Posted on 03/17/2015 8:14:26 AM PDT by iowamark
Believe in unicorns and fairy tales don’t you General?
I agree, but the question is for how long. I think your belief that it would have been no more than a decade is unrealistic. Having fought a war expressly for the defense of slavery and including clauses in their constitution expressly forbidding the outlawing of slavery, it seems highly unlikely that just a few years later they'd ban the peculiar institution.
While it's possible that some slaveowners would have individually seen the economic sense of emancipation and freed their slaves, I think slavery as a legal institution would have survived well into the 20th Century. Keep in mind that mechanization and advances in pesticides didn't reduce the need for intense labor on cotton until the 1940s.
Perhaps, but perhaps a sane commander, which the Germans didn’t have, would have recognized the need to focus troops on one objective and not on a broad front. Maybe shifting Army Group North to cover that gap might have prevented the Russians from attacking the gap? You’re probably right, though. The Germans to that point hadn’t attempted anything nearly as ambitious as Barbarossa, so it’s likely that the Wermacht lacked the capability to achieve a meaningful, positive result regardless of strategy. However, I’m sure you would agree that the command of the Nazi forces was atrocious and glaring blunders were made, most notably needlessly sacrificing an entire army in an attempt to hold an untenable position in Stalingrad.
And be replaced with what?
And what of poor Southern whites who were share croppers and had no stake in the plantation system?
Sharecropping was not widespread until after the end of slavery. Small farmers in the South for the most part owned their own land.
While horrible a condition to be sure, it was in the interest of slave owners to keep slaves fed and alive at a minimum simply so as to work.
Well, yeah. You don't abuse or starve a valuable asset to death. Wouldn't make sense.
Slavery was immoral, an abomination before God and the ideals America was founded on. It had to end.
Except that virtually all Southerners didn't think slavery was immoral, didn't see it as an abomination before God or anyone else, and weren't in a hurry to see it end.
It would have lasted a lot longer than the 10 years you mentioned because emancipation had three major strikes against it in the eyes of Southerners. One, there was nothing to replace it. Two, it was profitable. And three, if you end it what do you do with all those free blacks suddenly wanting rights and all?
What’s even more hilarious was that as my great grandfather got older, the family would pass him around, stay a month here, a month there. Every afternoon, he wanted to walk up to the beer garden and get a brewski at 2 in the afternoon. Trouble was their was one blk family in the town, they were good people; town barber. My ancestor blamed his disability from Andersonville on the govt’s freeing the slaves or such. So every time he saw one of the colored kids; he’d chase them hollering up a storm. My aunt had to go with him to the beer garden so ole William didn’t get himself into trouble, ha ha. Crazy old folks from an earlier time.
My great-grandfather was an equally eccentric old coot from Helena Montana. He loved kids and would gather them up in his open touring sedan and take them to town for a treat at the drugstore. He was the epitome of “color-blind” had never gave a second thought to the race of the kids. He once scandalized my great-grandmother when he referred to a carload of kids (including several blacks) as “my children”.
The artillery of the day gave much more bang for the buck than the Gatling gun, a temperamental, finicky beast that was expensive to feed.
A bigger miss was not implementing full use of the repeating rifles available at the time.
If you listen to the “Lost Causers or their sympathizers slavery was already a ‘’dying institution’’ in 1861.(hogwash!) The moral and social imperative against it would have demanded it’s end. And blacks themselves certainly would have rebelled, perhaps more successfully than other failed attempts. Maybe not in a decade perhaps but I would think certainly by the mid-1870s.
Which was not introduced into Southerern society by their choice.
If, as the argument claims slavery was dying, what was to be the intended plan to deal with blacks who were no longer slaves.
You are the one claiming slavery was dying. The Southern leadership in 1861 fully expected it to continue for generations.
I've always been amazed at that claim, in the face of the fact that slaves were increasing in both number and price right up to the war. Sounds like a booming institution to me.
Which also goes to why I think you're being generous in your estimate of when slavery would end. After land, the most valuable asset in the south was slaves. Billions of dollars worth--in 1860 dollars, no less. I don't see any moral argument overcoming the simple economic self-interest inherent in maintaining that much wealth. And any compensated emancipation scheme would be even less likely in an economy of only the southern states. There simply would never be enough money.
Slave rebellion was a possibility, but the south did a pretty good job of preventing those and the only really successful example is Haiti, which was a far different set of circumstances than those in the south--a colonial island thousands of miles from a motherland that has its hands full with the Napoleonic Wars, with a vast slave majority, etc. etc.. I think the south would have been able to suppress any uprising.
