How long would slavery exist in a victorious CSA?

Assuming victory for the CSA, how long would slavery survive as a legal institution?


  • Total voters
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OTL, in all but name?



This. I think that the rising Social Darwinism of the fin de seicle, combined with all the weird "biology" that was accepted norm of the good virtuous scientific gentlemen of the time would lesson the outrage over Southern slavery a great deal more than we assume.



Likely something along these lines.

To *some* extent, at least amongst conservatives. Liberal types, however, might actually become even *more* outraged, especially as time goes on.

It didn't have a huge, hostile neighbor just across the border nor was 1/3 of its population eager to leave .

Or an economic system that would have been eventually doomed to failure, bar the rise of a dictatorship.....

The Confederate Constitution made it almost impossible for slavery to be abolished. Congress is specifically stripped of any ability to pass laws limited slave ownership in any way. A state might conceivably abolish slavery within its own borders, but other language makes clear that any slave-owner can travel with his slaves to any state in the Confederacy, so in effect slavery is legal throughout the Confederacy until every single state individually passes state-level legislation abolishing slavery. Needless to say, that's very, very, very difficult to achieve (I'm looking at you, South Carolina).

Yep, unfortunately this happens to be correct.

And in 1860, there was next to no abolitionist sentiment in the Confederacy. There had been a sharp change from Jefferson's day, when slavery was seen as a necessary weevil that had to be eventually extinguished, to the age of Edmund Ruffin and his ilk, who saw slavery as a positive good that had to be protected at all costs. There were some who privately harbored anti-slavery feelings (John C. Breckinridge probably being one of them), but they could never have expressed them publicly without being cast out of proper society.

Sad, but true: Jefferson would have been horrified by the Fire-Eaters, and even Andrew Jackson didn't like them much.

After all, look what happened to Patrick Cleburne in early 1864.
Didn't Cleburne die in battle, though?

The lost cause has succeeded in spreading this meme that slavery was becoming unprofitable and was fast on its way out. It's hard to be further from the truth.

I'm not so sure of that: they might have publicly adopted this stance for their own purposes(it certainly made for good PR, admittedly.), but they sure didn't start it. Hell, if anything at all, the meme that slavery would have survived to the present day with no problems at all, actually fits the real belief systems of much of their ranks, rather more closely(as horrible as that sounds, it's true).

Plantation slavery wouldn't have become economically obsolete until the 1930s, when IOTL the first mechanical cotton pickers were developed. Even then, it would take time for the technology to mature and for planters to invest in it. It's important to remember that slavery's successor system, sharecropping, survived into the late 20th century in some places. It's reasonable to assume that at least a few old fashioned plantations would still be in business a full century after confederate independence, assuming a perfect world where only economic forces are at play.

To *some* extent, but that's if the C.S. economy doesn't implode by then; this may not be accepted by some, but we often grossly underestimate just how greedy many planters were, often to the point of irrationality.....and greed is never good for a nation's overall well-being: just look at the U.S. IOTL prior to the Great Depression.

In a world where liberalism has ended in a said farce, presuming that the Union simply comes apart and the Confederates simply have decided that Slavery = Good is a national credo, I think the more likely course of action is that the modern views of humanity--things like the UN Declaration of Human Rights--never emerge at all.

I'm not convinced of that. Not one bit. Now, granted, I don't disagree that the C.S.A. being successful *would* be a blow to liberalism, but I doubt this would actually prevent anything like the U.N. D.H.R. from being created.

Oh, and by the way, for anyone who thinks that traditionally reactionary societies are inherently stable-one needs only to look at Russia prior to 1918 IOTL; it can be plausibly argued, sadly, that the death of Alexander II was what started Russia on the road to societal ruin. Or hell, even Qing China counts for an Eastern example.

Confederate Victory means the defeat of the United States, a ramification that the Sons of the South have not considered beyond the first conclusion. If Liberalism ends in Mexican style warlordism or what would basically be an failure over much of North America, how does it exactly influence the world in its direction?

And again, we can point to Qing China in particular.

National Exceptionalism, that we are better than them and therefore they can plow our fields and mill our grain, will likely not end.

It hasn't quite ended even IOTL. But that won't necessarily prevent a decline.....

