Would the Confederates ever abolish slavery if they had won?

Would the Confederates ever abolish slavery if they had won?

  • Yes

    Votes: 140 69.3%
  • No

    Votes: 62 30.7%

  • Total voters
    202

Saphroneth

Banned
The idea that the civil war would end Abolition is quite hilarious. I mean what would people just suddenly become robots with no ability to want to improve the lives of their fellow men and remove what was gnerally seen as an evil if the Noth loses the civil war? It might not be in 1866, but 1876? 1882? 1888? Yeah by 1890 the North would not have slavery.
Oh, I'm hardly saying that slavery would last forever. But I'm saying slavery could be significantly extended in life.
 
Free states don't necessarily elect abolitionists.
And any abolitionists who do get elected may well decide discretion is the better part of valour, if strategically-placed border states which feel they're being treated unfairly have the option of shifting allegiances to the rival next door. It'd be much safer for any abolitionists to focus on ameliorating the system of slavery in the Union and restricting its extension to the territories, while simultaneously fulminating against how much worse things are south of the border, rather than actually risking upsetting powerful and entrenched interests by pushing for genuine measures of abolition.

Even Lincoln thought that compensated emancipation would take forty years after the passage of a constitutional amendment to complete:

'Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled (two-thirds of both Houses concurring), That the following articles be proposed to the legislatures (or conventions) of the several States as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all or any of which articles, when ratified by three-fourths of the said legislatures (or conventions ), to be valid as part or parts of the said Constitution, viz:

ART.--. Every State wherein slavery now exists which shall abolish the same therein at any time or times before the 1st day of January., A. D. 1900, shall receive compensation from the United States as follows'
 

SRBO

Banned
They could NOT deport all the Blacks to Africa it would be way too expensive. The proposal was little more than goop to serve John Q Stupid. It would have jammed up the rail networks and the ports for starters.

Well nobody is silly enough to do it at once
 
Depends on your definition of "ending slavery". As Chris Rock says slavery ending is "whenever your particular town decided to act right", it can be as late as the 1960s, 70s, even still today there are "sunset towns" in northern Arkansas (and I'm sure many other Southern states). Even after slavery may be abolished you're talking about decades (or a century or more) of apartheid policies. Should the Confederacy survive I wonder how it will influence other nations around the world and especially the Boer Republics, the British Boer War, and the 1910 Union of South Africa. One could see a relatively larger number of apartheid states around the world receiving "moral", economic, and political support from South Africa and the CSA.
 
Free states don't necessarily elect abolitionists. If Lincoln's party goes down in flames with the failure of the war, the Democrats who take over aren't going to indulge in all this 'abolitionist extremism'; they would have a solid hold on the border states and on the votes of immigrants who don't care about slavery. You also might see large scale defection of free soil Whigs from the Republicans to the Democrats, depending on how the issue of the territories is handled. Would have to look up the relevant democrat views on the issue.

When it comes to the democrats and republicans I can see it going two ways more or less:

1. The republicans go down in flames as a result of their failure in the civil war with the democrats more or rising to power and taking over for a few generations. In this case I imagine relations between the CSA and USA will be more or less reconcilary with them attempting to rebuild ties.

2. The Republicans maintain their hold inventing a sort of "stab in the back theory" for why the war was lost, kinda like what the German right did after WW1, putting the blame on the democrats alongside other undesirable elements(immigrants, communists maybe) for the loss of the war. "If it weren't for these traitors we could have won the war and kept are nation one" will be the general opinion. In this case the Democrats lacking a solid south like in OTL may fade away with the republicans turning the nation into something akin to a dominant party state for a long while putting the USA on an increasingly authoritarian and dark path. In this case, especially if the war was lost because of foreign involvement(Britain, France), I imagine the USA would become increasingly isolationist and even volatile turning on it's former trade partners and maintaining a belligerent stance towards the CSA to keep up the facade. Sorta like North Korea in a way. I don't know if Lincoln would have the stomach for this but I think of a few within his party who would play ball(Benjamin Butler maybe?).
 
