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Hi, I'm Samnell and I study middle nineteenth century US history.
I'm here to correct some frequent errors in the pop culture-oriented understanding of the Civil War. In most cases, seeing through them requires no more than an exercise of the dark arts of reading. I think this covers everything in the late eruption, but let me know if I forgot something. I tried to be thorough, which necessarily makes this long. I've culled the misinformation from a recent post and years of rather tedious experience, but it was asked that this be taken to another thread. So here we are.
Claim: The war wasn't about slavery at all!
Answer: It would be dishonest to call this anything short of a lie, whether spoken consciously or repeated unwittingly.
If the war wasn't about slavery then nobody ever told the Confederates. Four rebel states passed official statements of their causes when they passed their ordinances of secession. Each one was drafted by the body authorized by the voters of the state to decide whether or not they would attempt to leave the United States, voted on by that body, and published as a public statement of their reasons. These documents are revealing and ought to be read in full. I'll link to each in turn. Here they are in order of secession ordinance:
South Carolina noted that in ratifying the Constitution, the states placed themselves under various obligations.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
Without this, the Fugitive Slave Clause, South Carolina held that it would not have ratified. And for a while, the system worked. If your slave ran off, you could go and get your slave back from another state. But the times? They were a-changing:
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
I don't know how much more plainly one can say this. There's a great deal of throat clearing about the nature of the nation as understood by South Carolina as of December, 1860, but it says in black and white that the free states are increasingly hostile to slavery and have disregarded their obligation to aid in the return of fugitive slaves, therefore South Carolina is free to secede. This isn't something that the secession convention made up after a really epic bender down in Charleston, but rather a straight out fact. Back in the 1840s, the Taney Court ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that while enslavers had a right to cross state lines and seize the human property that dared steal itself from them, the states did not have an affirmative duty to facilitate that. They could pass laws barring the use of state facilities or the cooperation of state law enforcement in the recovery and rendition of slaves. These laws are usually referred to collectively as Personal Liberty Laws. The states that SC names did just that.
The slave states, always and only exponents of states rights when the right was slavery and always and defenders of the unlimited power of the federal government to suppress any species of state sovereignty employed to impede slavery or in any way threaten the right to hold slave property, had in fact demanded the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to overrule all of those laws, expanding the power of the national government to the degree that refusal to cooperate in slave renditions became a crime and providing the power for a slave catching expedition to deputize you on the spot to help. If you refused, you were guilty of that crime. This is a slave patrol draft.
But South Carolina had more sweeping grievances than Personal Liberty Laws ten years dead, or even the fact that after several high profile renditions and a few dramatic rescues had practically nullified the Fugitive Slave Act by 1854. (The last major rendition, that of Anthony Burns from Boston, literally required the Pierce administration to call out the Army and Navy.)
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
Let me break those out for you:
1) the free states assumed that they had a say in whether or not slave states should have slaves2) the free states deny that a right to property in slaves exists
3) the free states denounce slavery as sinful
4) the free states have permitted societies that condemn slavery, encouraging slave revolt and absconding
5) those socieities have gone and done just that, to the tune of thousands of slaves, and distributed antislavery materials which prompt slaves to revolt
Furthermore, South Carolina held that the free states in their perfidy elected an antislavery president:
Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This deed, South Carolina insisted, was done
in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
They let black people vote, even!
I've handled South Carolina's declaration in some detail. I don't intend to replicate this with the others because the grievances are largely the same.
Mississippi acted next
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That's the opening paragraph, incidentally.
Florida and Alabama came next, but neither published a declaration like the first two did. A document exists for Florida, but it's not clear if it was ever officially approved and so we can't ascribe to it the same imprimatur we would to the others.
This brings us to Georgia
For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war. Our people, still attached to the Union from habit and national traditions, and averse to change, hoped that time, reason, and argument would bring, if not redress, at least exemption from further insults, injuries, and dangers. Recent events have fully dissipated all such hopes and demonstrated the necessity of separation. Our Northern confederates, after a full and calm hearing of all the facts, after a fair warning of our purpose not to submit to the rule of the authors of all these wrongs and injuries, have by a large majority committed the Government of the United States into their hands. The people of Georgia, after an equally full and fair and deliberate hearing of the case, have declared with equal firmness that they shall not rule over them
The reference to equal enjoyment of the territories refers most explicitly to the matter of Kansas, where a proslavery government elected by massive fraud abetted by lynching, tarring and feathering, and all manner of other violence and threats of the same, contended with a free state government that seeing actual Kansans virtually written out of their own governance, established their own. But territorial grievances go all the way back to the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery from the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a corner of Minnesota. They continued in the Missouri Controversy, which was settled by letting Missouri have slavery essentially in perpetuity but excluding it from all other states formed from the Louisiana Purchase south of its southern border.
