Posted on 07/19/2017 4:34:02 PM PDT by Ciaphas Cain
Another one with the ‘’slavery was on it’s way out’’. Please, that’s cliched beyond belief.
Well, that is my reading of the probable course of history.
Even if the Republicans had not succeeded in blocking slavery in US territories, the land further west wasn't suitable for cotton without massive irrigation, which wasn't do-able with the technology of the day.
What other crop was available to support a plantation-style economy?
The only sure thing is that there will be a lot of naked women.
The only thing I ask from Hollywood is to entertain me. If they can do this, I'm happy. There's plenty of liberal story arcs in Game of Thrones (not to mention nudity and straight and gay sex) but the show itself is entertaining so I enjoy watching it.
I'll keep that in mind.
Many Southerners were anti-slavery on a moral basis, but owned slaves for economic reasons.
The antebellum south, being such strong supporters of the US Constitution, banned even speaking of abolition - even in the abstract. So one could fit abolitionist southerners on the head of a pin.
Those economic reasons were ultimately doomed by increasing mechanization.
Ah, here's where the competing interests of economics and politics collide. Without any other influence this might be true. But the southern rulers sought to drive their fortunes upon the backs of slave labor and, in doing so, sealed their fates. jmacusa raised a good point. By deliberately placing slavery so prominently in their constitution they chained themselves to it. No matter the evolution of events and circumstance, the south was wedded to the exploitation of slave labor. Southern planters turned their backs on innovation and progress.
Curiously, what really sealed the slavers doom was their own miscalculation in the destruction of millions of pounds of cotton in New Orleans. ol jeff davis came up with a shrewd gambit known as the "Cotton Diplomacy". He somehow thought by withholding the supply it would make demand by Europeans greater. Instead it spurred them to seek out (and find) alternate sources for cotton. Soon enough "King Cotton" was no more. Perhaps if they had heeded your advice about confusing economics with politics... "If" the Republicans had campaigned to free the slaves and re-imburse the owners monetarily, the Civil War probably would not have happened. But they did not...they simply wanted to issue an edict.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, compensated emancipation was proposed but the slavers would have none of it. The "edict" came from the south and it was an insistence on war.
Tobacco.
I seriously doubt that tobacco would grow well any further west than about San Antonio. Too dry.
And if the soil fertility has been already worn out by cotton, I doubt that it would thrive as a "post-cotton" substitute east of there either.
Of course that "pinhead" supported abolitionist southerners like Washington and Jefferson Washington actually freed his slaves (which wasn't easy at the time). Jefferson couldn't afford to, as he wasn't the money manager that Washington was, but he knew slavery was a bad idea and said so. I'm sure I could come up with more.
Are you serious? Do you live in the United States? Have you never heard of Winston-Salem, North Carolina? Tobacco is grown all over the South. Has been for over two hundred years.
Yes, I'm perfectly serious. I was born and raised in South Louisiana (on a farm), so I am very familiar with the horticultural history of "the South".
The "expansion of slavery" that the Republicans denied wasn't "in" the south....it was focused westward. And my point is that the transition from "adequate for tobacco" rainfall to "inadequate for tobacco" happens just about San Antonio, and continues westward to the Pacific Ocean. I doubt that even the central valley of California has rainfall sufficient for either cotton or tobacco.
Tobacco as a crop needs lots of water, and it "was" raised where the rainfall was adequate. Note, though, that tobacco had ALREADY been displaced by cotton as a mass cash crop well before the Civil War.
You might also note the places were sugar cane is successfully grown in North America...places with very high rainfall and subtropical temperatures. Like tobacco, only more so.
I think that you're probably overstating that a bit. Sure there were men like Robert Lee who paid lip-service to the moral evils of slavery yet believed that slavery was necessary for the well-being of blacks in the South. You would be hard-pressed to find any Southern leader of the time who was truly opposed to slavery, so a political or social solution that resulted in an end to slavery was a non-starter.
Likewise the economic driver for slavery has been overstated as well. True, slave labor was required for the large plantations but the average Southern slave owner was not a plantation owner. The average slave owner held fewer than seven or eight slaves and was just as likely to be a middle-class town dweller as a farmer. Slaves did more than labor in the fields. Slaves were gardeners, nursemaids, cooks, grooms, coach drivers, household servants of every type. Men like Thomas Jackson, a college professor, owned slaves for that purpose. Mechanization in the fields would not have done away with the need of the other kinds of labor that in the South were filled by slaves.
"If" the Republicans had campaigned to free the slaves and re-imburse the owners monetarily, the Civil War probably would not have happened. But they did not...they simply wanted to issue an edict.
Why would you think such a plan would work? Leaving aside the total cost - millions of slaves probably worth over a billion dollars at a time when the federal budget was less than $70 million - why would the Southern slave owners want to participate? Sell off their chattel and they would be forced to find a replacement that was not readily available. There was no interest on the part of slave owners for a compensated emancipation plan, not in the North and certainly not in the South.
