How long would Slavery Last in a Victorious Confederacy?

There's primarily-agrarian Brazil, which only abolished slavery in 1888, and, even then, not without certain opposition (cue the undertone of the republican coup of 1889).

So an agrarian, non-industrial country, with not much in the way of capacity, and whose principal role would be as a rival competitor in the export market? Yeah, okay. I can see Brazil doing the CSA so much good. The CSA might well extend the slavery era for Brazil by helping prop up the slave economy. I don't know that the CSA would get much out of it.


Britain and France could also give small support to the CSA behind the curtains, to prevent the Monroe Doctrine from coming back and open up the latin american markets.

For most of the 19th century, the Monroe Doctrine was basically enforced by Britain. Through much of the 19th and even early 20th century, Britain was the dominant neocolonial power in the region, so much so that Argentina was virtually a British dominion. They actually tried to get into the Commonwealth.

In the early 20th century, there was an influx of German immigration and influence.

And of course, Europe was firmly ensconced in the Caribbean in the antilles.

Seriously, if the European powers wanted a free-er hand in the Caribbean, Central America, Latin America, then their proximate geographical threat would be the CSA. Their interest would best be served by bargaining with the USA for liberties in Latin America, in exchange for good relations with the USA and isolating/screwing the Confederacy. What's the Confederacy got to offer? Cotton is very nice, but you can't use it for gunboats. France and Britain will eventually have their own supplies. It's a declining commodity.
 
Actually, moral questions aside, I think the USA is a bigger threat simply because it at least "claims" the who place thanks to the Monroe Doctrine... Britain liked it but if for whatever reason they decided they didn't, the house of cards come crashing down
 
So an agrarian, non-industrial country, with not much in the way of capacity, and whose principal role would be as a rival competitor in the export market? Yeah, okay. I can see Brazil doing the CSA so much good
No need for so much snark there, pretty please.

Seriously, if the European powers wanted a free-er hand in the Caribbean, Central America, Latin America, then their proximate geographical threat would be the CSA. Their interest would best be served by bargaining with the USA for liberties in Latin America, in exchange for good relations with the USA and isolating/screwing the Confederacy. What's the Confederacy got to offer? Cotton is very nice, but you can't use it for gunboats. France and Britain will eventually have their own supplies. It's a declining commodity.
How could the CSA be a "threat" if you mentioned it has no resources to pull off military industrialization?
Plus, if the USA, instead of the CSA, are propped up by Britain and France, the latter actors will most likely just find a new competitor.
With the USA and their geopolitical power broken, i'm pretty sure at least some markets would be open. Mexico and the former United Provinces of Central America, for example.
 
No need for so much snark there, pretty please.

Yeah. Sorry about that. Sometimes it gets out of hand. I don't see Brazil being a meaningful or useful ally of the Confederacy. Between 1840 and 1920 its geopolitical focus was entirely on the southern cone.


How could the CSA be a "threat" if you mentioned it has no resources to pull off military industrialization?

I was thinking Filibusterism. Wayne Walker in Nicaragua, the occasional adventure in Mexico, OTL. The ideology of the Confederacy was definitely expansionist in intent, if not in ability. Look up Knights of the Golden Circle.

Plus, if the USA are propped up by Britain and France, the latter will most likely just find a new competitor. European influence in South America may have ammounted to something, but it was actually pretty iffy from Peru and upwards.
With the USA and their geopolitical power broken, i'm pretty sure at least some markets would be open.

I'm not so sure of that. Britain was the dominant foreign power in Ecuador and Peru into the 1920's. They were only eclipsed by the United States then, and the US didn't really have full dominance until the 1940's.

As to Colombia and Venezuela, I would have to look it up and do some research as to the relative scope of international involvement.

The United States has always been heavily involved in Central America, but even there, OTL the French had enough presence and influence to commence an effort to build a canal. We think of the Caribbean as an American lake, but up until the Spanish American war, almost all the real estate in the Caribbean was divided between the Spanish, British, French and Dutch... the only exception was Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the Dominicans occasionally flirted with Spain.
 