Meanwhile, Slavery likely becomes more and more cruel and more and more profitable. Imagine the profits of selling organs for transplants, or sexual gratification with children, under the aegis of a belief that God approves. If enough people make enough money, the guys who ask the hard questions can get shot, or lynched, or recant under torture, and the system can perpetuate itself, vindicating itself by its mere existence.
At least up until the economy implodes.....which, admittedly, could take a long time(maybe up until about 1960 or so at the very worst) depending on how all the cards are played.

Given a Southern Victory and the collapse of ideas that make opposing Slavery politically feasible, you likely have slavery lasting until Robots become cheaper.
Nope, barring some highly unlikely massive spike in technological advancement, the C.S. economy would have imploded some time before that.
 

bugwar

Banned
Make Love, Not War

Nope, they won't be chums. Too many died for that and too many Unionist left even in a failed Civil War
Sure they would be 'chums'.
Too many surviving veterans and Northern civilians were tired of war, and just wanted to get on with their lives, not spend it in a fruitless rematch of Civil War 2.0.
They already lost once, why try again?

You don't need hate, just pragmatism. If the CSA fails less people will try it in the future.
Do you really think the liberals of Yankeeland would put up with a large standing army to keep their own people in line?
Remember, they don't have to worry about slavery anymore, almost everyone up there is white and all are free.
Who would rebel?
And against what?
Or do you have sources stating that the people of the North were tired of the Federal government's actions during the war?


Actually he will, thousands of slaves escaped during the war and roamed the countryside and some of them were armed this won't change even if the South wins.
And how many of the 'free ranging blacks' would stay behind in hostile lands when the Federal army leaves?

Slave cases were clogging up the courts OTL .
Source please?


Actually it will, they aren't going to be chums and just trusting that the enemy won't start things up again is stupidity beyond even Jeff Davis.
Why would the Yankees want to attack the South again?
They already lost once, why compound the error?
The war was expensive enough the first time for the North, why do you believe it would be any cheaper on the second try?

It wouldn't make the blue states angry , it would make the job of escaping slaves much easier. They don't have to go all the way to Canada, Ohio will do.

Um, that is the situation in our timeline.
Slaves didn't have to go all the way to Canada to gain freedom.
The Northern states were going out of their way by 1861 to not enforce the Fugitive Slave Laws.
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Didn't Cleburne die in battle, though?

Yes, at Franklin in November of 1864. The point I was making was that most of the generals to whom he pitched his limited emancipation scheme were outraged and horrified at his suggestion, even after the disasters of Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga and when the Confederacy needed every person holding a rifle that it could find. There were some exceptions, among them Breckinridge and Hardee, but generally Cleburne's plan was considered near-treason. General Walker nearly challenged Cleburne to a duel over the matter, the Confederate government ordered the whole thing hushed up, and Cleburne never received another promotion even though he was probably the Confederacy's finest division commander.

This shows up dedicated the powers-that-be within the Confederacy were determined to maintain slavery.
 
Here's a question or two.

Would the CSA and USA still have the same economic dependency on each other once they became separate federations? How would defeat affect the trend of unaccountable executive power Lincoln laid down? If the British didn't stay strictly neutral in the U.S. south, does this mean they didn't intervene in China, which would thereafter be ruled by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
 
Plantation slavery wouldn't have become economically obsolete until the 1930s, when IOTL the first mechanical cotton pickers were developed. Even then, it would take time for the technology to mature and for planters to invest in it. It's important to remember that slavery's successor system, sharecropping, survived into the late 20th century in some places. It's reasonable to assume that at least a few old fashioned plantations would still be in business a full century after confederate independence, assuming a perfect world where only economic forces are at play.

Excellent points, but the first commercially viable mechanical cotton pickers didn't come out until the 1950s.
 
An interesting view on your part.
Mine is on the fact that the bluecoat voters agreed that they should move on past the war, get back to normalcy and the benefits it brings.
This was a war that split families, and now they have the chance to renew their ties.

A bigger obstacle to post-war relations is going to be Confederate revanchism. By their actions the Confederates showed that they considered all slaveholding states to be theirs by right. And a the southern US territories for their mineral wealth and route to the Pacific. Not only will the Confederates not gain that, they will almost certainly lose parts or the whole of states that did secede. And OTL shows southern leadership was very good at holding grudges.
 
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