Different crops and the viability of slavery

In such a situation, poorer whites might come to see slaves more as direct competition for their own farms and be more vocally opposed to it.
 
Had the boll weevil hit the south in the 19th century I think cotton production would have shifted to Brazil and Argentina. It would mean economic boom for South America at the expense of the US. Impact on the Industrial Revolution will probably be minimal.
 
Had the boll weevil hit the south in the 19th century I think cotton production would have shifted to Brazil and Argentina. It would mean economic boom for South America at the expense of the US. Impact on the Industrial Revolution will probably be minimal.

Yes for Cotton in Brazil. Northern Brazil experience a considerable cotton boom during the civil war, due largely to the cutoff of American exports. If America never becomes a major cotton exporter, Brazil will likely develop its own cotton culture (though cotton would be competing with both sugar and coffee)

No for cotton in Argentina. During this time range Argentina had an extremely small population, especially in its principal cotton growing regions, no infrastructure, and military dictatorship/slow burning civil war.
 

Thande

Donor
Thanks a lot for your help, Jared. You make a good point about a lack of cotton having an effect on textile industrialisation. Now in my TL, while Britain industrialises more or less like OTL, perhaps a bit less, France and Flanders develop their textile industries earlier than OTL. So I suspect without the cotton boom, much of it will be based on wool instead, which has a significant impact on the fabrics of choice and their position in society. Thanks for that.

Re the other question you asked, Britain abolished the slave trade at about the same date as OTL, a couple of years earlier perhaps, so that won't have a major effect.
 
Thanks a lot for your help, Jared. You make a good point about a lack of cotton having an effect on textile industrialisation. Now in my TL, while Britain industrialises more or less like OTL, perhaps a bit less, France and Flanders develop their textile industries earlier than OTL. So I suspect without the cotton boom, much of it will be based on wool instead, which has a significant impact on the fabrics of choice and their position in society. Thanks for that.

Re the other question you asked, Britain abolished the slave trade at about the same date as OTL, a couple of years earlier perhaps, so that won't have a major effect.

Worth figuring out where those million extra sheep are living, too.

Don't think there's room left in Scotland or Spain for expansion of shepherding on that scale. Italy? Ireland? New England? I think the western bits of Louisiana are good sheep country. You could maybe use a lot of the Appalachians if you burnt out the timber first. Iffy. And you need someplace with easy transport back to the northwest of Europe....

Wherever it is, the critters are simply ruinous for the topsoil, especially if your comparison is cotton plants. Mass desertification ensues. Probably ends up one of those heritage points of controversy - did mass industrialization "destroy" this or that country's arable land.
 
(though cotton would be competing with both sugar and coffee)

IIRC, the Brazilian cotton culture was centered in Maranhão(what was Maranhão then, not the current Maranhão state, which is much smaller), which was far from sugar and coffee planting areas. An interesting side-effect would be the development of an area which has been poor for most of its history(Maranhão still is one of the poorest states in Brazil)
 

Valdemar II

Banned
Interesting. If memory serves, there were also differences between malaria strains even within the Old World. European strains of malaria weren't as readily transmitted by African mosquitoes, and vice versa.

The North European mosquitoes whom was able to spread Malaria preferred cattle blood to human blood, was usual nocturnal, and only drank human blood opportunistic, with changes in how you raised cattle, like placing them indoor and separate from human in the night, the mosquitoes contact with humans was limited, which was how we accidental got rid of Malaria North of the Alps.
 
IIRC, the Brazilian cotton culture was centered in Maranhão(what was Maranhão then, not the current Maranhão state, which is much smaller), which was far from sugar and coffee planting areas. An interesting side-effect would be the development of an area which has been poor for most of its history(Maranhão still is one of the poorest states in Brazil)

Exactly, Maranhão was the center of Brazilian cotton. However, during the early 19th century Pernambuco also had an important cotton production. Considering that sugar was already suffering decline at the time, maybe it could be replaced in some areas by cotton. Also, could it be possible that Southern Bahia starts to produce cotton instead of cocoa, or the soil and climate there would be a problem?
 