The subject erupted again during the debates over the annexation of Texas, which was not done by treaty in part because Texas claimed a vast swath of territory (most of which it had never exercised any control over) and practiced slavery. This would include land north of the Missouri Compromise line. Texas annexation brought the Mexican War in due course, which resulted in more territory. Most of that territory ran below the Missouri Compromise line. But remember what I said about the Lousiana Purchase? The Mexican Cession was not that and slavery had been abolished in Mexico decades before. So David Wilmot (D-PA) proposed, in the famous Wilmot Proviso, that the same language that kept slavery form the Northwest Territory be applied to the Mexican Cession. The South was outraged and the outrage got worse when they found gold in California and consequently it had sufficient population for statehood almost overnight. The Californians voted overwhelmingly not to have slavery. The eventual settlement for all of this brought the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, let California come in undivided and free rather than split or with slavery imposed upon it, and left the status of New Mexico and Utah carefully ambiguous. Both territories instituted slavery in the late 1850s.
Which brings us to 1854 and Kansas. I'll spare you the really interesting and somewhat complicated story unless someone wants to know, but the short version is that as the price for opening up Kansas to white settlement a collection of Southern politicians demanded that the Missouri Compromise be struck down and slavery permitted everywhere not yet a state. They go their way, under the fig leaf of "popular sovereignty". The argument was that the people of the territory would decide one way or another, but this was instituted to and understood by all parties as meaning that the people, who already had the power to vote slavery in when they became states, would now have the power to also vote it in earlier. It was ambiguous as to whether or not slavery existed in a jurisdiction by default and freedom had to be voted in, or the other way around. In actual practice, slavery was a creature of state law that national law recognized somewhat inconsistently, but Southerners routinely maintained that slaves were property and like all other property was guaranteed by the Constitution.
In overthrowing thirty years settled law, a sectional compromise that most understood as absolutely fixed and inviolate, the South and its northern allies outraged even men in the North who had rarely ever given slavery a thought before. They instituted a party to redress this, the Republicans. They came close to winning the 1856 election and did win in 1860.
This brings us to Texas, the last Lower South state to act.
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
[...]
The States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa, by solemn legislative enactments, have deliberately, directly or indirectly violated the 3rd clause of the 2nd section of the 4th article [the fugitive slave clause] of the federal constitution, and laws passed in pursuance thereof; thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate the amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holding States in their domestic institutions-- a provision founded in justice and wisdom, and without the enforcement of which the compact fails to accomplish the object of its creation. Some of those States have imposed high fines and degrading penalties upon any of their citizens or officers who may carry out in good faith that provision of the compact, or the federal laws enacted in accordance therewith.
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.
Does this all adequately speak for itself yet? Possibly not. Let's hear the Vice-President of the Confederacy on the issue.
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.
Don't believe him? He was there. But I sense you want more data. The states trying to bolt the United States send commissioners to other state states to try to convince them to join the party. These men made speeches and wrote letters that, as official communications from states lobbying other states, we should understand as similarly expressions of reasons why states would wished to quit the nation. Even when they address states that did not ultimately secede, their appeals inherently reflect what they think should induce a state to follow their lead and why the states appointing them took chose the course they did.
This is from JLM Curry (Alabama) to the governor of Maryland:
Having watched with painful anxiety the growth, power, and encroachments of anti-slaveryism, and anticipating for the party held together by this sentiment of hostility to the rights and institutions of the Southern people a probable success, too fatally realized, in the recent Presidential election, the General Assembly of Alabama, on the 24th of February, 1860, adopted joint resolutions providing, on the happening of such a contingency, for a convention of the State "to consider, determine, and do whatever the rights, interests, and honor of Alabama require to be done for their protection."
[...]
The bare fact that the party is sectional and hostile to the South is a full justification for the precautionary steps taken by Alabama to provide for the escape of her citizens from the peril and dishonor of submission to its rule. Superadded to the sectional hostility the fanaticism of a sentiment which has become a controlling political force, giving ascendancy in every Northern State, and the avowed purpose, as disclosed in party creeds, declarations of editors, and utterances of representative men, of securing the diminution of slavery in the States and placing it in the course of ultimate extinction, and the South would merit the punishment of the simple if she passed on and provided no security against the imminent danger.
[...]
They [Republicans] refuse to recognize our rights of property in slaves, to make a division of the territory, to deprive themselves of their assumed constitutional power to abolish slavery in the Territories or District of Columbia, to increase the efficiency of the fugitive slave law, or make provision for the compensation of the owners of runaway or stolen slaves, or place in the hands of the South any protection against the rapacity of an unscrupulous majority.
[...]
The sentiment of the sinfulness of slavery seems to be embedded in the Northern conscience. An infidel theory has corrupted the Northern heart. A French orator said the people of England once changed their religion by act of Parliament. Whether true or not, it is not probable that the settled convictions at the North, intensely adverse to slavery, can be changed by Congressional resolutions or constitutional amendments.
