Slave Revolt in an Independent Confederacy

Continued small slave revolts would make it impractical for the CSA to continue having slavery. At that rate, slavery would probably be ended by the late 1890s.

If the CSA wants to integrate with the international community with globalization, it would have to abandon slavery eventually.
 
Last edited:
I don't buy they would all be small. The deep south states had slaves increasing as a percentage of population. Eventually you'd get to the point where slaves make up 80%+ of the population. At that point you don't have enough whites to deal with a larger rebellion, and it would snowball as they go from plantation to plantation releasing other slaves. It's possible you could get a "Slave Republic" being formed like in Haiti, and a bloody, endless civil war.
Wasn't the Republic of South Africa during apartheid something like 80% black and 10% Indians/Asians and Coloureds with only 10% whites? Now granted conditions weren't as bad as slavery but as Jared mentions even then slave revolts in the South were fairly rare. As long as they're willing to use force, which in the end the South African government wasn't, I can't see them falling for a fairly long time.
 
But I think they could manage if their goal wasn't to shatter the existing political order or carve their own territory out of the Confederacy, but simply a mass exodus to the United States, as MKN suggested.
The problem there is that the Union really, really doesn't want any more blacks.

Would they institute river patrols on the Ohio? Probably. Would they send back blacks who made it across? umm.. Good question. Would they ship those escaping blacks off to Haiti or Liberia? That's at least a possibility.
 
The problem there is that the Union really, really doesn't want any more blacks.

Would they institute river patrols on the Ohio? Probably. Would they send back blacks who made it across? umm.. Good question. Would they ship those escaping blacks off to Haiti or Liberia? That's at least a possibility.

Now there's a fun timeline for someone to write. The Confederacy successfully secedes and the Union overwhelmed by the influx of black refugees tries to figure out what to do. Abolitionists won't let them send them back, competition with white immigrants for jobs leads to rioting, sending them to Liberia is too expensive and as a result the US becomes expansionist and seizes or buys an island in the Caribbean to send them all to.
 

Spengler

Banned
I'm wondering but if there were future conflicts between the USA and the CSA could the USA try to ferment revolts within the confederacy?
 
Wasn't the Republic of South Africa during apartheid something like 80% black and 10% Indians/Asians and Coloureds with only 10% whites? Now granted conditions weren't as bad as slavery but as Jared mentions even then slave revolts in the South were fairly rare. As long as they're willing to use force, which in the end the South African government wasn't, I can't see them falling for a fairly long time.

The South Africa government wasn't willing to use force? They had one of the most brutal police states out there. If De Klerk hadn't made a deal with Mandela, the whole place would have collapsed into a horrible civil war.

I have a huge respect for Jared, and he's written a much better timeline than I could ever do. But I do feel that once you have large numbers of slaves in urban areas, you will get a slave revolt that properly goes wild at one point. Particularly when you don't have enough whites to put them down, it's going to be a chain reaction where those that have broken free start releasing the next lot along, who can release the next lot etc. It's only a matter of time before you get to critical mass, as they found out in Haiti.
 
I have a huge respect for Jared, and he's written a much better timeline than I could ever do. But I do feel that once you have large numbers of slaves in urban areas, you will get a slave revolt that properly goes wild at one point. Particularly when you don't have enough whites to put them down, it's going to be a chain reaction where those that have broken free start releasing the next lot along, who can release the next lot etc. It's only a matter of time before you get to critical mass, as they found out in Haiti.

The crucial factor was never whether slaves outnumbered whites in any particular region. What mattered was how much whites (and their guns) outnumbered slaves in the state or country as a whole. A local majority of slaves meant little, since taking the immediate region would probably not be a problem anyway. (See, for example, Nat Turner's rebellion). But the slaves knew that the white militia from elsewhere would stomp hard and kill any would-be rebels. Interviews with ex-slaves make this perfectly clear.

Or, to put it another way, there were parts of the antebellum South, sometimes whole counties, where the slaves outnumbered whites by 4 or 5 to 1 or more... yet plantation owners usually didn't even bother to lock their doors at night.