People who became slaves where rubber was the main 'crop' faced even more issues than others and it's true regardless of the Imperial slave masters, with famously King Leopold and The Belgians being genocidal and the Germans fairly close behind wrt rubber plantations!
 
You say that slavery was an advantage in wheat production. If you have a situation where many more slaves were imported due to a later abolition of slavery, that would mean wheat would pick up a lot of them. It seems like that would mean slavery could spread very far north... with big political consequences.

Yes, in a no cotton gin situation, it's entirely possible that slavery would become entrenched in southern Illinois and Indiana, for instance. There were efforts along those lines during the 1820s in OTL anyway, and in an ATL with a greater supply of slaves and less pull down south, it could easily be successful.

Is there any slavery could become big in Appalachia if the price fell enough? Cohee culture seemed big against it in our timeline.

If the slave price falls too far, abolition becomes possible.

If it fell somewhere in between, well... The biggest problem in the Appalachians is the lack of, well, flat land. Small farms can certainly use slaves (and often did), but they can't take advantage of the economies of scale which let plantations do so well in OTL. Transportation is also a problem; it's hard to get the produce to market, and hence less profitable overall.

Slavery could be used in mining, turpentine extraction, construction, and farming in the Appalachians, but I'm not sure how profitable it would be.

As a final point, I've also heard that the price of slaves was starting to go up anyway before the slave trade was banned, due to the supply of them drying up in Africa. Is there any truth in this?

Not that I'm aware of. Other countries continued the slave trade for much longer. Brazil was still able to import considerable numbers of slaves until 1850, and only stopped because the Royal Navy cracked down on their shipping in Brazilian waters. The illegal slave trade continued even longer into Cuba, with the connivance of the locals. ("Why senor, I have had these Africans on my plantation all my life.")

Could another source be found? I'm thinking the indigenous peoples of Mexico and/or Gran Colombia.

I doubt it, short of major military effort. Free peoples don't like becoming slaves. While it could be done with enough military force and willingness to use brutality, there's no existing social structure and middlemen to use as there was with the African slave trade.

The problem is with economic viability. Slaves could be used for wheat production, but wheat isn't nearly as labor intensive, nor as profitable per unit as sugar, cotton, or tobacco especially in a labor poor environment such as North America. It would be much more profitable to use the money needed to buy a slave(s) and invest it in more land, than to use chattel labor for the planting and harvest, and have to support said slave(s) during the long winters.

Sugar and cotton were certainly more profitable. The situation is actually much less clear-cut with tobacco. During boom tobacco times, tobacco returned a greater profit. When tobacco prices dropped, planters switched from tobacco to wheat to obtain greater profits.

This happened in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina between the Revolution and the ACW. Parts of Georgia and South Carolina switched to tobacco after the Revolution, but then switched to cotton once the tobacco price subsided and the cotton gin allowed the price to boom.

There must come a point though where all the good sugar and cotton growing land was used up. At that point there would be a significant price differential between northern land and southern land, making the investment in slaves (providing they were cheap enough) and wheat slavery worthwhile?

The price of land wasn't really the determining factor in slave investment. Outside of the eastern seaboard and a few other isolated pockets, land was relatively cheap throughout most of the nineteenth century. Labour was the crunch. Reliable hired agricultural labour simply did not exist in either the North or the South. Farms were mostly family-sized in the North because the reliable labour didn't exist at any price.

What would matter is whether there was enough of a glut of cotton production to send cotton prices tumbling. In that case, slave labour might switch to other crops, with wheat (grains) and tobacco being the leading two candidates. (Sugar was so geographically limited that it didn't really matter much in the OTL USA, and maize didn't have an export market, since Britain in particular didn't care for it.)

The social effects of no cotton would be interesting. From what I recall from my last visit to Colonial Williamsburg, one of the things about tobacco is that you can grow it in relatively small quantities and still turn a decent profit off of it; most small farmers in colonial Virginia would have at least some land in tobacco.

Quite true; but then this was equally true of most small farmers within cotton-growing regions too. Cotton is profitable in small-scale farming too. It was just that cotton was so profitable that small-scale farmers quickly became large-scale farmers, where geography permitted, and that gang labour in cotton also allowed some other productivity advantages.