Have you noticed any common themes yet?
Claim: Lincoln fought to return fugitive slaves to the South.
Answer: Untrue. Lincoln declared in his first inaugural, addressing himself to the South and hoping to avoid bloodshed, pledged that while he personally objectived to the Fugitive Slave Act, he understood it as his duty as president to enforce it. He did this as an olive branch to forstall violence among whites, not because he thought slavery was totally awesome and it was right for slaves to be with their enslavers.
He said so:
I take the official oath to-day with no mental reservations and with no purpose to construe the Constitution or laws by any hypercritical rules; and while I do not choose now to specify particular acts of Congress as proper to be enforced, I do suggest that it will be much safer for all, both in official and private stations, to conform to and abide by all those acts which stand unrepealed than to violate any of them trusting to find impunity in having them held to be unconstitutional.
Furthermore, when slaves did arrive at United States lines and owners sought to recover them, no clear policy at first existed. Some were returned on the authority of officers on hand, but Benjamin Butler declared absconded slaves contraband of war as their labor would be used to support the rebellion. Therefore, the Army had the power in time of war to seize them and hold them without compensation to deny their labor to the enemy. This soon became official policy and thereafter the advance of US Armies routinely resulted in slaves coming to those lines to seek their freedom, however tenuous it might then be.
Claim: Lincoln fought to keep slavery as is.
Answer: Misleading. Lincoln declared that he had no intention to meddle with slavery where it already existed. This was the standard position of the Republican party, which was not an abolitionist outfit demanding the immediate end of slavery and, often, some kind of racial equality. It was an antislavery party interested in the limiting and ultimate extinction of slavery, something which they estimated may take a century or more. They proposed to do this in chief by restricting slavery in the territories, where Republicans believed that the national government had the power to do so, which would confine the institution to slowly wither and die away in the South as it had in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. Southerners understood this and repeatedly identified the restriction on slavery in the territories as pernicious to their section's future. This led to demands for a federal slave code to institute bondage officially in every territory in the nation, which hit the Democratic convention of 1860 and split it in half. Twice. Thus Stephen A. Douglas ran for president as a Democrat and got the support of a state and a half (Missouri and part of New Jersey) while John Breckinridge ran as a Democrat in the South and swept the Lower South cotton states.
Claim: Lincoln suppressed the Maryland legislature, preventing them from meeting.
Answer: Untrue. The security of Maryland is obviously vital to the integrity of the nation, as it surrounds Washington on three sides, with Virginia over the Potomac on the fourth. Virginia's fate was already decided, but Maryland's was not. However, the governor had not called the Maryland legislature into session and the legislature was not then sitting.
However, it appeared in the spring of 1861 that Maryland might have an active insurrection. It included tobacco country on the east side of the Chesapeake and in the state's southern reaches that was pro-Confederate. The loyalty of Baltimore was suspect as well, and there we soon had a problem. The railroads leading to washington went through Baltimore, but did not connect directly. The first armed units answering Lincoln's call to put down the insurrection had to disembark and march through town to board a second train. A mob shadowed the 6th Massachusetts on that path and eventually attacked it. They threw stones, bricks, and eventually drew guns. Under apparent attack, some of the soldiers opened fire without orders. Four of them and twelve Baltimore residents didn't make it out alive. The four soldiers were not the first deaths of the war, technically. During the surrender of Fort Sumter, a cannon exploded during a salute and killed a man. But these were the first combat deaths of the war.
It looked like this was going to happen again and again. Baltimore's mayor and chief of police, both Confederate sympathizers, applead to Maryland's governor for permission to destroy the rail bridges that carried soldiers in from Philadelphia and Harrisburg. He reluctantly agreed. Secessionists tore town telegraph lines linking the capital with the rest of the nation as well. For days, no news could get through and it looked in Washington like they had an enemy army active to their north. Public buildings were fortified in expectation of attack.
A few tense days passed, but then the 7th New York arrived, with more trains behind it. They took a long route, via Annapolis, and only arrived because Benjamin Butler (the contraband guy) got word of the bridges being out and disembarked his troops ahead of the break in the line. He seized a steamboat, landed his men at Annapolis, and railway workers in his ranks repaired the damaged tracks.
Martial law was imposed on Baltimore, but given all this you can hardly blame anyone but the secessionists for it. At this point, the governor finally called the legislature. He expected bad news, but the legislature contented itself with a pro forma denunciation of war, a claim of state neutrality, and outright refused to either debate an ordinance of secession or to call a secession convention for the job.
So first off there's nothing to suppress, since no legislature in session. Then when one gets into session in mid-May, it doesn't consider any such thing as rebellion.
I realize that this isn't the actual claim most recently offered up on the Paizo boards, but it's a common one so I wanted to address it before and as context for getting into the next. It seems our resident neo-Confederates can't even get their bad history correctly bad.