Well nobody is silly enough to do it at once

It couldn't be done without enormous expense even over a decade of two. There were millions of Blacks and they would have to be caught, fed, housed, and shipped over with supplies . It would almost certainly be more expensive than the military.
 
Depends on your definition of "ending slavery". As Chris Rock says slavery ending is "whenever your particular town decided to act right", it can be as late as the 1960s, 70s, even still today there are "sunset towns" in northern Arkansas (and I'm sure many other Southern states). Even after slavery may be abolished you're talking about decades (or a century or more) of apartheid policies. Should the Confederacy survive I wonder how it will influence other nations around the world and especially the Boer Republics, the British Boer War, and the 1910 Union of South Africa. One could see a relatively larger number of apartheid states around the world receiving "moral", economic, and political support from South Africa and the CSA.
Slavery is slavery, apartheid is apartheid. Ending slavery means ending official ownership of people.
 

Spengler

Banned
Oh, I'm hardly saying that slavery would last forever. But I'm saying slavery could be significantly extended in life.
By at most two decades. It had no longevity like it had in the south.

Also to whomever thinks the USA would turn into DPRK that is quite hilarious, the CSA if it keeps slavery is not going to be with friends so will not be propped up by some foreign power, sooner or later the Union will come back.
 
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Slavery is slavery, apartheid is apartheid. Ending slavery means ending official ownership of people.

Apartheid, and the programs that preceded its introduction in 1948, included slavery under any name but slavery; Africans "working" for Whites with no allowance to quit and having to have passes to go places and can only live where their "job" is among other restrictions; apartheid was not about "separate but equal" or just separate and unequal; it codified Africans having to work in slave conditions and not leave their "employers" and both employee and their children were stuck to the employer and his descendants. I'm offended by the implication that once official slavery by the name of slavery ends then there is no "slavery". By your definition sex slaves in the US are not in slavery, because slavery has been abolished in the US; and I find that offensive in the highest degree.
 
Apartheid, and the programs that preceded its introduction in 1948, included slavery under any name but slavery; Africans "working" for Whites with no allowance to quit and having to have passes to go places and can only live where their "job" is among other restrictions; apartheid was not about "separate but equal" or just separate and unequal; it codified Africans having to work in slave conditions and not leave their "employers" and both employee and their children were stuck to the employer and his descendants.

I'm offended by the implication that once official slavery by the name of slavery ends then there is no "slavery". By your definition sex slaves in the US are not in slavery, because slavery has been abolished in the US; and I find that offensive in the highest degree.
Wouldn´t you call those "serfs"?

I used the wrong world, abolishing slavery means ending official ownership of people. Of course slaves could exists even if not legal. Also I find insulting that you assume I mean offense to you with my words, see how irritating this condescending way of talking is?
 
I imagine if slavery were to continue into the 20th century there might be boycotts. Something akin to what happened with Sao Tome and Principe would happen. That year Britain's Anti-Slavery society investigated labour conditions on the island as labourers had been recruited in Portuguese West Africa to work on the cacao plantations. There investigations began around 1905 and the controversy ensued with some chocolatiers boycotting the island, and the Portuguese eventually made reforms to the system by 1909. This boycott was not uniform, as German, America, Dutch and other chocolate producers largely ignored the issue of slavery.

With cotton, the issue becomes a little trickier, as the former confederacy produced most of the world's supplies by 1913. Assuming the Confederacy remains intact, based on actual 1913 figures, it produces nearly two-thirds of the world's raw cotton, or 13,545,000 bales. India is next with 3,692,000 (17%), Egypt 1,496,000 (7%), Russia 1,030,000 (5%), China 620,000 (3%) and Brazil 420,000 (2%). Based on consumption, Britain consumed around 20% of the world's raw cotton, with the rest of Europe consuming another 20%, and the U.S. consuming around one-third of the world's raw cotton.