Incidentally, this was not true of nineteenth-century sugar farming. By then, steam sugar presses and the like required large sugar crops to be efficient. Small farmers in sugar would go broke in the South, while in Brazil they needed access to the sugar presses which the big fazendeiros maintained (and which also helped as a means of political and social control for the fazendeiros, by the way).

A side effect of this was that the price of slaves was considerably lower than it would become after the cotton boom got into full swing, and therefore that far more people owned (and therefore regularly associated with) slaves. There also was more land available for small farmers, since the massive cotton plantations hadn't formed yet. These produced a population that had far more everyday interaction between whites and blacks, and with much less of an economic gap between any given level of the social strata.

A good point, although it's worth noting that small farmers tended to be the ones who settled even in cotton country. While there were occasional exceptions, most of the cotton frontier was opened by small farmers who might have access to a slave or two. It was only as they became connected to export markets and reinvested their profits that they grew into plantations.

If cotton is gone, small tobacco farmers will have relatively more access to slaves (although the big planters will still own more). Wheat farming in Virginia may stay the same way, for reasons of geography, although in the more open expanses of the Midwest, wheat will probably grow into plantations too if they have access to slaves. And then sell a lot of their slaves to buy reapers whenever they're invented. (While keeping a smaller number to man the reapers.)

The major reason that slaver labor was concentrated in cotton production in the deep South (and secondarily in tobacco, rice, and indigo) is not that other crops were inherently unprofitable with slave labor, but rather because cotton was so profitable that cotton planters bid up the price of slaves to levels that made other crops unprofitable. From ~1800 to the Civil War, there was a steady process of the slave population being moved southwards ("sold down the river") as cotton planters expanded and growers of other crops in the border south sold their slaves and switched to free labor. Since the Atlantic slave trade was banned in 1808, the supply of slaves was relatively fixed and increased demand meant higher prices.

Quite true, with one minor caveat. The trend of slaves shifting southward and westward had begun to decline in some areas. Virginia's slave population was starting to increase again by around 1850 or so (I forget the year), where before it had been in dcline. But the general trend remained.

If you want to spread slavery over a wider area and working more crops, you could either delay the ban on the Atlantic slave trade to increase the supply of slaves, or accelerate the invention of the cotton gin in order to drive more importation of slaves before the ban.

The first would definitely do it. I'm not sure whether the second would. Accelerating the invention of the cotton gin may import a few more slaves, but it will also encourage the earlier migration of slaves southward and westward, too. That would limit their geographical expansion, particularly in the Midwest.

If you instead reduce the profitability of cotton (by delaying the cotton gin or introducing an environmental obstacle like an early boll weevil outbreak, as suggested upthread), you'll also get a more spread out slave population, but with very different impact on the rest of society. You'd likely see weaker political support for slavery, since slaveowners would have more of their wealth in land and less in slaves. You'd also have a somewhat smaller slave population (as cheaper slaves are more likely to be manumitted) spread over a larger area, leading to a political structure around slavery more like OTL border states than the deep South.

The thing is that it only takes a relatively small proportion of the population to become slaveholders for slavery to become entrenched in a state. 10% of a state's population in slaves will be enough in all but the most extreme of cases.

Even less than that would probably do it. Consider Delaware, where the slave population was moribund by 1860 and had been for decades, but the people there still clung to slavery, and refused to get rid of it even when it was clear during the ACW that slavery was on the way out. Slavery was only abolished in Delaware by the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment; an amendment which Delaware itself rejected at the time, and would only symbolically ratify in 1901(!).

And also, incidentally, wealth in land will still be relatively small relative to slaves, since land was relatively cheap. Most of a slaveowner's capital will still be tied up in slaves even if slave prices don't increase in real terms from their price in 1800.

In such a situation, poorer whites might come to see slaves more as direct competition for their own farms and be more vocally opposed to it.

