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

You think someone else could have saved the Union at less cost?
Probably any of a dozen or so moderate Democrats or Whigs.

The Republicans were the new political party which spooked southern elites. Rolling back from now to semi-modern times, the Republican Party might rank as the single most successful ‘third party’ to push its way into an existing political system.

And per our discussion here, the damn civil war may have been necessary to free the slaves before 1900.


PS I still want my trifecta of an earlier, better liberation from slavery with no civil war!
 
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We might need to go all the way back to Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

And even though Bacon himself wasn’t much of a leader, this is what scared shitless the elites in Virginia of the prospect that English indentured servants and African slaves just might find common cause.

And so over the next couple of decades, the Virginia legislature passed laws increasingly restrictive, for example, that slaves could no longer own land or own firearms. But some of these strike me as relatively late and perhaps with some real potential as PODs.
 
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. . . However, sugar-growing was only a very small part of US slave use, mostly in Louisiana. . .
In a sad historical irony, if the Confederates had gotten their fondest wishes and expanded into Cuba and the Caribbean, they may have been the relative good guys by saying and taking the approach, you can’t work people this hard and not hardly feed them.

PS a lot of emphasis on the word “relative”!
 
If I remember my statistics correctly, at the time of the ACW approximately one in four southern households even owned one slave, the percentage with multiple slaves was much smaller. Most whites in the south had no financial stake in the continuation of slavery, however there was a huge social one. With blacks, even free blacks, being a permanent underclass where the highest black was lower then the lowest white, this was a plus for the elites. Furthermore any white, should they get the money, could aspire to become a slave owner. All of this worked in the favor of the southern elites who saw themselves in a vision of a squireocracy with distinct and difficult to cross class lines. There was talk in the CSA political circles of, after a victory, of the reimposition of property qualifications for the franchise, but the permanent presence of slaves (and free blacks were going to go away) would keep the whites who did not qualify for franchise satisfied.

Many of the southerners were all about preserving their way of "civilized" life against the northern money grubbers, parvenus, etc. The more perceptive ones realized that even with the 3/5 rule and the northern democrats backing the south up, that sheer numbers in the House of Representatives were turning against them rapidly and should the differences between northern and southern democrats diverge this would be huge. The other reality was that while you might get some new states to pass slave constitutions that was highly unlikely, and even if passed they would probably be nullified in short order meaning the Senate was going to go further against them. The really sharp ones, if there were any, realized that the financial balance where the south's agricultural products were the big money maker in the USA was shifting rapidly, and norther industry as well as commercial agriculture (wheat for example) was going to be the major money maker.

Put all that together, and the "slave power" or disproportionate political power the south had was going to fade, which meant that slavery was going to be in trouble - liberty laws in the north, economic issues, and so forth. Hence the attempts to expand in places perceived as being more slave amenable, and eventually secession.
 
You're right. Slavery was going nowhere anytime soon - and we're talking about the cotton plantation economy as well as any slave dependent, labor intensive industry that eventually takes off in Virginia or wherever.

The dumb, tired, old meme that slavery disappears peacefully in a few years after 1865 needs to die.
I would point to bleeding Kansas. That is about as bald an attempt to "spread slavery" as you can get. It proves the slave states didn't think it was going away.
 
Slavery existed because it was profitable, and would have remained profitable for as long as it existed. But being profitable isn’t enough, it needs to be more profitable than its alternatives. I mean, it’s theoretically possible to produce clothes with 18th century methods today, and be ‘profitable’, but not nearly as profitable as mass producing them in a factory.

It’s the same with slavery. It may have been the most profitable alternative in 1860, but would that still have been the case in 1900? Or 1920? 1940? That’s the question that needs to be answered. Institutions rarely change on their own because they are ‘bad’, they usually change because there are alternatives that are better.
 
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