WI Boll weevil hits before the ACW

Could the pest have arrived earlier. Might it have weakened the South's political influence and the influence of the planter class?
 
Well any response?

Well the Boll Weevil didn't reach Texas until 1892 historically, then it still took three decades to seriously disrupt the South's cotton production. Realistically it would have to arrive sometime in at least the 1830s to cause the economic problems it managed in a more motorized US and have a reasonable amount of time to spread out amongst a less dense population.

I'm just uncertain how it could spread more quickly than OTL. Up the Mississippi? Can the weevil be transported on a ship so that it can infest plantations along that waterway?
 
Your best bet, probably, would be to have a 'scientific' cotton grower import a bunch of cotton from various parts of Mexico to see what grew best. Possibly including importing naturally coloured cotton to see if it could be crossbred with higher yielding varieties.

If some planter thus established a cotton breeding establishment, he might ship seed for planting and bolls for display of his products. If a boll weevil got loose in his stuff, it could be widely spread.

Pretty far fetched, yes. Possible? Also yes, IMO.
 
I think Dathi has it right, that seems to be a good way to introduce the Boll weevil. This actually strikes me as the sort of tomfoolery Thomas Jefferson might have gotten up to, but he died before the cotton gin. Maybe post-presidency he gets involved in long-staple cotton growth in Georgia or South Carolina (IIRC, long staple cotton was the variety grown before the cotton gin in those regions), tries to introduce some Mexican varieties, introduces the boll weevil, and accidentally strangles the cotton industry in its crib.

Slavery was very deeply ingrained in the south, I shudder to think what 'final solution' the Southern Whites might have come up with if they had no use for the slave population. Pogroms and extermination camps would be at the more dystopian end of the possibilities; an earlier abolishment of slavery followed immediately by an alt-Jim Crow is in the mid-range, with alt-versions of black migration to the industrial north and participation in America's wars occurring decades earlier than OTL; a possible happier ending for American blacks is mass migration to Mexican Texas, followed by the establishment of an independent Black Republic which is allowed to flourish, possibly used as a buffer state by Mexico against the US or vice versa (a buffer state against the Comanche is also possible).
 

Driftless

Donor
Or other well-intentioned but disasterous/probelematic human introduced alien invaders: rabbits in Australia, snakehead fish, burmese python to Florida, kudzu, asian and common carp to the US. It's more a matter of when and how.
 
I think slavery would have taken a hit but would not be extinguished.

Plenty of other crops (tobacco, indigo, rice, sugar) could/would still be grown at a profit but not as great a profit. The value of slaves, therefore, would drop considerably. There would be less slave importation (both legal and illegal) from TJ's time to 1861 and that would affect populations. More would be voluntarily freed from 1800 to 1865 than otherwise, creating a larger class of free blacks, which would also affect the outlook of the institution.

As much of the anti-bellum south culture was based on the highly profitable crop, the overall outlook of the culture would change somewhat.

Perhaps some of the western slave states like Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Texas, etc, would be less likely to implement slavery in the first place (or eventually emancipate) as cotton was the main large plantation-scale crop relevant to those areas (no tobacco, rice, indigo).

Also, tobacco is a crop even harsher on the land than cotton, if that is possible. It quickly wore out land. If tobacco isn't grown to the west, that would create great bouts of surplus slaves. Some could be bought cheap and used as labor on smaller scale but the overall prestige of the institution would change.

If the end result of these changes by 1861 was (I'm making these numbers up naturally), fewer blacks overall due to the effective premature end on importation of slaves, 1/2 to 2/3rds the number of enslaved blacks, a richer mix of free blacks, two or three fewer slave states, several more that only have nominal populations of slaves (Delaware, Kentucky or Missouri-style), this would have a marked affect on American history.
 
If the end result of these changes by 1861 was (I'm making these numbers up naturally), fewer blacks overall due to the effective premature end on importation of slaves, 1/2 to 2/3rds the number of enslaved blacks, a richer mix of free blacks, two or three fewer slave states, several more that only have nominal populations of slaves (Delaware, Kentucky or Missouri-style), this would have a marked affect on American history.

Do you think that political abolition is possible in this scenario, with a slight majority of free states deciding to abolish slavery-or is it not seen as such a pressing issue since there are fewer slaves?
 
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