Claim: The Maryland legislature was going to revoke Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus.
Answer: Garbled nonsense. Whatever you think of Lincoln's suspension of the Great Writ, the Maryland legislature had no such power and, at any rate, do not appear to have tried to assert one. At least the dates are right. Lincoln suspended the writ on April 27. I must note, however, that Lincoln did not suspend the writ everywhere, or even everywhere in Maryland. He did so in response to news that pro-Confederate Marylanders were going to burn railroad bridges and tear up tracks connecting Washington to the rest of the North, thereby obstructing troop movement into the capital. Since they did just that, one can see where he's coming from.
One of those guys, John Merryman, was arrested for his involvement in wrecking transport and communications. He had the cash for a lawyer, as well as serving as a lieutenant in a Confederate cavalry unit. (They helped him burn the bridges.) Merryman's lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus from Roger Taney, of Dred Scott fame. This was not a Supreme Court decision. Taney acted in his capacity as a circuit court judge. Back in the day, Supreme Court justices spent most of the year doing that duty.
Taney denied that Lincoln had the right to suspend the writ at all, noting the provision that authorized it in cases of rebellion was in the article on the Congress. No Congress was then in session. (The 37th Congress met in special session from March 4 until March 28, but then adjourned until July 4.) Furthermore, the line is a clear emergency power and does not in itself specify that Congress must suspend the writ to suspend it, only that it may be suspended.
Lincoln refused to comply with Taney's ruling, arguing when Congress got back that he had a real emergency on his hands and could not afford to wait a few months for Congress to get back together given the situation he faced in April. Was he supposed to let the entire government fall to an insurrection to secure a single provision of its constitution? Merryman was released seven weeks later, incidentally.
There's a bit more going on here, but this is the essential nut of the case. I'm already seven pages in, so I've got to cut details somewhere.
Claim: Lincoln didn't emancipate any slaves for two years. Obviously it wasn't that important to him.
Answer: Misleading. Lincoln did not believe that he had the unilateral power to abolish slavery. He also hoped that the war could be quickly ended and the South reintegrated with a minimum of fuss. Abolishing slavery, the very thing which they fought to save, would hardly facilitate that. He was also keenly aware that most US soldiers had not signed on to free the slaves, any more than Lincoln prosecuted the war to free them. They alike viewed preservation of the nation as paramount. Of course, if waging a war against the slave states greatly harmed slavery, then Lincoln was going to take the twofer with a smile.
When it became clear that the war would not be over by Christmas, or in a single decisive battle, things changed and Lincoln changed strategy with them. The South relied on slave labor. By taking it away and making every advance of the Army into an advance of freedom, he could deny the rebellion that labor source and simultaneously make it available to the United States. He justifed this under his war powers as commander-in-chief, not under ordinary powers that any old president possessed whenever he felt like using them.
Furthermore, Lincoln supported previous emancipation efforts. The First Confiscation Act implicitly gave Congressional imprimatur to Butler's contraband argument, allowing the seizing of slaves being used by the Confederacy. The Second Confiscation Act specifically authorized the freeing of the slaves of any Confederate who refused to surrender within 60 days. Lincoln signed both acts, which is a damned strange thing for him to do if he only magically started caring about slavery two years into the war.
Claim: The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, but only to draft them.
Answer: Nonsense. The Emancipation Proclamation permitted freedpeople to enlist in the US Army. It did not require them to do so. They remained "thenceforward and forever free" and pledged the United States and its military to defend that freedom regardless of whether or not they chose military service. While some of them were undoubtedly compelled on the ground to sign up, the United States had no particular difficulty finding volunteers. Furthermore, the Emancipation Proclamation entered into effect on the first day of 1863. The first actual United States draft did not begin until the Enrollment Act came into force on March 3 of the same year. The draft applied to, and I quote:
able-boded male citizens of the United States, and persons of foreign birth who shall have declared on oath their intention to become citizens
From the Naturalization Act of 1790 onward, citizenship was limited to "free white persons." A freedperson, or even a black American born free, could not be a citizen. This changed with the Fourteenth Amendment.
Because the proclamation was an expression of Lincoln's war powers, he did not consider himself to have the authority to emancipate slaves in areas not in rebellion and where the United States government had something resembling ordinary functions. Thus Lincoln exempted the loyal slave states, but notably he declined to exempt from its effect many areas under United States control where civilian governemnt was not then functioning.
Was the Emancipation Proclamation a military act? You bet. There was, after all, a bigass war on. Was it limited? Yes. Did the United States do nothing for the slaves beyond its reach? Well, what could it do? They were out of its practical power, it was capable of doing nothing. But per its own terms, as soon as the slaves came within the ability of the United States to do something, they became free. Did it only apply during the war and do nothing thereafter? Nonsense. Go read it. The words are "forever free" not "free until the war ends, then good luck". If that doesn't suffice for you, then know that Lincoln was anxious that some peacetime court might overrule the proclamation and put the freedpeople back into slavery. Thus he spent months lobbying intensely for the Thirteenth Amendment. You can see a version of that in the Spielberg movie.