You misunderstand me. I’m not saying slavery was dying. I’m pointing out this is the argument the “Lost Causers’’ and Confederate sympathizers use. Slavery was NOT dying out. The South wanted to preserve it and at the time, in the late 1850s Kansas was applying for statehood. The South wanted it to be a slave state and the North did not. It’s in Kansas, “Bleeding Kansas’’, that The Civil War really started.
Generous, yes perhaps. But look at Kansas prior to the beginning of the war. It wasn’t called “Bleeding Kansas’’ for nothing. As far as a moral argument versus money, the increasing number of slaves and the force of abolition, the simple desire of people to live without a boot on their neck and a whip on their back has time and again throughout history to be more powerful than money.
You’re clearly a less cynical man than I.
LOL! Well thanks but I can drip cynicism at times. Someone told me once I was very sardonic. No “Bubba’’, I just read history and believe in the inherent decency of most of my fellow man. Most, not all. Starry-eyed I’m not. Good chatting with you.
There was no plan to replace slavery in the South. The leaders in the South envisioned slavery lasting indefinitely. They saw no moral issue, or at the very least were able to rationalize away any moral issue with slavery. There was no indication in the antebellum South, despite the arguments from “lost causers” that slavery was dying. In fact, at the start of the war, slavery was as strong as ever.
I think a valid analogy (not perfect, mind you, but illustrative) would be the analogy between slavery in the antebellum South and fossil fuels today. The economy of today is in a very real way based on fossil fuel consumption, most especially consumption of oil. All transport of goods requires oil. Nearly all energy needed for manufacture of goods requires fossil fuels of one type or another (except for areas, such as the Niagara area in NY where hydroelectric power is readily available, but these are limited.) Think about the economic implications if fossil fuels were to suddenly disappear. Our economy would essentially collapse. Do you think that we would give up fossil fuel usage voluntarily?
Similarly, the antebellum South’s economy was based on slave labor. The disappearance of slave labor did cause an economic collapse and required complete restructuring of the Southern economy. How likely was it that those in power would have given up slave labor voluntarily? There’s a reason that the antebellum South was one of the last bastions of slavery, at least among Western nations. Southerners were not morally inferior to other people inhabiting Western nations; their economy was based on slavery, and they saw no reasonable alternatives to it.
When slavery became economically untenable in the North it was gradually phased out. Yet it was fine for Yankees to impose crushing tariffs on the South for goods and services that benefitted them.
As mechanization of plantation and farming methods came to the fore in the South, it’s reasonable to expect that the moral implications of slavery would have become more and more obvious...unless you see Southerners as somehow less human than their upstanding Yankee counterparts.
Or are you just a fan of statism?
I neither see antebellum Southerners as less moral than other humans nor am I a statist. It is simply factual, though, that the Southern economy was based entirely on slave labor and that the South was not going to voluntarily throw their entire economy into collapse. I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but it is human nature. No society has ever voluntarily destroyed its own economic basis.
You are making invalid assumptions. You discuss what would have happened as mechanization of plantation and farming methods, but you fail to realize that there was little incentive to mechanize the plantations and farms. Slave labor, once the initial purchase was made, was cheap to maintain. Further, slave labor had a tendency to replenish itself. The initial investment was already made; why would plantation owners make another large scale investment in machinery to replace the slaves?
I am quite sure that, deep down, most Southerners recognized the moral implications of slavery. They also rationalized those moral implications away in order to maintain their economy. We do much the same today. Our economy is based on fossil fule utilization. Fossil fuel utilization is not without its harmful effects. Even discounting the whole global warming non-issue, fossil fuel use has caused pollution, which in turn has caused human suffering and death. We don’t normally worry about such suffering and death, though, do we? We consider it an acceptable cost relative to the economic benefit of the ability to utilize fossil fuels. I believe that antebellum Southerners likely might have felt the same way.
The Civil War was NOT about tariffs. If it was, it would have occurred back in the 1820’s rather than in the 1860’s. The South was able to come to a compromise on the tariff issue precisely because the tariff, while damaging to the Southern economy, did not undermine the economic basis of the South. So long as the South had slavery, its economy was viable.
I am speaking in the short term here, of course. The elimination of slavery (along with the war itself) forced the South to build an economy that was based more on industry and was less reliant on cash crops. That, ultimately, was beneficial to the South in the long run. It’s hard to look toward long term benefit, though, when your economy is in the process of collapsing, so I don’t think it’s very likely that the South would have given up slavery voluntarily.
So, sometime in the 1940s.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.