Outlaw Slavery with the Passage of the US Constitution?

[Jared]

I defer to you on this topic, as I know how much you've researched it, but just to test a couple of things:

On tobacco, doesn't soil restoration take time? There's also the issue that tobacco (and rice) requires more skilled slaves than cotton does, which ups their price and makes the trade less profitable.

Soil restoration takes time, yes, which is why one of the methods Ruffin suggested was to use crop rotation, which allowed other useful crops (food, fodder, etc) even when the soil is not growing tobacco. There were various methods he and others proposed, but the net effect was that tobacco production was still highly profitable in Virginia, even if it took a few years to restore the most exhausted soils (such as around the Tidewater).

In terms of slave prices, the basic price of slaves in OTL was set by the sheer scale of the cotton boom, and the high returns it generated. This led to cotton planters bidding against each other for the limited supply of slaves, and in turn pushed up prices to a much higher point than they would have been in the absence of cotton. So while skilled slaves still commanded higher prices than unskilled slaves, in a hypothetical no-cotton South, the overall slave prices are going to be lower, not higher, even for skilled slaves.

I accepted that grain was more efficient than using slavery, but my understanding was that it wasn't a huge differential (which is what I think you need for people to do logical backflips to deny the obvious moral repugnance of slavery over a vigorous abolition campaign)

Sources differ on how much grain had a productivity advantage per worker with slavery. The crucial advantage of slavery, though, was that it allowed the more efficient farmers to expand and push out small farmers. This is because in the nineteenth century agricultural USA (both North and South) land was cheap and labour was expensive, and in particular, hired labour was unreliable. Even the most efficient free farmer couldn't expand their farm beyond what could be farmed by their own family with occasional hired help. (Hired labourers tended to quit, go on strike, depend too high prices, or go and start their own farm.)

Slavery changed that because slaves couldn't go and start their own farm. This allowed the more efficient/lucky slave-using farmers to expand in a way which wasn't possible with free soil, and take advantage of economies of scale and access to greater capital which free farmers could not. This process applied to grain as much as to cotton.

On sugar, the coastal areas of the Gulf is a pretty slim slither of land, isn't it?

It's large enough to permit a very profitable sugar sector, with strong political influence.

More broadly, if the cotton gin is delayed, what happens is that there is no one dominant crop throughout the South, but rather that there would be a mixture for uses for slaves, each of them profitable enough in their area: tobacco, grains/livestock, rice, sugar, long-staple cotton, urban manufactures, etc. This is akin to the pre-ARW pattern, where there was tobacco, rice and indigo, with smaller use of other crops, artisanal work, etc.

 

[Alex Zetsu]

I'm just wondering if the southern delegates had a brain fart and 75% of each southern state's delegates (so in a sense EVERY state passed it by a supermajority) approved of a construction that outlawed slavery, what would happen? Aside from the delegates meeting an "accident" the constitution is passed and slavery is outlawed, what are the states going to do about that?

 

[David T]

I'm just wondering if the southern delegates had a brain fart and 75% of each southern state's delegates (so in a sense EVERY state passed it by a supermajority) approved of a construction that outlawed slavery, what would happen? Aside from the delegates meeting an "accident" the constitution is passed and slavery is outlawed, what are the states going to do about that?

If by "delegates" you mean the southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention, even if they somehow went along with such a provision, there are still the ratifying conventions. If the slaveholding states don't ratify--and as it was VA and NC were hard struggles--the Constitution will never go into effect. If in addition you mean that the delegates to the southern state ratifying conventions *also* go along, we are just getting even deeper into ASB territory.

 

[Thoresby]

The States ignore the Constitution and demand and another Convention or simply secede.

 

[Arkenfolm]

Not happening. Slavery is too profitable, with too strong of economics behind it to ban it. Since the South had such economic value (significantly more than the north), you can't ban what makes their economy so strong.

At most you could change the culture to make a progressive outlawing of slavery like what Brazil did possible. But that's still pretty doubtful. Those plantations wouldn't work themselves, and slaves were in high demand (a slave was about the price of a new car).

Yes, but rice and, especially, tobacco, depleted the soil horribly, meaning that heavy slave use in those areas was on the way out. (This was a major reason why Virginia and North Carolina supported banning the slave trade, as it kept slave prices high for them to be sold down south.) Grain wasn't particularly more profitable using slaves than free labour, so such farmers wouldn't be aggressively pro-slavery. And Louisiana was the only area of the US that could really grow sugar, so that won't be a big bastion of political power on a nationwide basis.

So for slavery to last more than 30-40 years, it probably does need cotton.

Hence where you get the expansion of slavery wherever it needs to go.

Appalachia can grow the grain for you--most of Appalachia's grain was for slave plantations in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, etc. The limited amount of slaves there presumably were used to some degree in those venture.

I'm just wondering if the southern delegates had a brain fart and 75% of each southern state's delegates (so in a sense EVERY state passed it by a supermajority) approved of a construction that outlawed slavery, what would happen? Aside from the delegates meeting an "accident" the constitution is passed and slavery is outlawed, what are the states going to do about that?

Pass out enough whisky and get these delegates to have their brain fart (ASB as it is), but I'm sure they'd get some way to get peonage out of the newly freed slaves.

 

[Alex Zetsu]

If by "delegates" you mean the southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention, even if they somehow went along with such a provision, there are still the ratifying conventions. If the slaveholding states don't ratify--and as it was VA and NC were hard struggles--the Constitution will never go into effect.

Whoops. I forgot the states had to ratify it. If all the people who need to have a brain fart are in the same event, hallucinogenic fungs like Ergot or maybe free whisky would do the job. Rats

 

[Nivek]

Only if the Constitution is just adopted people above mason-dixon line and that is still maybe...

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Nope. Not going to happen.
If emancipation is in the draft, it never passes. It's that simple.

 

[Mackon]

Could anti-slavery be more dominant, sooner? IIRC a lot of the 'southern' states that eventually formed the Confederacy didn't actually have much in the way of slavery.

 

[IchBinDieKaiser]

I could only see a gradual abolition being implemented in the constitution, with a guarantee that slave owners will be compensated. Even in this scenario the best outcome would be that only North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia seceding. The upper south were more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. They were also the biggest southern supporters of ending the slave trade, so I think they could possibly get on board with a gradual emancipation.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

guarantee that slave owners will be compensated

Compensated? With what? The Federal income was tiny in the early days, and slaves were expensive. Moreover, the US already had a huge debt from the war that it wasn't being able to realistically pay off. If they try to pay slave owners in 'Continentals', that's pure theft.

Also, remember that the Constitution imposed a ~10 year prohibition on any restrictions on slave imports. Given that THAT got written in, I doubt emancipation is at all feasible.