WI: Post ACW the slave holders don't get to keep their land?

Hindsight is always 20/20, or so they say.

More like the Republicans were openly protectionist at that time, and protectionists never have had truck with the idea that many small producers could better in price, quantity, or quality than a few big producers.
 
Actually, iirc, most history textbooks were written in the north - but they pretty much accepted the Southern viewpoint. After all, secession was safely defeated now, so why quibble over comparative trifles?

This process began surprisingly fast. As early as 1879, Albion W Tourgee was complaining that at this rate veterans would soon be ashamed to admit that they had fought for the Union.

Where the South did best was probably in romantic novels. In such works, no one with any class would ever have been caught fighting for the north, and I sometimes wonder if the novels didn't have more impact than the textbooks.

Right. All the same, it's not the usual "victors writing the history books" that happens elsewhere. *That* history would have noted that Lee did as well as he did against overly cautious generals who were great organizers and terrible field commanders, painting Grant as the badass in the making, Chattanooga as the moment it all came together, and the Union under Grant as why the South was always foredoomed to lose the moment it fought someone who was able to truly harness the US military as it should have been.

In any history written on that line, Grant would be to the Northern history what Lee was to the Lost Cause. With the advantage of actually winning the war.....:D
 
There actually wouldn't be a negative impact, and indeed, production might increase. Independent small farmers still have bills to pay and would need to grow cash crops because that would be their only means of income. The experience of the share-cropping system shows this. Sharecroppers grew food for their families and cash crops at the same time to pay their bills, and cotton production increased because, without top-down management of how much cotton was planted, the small farmers put even more land under cotton cultivation than had been the case previously.

okay. But... the problem with cotton (and tobacco, IIRC) is that it depletes the soil fairly quickly... a small landholder will soon be unable to grow cotton after a while. Despicable as the large plantations were, they were able to rotate around and keep some amount of cotton coming all the time. So, I still wonder if cotton would eventually decrease...
 
They might have been able to, but they chose to expand instead...and waste yet more land.

And yes, tobacco is also fertility destroying. So is anything grown without proper care, they're just particularly vicious.
 
Right. All the same, it's not the usual "victors writing the history books" that happens elsewhere. *That* history would have noted that Lee did as well as he did against overly cautious generals who were great organizers and terrible field commanders, painting Grant as the badass in the making, Chattanooga as the moment it all came together, and the Union under Grant as why the South was always foredoomed to lose the moment it fought someone who was able to truly harness the US military as it should have been.

In any history written on that line, Grant would be to the Northern history what Lee was to the Lost Cause. With the advantage of actually winning the war.....:D



I often think that "the victors write the history books" is only a half truth at best.

Napoleon gets far more romanticised than Wellington, and I can't recall any book hero-worshipping Douglas Haig or Butcher Cumberland, while Hannibal seems to be better remembered than his Roman opponents, most of whom are all but forgotten. Historically, you get lots of "unpopular winners".
 
okay. But... the problem with cotton (and tobacco, IIRC) is that it depletes the soil fairly quickly... a small landholder will soon be unable to grow cotton after a while. Despicable as the large plantations were, they were able to rotate around and keep some amount of cotton coming all the time. So, I still wonder if cotton would eventually decrease...

The late 19th century was when the large-scale use of nitrate fertilizers was first coming into vogue. The Chilean guano islands were being mined for the stuff, and there was another, lesser known source...bone meal. There were tons of bones lying around on Civil War battlefields, and an industry arose in the 1860s and 1870s where people would go out and gather these bones...horse, human, or whatever...and grind them up for fertilizer (graves which were in military cemeteries were generally not mined for bones, but there were a lot of battles where the two armies met and fought in some relatively remote area for example, and then moved on, leaving the bodies to rot where they lay. In many cases those bones could still be seen there, years later...bones from the battle of Chancellorsville, for example, were encountered by troops during the Battle of the Wilderness, a year later, and there is a famous picture of bones from the Wilderness being gathered up after the war). Bones from the millions of buffalo killed on the plains for their fur were eventually gathered up and processed for fertilizer as well.

So soil depletion didn't turn out to be a problem during the sharecropper era. The cost of the fertilizer is one of the things which kept the sharecroppers in debt and thus essentially bound to the land while they worked the debt off. Small independent farmers would have likely run into the same problems, with the same results.

Essentially the thing we've got to remember here is that the only real difference between a small independent farmer and a sharecropper in the post-Civil War South was who owned the land. An independent farmer owned the land himself. A sharecropper rented the land from a landlord (rent being paid in the form of a portion of the crop produced). But both were motivated by the same goals...feed your family and earn some spending cash. They both farmed the lands the same way, with the same goals. So looking at what happened, production-wise, with the sharecroppers should be instructive as to what would be the case with the ATL independent black farmers.
 
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The statistics I have seen say only 10% of Southerners owned slaves and only 1% owned more than 10 slaves.
Also, I do not want to burst anyone's bubble, but the majority of the United States, including Lincoln were ambivalent at best about slavery. President Lincoln himself stated that all he cared about was preserving the Union and if he could do it by not freeing any slaves then he would do it that way, if he could do it by freeing some slaves then he would do it that way and if he could do it by freeing all the slaves then he would go that route. The ending of slavery was the greatest and most noble consequence of the war, but it was not the primary reason for it. Even the Emancipation Proclamation was more political than idealogical, it ensured that Great Britain would stay out of the war.

I know it is nearly four months, but still this deserves a response -there has been recent speculation that the reason Britain ultimately stayed out of the war was not because of emancipation of the slaves but because the Union had developed iron-clads like the Monitor which potentially posed a very serious threat to the vaunted Royal Navy and therefore imperiled not only Canada but also the British Empire as a whole which had not yet developed anything equivalent.
 
What if the freed slaves got the land they had worked on all their lives instead of the former slave owners getting to keep it
Course if you take the property of Slaveholders - The Black and Indians Slaveholders will be the ones most Hurt.
 
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