Posted on 10/20/2002 8:01:28 PM PDT by Aurelius
There was second-class citizenship for blacks when I was growing up. I remember back of the bus, back of the theater, water fountains for coloreds, restaurants not serving blacks, separate colored waiting rooms in doctors' offices, a black guy with a masters degree taking the trash out of our offices, and run down public school facilities.
I remember blacks having to prove they could read in order to vote. (Actually, that may not be such a bad thing for everyone, regardless of color.)
Those were the good old boy days of control by the Democrat Party, worthless scum that they were/are.
Federalist 39 Dittos
Wait - blacks never had the "power" (your favorite word) to pull off a slave revolt. According to what you said in that other thread "there is no such thing as rights", "everything must be bought and paid for", blacks still don't have the right to liberty, according to what you said about the right to revolution.
The thing about the abolitionists is just how much effect such a small group could have. I don't know about the statistics, but most Northerners weren't abolitionists. Without Brown, Northerners could have convinced Southerners that abolition and slave revolts were't coming any time soon. After Brown it was impossible to do so.
You could say that the militant abolitionists killed off gradual compensated abolition. The other side of the coin is that the absence of a real program of gradual compensated emancipation created militant abolitionism.
One way of looking at Garrison's abolitionism is that it was abolitionism for a democratic, not to say demagogic, age. The older gradualists came from a more aristocratic and republican environment and didn't have much visible success in the South. The younger generation would use the new popular press to agitate and organize (though this could be seen as a return to the tactics of the revolution). A great success by the earlier gradualists could have frustrated the militant younger generation, but those older gradual abolitionists were probably thrown off balance by Garrison's rising generation.
The colonies really didn't interact with each other that much. They were insular and more isolated from each other. To the degree that they weren't completely self-reliant or self-sufficient, they were trading with England and the West Indies, much more than with each other.
Bringing the colonies together in one country probably did put us well on the way towards sectional conflict. Railroads and the new lands west of the Appalachians and Mississippi helped to create a country, but one by-product was that the growing together of sections made us more aware of the differences between us.
Some have seen the agricultural-industrial conflict as that between the old colonial model of production of raw materials for the global market and the new national model of workshops and factories producing finished goods for the home and foreign markets. The tragedy is that the new states didn't bring the old ones together, but helped to pull them apart.
Slavery probably would have been abolished when it was no longer profitable. Probably around the turn of the century, or perhaps by the 1930s. Possibly a compensated emancipation would be followed by colonization or peonage. Abolition might have come near the turn of the century and been followed by some mixture of bondage and nominal freedom that would have endured until mechanical cotton pickers took off. But of course people couldn't have forseen this at the time of the Civil War.
It's hard to think that the USA or CSA could have kept slavery for a century or half-century longer than we did. But our timeline for abolition has been influenced by what actually happened here in the 1860s, so one could expect that Brazil and Cuba might have kept slavery longer if we did too. MacKinley Cantor's fantasy of a victorious Confederacy spontaneously abolishing slavery after the war is too romantic and sentimental.
Things always seem inevitable or fated in retrospect. One could imagine a great national leader who might have prevented war and brought emancipation peacefully. We might then have looked at things very differently. But it wasn't to be. Maybe one reason was that we didn't have any strong external enemies to unite against. Consequently national sentiment declined in the Deep South. And soon enough we had found enemies to unite against -- in each other.
I wouldn't say that all mistreatment of blacks stems from it, but there certainly was heartfelt resentment by Southern whites of Reconstruction and Yankee military rule.
In Texas, after being voted out of the governership by a 2-to-1 margin, armed Radical Republicans seized the basement of the capitol building and the mayor of Austin to try to hold on to power by force. There is an interesting 1889 account of this 1873 event at Radical Republican Power Grab -- scroll down to the bottom of the first column on page 302.
In this case, I would have sided with the Democrats. But that was then and this is now.
Slavery was not destroyed, it was merely transformed. What do you think the so-called "income tax" is? Slavery is as necessary a concommitant of civilization as syphillis and war.
Another factor is foreign competition. With new countries taking up cotton production, the profitability of slave plantations would have been cut into. While this wouldn't necessarily have meant an end to slavery, it could have weakened the power of the slaveholders and their ability to maintain slavery.
Yet another possibility is that slave revolts would occur, leaving large areas of the country in chaos.
I consider that outside of the realm of possibility.
All the mistreatment of blacks is rooted in the southern institution of treating them as chattel property, to be bought and sold, and not as human beings.
You have correctly stated the issue.
The coastal blue Zone will be overcome by refugees from inland cities and then will be squeezed into capitulation when devoid of all resources.
Slavery wasn't solely a Southern institution. You'll find black slaves in New York in the old Dutch records, and the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts sold hundreds of captured Indians into slavery. Slavery remained in place longer in the South because the economics of large scale plantation agriculture favored it. The North generally had poorer soil and smaller farms.
Was the war started over slavery? No. Was it fought strictly over slavery? No. I will say this though, had slavery not ended with the end of the Civil War, another war would have occurred sooner or later around that very issue.
Slavery was not going to die in America without bloodshed, even the founding fathers knew this.
Given southern attitudes towards blacks in the 80 years after the Civil War I don't think that this would be impossible to imagine. I doubt that plantation slave labor would have lasted until then, but a large percentage of slaves never set foot in a cotton field. They provided domestic labor and the economic incentive to end that form of chattle slavery would have been much different than the incentives needed by the plantation owner. The idea of a family owning a servant or cook or maid as late as 1940 is not that hard to believe, assuming that an independent confederacy could have A) held out against international pressure to end slavery, and B) mustered the political will to change their state and national constitutions to allow the government to end it. It never would have ended otherwise.
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.