In Haiti, the only successful large-scale slave revolution in history, slaves outnumbered free people (both whites and blacks combined) by something like 10 to 1. That's rather a significant difference from a country where whites as a whole outnumber slaves by at least 2 or 3 to 1, depending on the borders of the Confederacy). There were only two states (South Carolina and Mississippi) where the slave population outnumbered whites, and even then the whites weren't that badly outnumbered.

Also, I'm not sure why cities are such a big deal. Whether the slaves are concentrated in a city or rural region doesn't really make much difference to that. For all that some slaveowners grumbled about problems with slaves in cities, urban concentrations of slaves in the antebellum period (yes, there were a few cities with significant numbers of slaves), didn't seem to pose any significant threat of slave revolt. Living in cities amongst free blacks sometimes made it easier for slaves to escape to freedom (or hide out amongst them), but that's not the same thing.
 

Would you really want to keep on having slaves when they keep on killing your family members, burning your cash crops and burning down your houses? It'll get to the point where the benefit of having slaves will outweigh the risks of not having them. As technology progresses, the need for manual slave labor decreases. Why have a hundred slaves doing a job when one man with a machine can do it?

Care to name any Confederate leaders who cared about integrating with the international community?

In time. Would the CSA really have no international foreign relations to speak of, fifty or one hundred years down the line? No man is an island. Hell, even North Korea, one of the most isolated countries has some form of foreign relations.
 
Last edited:
Would you really want to keep on having slaves when they keep on killing your family members, burning your cash crops and burning down your houses? It'll get to the point where the benefit of having slaves will outweigh the risks of not having them.

There weren't "continued small slave revolts" at any point in OTL, so why do you assume the CSA would be faced with "continued small slave revolts"?

As technology progresses, the need for manual slave labor decreases. Why have a hundred slaves doing a job when one man with a machine can do it?

Actually, the invention of the cotton gin led to a need for more, not less manual labor. And if a machine actually frees up 99 slaves to work on other jobs, then they'd be put to work on other jobs, not set free.

Owning slaves was also about prestige, not just economics.

In time. Would the CSA really have no international foreign relations to speak of, fifty or one hundred years down the line? No man is an island. Hell, even North Korea, one of the most isolated countries has some form of foreign relations.

You have a lot of excluded middle there, which your own example of North Korea undercuts.

The CSA can have enough trade for their needs without abandoning slavery.
 
The South Africa government wasn't willing to use force? They had one of the most brutal police states out there. If De Klerk hadn't made a deal with Mandela, the whole place would have collapsed into a horrible civil war.

I have a huge respect for Jared, and he's written a much better timeline than I could ever do. But I do feel that once you have large numbers of slaves in urban areas, you will get a slave revolt that properly goes wild at one point. Particularly when you don't have enough whites to put them down, it's going to be a chain reaction where those that have broken free start releasing the next lot along, who can release the next lot etc. It's only a matter of time before you get to critical mass, as they found out in Haiti.

That force also led to them becoming pariahs, isolated, and failed abysmally at what it was intended to do. The CSA does not have things like diamond mines and a crapload of vital natural resources to pay for its surveillance state, and has a *lot* of backwoods with disgruntled farmers who will like being excluded from political power in the CSA.....very, very little. The CSA attempting to maintain control over slaves and how it will pay for that, as just one problem, is one of the biggest reasons I say the CSA's long-term future is a dictatorship of *some* kind.
 

iddt3

Donor
That force also led to them becoming pariahs, isolated, and failed abysmally at what it was intended to do. The CSA does not have things like diamond mines and a crapload of vital natural resources to pay for its surveillance state, and has a *lot* of backwoods with disgruntled farmers who will like being excluded from political power in the CSA.....very, very little. The CSA attempting to maintain control over slaves and how it will pay for that, as just one problem, is one of the biggest reasons I say the CSA's long-term future is a dictatorship of *some* kind.
It does have cotton, and eventually oil, though.
 
One of the reasons there was a commitment to slavery in the CSA was that the upper classes realized that by having a serious permanent underclass the yeoman farmers and "lumpenproletariat" would be less inclined to upset the political apple cart. Quite a number of "upper class" men in the CSA envisaged a return to property qualifications for the franchise, making sure only the "better class" was involved politically. Remember only about one out of four households in the south had any slaves, and most had a small number. Even those who owned a few slaves had no economic interest in the system, in fact slavery kept an economic lid on many.

