No Civil War - when is slavery abolished?

  • Earlier than OTL (during Lincoln's first term)

    Votes: 1 0.8%
  • A bit later than OTL (after 1865)

    Votes: 8 6.0%
  • Later than OTL (1870s - 1888)

    Votes: 68 51.1%
  • After 1888

    Votes: 30 22.6%
  • 20th century

    Votes: 26 19.5%

  • Total voters
    133
I wonder if the 'double whammy' of mass media and mechanization wouldn't put an end to it.... newspapers/radio/television would bring that international condemnation right to every household, and mechanization would start reducing the number of people needed in the jobs that slavery used to fill...
 
I wonder if the 'double whammy' of mass media and mechanization wouldn't put an end to it.... newspapers/radio/television would bring that international condemnation right to every household
USA had a lot of newspapers in the first half of 19th century, far more than Britain.
How would Hollywood operate with slavery being legal? Or would there be major film studios in, say, Texas if slavery is legal in Texas but not in California?
 
You will probably see a gradual emancipation in the late 19th century, similar to what Harry Turtledove envisioned in The Guns of the South. IE, all slaves born from 1880 to 1890 are emancipated after their 21st birthday, and all children of slaves are born free after 1890.

This coincides nicely with Industrialization and will lessen the economic blows that @CalBear mentioned.
 
In slavery, you don't have a choice. If you break the law, get caught and convicted, you're not "enslaved" - you're incarcerated. Nobody wants you there (except perhaps the victims of your crime) and there is no advantage to the state/nation for keeping you there. Not slavery. And to equate the two is insulting to true slaves who are victims and NOT perpetrators of crime.

You're assuming all laws are just. I don't agree that violating laws of segregation makes one an immoral person, or a 'true' criminal, their 'crime' has no victims.

But I believed the Thread is discussing the Slavery that I described... so all other forms pf slavery are redundant in this specific case even if applicable in some forms. If the worst is the norm and practiced well into the twentieth century...

I think we're veering from the main course of the discussion.

I think it's relevant.

Without a Civil War, how long does slavery continue?

If we're just talking about the peculiar slavery of the Antebellum South, what I would call chattel slavery, there is one answer. If we're talking about all the ways free (un-free) labour can be extracted from people, all the ways it has historically been extracted from black Americans, all the ways it may be extracted from them in ATL, it has a different, more complicated answer.

There's a curious trend to describe all unfree workers as slaves these days, I suspect because the emotional baggage of the word makes campaigning against it easier. The key feature of slavery is that the unfree worker is legally considered property. Debt bondage, indenture, penal labour, corvée labour and military conscription are all unfree labour and objectionable to a greater or lesser extent, but in none of these cases is an individual considered to be owned by another person.

The property definition is not sufficient. If one is forced to work and can't legally or physically leave, that's enough for me to call one a slave, it would be enough to consider myself a slave. Slavery where you are transferable property is one kind of slavery.

What happens in your examples of un-free labour when the labourer walks away to do something else with their life? Does the law return them to their 'owners', as though they were missing property, or does the law ignore them?
 
Just a thought, but wouldn't the planter class eventually have an interest in emancipation as the years wore on? By this, I mean, as industry takes off in the North and as cotton starts to lose its value as a cash crop on the international market, how is slavery for profit really sustainable any more to the planter elite? I imagine most of their slaves would pretty much be mortgaged by the 1920's anyway, right? Wouldn't it just be more economical for them to support gradual emancipation and a shift toward sharecropping?

I apologize in advance for any ignorance displayed in this post. I don't know much about the subject of slavery and American economics in this period. My question is largely inspired by what I know about Russian serfdom and emancipation during the same time period (where something like upwards of 60 percent of serfs were technically mortgaged to the bank by the nobility).
 
Mass manumission does not equal abolition of slavery.
In 1872 Census, 74 % of Negroes and Mulattoes in Brazil were free. Yet slavery was not abolished till 1888.
In 1860, just 11% of Negroes and Mulattoes in USA were free. And that includes free as well as slave states. Taking slave states alone, how big was their free coloured population?
And in 1850s, both North and South were cracking down on free coloureds. Oregon banned them from settling, while Arkansas, a slave state, made the move of banishing all of them from the state.
When would South have made the move from cracking down on voluntary manumission and free Negroes to permitting voluntary manumission and allowing freedmen to remain in society?
And once that move is made, how long would it take to voluntarily manumit most slaves?
 

Art

Monthly Donor
Just where the hell are these 4 million plus people supposed to go? Liberia?
 
What happens in your examples of un-free labour when the labourer walks away to do something else with their life? Does the law return them to their 'owners', as though they were missing property, or does the law ignore them?
In all of the other forms of unfree labour, the worker has some form of rights, often a limit to the amount of labour provided, and in some cases (e.g. military conscription) are entitled to receive pay.
 

missouribob

Banned
In all of the other forms of unfree labour, the worker has some form of rights, often a limit to the amount of labour provided, and in some cases (e.g. military conscription) are entitled to receive pay.
Doesn't matter much if you get paid if you die in the end does it?
 
Doesn't matter much if you get paid if you die in the end does it?
Matters a hell of a lot if your superiors get disciplined for mistreating you and you get your life back after a couple of years. It's worth noting that military conscription is one of the less objectionable forms of forced labour, and it's still pretty objectionable.
 
In all of the other forms of unfree labour, the worker has some form of rights, often a limit to the amount of labour provided, and in some cases (e.g. military conscription) are entitled to receive pay.

In every single form of unfree labour, the worker has some form of rights, including chattel slavery in the Antebellum South.

In the other examples, not chattel slavery, what actually happens when the worker walks away? If they are returned by the law, or charged with the crime of leaving, they are a slave of some sort, this includes indentured labourers, debt bondage, corvee labour, military conscription, and penal labour. If they can walk away from the situation without the law returning them to their owners (or whatever you want to call the masters of non-chattel slaves), or charging them with self-theft, they are not slaves; but this is not the case in your examples of un-free labour which are not slavery. If you want to call a person who can be returned by the law to their rightful place, to their rightful master, 'not property, so not slavery, by technicality', I have to disagree.
 
In slavery, you don't have a choice. If you break the law, get caught and convicted, you're not "enslaved" - you're incarcerated. Nobody wants you there (except perhaps the victims of your crime) and there is no advantage to the state/nation for keeping you there. Not slavery. And to equate the two is insulting to true slaves who are victims and NOT perpetrators of crime.
Ah, the problem is though, you'd often get situations where a black man is convicted (by an all white jury, remember very few places in the South had black jurors, as being a juror required property to an extent out of the reach of most black people) of, say, jaywalking or some other relatively minor crime, and sentenced by a judge to forced labor (which could be hired out to the private sector with the wages going to the government - it's part of why states like Mississippi in the early 20th century had next to no prison system as we know it) for a disproportionately long time (remember, a lot of the United States didn't have definite sentencing in their criminal codes well into the 20th century). And as soon as said convict gets out, the police charge them again with a similarly picayune offence. Essentially, it's slavery by installment.
 
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