To be pedantic, slaves didn't compete with poor whites, per se. Slaveowners competed with free farmers. The difference is that poor farmers, if successful, can buy a slave themselves. Many did, in the South. Even non-slaveowning farmers there were often (although not always) supportive of slavery since they aspired to become slaveowners themselves.

Yes for Cotton in Brazil. Northern Brazil experience a considerable cotton boom during the civil war, due largely to the cutoff of American exports. If America never becomes a major cotton exporter, Brazil will likely develop its own cotton culture (though cotton would be competing with both sugar and coffee)

In terms of exports to Europe, Brazilian cotton couldn't compete with North American cotton for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even into the twentieth. There were brief surges in Brazilian cotton production during the American Revolutionary War and the American Civil War, since that interfered with North American exports, but they dropped again after that.

No cotton gin doesn't change that, since the most productive cotton-growing areas of Brazil had switched to short-staple cotton anyway, which requires the cotton gin, too.

Also, as you point out, Brazilian cotton had to compete with sugar and coffee plantations. As I understand it, in northern Brazil the main cotton zone tended to be inland, rather than right on the coast. (In Pernambuco, sugar was grown on the coast, and Maranhao had forests on the coast). So transport as also a problem for major exports, and would require investment in building that up.

Thanks a lot for your help, Jared. You make a good point about a lack of cotton having an effect on textile industrialisation. Now in my TL, while Britain industrialises more or less like OTL, perhaps a bit less, France and Flanders develop their textile industries earlier than OTL. So I suspect without the cotton boom, much of it will be based on wool instead, which has a significant impact on the fabrics of choice and their position in society. Thanks for that.

As Admiral Matt points out, having wool textiles presumes that they find somewhere to farm the large number of sheep required. (A million? Two million? Five million? I'm not sure.) That needs a lot of empty land which isn't being used for some other purpose, and doesn't scale up as easily as cotton did in OTL.

Finding somewhere for the sheep to graze would be interesting. In OTL, wool took off so much in Australia and NZ because of so much empty land that it was easy to run sheep without competing with other interests. (Or, rather, other than the interests of the indigenous people which were ignored or driven out.) Sheep could be run in other places, but there's transport and ecological issues to be considered, too.

So it could be done, perhaps, but wool textiles didn't have the same mass market consumer appeal that cotton textiles had. That would still slow industrialisation, since they can't make such big profits, and market saturation would kick in earlier.

There may be some scope to work with flax, too. It won't have the same mass market appeal either, but one point to consider is that in OTL, the Irish linen industry experienced a resurgence during the ACW when cotton textiles were cut off. It might develop earlier (or some other flax cultivation elsewhere) in the absence of cotton.

The North European mosquitoes whom was able to spread Malaria preferred cattle blood to human blood, was usual nocturnal, and only drank human blood opportunistic, with changes in how you raised cattle, like placing them indoor and separate from human in the night, the mosquitoes contact with humans was limited, which was how we accidental got rid of Malaria North of the Alps.

Interesting, didn't know that.

Australian mosquitos also preferentially bite another species over humans (dogs), so this was another factor limiting the spread of malaria here.

Exactly, Maranhão was the center of Brazilian cotton. However, during the early 19th century Pernambuco also had an important cotton production. Considering that sugar was already suffering decline at the time, maybe it could be replaced in some areas by cotton.

Was sugar doing that badly in the early 19th century? I thought that the real shift didn't come until later in the century, as competing sources in the Caribbean and elsewhere really started to kick in.

Also, could it be possible that Southern Bahia starts to produce cotton instead of cocoa, or the soil and climate there would be a problem?

I think it could grow short-staple cotton, if I'm reading the climate conditions right, but that would require the cotton gin. Not sure about soil.
 
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To be pedantic, slaves didn't compete with poor whites, per se. Slaveowners competed with free farmers. The difference is that poor farmers, if successful, can buy a slave themselves. Many did, in the South. Even non-slaveowning farmers there were often (although not always) supportive of slavery since they aspired to become slaveowners themselves.
So they did compete with poor whites, those who happened to be farmers. An alternate situation occurred to me. If slavery is focused on less profitable cash crops, demand could be less and so prices might be less. Also if these farmers only buy one or two slaves they may treat them better than the larger plantation owners simply because they work more closely in daily activities and because they can't afford to lose their investment through neglect/harsh treatment. This being a relative term obviously.