Interesting.
1) If memory serves, didn't Texas secede from Mexico primarily because the Mexican government tried to enforce the Mexican anti-slavery laws against the anglo immigrants?
Textbooks will often quote period propaganda about how the Mexicans were going to force them all to convert to Catholicism, but yes pretty much. The Mexican government had traditionally been extremely weak in the area, which is why they invited foreigners to settle it to begin with, and while it had looked the other way before when Texans broke its emancipation laws a consolidation would mean at least the serious potential for more enforcement.
Also, while the Texans knew when they went to Texas that they were leaving the United States (and many of them did so specifically to duck out on debts) it's likely that most of them expected the United States to come get them in the future. Given our territorial gains, especially in the area, were frequently irregular and frequently accompanied by transitory republics, the model was in common currency. It was frequently floated as a way to get Cuba into the country, for example, and William Walker probably had it in mind at least as an option when he filibustered in Baja and Sonora. Nicaragua is more complicated, both from the distance and the fact that having gained temporary control of the country Walker seems to have thought he might just have it for himself. But then he told a different story when his situation grew grim and he desperately wanted help.
2) Have you read Our Man in Charleston, and if so is it worth the $14?
I'm not familiar with it, sorry. Journalists writing history tend to raise red flags for me. They're not all bad, but many are pretty dire. It doesn't seem to be on the radar of the CW blogosphere, or at least the corner I inhabit. However, the McPherson and Holzer blurbs are encouraging.
The question of whether Lincoln really would have ended slavery or not without the civil war is irrelevant: what matters is if the south THOUGHT he would end slavery, or prevent its spread into the the new states (which would eventually end it later)
Its true that most people fighting for the south didn't own slaves. But like with all wars you don't say "Get out on the battlefield and fight for how I make my money! Oh, and I'm exempt because I own slaves because I'm needed at home". You spin the propaganda machine to be about something else: states rights, freedom! Northern invaders, blood and glory! When the blacks are free they'll kill you in your sleep!
In other words they were lied to. Lied to so well and so pervasively that the lie continues to this day.
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The question of whether Lincoln really would have ended slavery or not without the civil war is irrelevant: what matters is if the south THOUGHT he would end slavery, or prevent its spread into the the new states (which would eventually end it later)
Lincoln did not think he could end slavery before the war. Both he and the South understood his election as the possible beginning of the end for slavery. It matters in that without keeping it in mind a lot of Lincoln's actions during the war don't make much sense.
Its true that most people fighting for the south didn't own slaves. But like with all wars you don't say "Get out on the battlefield and fight for how I make my money! Oh, and I'm exempt because I own slaves because I'm needed at home". You spin the propaganda machine to be about something else: states rights, freedom! Northern invaders, blood and glory! When the blacks are free they'll kill you in your sleep!
That was mostly after the war. States rights talk in particular is almost a whole-cloth creation of he defeated Confederates themselves. Realizing they weren't likely to get their slaves back, they sought sympathy by pretending they went to war over some kind of constitutional esoterica and slavery was just a small part of it, rather than the only part of it that mattered in the slightest. Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis were big players here, but there were many others. In the actual antebellum record, one finds that white Southerners discover states rights when they believe the national government beyond their control and forgot them as soon as they learned otherwise. This is why states rights is generally understood by historians as a method by which goals are to be achieved (or frustrated) rather than an end in itself. Thus a citation of states rights should be met at once with the question of states rights for what.
I think the best answer I've ever gotten for that one was "for the states to decide things!" At least he understood on some level that it was a means and not an end, even if he got confused halfway through.
This tendency, incidentally, seems characteristic of states rights enthusiasts in general. If you've just lost the election, everything is unconstitutional, should be nullified*, etc. If you've just won it, then the very same things become clearly constitutional and nullification is a species of treason. There's an ancient paper by the senior Schlesinger on the subject that's just pages on pages of this stuff on every conceivable subject.
Before and during the war, most white southerners probably legitimately believed that emancipation wouldn't just ruin the planters but also inaugurate a genocidal race war. They were obsessed with the example of Haiti and saw it acted out again in things like the Denmark Vesey plot and by Nat Turner. There were recurrent panics, especially in heavily enslaved areas, about real or imagined revolt conspiracies. They were emphatically fighting for slavery, even if not all of them agreed with the strategy in itself (Stephens opposed Georgia's secession, for example.) and some of the ordinary soldiers were recruited at gunpoint.
It's true that most soldiers didn't own slaves, but remember most soldiers were young men and slaves were expensive. How many eighteen year old army privates today own houses?