No, I don't see the CSA being a threat to British interests, and really they and the Dutch are the only fish that matters.
 
No, I don't see the CSA being a threat to British interests, and really they and the Dutch are the only fish that matters.

So what's the best approach for them on the US then?

Side with the Confederacy, incur enmity and geopolitical rivalry.

Or throw the Confederacy under the bus, in exchange for a free geopolitical hand.
 
Ignore the CSA, duh... And if the USA gets in the way of Caribbean interests (unlikely, the British supported the Monroe doctrine because it actually helped their interests) then ignore the South and play economic warfare against the North.

My point being, if either of the two reminants threatan Euroepan inretets, it's more likely tro be the industrialized North
 

Ian the Admin

Administrator
Donor
Put that sort of statement in someone else's mouth (or post) again and you are just plain gone.

Kicked for a week for trolling

I'm reversing the kick.

"Fixed it for you" is a standard internet idiom. Perhaps not everyone understands it but I don't want to see people kicked because not everyone understands a standard idiom.

Also, the "fixed" version is inoffensive.
 
I really don't think other countries would bother putting the bonus on the Confederacy and not the North African states which not only had slaves, they captured people and turned them into slaves! The Barbary Wars stopped them from having the naval power to capture ships and enslave captives but it was not due to a change in law of slavery in those nations but due to a lack of capacity

And no, I don't see anyone but Britain being able to force the issue if they tried. Also, Britain is likely the only one to try, if it does at all

To be fair, Tunisia abolished slavery of her own accord (though Europeans encouraged the move), several years before the US Emancipation Proclamation. The whole point of there being a Confederacy was their refusal to even consider the prospect of having to do the same sometime in the future. Also, slavery in Islamic contexts is legally different from antebellum south chattel slavery (although in practice it varied a lot and sometimes resembled that). In Islamic law, slaves are considered full human beings who just happen to be in a diminished, dependent condition. They can be sold or bought (but not separated from family members in the process) but cannot be really treated as property. Also, Islamic law encouraged freeing slaves - in the Confederacy, some states had laws against it.
This is however somewhat theoretical - slaves were often treated much worse than law consented, and even if in principle they had legal recourse (slaves could sue masters for mistreatment under shari'a laws, I don't think that would have ever been possible in Antebellum South Carolina) it was rarely possible for them to actually obtain it.
 
The idea that slavery couldn't end within in the lifetimes of people who fought in ACW, uses wrong arguments to justify itself.
Southern planters might've plunged US into war over slavery, but it wasn't how they 'sold' the war to poor and middle class domestically, or other countries internationally. No, they justified secession with stuff like Washington violating state rights, or appealed to southern national identity, or claimed that states joined union was voluntarily so could voluntarily leave. They did not feature slavery prominently in their propaganda, because they weren't stupid, they it wouldn't 'sell' very well.

Perhaps we should read what they actually wrote to justify secession.

"For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery." - Georgia Declaration of Causes for Secession

"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization." - Mississippi Declaration of Causes for Secession

"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection." - South Carolina Declaration of Causes for Secession

"Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time." - Texas Declaration of Causes for Secession

"In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States." - Texas Declaration of Causes for Secession

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." - Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy

"We but imitate the policy of our fathers in dissolving a union with non-slaveholding confederates, and seeking a confederation with slave-holding States." - South Carolina's Address to the Slaveholding States

"Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery, and of the free institutions of the founders of the Federal Union, bequeathed to their posterity. - Address of the Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention

"Louisiana supplies to Texas a market for her surplus wheat, grain and stock; both States have large areas of fertile, uncultivated lands, peculiarly adapted to slave labor; and they are both so deeply interested in African slavery that it may be said to be absolutely necessary to their existence, and is the keystone to the arch of their prosperity." - Address of the Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention

"The people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery. " - Address of the Commissioner from Louisiana to the Texas Secession Convention

"To evade the issue thus forced upon us at this time, without the fullest security for our rights, is, in my opinion, fatal to the institution of slavery forever. The time has arrived when the people of the South must prepare either to abandon or to fortify and maintain it. Abandon it, we cannot, interwoven as it is with our wealth, prosperity, and domestic happiness." - Message of the Governor to the Tennessee Assembly

