Slavery lost plantation owners to much money

I was reading several AH timeline stories about how someone went back in time to change the past to prevent a terrible future or how some thing different happened in the formation of the country and the one thing that was always a constant was that the issue of slavery eventually came up. This one issue either fractured the country or tore it apart beyond control.

I had an idea what would happen if the operational costs of owning slaves became far more expensive that some other alternative? What would the outcome of this be?
A possible alternative to slavery could be an early type of thresher for the harvesting of cotton or other piece of machinery that some genius thought up.
 
Depends on the social environment. An institution that stops being profitable will not just disappear, but it is likely to drop out of commercial usefulness. You might find slaves becoming some kind of status symbpols, like butlers or rolexes, and the majority of them staffing mansions and hotels. But that is assuming this is not just a momentary blip in the market. When slave labour is too expensive for argicultural use, the slaves become a commodity in glut, so prices are likely to drop and there will be some field that can employ them sooner or later. The high prices of the 19th century in the USA were largely due to artificially reduced supply (trade prohibition), anyway.

I'm just now reading a book on contemporary slavery - modern slavery apparently makes it possible to profitably produce *sand* manually. If that can work, I'm sure you'll be able to find some gainful application for a large slave labour force coming from the plantations.
 

ninebucks

Banned
If slavery became uneconomical, it'd be phased out and eventually abolished.

The CSA fought for its independence because they thought a sudden abolition would have ruined their economy, (which it would have/did), there was no attachment to keeping black people in servitude other than that that was how people made their money.
 

Neroon

Banned
there was no attachment to keeping black people in servitude other than that that was how people made their money.
Gee, and i thought modern pro-muliticulturalism feminists were living in denial :rolleyes: .
If slavery become no longer profitable on a large scale prices would go down and it would still be profitable for non-agricultural uses. The aforementioned status symbol domestic staff - especially since slave maids "cannot say no" as S.M. Stirling was fond of reminding us.
And also to remember: Even if slaves were manumitted due to being no longer profitable to keep, that would NOT make them citizens in a no-14th-amendment CSA. They'd be in the legal limbo of "residents" without voting rights and such. Propably become de-facto serfs.
 
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