However, you didn't need to personally own slaves to have a strong investment in slavery as an institution. You could come from a slaveholding family. (Recent studies of the Army of Northern Virginia have suggested that a larger than average number of its soldiers came from such a family.) If you did that, then you literally grew up with slaves in the house. You expected to inherit them. You might have had a personal slave given to you or grown up with an enslaved kid you would own later on. (Some of these personal slaves ended up going to war with their enslavers, since they didn't have any choice in it. The Confederacy used a lot of slave labor to handle logistics too.) Your family made its livelihood by stealing it from slaves, at least in part. Barring that you might also have rented slaves from a planter to help out now and then.
Furthermore, your realistic hopes for advancement almost always involved slaves. The South had a serious shortage of white labor. Slaves wouldn't demand better conditions, pay, or go off when they got a better offer. They certainly weren't going to save up and then move to the next state over to open up their own slave labor camp. Whites could do all of those things and might literally refuse to do work that slaves also did. One of the ways a white southern boy could get ahead was to score a job as an overseer. Many of them ended up with their own slave labor camps.
If you were or came from a small farming family, it's very likely that while you knew the local planters did not treat you as a true equal, you also knew you could depend on them to help you out from time to time. This was the norm in the plantation belts. Eugene Genovese describes a typical situation here (JSTOR paywall, but readable with a free account):
Josh owned no slaves, worked forty acres of so-so land more or less competently, and struggled to keep his head above water. Fortunately for him, he was kin to Jefferson Venable, owner of the district’s finest Big House, Ole Massa to a hundred slaves, and patron to the local judge as well as the sheriff. Moreover, Josh Venable’s wife was kin to John Mercer, himself “massa” to only ten or twelve slaves but decidedly a man on the make. […]
Now, poor Josh Venable himself rarely got invited to Cousin Jeff’s home and virtually never to the dining room table. Rather, he was usually invited to an outdoor affair-a barbecue to which many of the nonslaveholders of the neighborhood were also invited to celebrate lay-by or the Fourth of July. Josh also had to notice that he was only invited when many neighboring slaveholders were urged not only to come but to bring all their “niggers.” Still, kin was kin, and Josh got an ostentatious welcome as a member of the family. Ole Massa Jefferson, his own self, once took him by the arm to the barbecue pit to meet the new state senator, whom Ole Jeff had just bought and who might come in handy.
[...]
Josh resented his cousin-so much that he continued to hope that he would someday own even more slaves himself and maybe even reach the pinnacle of success-some day he might be able to make Cousin Jeff a low-interest loan to cover his famous gambling debts, not to mention those debts for somewhat unclear expenditures in New Orleans.
[...]
Everyone, including Josh, knew that his cousin may have been a little stuffy, may have put on airs, but that he always had a helping hand for anyone in the neighborhood, lack or white. Josh raised some extra corn and a few hogs. What was he supposed to do, hand-carry them to Cincinatti? Wait to sell them to unreliable drovers, who specialized in hard bargains? Cousin Jeff was already ready to pay a fair price even though he could just as easily have increased the orders through his factors and not bothered with such local trivia.
Josh also knew any number of local farmers who raised two or three bales of cotton. If they had to spend $125 each for a cotton gin and then pay the costs of individual marketing, they could not have covered costs. Yet, there was good Ole Jefferson Venable, and the two or three other such worthies, ready to gin the cotton for a fair service charge of 9 or 10 per cent and market it with his own large crop to insure a fair price for his poorer neighbors. No one ever accused Ole Jeff of trying to make a dollar off his neighbors. On the contrary, he was quick to send food and supplies to help someone down-and-out. And everyone saw how he sent a few of his hands to help a sick neighbor get in his small crop when everything hung in the balance. If it were not for Ole Jeff and a few others like him, how many of the poorer farmers could make it?
There's a lot of reason to buy into the system that has very little to do with not knowing one's own best interest. Did the rich take advantage? Sure. But the less well off whites could judge their interests as well as anybody and could see that those interests largely coincided with keeping slavery around even if they didn't hate the crap out of black people. And they also hated the crap out of black people. If you dig back into the roots of this in early Virginia, it turns out that they started hating black people so they could exploit them, rather than the other way around.
It's certainly true that enslavers could manipulate racial anxieties to get support...but the enslavers shared many of those anxieties. They went to bed every night with a slave in the room or just outside the door. Slaves cooked their food and watched their children. They were genuinely pants-wetting terrified that, being vastly outnumbered in their own homes, they knew the tiniest thing could bring the whole system crashing down. It's not like they were blind to the signs of slave resistance, no matter how much they tried to rationalize them. They could count the broken tools. They could recognize when commands were "misunderstood" rather than misunderstood. They knew slow work was quiet defiance. They damned well knew that the whip, which they considered essential to management, did not win them friends. Neither did all the rape.
