Culture of the South without slavery

What if slavery was banned by the British from the very beginning. What would the culture of the American South be like in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries? Surely it would be different from either New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, but how? What sort of economy would develop? How much and what type of immigration would it have? What sort of social structure would evolve?
 
"Banned slavery from the beginning" is a... tricky PoD. Limiting slavery's growth in the 18th Century, I can sort of see, but if the English are banning slavery in their colonies from the get go, that means England is a very different country, and ergo the settlers would be completely different. The idea needs fleshing out is what I'm saying.
 

Glen

Moderator
If suppressed from the beginning, the first very obvious difference is the lack of African influence on Southern culture. Another likely point will be a longer and more widespread use of indentured servitude to supplement work population. Cotton will not be able to grow as large or as fast.

Might want to look at Appalachia as a model for some of this.
 
I was going to explore something like this. Due to my POD slavery was going to largely collapse in the late 18th century. For black folks, they were going to more less get treated like Natives unfortunately and for the white folks I was planning on having small farm society like the north.

However, my TL is about the aftermath of a brutal pandemic, so in terms of how to develop such a scenario with a more traditional and less ASB POD, I'm not sure. You could explore a TL where the US doesn't win the ARW or it's avoided through compromise, and when the British end slavery it would effect America too (assuming such manumission isn't butterflyed away).
 
If suppressed from the beginning, the first very obvious difference is the lack of African influence on Southern culture. Another likely point will be a longer and more widespread use of indentured servitude to supplement work population. Cotton will not be able to grow as large or as fast.

Might want to look at Appalachia as a model for some of this.

This; I also agree the South would, on the whole, resemble more closely its West Virginia/Tennessee/Kentucky components. Unfortunately, while on a moral level banning slavery is the right thing to do, the lack of African influence would also be quite a shame...after all, that butterflies away some of America's best music (rock 'n roll, the Blues, hip-hop, rap...even country music wouldn't sound quite the same!), not to mention some of its best culinary elements :(
 
It might look a lot more like British feudalism, with white serfs/sharecroppers substituting for African-American slaves.
 
Ninety percent of the otl demand for African people abducted into slavery was from South America and the Caribbean... Okay, scratch off the British-controlled Caribbean locations.... So in other words, Africa is still screwed out of big chunks of population, and half of the people chained and taken across the middle passage still die en route.
 
If Georgia stays a free colony (there's a TL on this board featuring an early discovery of gold leading to this), it geographically "contains" the Barbadian slaver culture in South Carolina. This might keep it from spreading into the "Black Belt" of Alabama/Mississippi.

You'd still have African cultural influence in the country, albeit not as much.
 
I think this thread is very, very similar to your "economic viability of sugar, tobacco, cotton plantations without slavery" thread. They're really two peas in a pod. If there's slavery in the Caribbean, there's going to be slavery on the mainland in areas where it's economically profitable.

And importing slave labor was so profitable in both regions that like I said in the other thread, you'd need an early POD and a very strict religious prohibition on slavery in order to prevent it from happening. OTL no mercantile-focused European country is going to be banning slavery or the slave trade until post-Enlightenment; there's too much money in it.
 
.......you'd need an early POD and a very strict religious prohibition on slavery in order to prevent it from happening. OTL no mercantile-focused European country is going to be banning slavery or the slave trade until post-Enlightenment; there's too much money in it.


Quaker-power!!!!!!
 
If their's no slavery in the first place, then the culture of the South is going to be so fundamentally different as to not be recognizable to us IOTL.

The core of what we identify with Southern culture is the result of the White Caribbean slavers who formed the bulk of the population their, so if their's no slavery they won't be the nucleaus of the South's population, so overall you'd probably end-up with states that look more like Virginia and Maryland and some that simply don't have any real OTL equivalents.
 
Look to Australia for clues as to a non-slavery economy.

I'm very reluctantly with Sucrose on the economics of slavery trumping moral arguments for a good century, then it became entrenched.
Also the nature of slavery changed a lot in the 1700's from indentured servitude anyone (African or European) could be and yet earn their freedom, to lifelong bondage for Africans only needing a lot more paperwork to be manumitted.

However, I'm of the opinion that there was plenty of surplus population in the UK ripe to volunteer for indentured servitude or settlement to escape political beefs and poverty if they so chose and many did.
I wanted to point to Australia as a possibility as well as New Zealand or the Cape colony in South Africa as examples of British colonies that didn't require slavery for settlement or development.

The Caribbean element is troublesome b/c it sets the precedent of setting up plantations for cash crops worked by the cheapest labor possible with a mercantile class profiting from the inputs (slave labor) and outputs (molasses and rum). Here's a thought- say hurricanes devastate the coastal plantations
in Carolina enough that it's not seen as viable in North America?

