POD to free the slaves by 1865 without bloodshed?

Basically what the title says. What's the latest possible POD that results in the complete ban of slavery in the United States by 1865, while also avoiding major bloodshed, as in the American Civil War? Could Buchanan accomplished it? Does it take a POD during the presidency of George Washington? Is there even such a POD that accomplishes this after the foundation of the USA?
 

Grimbald

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Order by Cromwell or Charles II that forbids importation of African slaves into North America and frees all those here after 7 years of labor.
 
The Founders outlaw slavery at the beginning without beating around the bush with the idiotic idea that it'll solve itself.

And you end up with no United States at all - or perhaps two, one with slavery, one without. There's no way the South would ratify a Constitution that outlawed slavery. They wouldn't even allow the African slave trade to be stopped for another 20 years.
 
Basically what the title says. What's the latest possible POD that results in the complete ban of slavery in the United States by 1865, while also avoiding major bloodshed, as in the American Civil War? Could Buchanan accomplished it? Does it take a POD during the presidency of George Washington? Is there even such a POD that accomplishes this after the foundation of the USA?

The Founders agree to ban slavery anywhere west of the Appalachians (or more precisely, west of the original 13 colonies, as western New York and western Virginia already extended west of the mountains, and slavery was legal in both states). Kentucky and Tennessee are admitted as free states. Slaveholders devise a scheme of indentured service which is tantamount to slavery. This allows slaveholders to take their "animate property" into the western states and territories. But it is not hereditary slavery, and becomes both more widespread and less constraining over time. Delaware, Maryland, and the remaining northern states with slaves (NJ, NY, CT, RI) adopt it.

In 1826, the U.S. adopts a Constitutional amendment declaring that slavery is not hereditary, which means all children of slaves are free, even in the few states which still have slavery. Indentures can be bought and sold, but it becomes illegal to break up families, and increasing numbers of blacks are not indentured, working for wages, or as sharecroppers, or striking off to become smallholders on the frontier. Virginia and North Carolina abolish slavery in the 1850s. Finally in 1862, South Carolina and Georgia convert their remaining slaves to indentures.
 
And you end up with no United States at all - or perhaps two, one with slavery, one without. There's no way the South would ratify a Constitution that outlawed slavery. They wouldn't even allow the African slave trade to be stopped for another 20 years.

In fairness the question was without bloodshed, not a singular nation at the end result.
 
The Founders outlaw slavery at the beginning without beating around the bush with the idiotic idea that it'll solve itself.

It solved itself with some bloodshed. More importantly, if three generations after you don't have to deal with a potential problem you couldn't solve, that's OK as long as you didn't create the problem in the first place.

How about the British win at Saratoga? As long as the French don't enter the war, the Patriots lose (if the French join and THEN the British win at Saratoga, I think the Loyalists are still doomed).

Anyways, the British crown trumps the property rights, so the crown can take away the slaves with some compensation with no muss or fuss, just like they did in Jamaica.
 
Cotton Gin doesnt get invented for another 30 years by which time the slavery issue resolves when short-staple cotton fails to be profitable west of OTL Dublin, GA. Or the British threaten a trade embargo between 1830 and 1845 with France willing to play along.
 
No cotton gin, perhaps? Indigo and tobacco were depleting soil productivity to the point of economic extinction by that time. (Snap.) That said, I don't think that suffices to get there.
 
Right off the bat, you'd need to prevent, or severely delay the Cotton Gin from being invented. That's what kickstarted the calcification of the South's "peculiar institution"; prior to that pretty much everyone agreed that slavery was terrible but couldn't conceive of an alternative.

That, and slow down (or even halt) the US' rate of westward advancement. Butterfly away the Louisiana Purchase (either by having Jefferson lose or it never being offered for sale in the first place) and some hotheaded President trying to take it by force would be a boon. Have Britain fully commit to the War of 1812 and taking chunks of the Midwest. Something, anything, to prevent the US from growing as exponentially as it did between 1800 and 1848. Slow down or prevent the possibility of new slave states, and you avoid a lot of problems.
 
The problems with delaying the cotton gin are twofold:

(i) it isn't plausible for it to be delayed by more than a handful of years (10 at most); and
(ii) paradoxically, delaying the cotton gin may strengthen the geographical spread of slavery within the USA.

For the first, the cotton gin was a simple enough invention, with hand-controlled equivalents already present in other parts of the world. The British demand for cotton was also high enough that lots of people were throwing lots of money at potential solutions. Someone would have come up with a similar version pretty quickly. I think that a more than ten-year delay is implausible.

For the second, the invention of the cotton gin had the effect of concentrating slave populations in cotton states. This led to the involuntary migration of large numbers of slaves south and west from the border states and Upper South into the cotton states, following the invention of the cotton gin. One of the side-effects of this was that it stopped to free states being turned into slave states.

Illinois and Indiana nearly turned back into slave states in OTL in the 1820s as it was. Although nominally illegal, slavery was commonplace in the downstate areas of those states in the 1810s and 1820s, due to slaveholding Southerners moving there from Kentucky, Virginia etc. After the spread of the cotton gin, slaves and slaveowners were drawn further south instead, and while there were various pushes to legalise slavery after statehood, it never eventuated. If the cotton gin is delayed, more slaveowners move into those states in the 1810s and early 1820s, leading to greater internal pressure to legalise slavery - and Congress has no authority to stop them once they are states.
 
I think you can delay the cotton gin by 30, maybe 35 years. It took a stupidly long amount of time to go from impulse steam power to turbine steam, even after the proper metal working made it possible. So just the innovators can just be scratching their heads. If you butterfly the hand controlled equivalents from (India?), even the concept becomes hard to imagine.
 
I think you can delay the cotton gin by 30, maybe 35 years. It took a stupidly long amount of time to go from impulse steam power to turbine steam, even after the proper metal working made it possible. So just the innovators can just be scratching their heads. If you butterfly the hand controlled equivalents from (India?), even the concept becomes hard to imagine.
The impulse steam power to turbine steam is a much more complex transition; it's not an equivalent comparison.

Whitney's cotton gin was an independent invention; there was no inspiration from India. The thing is that India (and China) show that the concept can be independently invented multiple times. And the cotton gin was essentially invented within a handful of years of there being a demonstrable need for it. Until the ARW, long-staple cotton supplied sufficient British demand, and there wasn't the potential to occupy the land where short-staple cotton grew and long-staple cotton didn't. Post-ARW, the demand reappeared and the land got occupied, and the cotton gin appeared very quickly thereafter. With lots of people in the USA and Britain looking for an appropriate device, someone is going to work it out pretty quickly. If only by looking to India and getting inspiration from them.
 
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