Though I don't know the data either way so I'm only speculating.
 
As Admiral Matt points out, having wool textiles presumes that they find somewhere to farm the large number of sheep required. (A million? Two million? Five million? I'm not sure.) That needs a lot of empty land which isn't being used for some other purpose, and doesn't scale up as easily as cotton did in OTL.

Finding somewhere for the sheep to graze would be interesting. In OTL, wool took off so much in Australia and NZ because of so much empty land that it was easy to run sheep without competing with other interests. (Or, rather, other than the interests of the indigenous people which were ignored or driven out.) Sheep could be run in other places, but there's transport and ecological issues to be considered, too.

So it could be done, perhaps, but wool textiles didn't have the same mass market consumer appeal that cotton textiles had. That would still slow industrialisation, since they can't make such big profits, and market saturation would kick in earlier.

There may be some scope to work with flax, too. It won't have the same mass market appeal either, but one point to consider is that in OTL, the Irish linen industry experienced a resurgence during the ACW when cotton textiles were cut off. It might develop earlier (or some other flax cultivation elsewhere) in the absence of cotton.

Don't forget long-staple cotton.

It may well have actually declined after the invention of the cotton gin, because it was no longer necessary to cultivate it as intensely with the masses of short-staple available. [I say may as my sources are conflicted and the Cabalicide doesn't get too specific.] In this situation it's likely to expand to fill up every possible niche. It can be cultivated through most of the Caribbean and (IIRC) parts of Florida. The delta of the Nile is also good, as it happens.

Given that it was already the preferred cotton in OTL for its improved texture, cotton is likely to be even more of a prestige product in Thande's TL, both for the quality and the availability.
 
If the slave price falls too far, abolition becomes possible.

Why would this be?

It was also mentioned sugar started going into decline in the mid-19th century? Was this due to overproduction? What did sugar producers in the West Indies and Brazil start going into instead?

If the slave trade hadn't been abolished, and the slave price stayed low, I'm imagining cotton production would have been increased even more. Where else would/could it expand beyong the American South? Could overproduction make it go the way of sugar? Would producers in the Deep South replace it with something else?
 

The Sandman

Banned
Also if these farmers only buy one or two slaves they may treat them better than the larger plantation owners simply because they work more closely in daily activities and because they can't afford to lose their investment through neglect/harsh treatment. This being a relative term obviously.

This is both true and significant for future social developments. One of the things that stands out (to me, at least) between the pre- and post- cotton gin South is the way slavery was viewed. For the most part, you only start to see people defending slavery as morally correct after the concentration of both land and slaves into the hands of the cotton planters had begun. Before then, while slavery was considered an economic necessity, it was not broadly defended as appropriate from a moral standpoint.

Racism was also, IIRC, a more broad-based thing as a result of so many whites (and the occasional free black) owning slaves or associating with them on a daily basis. You would have far more examples of people differentiating between "blacks" as a category and "specific black people I work with". It's not equality, of course, but it makes a better starting point from which to build to equality than OTL's harshly ingrained racial divide.
 
People who became slaves where rubber was the main 'crop' faced even more issues than others and it's true regardless of the Imperial slave masters, with famously King Leopold and The Belgians being genocidal and the Germans fairly close behind wrt rubber plantations!

In none of the German colonies was rubber the main crop. What info I've found shows French rubber producing areas were nearly as bad as the Belgian and that some former German colonies mandated to France after the Great War petitioned the League of Nations to be returned to German control.
 
So they did compete with poor whites, those who happened to be farmers.

Not quite the point I was making. The distinction is that what's going on is not a contest between slave workers and free workers, exactly. It's a contest between white farmers, and more precisely between good (successful) and bad farmers. The successful ones make bigger profits, and are then able to buy a slave or two, and then become even more successful farmers, returning greater profits, and buying out their less successful counterparts.