The result of their NOT doing so was probably more expensive to the country than re-imbursement would.
In hindsight, the rebellion did cost more in money alone than compensated emancipation would have. But hindsight is 20/20.
Washington and Jefferson head the list. Who, exactly, do you think manned the Underground Railroad?? It wasn't Yankees, and I seriously doubt that they were all non-slave-owning small farmers, either.
Well I had expected someone from the times of the rebellion, but be that as it may to say that either Washington or Jefferson were anti-slavery is a bit of an exaggeration though Washington came closer than Jefferson. People claim that Washington freed his slaves when he died, but in fact his will freed only one of them immediately, some of them on the death of his wife, and some remained slave for the rest of their lives. Jefferson never freed his slaves, and once proposed emancipating slaves and expelling them to Haiti. Both may have claimed to oppose slavery during their lifetimes but the proof is in their actions.
Who, exactly, do you think manned the Underground Railroad?? It wasn't Yankees, and I seriously doubt that they were all non-slave-owning small farmers, either.
Considering the Underground Railroad ran primarily through Northern states to Canada then I'd say that Northern Yankees did provide the bulk of the support.
I revere Washington but he only paid lip service to the issue of abolition, and even at that only with regard to his own slaves. Jefferson as all over the map. And both of them were 80 years earlier than the slavers rebellion.
Who, exactly, do you think manned the Underground Railroad??
It sure wasn't southerns.
Nor can you wear tobacco.
"Cotton was profitable and slave trading was profitable and keep slaves alive was a bare minimum in expense.
Hardly. Slaves were very expensive. In the value of currency of the day, they cost just about as much as a high-end tractor costs a farmer today. Plus they had to be fed and housed which isn't exactly cheap. This "did" make slave-trading profitable, which ties into my point below.
"It was crucial to the South to preserve slavery and “King Cotton’’.
They might have thought so, but cotton as a cash crop was doomed, not by politics, but by the laws of chemistry and biology. Monocropped cotton depleted the soil of nutrients (especially nitrogen) to the point that it could no longer be grown profitably. There would have had to have been a major breakthrough in fertilizer production for it to have continued. This was the whole reason for the interest in opening the western territories to slavery. It is also why some plantations began to "farm slaves". It was the only way they could turn a profit.
So exactly how did the slaves get to the BEGINNING of your "only northern states Underground Railroad". Methinks your map is somewhat incomplete.
You have an alarmingly simplistic view of this matter. Particularly in light of your persistent involvement on FR, you should have been exposed to at least a few actual facts contrary to the narrative. I live about 30 miles from Mendenhall Plantation. That region of NC was settled by Quakers. I’ve seen Levi Coffin’s false bottom wagon that he used to take runaway slaves north. It’s still there if you can bother yourself to come out of your “Slave Power” university-induced stupor long enough to take a look.
Horses were more expensive . A slave was about $400. A horse was twice as much. Slaves couldn’t pull a plow or a wagon, a team of horses could. Shows the inhumanity of slavery. Cotton was crop that did require lots of water but it’s what made it expensive and profitable.
A mechanical Cotton picker was developed back in 1850. Perhaps if the entire industry wasn't destroyed by the Civil War, it would have been developed further before 1940.
Slavery, or something like it, could have lasted a very long time.
Between 20 and 80 years longer is my estimate. After that, it would simply have been nonviable.
And the notion that we'd end up where we are today if the Civil War had gone the other way, is a dubious one: things could have turned out very different indeed.
Well, we wouldn't have had that war with Spain. We wouldn't have gotten involved in World War I, and that would have prevented World War II from occurring. The Holocaust wouldn't have happened, nor would all the deaths from World War II. The Atomic bomb likely wouldn't have been developed as early as it was, if ever.
Those are the directly traceable elements to US use of Military in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Who can say what would have been the indirect consequences of the North and South separating? Perhaps archduke Ferdinand would not have been shot, and all the millions killed as a result of World War I would have been prevented as well.
Actually, I don't see how things could have turned out much worse than they did in our current historical timeline. Very bloody was this timeline.
Like it or hate it, the movie C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America already dealt with a similar premise back in 2004 about as well or as poorly as could be expected.
Never heard of it, and I have never seen it. I predict it was probably told in a manner that simply agrees with the confirmation bias of modern people from the North East, as are most movies nowadays.
In other words, more propaganda intent on convincing everyone that the right thing was done when the North invaded and killed people.
Yes! Absolutely correct! I have been trying to make people understand this for the last two years. *NEW YORK* collected the vast majority of all import duties.
But 3/4ths of that money was produced by the South. Only 25% of the money was produced by the North. New York was getting a huge windfall off of Southern produced goods, and so was Washington D.C.
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