That little spark could come from something as simple as a slave hearing a Fourth of July speech, or learning that such people as abolitionists existed. Enslavers routinely believed their property far more ignorant than they really were, and could convince themselves that African-Americans were "natural" slaves who would only cause problems if they got crazy ideas into their heads from elsewhere. Thus even discussion of slavery where slaves might hear, which was anywhere in the South, became a dire threat which required extreme measures to combat.
The obvious examples don't require rehearsing. Regular lynchings of whites that didn't seem sound enough on slavery handled the small-scale stuff. That Quaker that just moved to town? The Irishman with his funny accent? Those Germans over there? That Yankee? That one enslaver that operated a Bible school for the slaves? Any one of them could be the next Bin Laden, wittingly or otherwise. Especially if someone's slave went missing. Arguing that the state should embark on a plan to gradually bleed away its slave population was enough to get Cassius Clay stabbed in Kentucky, hardly at the heart of slave country.
Very nice. I recently quoted much of this material (primarily the state articles of secession, and cornerstone speech) to a chap on Facebook, after he accused me of "never having had a real history class" upon my disagreement with him about the purpose of the Confederacy. (During the recent flag debates)
Claim: The war wasn't about slavery at all!
Answer: It would be dishonest to call this anything short of a lie, whether spoken consciously or repeated unwittingly.
Hmmmmmmmm.
He was also keenly aware that most US soldiers had not signed on to free the slaves, any more than Lincoln prosecuted the war to free them. They alike viewed preservation of the nation as paramount.
Hmmmmmmmm.
*SHRUG* Welp.Interesting post, I suppose, but the conradictory nature of the information and its interpretation by the author makes it somewhat less than convincing.
I can't tell if you honestly don't see the contradiction here, or are deliberately attempting to mislead through careful choice of wording. I'm going to assume the former unless told otherwise. I can't honestly remember someone saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery at all, but many claim that wasn't the MAIN focus. I'm assuming your first quote is merely rhetoric to motivate readers. It certainly got my attention.
The Civil War, like all wars, was fought over power. Power can be tracked in many currencies... land, money, people, property... including, in this horrible case, people treated as property.
I believe that he means that the ultimate root cause, the "1", is power. In this instance, power derived from slaves. Boiled down to its essence in this manner, every war ever fought is about power.
I can't honestly remember someone saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery at all, but many claim that wasn't the MAIN focus.
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I can't honestly remember someone saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery at all, but many claim that wasn't the MAIN focus. I'm assuming your first quote is merely rhetoric to motivate readers. It certainly got my attention.
This thread is in response to a post in another thread.
It wasn't about slavery at all...
Edit: ninja'd by a red goblin.
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Hi, I'm Samnell and I study middle nineteenth century US history.
I'm here to correct some frequent errors in the pop culture-oriented understanding of the Civil War. In most cases, seeing through them requires no more than an exercise of the dark arts of reading. I think this covers everything in the late eruption, but let me know if I forgot something. I tried to be thorough, which necessarily makes this long. I've culled the misinformation from a recent post and years of rather tedious experience, but it was asked that this be taken to another thread. So here we are.
Claim: The war wasn't about slavery at all!
Answer: It would be dishonest to call this anything short of a lie, whether spoken consciously or repeated unwittingly.If the war wasn't about slavery then nobody ever told the Confederates. Four rebel states passed official statements of their causes when they passed their ordinances of secession. Each one was drafted by the body authorized by the voters of the state to decide whether or not they would attempt to leave the United States, voted on by that body, and published as a public statement of their reasons. These documents are revealing and ought to be read in full. I'll link to each in turn. Here they are in order of secession ordinance:
South Carolina noted that in ratifying the Constitution, the states placed themselves under various obligations.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: "No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."Without this, the Fugitive Slave Clause, South Carolina held that it would not have ratified. And for a while, the system worked. If your slave ran off,...
congratulations! This is the longest post I have read on paizo.
Lincolns quotes on slavery are contradictory because moving to the extreme for a party primary and then the middle for a general election is not nearly as modern an invention as some would think.
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The Civil War, like all wars, was fought over power.
You lose quite a bit of detail and significance when you retreat to such a vaguely generalizing analysis.
Sure, the Civil War was about power, but there's a reason that the Southern machinery of politics was collectively called 'the Slave Power' in contemporary discourse.
The 'slave' part of that phrase was significant, and retreating to such a distant and blurry picture that you can only make out the 'power' part - at that point, you're so zoomed-out that you lose the ability to learn much about the Civil War.
Sure, all wars are fought over power.
Now tell me something about this war.
I'm assuming your first quote is merely rhetoric to motivate readers. It certainly got my attention.
Nope, as, *looks up* several posters have already pointed out as I was writing this, damnable ninjas all, ahem, as they have pointed out, someone was posting here trying to convince readers that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, as well as various other pieces of misinformation, specifically corresponding to the various bolded "claim" entries in Samnell's post.