"The Black Republican party has for years continued to make aggressions upon the slaveholding States, under the forms of law, and in every manner that fanaticism could devise. and have now gained strength and position, which threaten, not only the destruction of the institution of slavery, but must degrade and ruin the slaveholding States, if not resisted. - Message of the Governor to the Alabama Legislature

"The Federal Government has failed to protect the rights and property of the citizens of the South, and is about to pass into the hands of a party pledged for the destruction, not only of their rights and property, but the equality of the States ordained by the Constitution, and the heaven-ordained superiority of the white over the black race. -Letter of the Commissioner from Alabama to the Governor of Kentucky

"What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters, in the not distant future, associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped, by the Heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? -Letter of the Commissioner from Alabama to the Governor of Kentucky

"Will the South give up the institution of slavery, and consent that her citizens be stripped of their property, her civilization destroyed, the whole land laid waste by fire and sword? It is impossible; she can not, she will not." -Letter of the Commissioner from Alabama to the Governor of Kentucky

"Wealth is timid, and wealthy men may cry for peace, and submit to wrong for fear they may lose their money: but the poor, honest laborers of Georgia, can never consent to see slavery abolished, and submit to all the taxation, vassalage, low wages and downright degradation, which must follow. " Open Letter from the Governor of Georgia
 
I think I disagree. The problem with slavery in an industrialized society is not that it is physically impossible to have unpaid slaves doing factory work, it's that the logic of an industrialized market economy conflics with the logic of slave owning plantation aristocracy. In industrialized capitalism, there are always new form of all sizes popping up and falling down, or laying off workers and then rehiring them in accordance with the business cycle. This works fine for employers of wage laborers, because they only hire people's work temporarily and pay them just so long as they're hired. In a slave economy though, you have to buy labor at a higher cost and permanently before the work even begins. Basically, it turns the variable costs of wage labor into permanent investment. Rather than just buy the physical capital and then hire or fire workers as necessary, investors will have to buy the slaves at a high cost first, making it difficult for smaller investors to thrive, and then they just have to hope they bought the right number of slaves. If they bought too many, it's much harder to dispose of that extra labor because they can't just be fired, and if the profits turn out to be smaller than expected then the high costs of initial investment might prove that the whole enterprise was not worth it. In addition, it will mean that in periods of economic growth the price of slaves will increase as everyone will want to hire more labor, resulting in price increases that are not seen in other factors of production, therefore making investment even harder just when the market is ready for growth. Whereas in a recession, the price of slaves will decrease making it more difficult for industrialists to adjust to the market by selling their slaves.

What I can see, though, is foreign investors taking advantage of the low costs of labor (because they're all unpaid slaves) and building factories in the CSA where mostly slaves work (this I think can only work so long as the industrialists are foreign and their markets are mostly outside the CSA, for the reasons explained above). This might prove a little difficult though so what I think is even more likely and interesting is a situation in which foreign investors don't directly own the slaves, only the physical capital and administrative corporate infrastructure, while the slave owners operate as manpower contractors basically and rent their slaves to foreign owned factories. This would make an interesting dynamic and push the slave owners to a strange position in which they are the global masters of the cheapest labor but also not even the ruling class of their own country (after all, they're just middlemen int this arrangement). I also wonder how the big plantation owners would react - would they be strongly opposed to this new class of slave contractors because it sidelines themselves and also puts their own country under foreign economic influence, or do they use this as an opportunity to use their slaves outside harvest time by renting them in factories?

Renting slaves was common - the factory owner had no need to purchase his slave work force. Many southern industrialists, like the Tredegar Iron Works, preferred slaves workers since they could not go on strike.
 

Md139115

Banned
Renting slaves was common - the factory owner had no need to purchase his slave work force. Many southern industrialists, like the Tredegar Iron Works, preferred slaves workers since they could not go on strike.

