Confederate Victory and the Future of Slavery

if the CSA succeeds in achieving independence, how does that affect the institution of slavery in the south and abroad in the near to mid term?

Will slave prices continue to rise? How will that affect the size of the black population in the south vs OTL?

In Brazil and Cuba, does this vindicate slavery and hamstring the idea of abolition?
 
I assume method of victory is handwaved?

It depends on what will North do. Will they expel escaped slaves back south as illegal immigrants? Doubtful. Fugitive slave laws will end up repealed. It means that North is no longer subsidizing Southern slavery by hunting down escaped slaves at their own expense. So CSA has to pick up the slack, and bear costs of securing their own border.
 
The biggest wrench into slavery is going to be the Industrial Revolution. Not sure how slavery would evolve if industry takes off in the South. One possibility is that slaves are made to work in factories, with plantation owners cashing out and selling slaves to industrialists, though the price of slaves will drop dramatically due to the dangerous conditions factories used. This could lead to any number of outcomes, not the least of which is slave revolts. When factory work is no longer seen as an opportunity but as a death sentence, people will revolt, and major reforms will be necessary or the CSA will suffer economic collapse and be forced to become an insular, somewhat agrarian society. This still would have it on the brink of collapse, with slaves constantly up in arms.

Freed slaves may carve out a state from the CSA of their own, but the damage to industry will be done, and reforms will be demanded all over North America. Sure, there will be a fight, but it will be with increased fervor and with more participants who don't want to be viewed as like the backward, slave-driving Southerners. Organized labor will have increased power, and perhaps either the USA or CSA will have a full-on Labor party or party faction.
 
Should the CSA win I doubt the north would send any slaves who had made it behind Union lines back, and of course the Dred Scott decision is moot given the split. Assuming the British, and secondarily the French, are the initial CSA allies once the splitting of the USA has been accomplished, the British especially will find slavery morally repugnant which will cause problems for the CSA. In addition to imperial sourced cotton coming in, the British may not want to buy slave produced goods...

Industrial slavery is possible but fraught with difficulties. Skilled workmen are not disposable like field hands. The experience prewar with slaves involved in the iron industry, for example, shows they had to be given a great deal more slack and even financial incentives. Furthermore as agriculture is mechanized, the plantation owners will have lots of "surplus" slaves. Prices will plummet, and given how much capital was tied up in slaves across the south this will be a major economic hit. Additionally, by the time of the ACW many states had passed laws limiting manumission and not allowing the residence of reed slaves or free blacks at all.
 
Should the CSA win I doubt the north would send any slaves who had made it behind Union lines back, and of course the Dred Scott decision is moot given the split. Assuming the British, and secondarily the French, are the initial CSA allies once the splitting of the USA has been accomplished, the British especially will find slavery morally repugnant which will cause problems for the CSA. In addition to imperial sourced cotton coming in, the British may not want to buy slave produced goods...

I don't know about the French, but the British are on solid terms with the US by the 1860's and as you say, they had no use for southern cotton. I think the idea of the British joining the CSA is horrendously overblown by this point. In any case, the CSA would likely be seen as something of a pariah. Slavery would probably evolve into serfdom. The blacks are still kept down, but they make an 'honest living' by doing the shitty jobs that the whites don't want to do and earning enough to buy a loaf of bred and some off-cuts at the end of each week.
 
International pressure is the only thing I could really see dampening slavery's long run prospects, which were perfectly compatible with industrialization. Even the international pressure could be mitigated. An independent south would have great trade relations with Britain and France (people bring up Indian and Egyptian cotton, but that's not even a quarter of what they were using before the war), and the U.S. would still have slavery for quite some time after the war. Hell, a Confederate victory could even revitalize slavery in the western hemisphere, encouraging Spain and Brazil to hold onto it longer than OTL upon seeing the victory of a slave republic in North America.
 
Assuming Delaware, D.C., Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri stay with the Union, yes in theory there is slavery in the USA. In some places it is a small remnant, in others a little more but nowhere so important it can't go away quickly - and go away it will and rather quickly. Yes the UK will need to import some cotton from the CSA, but this will be minimized as rapidly as possible. I'm not saying industrial slavery isn't possible, however the need to educate industrial workers, the skills that will need to be trained and then honed all mitigate against this. There are only so many grunt jobs that unskilled illiterates can do in a factory, and there are so many opportunities to cause sabotage. Sure you can have a Draka like reign of terror, where every accident is treated as sabotage and you kill (rather hideously) a large number of slaves when it happens, but that has its own drawbacks. Furthermore one of the desires of the political leadership of the south was to avoid industrialization - of course eventually there would need to be some, but by then the CSA will be way behind other powers.
 
The whole idea of Southern Independence, to protect slavery, is a catch-22, by the secessionists' own logic. Consider:

- They opposed the Republicans on the issue of extending slavery to the territories. Until the war started, there was no effort to abolish slavery in either the Republican party or the Federal government as a whole.
- The slave holders were adamant that the expansion of slavery was necessary to its economic viability.
- If they successfully secede, all the territories that they wanted to spread slavery into are now in foreign territory. Of a government that is now purged of almost all pro-slavery elements.

I really would like to lay out the logic to them, at each secession convention, and ask them just how this all was supposed to work out. Peacefully seceding would doom their cause, and violently seceding would cost them lives and treasure, and alienate their major trading partners.
 
When would slavery end in a defeated U.S.? If the war is lost, the Abolitionists and Republicans may be discredited forever, and no one is going to want to stir up trouble poking at the slavery issue again. It can only be eliminated by constitutional amendment, or by state legislatures, neither of which are going to be forthcoming in the requisite numbers after a lost war everyone will be blaming on the Republicans.

Slavery was perfectly profitable when used for industry OTL, in mills, mines, distilleries, ironworks, etc. Even if factory work requires education (not much), it's a workforce management owns their entire lives, so any additional costs would just be a drop in a bucket, especially if they can expect good returns. The South was perfectly willing to industrialize, with states like Virginia pointing the way; the war was not based on opposition to industry, with many southerners pointing out the complimentary nature of agricultural and industrial economies.

I really would like to lay out the logic to them, at each secession convention, and ask them just how this all was supposed to work out. Peacefully seceding would doom their cause, and violently seceding would cost them lives and treasure, and alienate their major trading partners.
That's what Mexico is for. Or Cuba, or Nicaragua. The territories weren't that great for slave agriculture anyway, so they likely wouldn't work as a pressure valve for surplus slave population or to bolster the interstate slave trade.
 
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