Thesis: slavery in the American south was not phasing out on its own.

The economist Paul Samuelson is talking about the coastal regions of Virginia, North Carolina, etc., selling slaves to Mississippi. I agree that the slaveocracy would have eventually ran out of new farmland, but it would have been a heck of a lot later than 1865.
Eric hosbawn mention the csa would hace been a bigger apartheid South África too and one useful for europeans power.
 
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The North may have had the numbers, but it looks like the South acted more like a solid block. For example, I’m going to look for a James McPherson quote to the effect that the south had the presidency for the majority of the time pre-Civil War and had a majority on the Supreme Court the entire pre-Civil War period.

* James McPherson the history professor, and not James McPherson the Union officer during the Civil War
 
Out of War, a New Nation
U.S. National Archives > Prologue Magazine, Spring 2010

James M. McPherson

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/spring/newnation.html

‘ . . . From the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 until 1861, slaveholders from states that joined the Confederacy had served as Presidents of the United States during 49 of the 72 years—more than two-thirds of the time. Twenty-three of the 36 Speakers of the House and 24 of the presidents pro tem of the Senate had been southerners. The Supreme Court always had a southern majority before the Civil War; 20 of the 35 justices down to 1861 had been appointed from slave states. . . ’
That’s a lot of political power held by the South. Certainly enough to block.

With the election of Lincoln entirely by northern states, they saw that the days of this power were numbered and reacted quickly. Maybe a little too quickly.
 
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Marc

Donor
I know it's a killjoy, but let us never forget that slavery was about a number of truly ugly, addictive, things besides being about economics.
To paraphrase Lord Acton: Power over people's bodies corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
 
However, a successful secession would by its very nature block the spread of slavery.
That depends how willing the CSA is to go to war in say Central America or the Caribbean, either as a nation or by supporting filibustering.

Also with the 13th amendments 'punishment for crime' exception you could argue the South kept slavery up into the 1940s. Thanks to lots of petty laws targeted at blacks.

That still happens, but in the early 20th century convicts were being rented to plantations and sent into mines.
 
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IMO Southerners objected to the Republican party's anti-slavery expansion position not so much because they expected slavery to expand within the current boundaries of the US (which was pretty clearly impossible after Kansas rejected Lecompton) or even because they mecessarily wanted to expand the southern slave system into Latin America--they were actually divided on the feasability and desirability of this. Rather, they objected to it because they considered it a *symptom* of the Republican Party's desire to assure northern control of the federal government, which could then be used for antislavery purposes. William J. Freehling has noted the paradox that the South Carolinians, the most ardent secessionists, were among the most skeptical of territorial expansion. Observing that Calhoun had opposed the drive to acquire All Mexico, Freehling adds:

"Some leading South Carolinians continued to harbor distaste for proposed Caribbean expansion in the 1850s. Mexico seemed full of non-American peons, Cuba full of free blacks, and the Southwest full of coarse frontiersmen. "It is not by bread alone that man liveth," intoned South Carolina's revered Francis Sumter in 1859. "We want some stability in our institutions." 12 South Carolina reactionaries wanted to stabilize their people-—in South Carolina.

"Many South Carolinians opposed a supposedly destabilizing Caribbean empire because they favored a supposedly stabilizing disunion revolution. These disunionists hoped that outside the Union and beyond unsettling northern attacks, a settled South could flourish. They feared that if the Union did acquire vast tropical lands, grateful Southwesterners would never secede and declining Carolinians would never stay east. Still, a taste for staying home and distaste for expansionism swept up the powerful South Carolina Unionist U.S. Senator James Henry Hammond, just as it did the secessionists. "I do not wish," said Hammond, "to remove from my native state and carry a family into the semi-barbarous West." https://books.google.com/books?id=MOainyyGxhsC&pg=PA168

(FWIW, Confederate diplomats during the ACW tried to reassure the Mexicans: yes, we wanted Mexican territory when we were in the Union--but only to counterbalance the political power of the Yankees. Now that we're out of the Union, we have no need for your territory, and it's the Yankees you should fear. Of course, they would say that, wouldn't they? But it was not *necessarily* entirely false...)