A lot depends on how much support slaves get from the Union or other outside sources, and how far the CSA is willing to go to keep slaves in line - "Draka" type punishments do work. While the CSA did not want to be influenced by foreigners, the reality is that they were vulnerable to economic pressures (ie: folks not buying their products) & had to import most industrial stuff.
 
There is no doubt in my mind that slave revolts in the CSA will be one of the factors towards its slide into autocracy. The Confederacy, even given a war that doesn't lead to massive destruction on its own territory, isn't going to find "Contraband Slaves" willing to accept whips and chains. This, along with the unionist minorities in parts of the states, is going to lead to a nasty round of settling accounts.


The United States is not going to easily relinquish its claims on the Confederacy, and will quick end slavery in the absence of the South. With the Underground Railroad now ending in West Virginia or Unionist Tennessee, the Southrons will have little choice but to keep a large standing army.


With the Confederacy likely turning into a police state with armed guards to keep the slaves in and the Union out, slaves will have little immediate opportunity to rebel. Their unhappiness, however, will not be lost on the Feds.


If and when the Union opts for a rematch (which may be just the two nations, or perhaps it is part of an Alt-WW1 around 1900), part of the strategy will be fomenting a slave uprising. The Confederates can't abandon slavery any more than the Soviet Union can abandon Communism; it'll still be around in Civil War II: Warwanker Boogaloo.


CW2WB would probably be won by the Slave Revolt more than Union Forces; the Confederacy could potentially thwart a headlong charge towards Richmond as it did in OTL multiple times, but it has no chance of also keeping 1/3rd of its population in check at the same time for long.


Some kind of grand gesture will be due these former slaves in the aftermath; they will undoubtedly have proven their courage in blood. The answer will probably not be an aborted reconstruction, as in OTL.


TL;DR: The South isn't going to allow any kind of rebellion to work, it'll be a giant armed camp. But if the USA goes for a rematch, they can't stop it from working.
 
The crucial factor was never whether slaves outnumbered whites in any particular region. What mattered was how much whites (and their guns) outnumbered slaves in the state or country as a whole. A local majority of slaves meant little, since taking the immediate region would probably not be a problem anyway. (See, for example, Nat Turner's rebellion). But the slaves knew that the white militia from elsewhere would stomp hard and kill any would-be rebels. Interviews with ex-slaves make this perfectly clear.

I'm largely in agreemebt, but I think it's a middle-sized area between local area and the size of a state. Once you have a slave revolt in a large area where blacks heavily outnumber whites, it's only a matter of time before you get a chain reaction where the majority of slaves in the area escape. If that's the case, you're getting slave rebellions of not tens, but tens of thousands. At that point, you need a professional army rather than just local militias to put it down. Even then, its questionable whether you can put the cork back in the bottle like Jamaica.

In Haiti, the only successful large-scale slave revolution in history, slaves outnumbered free people (both whites and blacks combined) by something like 10 to 1. That's rather a significant difference from a country where whites as a whole outnumber slaves by at least 2 or 3 to 1, depending on the borders of the Confederacy). There were only two states (South Carolina and Mississippi) where the slave population outnumbered whites, and even then the whites weren't that badly outnumbered.
Yes, agreed. It won't be an instant thing, but as slavery goes on I would imagine those numbers would change to get up to those sort of numbers in some states (2/1 or 3/1). There's also the danger that after the first couple of massive revolts happen, a lot of whites get nervous and start moving away from these areas.

Also, I'm not sure why cities are such a big deal. Whether the slaves are concentrated in a city or rural region doesn't really make much difference to that. For all that some slaveowners grumbled about problems with slaves in cities, urban concentrations of slaves in the antebellum period (yes, there were a few cities with significant numbers of slaves), didn't seem to pose any significant threat of slave revolt. Living in cities amongst free blacks sometimes made it easier for slaves to escape to freedom (or hide out amongst them), but that's not the same thing.
I think the cities thing matters because the groups of slaves are closer together, so its easier for chain reactions to start. i.e. it's easier to stop a bunch of slaves marching to the next plantations than the next street. It's also easier for a conspiracy to be formed in advance.
 
