Race relations in CSA

European immigrants will be better educated upon arrival and take mid level jobs, while uneducated slaves will enter in the lowest rung of unskilled labor.

Benjamin

This is simply not true. Most European immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe and Ireland, will have next to no education at all. Thats why many Polish were factory workers or coal shovellers, and a lot of Yugoslavs in the Midwest became farmers. They didn't come in as clerks or store managers. They were a lot poorer than you seem to think.
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
This is simply not true. Most European immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe and Ireland, will have next to no education at all. Thats why many Polish were factory workers or coal shovellers, and a lot of Yugoslavs in the Midwest became farmers. They didn't come in as clerks or store managers. They were a lot poorer than you seem to think.
Yeah. One of the main reasons immigrants and blacks got on so poorly is because they were competing for the same shitty jobs.
 

IronOwl

Banned
I'll play devil's advocate myself here and say possibly better than in OTL. The white south, if victorious, doesn't suffer the humiliation of defeat and reconstruction, and percieving 'dem uppity blacks' as lording it over the defeated white people. I think what I have just mentioned is perhaps the central reason for much of the hardcore hatred of black people in the south. With a southern victory, you get no KKK, and most blacks simply remain on the plantations. I can actually see slavery being abolished as early as the 1890's, on account of poor white southerners electing as populist-esque candidate (Ben Tillman?) on the back of attacking blacks and the Bourbon classes as being interlinked to their economic misery. Tillman sees slavery as being the primary tool of the Bourbons, and abolishes it, instituting a form of segregation instead. This carries on for a good long time, probably into the 1980's at least. However, international sanctions (probable) lead to its abandonment in the period ranging from the 1960's to the 1990's. In the CSA, you wouldn't have the same level of fear that was present in South Africa, which helped obstruct the end of white minority rule, for two reasons. Firstly the smaller black population, and secondly, the sense that blacks weren't that culturally different, which they were in Africa.
 
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This is simply not true. Most European immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe and Ireland, will have next to no education at all. Thats why many Polish were factory workers or coal shovellers, and a lot of Yugoslavs in the Midwest became farmers. They didn't come in as clerks or store managers. They were a lot poorer than you seem to think.

Yeah, that one point is probably wrong. In fact it may be a bit ironic, but at least the blacks speak English (to a degree given the accent and separate slave dialects). Even so I think some of you are overstating the conflict. OTL North, in my opinion a more racist place than a CSA victorious North would be, saw a huge influx of blacks in the years leading up to WWI. There were some riots and moves to bar them from unions but still they came.

@ Wolfpaw - The US spends millions trying to keep illegal immigrants out now and it doesn't work. I can't see them doing any better in an AH set in the early 20th century.

@ IronOwl - A very, very slim chance given that entire southerns society was built around the racial superiority of whites. Victory and independence would strongly reinforce these beliefs and leave those who most strongly believe them in near total of the CSA.

Benjamin
 
OTL, by the end of the civil war, the south was fully aware that slavery was in dead end mode. Add to this the British campaign to work against nations who indulged in slavery, and you have pressure on the south to ostensibly eliminate slavery. What remains to be seen is whether the CSA simply replaces the name slavery with some other term. Southern Africa did this aplenty: they instituted a head tax, then enforced a system that was slavery in every way but name. You may see a switch to share cropping, which was ultimately the same as slavery, except without the overseer.

Notherners did in fact see a massive migration to their cities, and they used the influx of labor the same way they used the influx of immigrants. Turtledove had it wrong that the north would not accept blacks. The north was perfectly willing to accept blacks, as long as they were second class, but 'free', citizens. the difference between north and south is that the north used and abused paid workers, while the south insisted on owning them and not paying them. It's the whole (lack of) pay structure thing that defines the south (and there I think Turtledove had it right). so, in a world without slavery, you have to think about how the southern culture could evolve from unpaid, owned, labor to the same thing, except without the 'owning' part.
 
On the eve of the civil war, blacks were 39% of the CS population, and the 1880 census shows them at 41.5% of the would-be CS population (5,410,298 out of 13,033,200), and that's not counting however many moved North or West in the twenty years following the War.

So by the early decades of the 20th century, we are more than likely to see a CSA whose black population is either very close to or has surpassed the 50% mark.
Still, 50% or 45% whites is not 10-15%, as in South Africa, and they've lasted until 1994. I think the CSA would definately have evolved to some kind of 'apartheid with no end in sight' state. I'm just wondering how stable such a state can be in the long run.

Do you think there can be a point where tensions become so-high (sustained black rebellions etc.) that the CSA will end up supporting some sort of a scheme to get rid of blacks? Ranging from promoting emigration to the US to full blown genocide?
 
Do you think there can be a point where tensions become so-high (sustained black rebellions etc.) that the CSA will end up supporting some sort of a scheme to get rid of blacks? Ranging from promoting emigration to the US to full blown genocide?

Full blown genocide?! Not by a long shot. What sells stories doesn't usually make good sense realistically.
 
Full blown genocide?! Not by a long shot. What sells stories doesn't usually make good sense realistically.
I have considered writing a TL in which a victorious CSA sets up reservations for free blacks much like the Indian reservations of OTL's US and with similar problems. What do you think of that? I figure the reservations could be set up in more rural areas like in portions of Florida, western Texas, and northern Mississippi.
 
I'm thinking there's way too many blacks to make a reservation system work. The amount of land and labor to police it makes it unworkable. Besides, by then, the US had already given all the worthless land to the Indians.
 

Deleted member 14881

maybe by the 1900's we could have a Haitian style revolt the Deep South a Black Republic and the Upper south a White populist Republic
 
I have considered writing a TL in which a victorious CSA sets up reservations for free blacks much like the Indian reservations of OTL's US and with similar problems. What do you think of that? I figure the reservations could be set up in more rural areas like in portions of Florida, western Texas, and northern Mississippi.

Black reservations? I consider that unlikely also. Why not just evict them? Dump them at the border and let them walk across. Rounding them up and holding them on reservations will just cost money.
 
Black reservations? I consider that unlikely also. Why not just evict them? Dump them at the border and let them walk across. Rounding them up and holding them on reservations will just cost money.

Which border? Neither the US or Mexico is likely to want to allow in millions of Blacks.
 

Deleted member 14881

You know factory farming? the CSA could use it to make more slaves.
 

Deleted member 14881

Like they make chickens maybe the CSA could try to make more slaves like that. Or they could try breeding black people like horses to get strong but docile slaves.
 
If we're looking at this realistically, thats unlikely though. As Southern agriculture starts to mechanise, there isn't any demand for a lot of slaves, and its morally indefensible, especially considering how Christian the South is. The factory-farming idea would be extreme even for the Nazis.
 

Deleted member 14881

If we're looking at this realistically, thats unlikely though. As Southern agriculture starts to mechanise, there isn't any demand for a lot of slaves, and its morally indefensible, especially considering how Christian the South is. The factory-farming idea would be extreme even for the Nazis.

I know I was going towards how dystopic race relations could be in the CSA
 
Black reservations? I consider that unlikely also. Why not just evict them? Dump them at the border and let them walk across. Rounding them up and holding them on reservations will just cost money.
Well I wasn't planning on writing that the entire populations of blacks in the south is forced onto reservations. I planned to write that in a situation where emancipation occurs over a long period then the government could set up reservations in which free blacks are "encouraged" to immagrate to. Of course they may be problems if they try to leave.
 
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