In terms of milled cotton, the U.S. share was higher, with 82% of all milled cotton in 1913 being produced in the U.S. another 17% in India, 7% in Egypt, 5% in China, and 3% in Russia. With textiles being such an important industrial export in many countries, this would give the Confederacy some leverage over control of the world market. Whether or not there are efforts to increase production elsewhere is up to anyone's guess. However, I imagine that for many European countries, they might simply choose to ignore the issue.

In 1860, U.S. Cotton exports were 3,535,373 bales, with 71% going to the United Kingdom, 16% to France, and 4% to the German States. By 1913, 9,124,591 bales were exported with 41% going to the UK, 26% to Germany, 12% to France and 15% going to the rest of Europe. This increasing share of non-British textile manufactures between 1860 and 1913 in a way would be beneficial to the Confederacy because they would not be so reliant on the British market for exports, and I can assume that is where most of the criticism would stem from (along with the U.S.).

In terms of textile manufacturing, by 1913 the UK was still dominant, it was home to 38% of the world's cotton spindles, the U.S. with 22%, Germany 8%, Germany 6% and Russia 6%. Interestingly enough, the ex-Confederacy was home to 11% of the world's spindles by 1913, an upward trend, perhaps due to lower labour costs. Of these, two-thirds was concentrated in the Carolinas and another 25% in Georgia and Alabama. Whether this would have developed as it did is anyone's guess, what is interesting is that African-Americans were largely excluded from mill jobs in the Carolinas.
 
In other words, a boycott of Confederate cotton is like a boycott of OPEC oil.... except that OPEC only controls about 40% of production, not 65% to 80% of world production.
 
I remember reading about during the days of slavery slaves would deliberately work slower and even engage in small acts of sabotage via destruction of equipment as a sort of quiet rebellion if you will. Similar things were seen during the holocaust from Nazi slave labor.

That and another factor to keep in mind was the lack of education among slaves which is essential for an advanced manufacturing base. In many states it was literally against the law for slaves to even be taught to read let alone go to any sort of school as such that is a pretty significant impediment to increased productivity.

Yes, this too. Of course, that alone wouldn't necessarily have been enough to make slavery unprofitable on its own, but it certainly did have more of an effect than historians(perhaps especially Southern historians, many of whom had at least some stake in the "Lost Cause" mythology) in decades past were often willing to admit.

Even Jeff Davis knew the CSA would never get Delaware as that was all but a nominal slave state and Maryland damn near impossible with the B&O being controlled by hard core Unionists and the state largely indefensible.

Yep, this. At best, the C.S.A. might have been able to get Kentucky and retain all of Virginia-it wasn't going to do any better than that. Not in the 1860s.

The idea that the civil war would end Abolition is quite hilarious. I mean what would people just suddenly become robots with no ability to want to improve the lives of their fellow men and remove what was gnerally seen as an evil if the Noth loses the civil war? It might not be in 1866, but 1876? 1882? 1888? Yeah by 1890 the North would not have slavery.

Agreed, slavery would end sooner up North. It is gone by 1890 at the very latest.

Yes, this, and there's the very real possibility that, should the U.S. lose the war, it might not actually be the Republicans who get the blame, but perhaps the Copperheads and conservative Democrats could get shafted instead.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Yep, this. At best, the C.S.A. might have been able to get Kentucky and retain all of Virginia-it wasn't going to do any better than that. Not in the 1860s.
Depends on the how of things. If there's a Trent war, for example, the Union is comprehensively screwed unless they end the war with Britain inside a few months - the Union is uniquely vulnerable in that time period to such a war, as at a stroke it cuts off over half their total small arms on hand as of 30 June 1862. (That is, the US in 31 Dec 1861 had roughly half the small arms in the country that it had on 30 June 1862, and all of the increase depended on foreign imports or materials.)