As I said previously, the main reason why Tredegar initially employed slaves was as a cost-cutting measure, then later on because there were no other workers available. However, you are right in that most of those slaves were not owned by Tredegar, but rather by slaveowners who rented them out for I believe $1 a day, though I could be wrong.
 
I'm going to need some clarification regarding this but didn't sugar lords in Barbados and other British islands work their slaves to death in the cane fields to the point that they had to import more slaves from Africa constantly to replace them while in the south they increased by natural means? I have never heard anyone say that Mississippi had worse working conditions than Barbados.

Yeah, nothing was worse than Caribbean slavery. It didn't matter which country it was, they were all death traps. The Caribbean is hot all year around, so the growing season never ends, and the main cash crop (sugar cane) is exhausting to harvest - slaves had to hack at it with machetes. And then there were the tropical diseases.
 
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I actually suspect slavery would have ended in the late 19th century. Keep in mind though, the end of slavery doesnt mean the granting of corresponding rights.

A large chunk (not all, or even a majority) of the south's stance on slavery was that the stance on slavery became the cultural touch point to determine which 'side' you were on in the north or the south. When you put that aside, the main motivation for slavery becomes a combination of economic self interest and racism (which often comes into being to justify economic self interest). This is why, for example, it was possible to abolish the slave *trade*. A combination of it being in the economic interest of the upper south (slaves on plantations were becoming less profitable there. Its why so many of the upper south slaves were being sold to the deep south) plus political advantages on an international level as the slave trade became frowned upon.

I suspect if the south had won the civilwar, the cultural pressure to hold on to slavery as a touch point to separate themselves from the 'yankees' vanishes. Its much more important to cling to it fiercely when its being attacked by perceived outsiders (which is how northerners were viewed) compared to making reforms when theres not that 'threat' to your identity hanging over things.

Politically as time progressed there would be huge pressure as well on an international stage.

I suspect these two things combined would lead to the end of slavery. But that it would end in such a way that in many senses it was 'name only'. I imagine there would in no way be equal rights (even worse then in segregation). And I imagine there would be all sorts of laws (or lack of laws protecting) to assure that the ruling class didnt just lose all that labour.


So yes i suspect 'slavery' as a legal institution would have ended in the decades following the war. Within a generation or two. But you wouldnt have been left with even the thin illusion of equality you had after the north won the war.
 
I really think there should be a poll added to this.

Aside from that, I really do wonder what the Northern states would look like. Would they be stronger or weaker? Also, would the South be able to capitalize on the oil in Texas and Oklahoma? If they could it might bring the levels of antagonism between the sides to new levels.
 

dcharles

Banned
Yes but getting from that to having the South industrialize after starting as a plantation economy is a bit of a stretch. My problem is that I can't see a process in which an industrialized market economy manages to grow in a society like the CSA, at least not without foreign investment.


Haha. I feel like I'm having dejavu. See this thread: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...acy-pulls-a-meiji.422274/page-8#post-15367205

But long story short, the South was industrializing, just not to anywhere near the extent of the North. IOTL, the postwar South became very industrialized in comparison to the rest of the world. In an ATL, the South emerges from the war richer and healthier, with many more factories than when the war started. The most likely outcome of this change in circumstance is that the postwar CS would be economicallly healthier and more manufacturing oriented than the OTL postwar South.
 

missouribob

Banned
Until today unless the CSA stopped existing, had a Constitutional Convention or a coup/revolution. Note that ATL 2017 slavery might not be very widespread but it would still exist de jure.
 
Haha. I feel like I'm having dejavu. See this thread: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...acy-pulls-a-meiji.422274/page-8#post-15367205

But long story short, the South was industrializing, just not to anywhere near the extent of the North. IOTL, the postwar South became very industrialized in comparison to the rest of the world. In an ATL, the South emerges from the war richer and healthier, with many more factories than when the war started. The most likely outcome of this change in circumstance is that the postwar CS would be economicallly healthier and more manufacturing oriented than the OTL postwar South.
Industrializing to what degree? Having some industry in a plantation dominated economy is not the same as being an industrialized slave holding economy. And it still doesn't mean slavery wasn't holding industrialization back.
 
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