However, a smallholder culture a la Appalachia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, etc could very well butterfly a lot of slave-holding. Also, you mention the Quakers. Who says all the German Amish and Mennonites and other European religious nonconformists all have to come to Pennsylvania?
A lot more of them coming South would have butterflied the Scots-Irish influence that dominated Southern culture.
I'm of the opinion that Texas wouldn't have seceded ten years later b/c there was enough liberal Europeans (Germans, Czechs and others) that wanted no part of slavery to stiffen the spine of those opposed to slavery to vote it down.
 
I'm very reluctantly with Sucrose on the economics of slavery trumping moral arguments for a good century, then it became entrenched.
Also the nature of slavery changed a lot in the 1700's from indentured servitude anyone (African or European) could be and yet earn their freedom, to lifelong bondage for Africans only needing a lot more paperwork to be manumitted.

However, I'm of the opinion that there was plenty of surplus population in the UK ripe to volunteer for indentured servitude or settlement to escape political beefs and poverty if they so chose and many did.
I wanted to point to Australia as a possibility as well as New Zealand or the Cape colony in South Africa as examples of British colonies that didn't require slavery for settlement or development.

The Caribbean element is troublesome b/c it sets the precedent of setting up plantations for cash crops worked by the cheapest labor possible with a mercantile class profiting from the inputs (slave labor) and outputs (molasses and rum). Here's a thought- say hurricanes devastate the coastal plantations
in Carolina enough that it's not seen as viable in North America?

However, a smallholder culture a la Appalachia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, etc could very well butterfly a lot of slave-holding. Also, you mention the Quakers. Who says all the German Amish and Mennonites and other European religious nonconformists all have to come to Pennsylvania?
A lot more of them coming South would have butterflied the Scots-Irish influence that dominated Southern culture.
I'm of the opinion that Texas wouldn't have seceded ten years later b/c there was enough liberal Europeans (Germans, Czechs and others) that wanted no part of slavery to stiffen the spine of those opposed to slavery to vote it down.

Yeah, this is the biggie why I was so skeptical of this being plausible without an early POD. A smallholder culture extending down into the southernmost colonies is perfectly plausible in the absence of large-scale plantation slavery, but it's only a short hop from the British colonies in the Caribbean to the British colonies on the southern mainland. Anything that's economically profitable on the islands is going to be imported to the continental colonies that have a similar climate. To prevent slavery in the South, you'd need to prevent slavery in the Caribbean, and that goes back to Socrates's thread on that subject a couple pages back.

The idea of hurricanes causing the island colonies to be abandoned is, sorry, pretty out there, IMO.
 
Are we counting the areas gained from the Spanish, Mexicans, Indians, and French already having there slaves freed or would they take them away with them?
 
Its actually very easy to find a Point of Divergence to ban slavery quite early in the British colonies. John Casor, the first slave in the British colonies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casor

Have the legal proceedings surrounding his indentured servitude go differently, and there possibly wouldn't be any slavery in the British colonies. Likely, the plantation colonies would be much less economically developed. What plantations there would be would be dependent on indentured servitude.
 
Its actually very easy to find a Point of Divergence to ban slavery quite early in the British colonies. John Casor, the first slave in the British colonies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Casor

Have the legal proceedings surrounding his indentured servitude go differently, and there possibly wouldn't be any slavery in the British colonies. Likely, the plantation colonies would be much less economically developed. What plantations there would be would be dependent on indentured servitude.
Wow, a Black owning the first Black slave in the Eastern Seaboard. Not that surprising I suppose, given that the man was from Angola, where the coastal cities made their money from slavery.
 
"Banned slavery from the beginning" is a... tricky PoD. Limiting slavery's growth in the 18th Century, I can sort of see, but if the English are banning slavery in their colonies from the get go, that means England is a very different country, and ergo the settlers would be completely different. The idea needs fleshing out is what I'm saying.

It would be easy enough, i think to get slavery definitively abolished about 1700. Lord Holt rendered decisions basically banning slavery in England about then, Blackstone's commentaries (initially?) Said slaves were freed automatically by breathing English air.

Oddly, slavery was allowed in England by a strange opinion published by two high goverment officials in 1729, that cited no legal precedents. Say what!?!?

So. A general statement that slaves are automatically free in England, circa1700. Then a legal opinion in north america, asserting the same as English rights, possibly by a local judge trying to establish ALL English rights for the colonists. We could then nip slavery in the bud before it got fully started. Black 'servants' might face lifelong indenture, but their kids wouldnt be slaves....
 
Don't know if this is discredited or not, but you might want to take a year off and read "Albion's Seed" by Fischer. Mostly the parts about Virginia and the back country. May give some idea of what might have been before the taint of slavery was put on the immigrants.
 
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