By the way, the fears of the South that blocking slavery expansion was only the first step in the Republicans' antislavery agenda were not totally unfounded, at least so far as the radical wing of the party was concerned. As Eric Foner noted in *Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War*:

"After they joined the Republican party, the radicals did not abandon their program of political action, nor did they seek to conceal that their ultimate objective was complete emancipation. Henry Wilson told a New York audience in 1855 that he favored immediate abolition “wherever [slavery] exists under the Constitution of the United States,” and he told a Michigan convention in the same year that Republicans “mean to place the Government actively and fully on the side of Liberty. . . .” “Let it be distinctly understood,” Wilson declared, “that our object is the emancipation of the bondsmen in America.” The influential western editor John C. Vaughan informed Chase that the “one end” of political anti-slavery was “the best means by Northern action of securing Southern Emancipation. . . .” 40 During the 1856 campaign, Horace Greeley wrote a public letter which candidly acknowledged that preventing the extension of slavery was only “the first practicable step” toward abolition, and that when the Republicans gained power, “other steps will naturally follow from which conservatives will probably recoil.” After the defeat of Fremont, as conservatives sought to moderate Republican platforms in many states, the radicals did not waver in their adherence to their program. The radicals, Chase wrote Giddings in 1857, must insist upon the denationalization of slavery, not mere non-extension, as party policy, “boldly avowing that we expect as the consequence of such action that slavery will be abolished everywhere. . In the same year George Julian chided Republicans who were “ashamed to avow” that abolition was “our ultimate purpose as members of the Republican party,” and in 1858 the Chicago Tribune editorialized that complete abolition was a goal “devoutly to be wished and earnestly to be labored for,” but that the party was committed to “first securing to freedom the new and unoccupied Territories of the Union.” 41 Nor did radicals moderate their program during the presidential year of i860. Charles Sedgwick told the House in March that he wanted the government to go to “the extreme verge of constitutional authority” against slavery, and a former Congressman from Maine, Daniel Somes, declared in October that a Republican victory would lead to abolition in the nation’s capital, an end to the use of slaves in federal employment, and eventually to emancipation in the South itself. 42 All in all, the radicals made it quite plain that they would hardly be satisfied if a Republican government merely prevented slavery from expanding. From first to last, the stakes for which they aimed were far more comprehensive..." https://archive.org/stream/freesoilfreelabo01fone#page/118
 
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That depends how willing the CSA is to go to war in say Central America or the Caribbean, either as a nation or by supporting filibustering.

The US only did so once, and even that was far from super popular. The CSA doing so in order to get new places for plantation economies (places that had had such economies for centuries, not exactly fresh virgin soil) will be less likely to succeed. And, given the conditions on the ground, likely far more trouble than its worth.
 
The US only did so once, and even that was far from super popular. The CSA doing so in order to get new places for plantation economies (places that had had such economies for centuries, not exactly fresh virgin soil) will be less likely to succeed. And, given the conditions on the ground, likely far more trouble than its worth.


While the US may not have succeeded in annexing very many parts of the Caribbean and Central America, political/economic intervention in the region was remarkably common and tolerated by the US populace. I think there is certainly a precedent for Americans altering political/economic conditions in Caribbean/Central America to its liking. An independent CSA would likely have the same desire, so the issue is one of ability-- an ability that would, as mentioned before, be urgently sought out by the CSA elite as a matter of national interest.
 
While the US may not have succeeded in annexing very many parts of the Caribbean and Central America, political/economic intervention in the region was remarkably common and tolerated by the US populace. I think there is certainly a precedent for Americans altering political/economic conditions in Caribbean/Central America to its liking. An independent CSA would likely have the same desire, so the issue is one of ability-- an ability that would, as mentioned before, be urgently sought out by the CSA elite as a matter of national interest.

Except that we see there were serious concerns among the population when America did go to war with Spain to acquire a colonial empire. I’m not saying it was a majority that opposed it, but a large enough and vocal enough minority.
 