The end result is plantations. But the other distinction is that because plantations have grown from small farms (at least west of the Appalachians), then they're mostly produced from the most effective farming class (better nous, better judgement, etc), and thus makes plantation agriculture even more effective since it's the most talented farmers running the biggest plantations. (Robert Fogel did quite a detailed study on this.)

This process happened quite quickly with cotton. In part, this was because cotton was such an incredibly profitable crop, meaning that a successful cotton farmer could afford to buy a slave quite quickly. It also happened because cotton was suitable for gang labour, which meant that once a planter had enough hands to form a gang of slaves, then their productivity went up even further.

It would happen slower with different crops, both for reasons of simple crop profits, and because of the effects of task versus gang labour. If there's no cotton, though, and if wheat is being farmed at all with slaves, then wheat plantations would probably evolve on flat ground. Tobacco is iffier, since its prices were so variable and it used task labour rather than gang labour, so slavery wasn't as big an advantage.

An alternate situation occurred to me. If slavery is focused on less profitable cash crops, demand could be less and so prices might be less. Also if these farmers only buy one or two slaves they may treat them better than the larger plantation owners simply because they work more closely in daily activities and because they can't afford to lose their investment through neglect/harsh treatment. This being a relative term obviously.

Given that even farmers who own one or two slaves would probably make enough of a profit to buy more, this situation may not last. Also, even large slaveholders tended not to treat their slaves so badly that they actually lost value. (With certain nasty exceptions, of course.) Slaves had value, and while the planters didn't care that much how the slaves felt, they did care when it started to show up in health effects or the like.

Don't forget long-staple cotton.

It may well have actually declined after the invention of the cotton gin, because it was no longer necessary to cultivate it as intensely with the masses of short-staple available. [I say may as my sources are conflicted and the Cabalicide doesn't get too specific.] In this situation it's likely to expand to fill up every possible niche.

It will, where those niches exist. But long-staple cotton is both a finickier plant, and also yields much less cotton per acre than short-staple. (There's a reason cultivation shifted to short-staple cotton.) I can't recall the exact difference in yield per acre, but it was at least 2x as high for short-staple cotton, maybe 4x as high, at least for Brazilian long-staple cotton.

That was the other benefit of short-staple cotton: it allowed the Industrial Revolution to really boom with textile mills because the short-staple stuff was so much cheaper to grow (in labour and in land) than the long-staple varieties. So even if long-staple cotton is being grown, it won't be as cheap or yield as much for the same acreage of land.

It can be cultivated through most of the Caribbean and (IIRC) parts of Florida.

It can be cultivated there, yes. The drawback is that most of Florida in 1800 is swampy and disease-ridden, and it will take a lot of effort to clear it.

The Caribbean is better, but the difference is that land is expensive in the Caribbean. For that matter, so are slaves: it's a competition with sugar for both land and labour.

This is not to say that long-staple cotton cultivation can't be done in those regions. It can, but the process will be slow, expensive, laborious, and still crimp the yield of any would-be cotton industrialists who want to set up textile milles in Britain or France or Belgium.

The delta of the Nile is also good, as it happens.

It is, but figuring out how to cultivate long-staple cotton effectively is not the work of a year or two. Or even ten or twenty. Farming and harvesting techniques need to be developed. Suitable cultivars need to be found, too.

For example, Egypt started to cultivate their form of long-staple cotton on a significant scale during the ACW, but that only worked because the cotton prices were so sky-high that it was feasible to import food. Once cotton prices crashed, Egyptian cotton production went with them, and didn't start to become competitive until the late 1890s/early 1900s. That was about how long it took to develop the sort of cultivars etc that were needed.

Caribbean production may do somewhat better, since they still cultivate it on a small scale, but it will still take a lot of time and effort to ramp up production to the required standard. It will also depend how cost-competitive it is with sugar, and for most of this period sugar had decent prices. Not to mention that the Caribbean is the best place to grow sugar. (Brazilian sugar was declining at this period due to competition from Caribbean producers.)

Given that it was already the preferred cotton in OTL for its improved texture, cotton is likely to be even more of a prestige product in Thande's TL, both for the quality and the availability.

Cotton will definitely be more of a prestige product, since there's a growing middle class but more limited product around. How much more depends on all of the factors listed above.

