of slavery that aroused British outrage, and it was an attack on the trade that was the method of destroying it. There wasn't really any question of invading the USA or Brazil to stop it. In other words, they were pragmatic about it.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Haha, estoy contigo en esto

I was just trying to point out that Northern Mexico is much more attractive than Abdul's making it out to be, not just two slabs of "worthless desert."

Yes, but I don't think you've demonstrated that at all. You've provided figures from 35 years after the time we're talking about that show that a large province has minimal economic production.

As an example, Alaska's output at the same time (1905) with a population of 63,000 was $7.7M just for fish canneries, $2M for furs, $15.6M for gold, not to mention everything else. Chihuahua is, as I said, worthless desert. It would be more expensive to administer than any contribution it could make to Confederate power.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Please remind me how the United States won the Mexican-American War, how long the logistical chains were then, and how much railroad support was used.

I'll remind you. We used the navy to land an army and march on Mexico city, while also using our navy to land in California. Options not open to the CSA.

Also, when dealing with the areas we took, Mexico's supply problems were far worse than ours, as their logistical lines were longer than ours, and had to cross the useless deserts that we're proposing the CSA annex. In the case of a war between the CSA and Mexico over Northern Mexico, the theaters are now directly adjacent to the centers of Mexican power, whereas the South is force to use long supply lines.

 

[Abdul Hadi Pasha]

Grimm, your contention in previous posts seemed to be that the end of the slave trade in 1808 and diplomatic pressure from Britain had a direct effect on the abolitionist movements in the Western Hemisphere. If that is so than you are wrong.

The South desperately wanted to expand slavery because they were losing control of Congress and thus power in the National government. And Delaware, Maryland and Missouri were, perhaps, moving towards possible future emancipation. These are both true, but were not in any way a result of the ending of the Slave Trade. They were because of demographics (more immigrants to the North giving the North more population and thus political power, especially in the House of Representatives), economics (Delaware and Maryland were moving more and more towards industrial economies with direct ties to the North and slavery was becoming less important economically) and environmental (much of the Southwest was not suitable for plantation agriculture, though some slave were brought into New Mexico, Arizona and southern California). The fact that American slavery became limited to just the Southern states most certainly was not because of Britain and the end of Slave Trade.

It wasn't until 1829 that Mexico really began to crack down on slavery. If the end of the Slave Trade had such a negative affect on slavery then how was it that slavery grew and prospered in newly independent Texas? Why did Britain have such good relations with the Republic of Texas if it so abhorred slavery? Why did she import so much "slave cotton"?

It's because Britain opposed slavery ideologically but diplomatically did little and economically benefited from the institution for quiet some time after ending it her own colonies.

Following the the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), Bleeding Kansas (1856), and the Dred Scott Decision (1857) the abolitionists most certainly did not believe they were winning. This is why radical abolitionists, like John Brown, saw violence as the only way to bring about emancipation. Ironically, the South despite recent victories could read the writing on the wall. The influx of immigrants to the North and the failure to gain more slave states did produce a bit of siege mentality but it was mutual. Thus, the 1860 election and the new census became crucial. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Benjamin

I'm not sure why you're using 1808 as a date. The British ended their slave trade in 1807, but slaves continued to be shipped to the South until a few years before the ACW.

 

[Grimm Reaper]

benjamin, slavery went from legal in all of the Western Hemisphere to Brazil and part of the United States, plus the remnant Dutch and Spanish colonies, in a short time and with minimal effort on the part of the British. Further the two major exceptions obviously did not feel time was on their side.

Why should the British have to wage a series of wars or pay a higher price when their low-cost, low-offense policy was working?



As for your position that abolition was not winning and slavery facing an end in the foreseeable future in even the southern states, with their 'successful' slavery, all I can say is that you are wrong.

 

[benjamin]

I'm not sure why you're using 1808 as a date. The British ended their slave trade in 1807, but slaves continued to be shipped to the South until a few years before the ACW.

Because the US ended its Slave Trade on Jan. 1, 1808. And yes I know, and noted, that some illegal importation of slaves continued until 1858. But the numbers were relatively small and natural increase was far more important.

Benjamin

 

[benjamin]

benjamin, slavery went from legal in all of the Western Hemisphere to Brazil and part of the United States, plus the remnant Dutch and Spanish colonies, in a short time and with minimal effort on the part of the British. Further the two major exceptions obviously did not feel time was on their side.

Why should the British have to wage a series of wars or pay a higher price when their low-cost, low-offense policy was working?



As for your position that abolition was not winning and slavery facing an end in the foreseeable future in even the southern states, with their 'successful' slavery, all I can say is that you are wrong.

Grimm, you are again confusing British pressure with economic and geographic realities. The regions in which slavery was not overly profitably ended slavery sooner. Latin America ended slavery as it gained independence from Spain; in most cases before Britain herself ended slavery. But where slavery was profitable...it took longer for slavery to end (Brazil, Cuba, Southern states). Even in some parts of eastern Europe slavery existed until the mid-1850s or early 1860s. (Albeit not African slavery, but there was little British pressure to end this "white" slavery.) The end of the slave trade and British political pressure, which I contend is highly overstated on these boards, had little over all affect on slavery beyond taking the moral high ground. One needs only look at the deplorable conditions that existed in colonial Africa all the way till WWII to see that the European powers were all talk and little to no action.

As for your view on the political situation prior to the American Civil War; I've already stated that both sides felt they were losing. While it is true that the North was gaining political power, the abolitionists did not yet have reason to celebrate. True abolitionists were a minority in the Republican Party until at least 1862, and many Republicans were more than willing to allow slavery to persist to restore the Union (though I doubt they would have supported a Constitutional Amendment protecting slavery any more than the South would have support an amendment calling for gradual emancipation). Many moderate Republicans felt that slavery, if confined to the current slave states, would die out naturally, but there is little real evidence to support this claim.

This of course is not to be confused with the ideology shared by some Southerners, such as Robert E. Lee, which said that slavery would end when God deemed it should; i.e. slavery would end during the End Times or more precisely...Slavery would end when Hell froze over. (I'm paraphrasing of course.)

It's funny that you list Brazil and the remaining Dutch and Spanish colonies as the only places slavery remained...as besides the British and French Caribbean possessions...these were the areas where slave based agriculture was most profitable. Britain of course was a special case on its own what with its early Industrial Revolution and the likes of such luminaries as William Wilberforce. France took another eight years (after a failed attempt in 1794) and I'm betting that the debacle in Haiti helped to make that decision for them. Of course to the overworked Arabs and Africans in France's colonies not being called a slave was purely a matter of semantics.

A quick glance on the Wiki page concerning Abolition shows how many, many nations retained slavery long after Britain's ending of its slavery and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Benjamin