Now there's a fun timeline for someone to write. The Confederacy successfully secedes and the Union overwhelmed by the influx of black refugees tries to figure out what to do. Abolitionists won't let them send them back, competition with white immigrants for jobs leads to rioting, sending them to Liberia is too expensive and as a result the US becomes expansionist and seizes or buys an island in the Caribbean to send them all to.


Or sends them into desolate places Out West which IMO the likliest solution.
 
I'm largely in agreemebt, but I think it's a middle-sized area between local area and the size of a state. Once you have a slave revolt in a large area where blacks heavily outnumber whites, it's only a matter of time before you get a chain reaction where the majority of slaves in the area escape. If that's the case, you're getting slave rebellions of not tens, but tens of thousands. At that point, you need a professional army rather than just local militias to put it down. Even then, its questionable whether you can put the cork back in the bottle like Jamaica.

Let me try putting it another way. You didn't get significant slave revolts unless the conditions were so bad that slaves figured that they had nothing to lose, and where they outnumbered the whites enough that they thought that they had a reasonable chance of winning.

The first was emphatically the case for most sugar plantations, particularly in the Caribbean. So, for that matter, was the second. Neither, however, was true in the antebellum South, and hence revolts were vanishingly rare there.

Again, this is what interviews with ex-slaves (and the historical record) make quite clear. It wasn't that slaves weren't willing to fight or run away, given the opportunity. They were, as the ACW shows. Given a realistic chance to escape (ie with Union armies close), slaves fled in droves. Given weapons and a meaningful opportunity to fight back, the former slaves fought for the Union.

What the slaves weren't willing to do was die for no realistic chance of success. And they knew that this was the only realistic outcome if they revolted in the antebellum South.

In your example above, if it takes calling out the professional army to fight tens of thousands of slaves, yes, the South would do it. Without question. With "justice" administered through rifle bullets for the rebel slaves, and likely for any around them whose loyalty wasn't sure. And in such a revolt, "guilty" would mean "black and somewhere in or near the rebellious area".

The slaves knew this too, which was they they didn't rebel en masse in OTL. It wasn't that they were remotely fond of their condition, it was just that they preferred living to dying.

Yes, agreed. It won't be an instant thing, but as slavery goes on I would imagine those numbers would change to get up to those sort of numbers in some states (2/1 or 3/1).

No reason that it would. The birth rates and overall population growth rates for slaves and whites were pretty similar, and had been for a few generations.

I think the cities thing matters because the groups of slaves are closer together, so its easier for chain reactions to start. i.e. it's easier to stop a bunch of slaves marching to the next plantations than the next street. It's also easier for a conspiracy to be formed in advance.

I'm not sure I follow. The existing history of slave revolts (rare) and planned revolts (more common) showed that such things were easy enough to do in either rural or urban areas, including spreading from one plantation to the next (or one iron mill to the next - see the Tennessee slave conspiracy of 1856). In fact, given that in some rural areas, the slaves formed a massive majority of the population, I'd call it easier to spread revolt and conspiracies, since there were fewer whites around to keep an eye on the slaves.
 
Let me try putting it another way. You didn't get significant slave revolts unless the conditions were so bad that slaves figured that they had nothing to lose, and where they outnumbered the whites enough that they thought that they had a reasonable chance of winning.

[snip...]

In your example above, if it takes calling out the professional army to fight tens of thousands of slaves, yes, the South would do it. Without question. With "justice" administered through rifle bullets for the rebel slaves, and likely for any around them whose loyalty wasn't sure. And in such a revolt, "guilty" would mean "black and somewhere in or near the rebellious area".

And in the border areas, that kind of policy means the slaves have nothing to lose and a reasonable chance at escaping/winning.
 
And in the border areas, that kind of policy means the slaves have nothing to lose and a reasonable chance at escaping/winning.

Or it would mean that some of the slaves or free blacks (ie those that feared dying) informed on any would-be large-scale planned revolt. This is what happened most of the time in OTL - Tennessee conspiracy of 1856, eastern North Carolina conspiracy of 1831, etc.
 
Top