A US Army 200,000 smaller than OTL in June 1862 (- 500,000 weapons, and using the 300,000 bad weapons in reserve OTL) is cripplingly vulnerable even before you start dealing with the other problems (to whit, and focusing for now on the narrow issue of the army - the Confederacy has more weapons and hence more troops than OTL; you need to deploy troops to the coast; you need to deploy troops north; the Confederacy can redeploy troops from handling the Union coastal forts and penetrations).

Given that, I think that you could realistically see the Confederacy getting Maryland - which was, after all, a very pro-CSA state OTL.
 
Slavery is not likely to die of natural causes at least until well into the 20th century, maybe even the information age. It's an extremely profitable form of labor control, and one that's very much compatible with semi-skilled industrial labor; the future of slavery had never looked better than in 1860.

If it does abolish slavery, it will probably be part of an international agreement that they reluctantly sign on to (gradual manumission in exchange for perpetual peace, something like that). Even that could be uncertain, depending on how the Confederacy works with its fellow slave states in Cuba and Brazil; if they see a new slave confederacy win independence and chart a path towards a new slave modernity, it could reinforce the institution.

Why was it abolished by the British in the first place, then, if it was so economically viable?
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Why was it abolished by the British in the first place, then, if it was so economically viable?
Because the British made it a moral issue.

Literally - "Abolition" was viewed roughly as well as "Freedom" in mid-late 20th century America.
 
Why was it abolished by the British in the first place, then, if it was so economically viable?
As Saphroneth said, it was a moral decision by the British voting public, not an economic one.

To expand a bit on this, the British Isles were not viable with slavery in existing prices, since there were more profitable uses for slaves in the British West Indies and similar places. This meant that the moral issues with slavery got it banned pretty quickly in mainland Britain. Slavery was still making money hand over fist in the British West Indies, right up to the time of abolition. This made no difference, because the abolitionists had many more votes in Britain than a handful of wealthy planters. In fact, the abolition of slavery sent the West Indies into an economic depression which lasted for decades.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
The Mansfield decision is especially notable - it was a judgement from 1772:

The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law [statute], which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged.​

This is as broad a decision as is possible to make under the situation - in effect, it declares that slavery is illegal unless it is specifically stated otherwise, and that it is illegal in England (and Wales). Mansfield couldn't make law in the colonies, but his decision was as wide-ranging as it could be. You even have Edward Long and Samuel Estwick, two leading British slavery apologists, conceding in the aftermath of the Somerset case that slavery is 'repugnant to the spirit of English laws' - this is very significant as it means that even proponents of slavery admit it is morally wrong.
 
Indeed, the Quakers in Britain were big proponents of abolitionist movements. There was also the anti-saccharine society, which urged what can be termed the world's first consumer boycott. Below is a bit about the movement to boycott sugar due to slavery in the Caribbean.

http://www.economist.com/node/8345592

Arguably, there could be some sort of boycott of Confederate cotton in Britain and the United States. Perhaps this coincides with a movement to increase production elsewhere, particularly in India and Russia. It appears that the number of fibers from Indian cotton was not suitable for British spindles, at least during the Civil War. Egyptian cotton was of high quality, but production would not be able to cover the loss of Confederate cotton.

Raw cotton remained the single largest import article from the U.S. to the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Japan as late as 1913, and below is the proportion of southern cotton used in the various countries for textile manufacturing.

CSA cotton as % of cotton used in manufacturing of the leading textile producing countries in 1913
United Kingdom 62%
Germany 61%
France 54%
Austria-Hungary 50%
Italy 64%
Russia 23%
Japan 17%

While Russia relied mostly on domestic supplies from Central Asia and Japan was increasingly importing British Indian cotton, Europe was still reliant on American supplies.

My guess is that there would be some pressure to ameliorate the system, and quell British and U.S. criticism, perhaps a gradual abolition by individual states would occur, one where a system of indentured labour would replace slavery. I imagine that it would be a system where conditions would be little better than slavery, but this would not be without precedent elsewhere in the Victorian world.
 
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