Also, the thing is that Egyptian cotton was itself a hybrid of the Sea Island cotton cultivars developed in South Carolina (as annual plants) with other perennial varieties of cotton which actually spread from Brazil to West Africa and then east and up the Nile. These hybrids were formed around 1850, and then really started to produce the high-quality Egyptian cotton. (While cotton was in Egypt before that, it wasn't the same very high quality product. (Source: here.)

This very high-quality product wouldn't be available earlier.

Why would this be?

The lower slave prices are, the less people are attached to them. This means that the other factors which push for abolition (moral ones and problems of perceived control) become more salient.

This is not to say that abolition would automatically follow, but it would at least be feasible if slave prices fell far enough. It won't be while slave prices stay high.

It was also mentioned sugar started going into decline in the mid-19th century? Was this due to overproduction? What did sugar producers in the West Indies and Brazil start going into instead?

A combination of factors led to the decline in sugar. The single biggest one was probably overproduction, though. Some competition from other sources, if I remember gith, too. And then there was the fact that with the abolition of slavery, it was a lot harder to get workers to cultivate sugar, ie it cost more, making sugar production less profitable.

Planters in Brazil shifted partly into coffee, and partly into diverse other crops. Planters in the British West Indies, at least, mostly went broke.

If the slave trade hadn't been abolished, and the slave price stayed low, I'm imagining cotton production would have been increased even more.

Sure, until over-production sent cotton prices plummeting. That happened a couple of times in the antebellum South, and would have happened again in the absence of an ACW. (British mills had over a year's supply of cotton in 1860.) Prices did fall again after the ACW.

Where else would/could it expand beyong the American South?

Nowhere, really, unless US borders have moved further south into Mexico. There was enough empty cotton land in the Old South even in 1860 that it would have been easy enough to ramp up production even further if needed.

If the US did annex certain parts of Mexico, and more specifically the lands around the Durango-Coahuila border, they'll have even better lands - that's about the best cotton-growing country on the planet.

Short of that, the South's competitive advantages mean that it will probably monopolise cotton production anyway, at least until near the end of the nineteenth century.

Could overproduction make it go the way of sugar?

Not quite that bad, but certainly enough to have severe problems.

Would producers in the Deep South replace it with something else?

Weren't much they could replace it with, in most cases. Sugar in a few of the coastal areas, tobacco in some of the more northerly areas, but not much else that's suitable as a cash crop. Other uses of slaves would probably become more prominent.

This is both true and significant for future social developments. One of the things that stands out (to me, at least) between the pre- and post- cotton gin South is the way slavery was viewed. For the most part, you only start to see people defending slavery as morally correct after the concentration of both land and slaves into the hands of the cotton planters had begun. Before then, while slavery was considered an economic necessity, it was not broadly defended as appropriate from a moral standpoint.

That's true to a point, but there was a diverse range of views even in the pre-cotton gin South. Even in 1790, you could get people expressing sentiments about slavery which wouldn't have sounded at all out of place in 1860.

The proportions of people who saw things that way seems to have shifted a fair bit, but it's hard to judge by exactly how much.

Racism was also, IIRC, a more broad-based thing as a result of so many whites (and the occasional free black) owning slaves or associating with them on a daily basis. You would have far more examples of people differentiating between "blacks" as a category and "specific black people I work with". It's not equality, of course, but it makes a better starting point from which to build to equality than OTL's harshly ingrained racial divide.

The concentration of slave ownership with the cotton gin shouldn't be exaggerated. There was a gradual consolidation of slave ownership in the hands of wealther families, but even in 1860 about 25% of the families in the South owned at least one slave.

There were big cotton plantations, sure, but there were plenty of slaves on smaller farms. The median size of a cotton plantation was about 35 hands, and that was just for cotton. Going from memory (Wright's book is unfortunately buried in a box somewhere), the average slave in the South as a whole worked on a farm with somewhere between 3 to 8 slaves, even in 1860.

The really big plantations were actually sugar plantations - 100 hands or more was normal in sugar plantations in Louisiana.
 
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