I disagree. There's many downsides to slavery, and they're especially acute if you're surrounded by neighbors that are both more powerful than you and don't approve of slavery. Simply put, the South seceded because they were convinced that blocking the spread of slavery would destroy their system. However, a successful secession would by its very nature block the spread of slavery.

That meme is dumb not because it claims CSA would eventually abolish slavery, but because it usually claims it'd do so within decade. In Guns of South, they initiate gradual abolition in 1868. Which is absurd.
Give me more realistic date. No sooner than 1895, at absolutely earliest. It has to be at least thirty years since independence, when new generation which doesn't remember civil war is entering politics.
 
I think the fact that forced labor is still used today, including in the United States, disproves the notion that it has somehow become "uneconomical." It would be more apt to say that we've just found ways of making it invisible to most of society.
Just look at the South West today. Latino immigrants work for next to nothing, in what some call wage slavery, so that people can get the Agro products for cheap prices. If they didn't exist or weren't as legally abused, then those food prices would be higher and few would be able to buy them, thus greatly weakening the profits of the industry leaders. They rely on those workers being essentially stuck working like hell for little to nothing in the same way cotton bosses needed slaves working for almost nothing, except for shitty food, clothes and housing, in order to make enough profit to sustain themselves and everyone else's lifestyle. Sure the Latino workers are paid, but it's just enough to get barely any clothes, shelter and food, whereas as in slavery, the owners just bought that for the slaves themselves, paying in proportion about as much as Agro bosses pay illegal workers. And it's not just America, but all over the world where people benefit from cheap labor, such as in Africa, with neocolonialism and everything.
 
Just look at the South West today. Latino immigrants work for next to nothing, in what some call wage slavery, so that people can get the Agro products for cheap prices. If they didn't exist or weren't as legally abused, then those food prices would be higher and few would be able to buy them, thus greatly weakening the profits of the industry leaders. They rely on those workers being essentially stuck working like hell for little to nothing in the same way cotton bosses needed slaves working for almost nothing, except for shitty food, clothes and housing, in order to make enough profit to sustain themselves and everyone else's lifestyle. Sure the Latino workers are paid, but it's just enough to get barely any clothes, shelter and food, whereas as in slavery, the owners just bought that for the slaves themselves, paying in proportion about as much as Agro bosses pay illegal workers. And it's not just America, but all over the world where people benefit from cheap labor, such as in Africa, with neocolonialism and everything.

That is a very superficial comparison with whoch I respectfully disagree.
 
That is not to say that slavery in industry is impossible, but rather that slave/forced labor is inefficient and becomes more so the more skilled the task is.
say this to the falun gong boys and girls making christmas lights in some godforsaken factory.
not saying you are wrong, but it will take a long time for industry to become too complex for a slave to work at, not even counting the fact that many sectors of industry nowadays still aren't.
Edit:words
 
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I agree, slave/forced labor can be effective (though inefficient) as long as you are making low value added products. Beyond that, it does not work well
 
While I don't think Slavery in actuality would go away in any expedited amount of time had the south won or not seceded, I do think that it would have evolved into a different institution. Oppressive sharecropping and working for a wage that could only sustain the bare minimum would have relieved international tension and lessened threats of uprisings to a degree. It wouldn't have been much better if at all, but I think it would evolve to that by the end of the 1870s.
 
As good a place as any for this:

One very often encounters the sentiment that an independent Confederacy would face significant political and economic pressure from abroad - the U.K. is usually mentioned specifically - which would strongly encourage if not effectively force abolition.

Is there any OTL reason to think this? I don’t know of a BDS style movement against the US or Brazil during their slavery eras.
 
I know it's a killjoy, but let us never forget that slavery was about a number of truly ugly, addictive, things besides being about economics.
To paraphrase Lord Acton: Power over people's bodies corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Such as raping an African woman and pretending to yourself that it’s something other than rape. The miniseries Roots bravely showed this, at least as much as you could for TV back in 1977.

Or whipping or beating a human being for not showing enough respect, or simply because you’re in a pissed-off mood.

* none of this is to be confused with BDSM games which nice couples of all stripes engage in! Ah, we humans are a curious lot.
 
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