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If y'all wanna get really in depth with the Civil War knowledge(and plumb the equally deep depths of Samnell's clever mind=D) may I recommend Freedmen's Patrol, Samnell's excellent, long running blog of all things Civil War.
I believe that he means that the ultimate root cause, the "1", is power. In this instance, power derived from slaves. Boiled down to its essence in this manner, every war ever fought is about power.Yes, but that's... Gah... memory's not working. Over generalization? Whatever.
It's reducing the analysis to the point of uselessness. It's like saying all deaths are caused by cessation of brain function or that all energy comes from gravity.
Intangible power (doctrines of governance: Communism, Fascism) is often combined with the tangible power ('living space', gold, certain rivers) to be derived from a successful war.
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I believe that he means that the ultimate root cause, the "1", is power. In this instance, power derived from slaves. Boiled down to its essence in this manner, every war ever fought is about power.Yes, but that's... Gah... memory's not working. Over generalization? Whatever.
It's reducing the analysis to the point of uselessness. It's like saying all deaths are caused by cessation of brain function or that all energy comes from gravity.
It depends on one's philosophical tastes. Overgeneralization works. So does oversimplification or excessively reductive. Analyses like "all wars are about power" might be trivially true, but also communicate next to nothing about them. Certainly they don't tell anybody anything that they don't already know or anything about any particular war. They're easy and sound profound, but often serve as a way to avoid talking about the actual issues at stake.
These explanations also play into the "everyone's a cynical bastard, damn them all" school of thought which appears on its face sophisticated but overlooks both important moments of real idealism motivating people to act against many of their apparent best interests and the fact that a single disposition spectrum of understanding (everyone is gray) is infinitely more simplistic than a two disposition spectrum of conventional goods and evils. Neither is adequate for understanding the past. Both are dangerously misleading. Doing it right involves a lot of careful distinctions and nuance. At some point humans really do resist simplification and you've got to try understanding them complexly.
Fair enough, Samnell. :)
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And quotes and links have already been supplied (And thanks, guys), but since I'm here:
Interesting post, I suppose, but the conradictory nature of the information and its interpretation by the author makes it somewhat less than convincing.
There's only a contradiction if you think that the reason one side starts a war must also be contested by its diametric opposite on the other side. That might sound reasonable at first blush, but falls apart on closer analysis.
If, however, you'd like a more elaborate parsing of words then here it is:
The immediate cause of the Civil War was secession followed (and occasionally preceded) by attacks on US property. The cause of secession was the preservation of slavery.
This is the standard academic formula, but it's generally more than most people are asking. It doesn't take a great deal of thought to understand why people would fight against an insurrection, especially against a fairly democratic for its time government. So the question is usually about what the CSA got worked up over, not why the United States fought to maintain itself.
but many claim that wasn't the MAIN focus.
Many random people, maybe. Many historians? Nope. The only significant debates over the war's cause, barring small points about individual actors or minor glosses on events, involve how it was all about slavery (the current parties are fundamentalists and neo-revisionists) and whether or not it was inevitable. (This usually isn't argued as such anymore, but shows up in debates especially of late antebellum compromises.)
I sense you want to hear more about these. Actually no I don't but I want to write some more about them and I'm the boss of me.
The Fundamentalists and Neo-Revisionists do not disagree on facts, but rather how they should be interpreted. Broadly speaking, fundamentalists consider the antebellum South sufficiently invested in slavery that all of its complaints were prima facie complaints about slavery. It's always front and center and to some degree the white South is clearly united upon it when push comes to shove.
The Neo-Revisionists believe most of the same things, but for them various issues that white Southerners raised may have been genuine, but all have slavery at their root. Thus they're interested more in dissent within the South than consensus and, to some degree, more convinced of the influence of individual actors.
Classing historians into these groups can be tricky unless they tell you themselves. Rarely do I see people naming names, but when they do the choices seem eccentric. Elizabeth Varon (author of Disunion!) had reviewers remarking on her odd choices. William W. Freehling reads to me like a fundamentalist, but considers himself a neo-revisionist.
The other dispute overlaps with this one somewhat. Historians do not like to call anything inevitable because it writes them out of a job, but a great deal of antebellum scholarship revolves around the question. It's generally somewhat tied up with understandings of the war as tragic or needless, but not necessarily so. The players are the Irrepressible Conflict historians (taking their name from a William Seward speech) and the Blundering Generation historians.
Broadly speaking, Irrepressibles think that a war of some kind was coming at some point over the future of slavery because the sections had developed differently to the point where old compromises and so forth could not indefinitely endure. Furthermore, their internal developments were generally accelerating and exacerbating this trend. The South was more united and proslavery in 1860 than it was in 1830, and more so then than in 1776, etc. The North was conversely more antislavery, albeit not to the same extent. These trends tended to feed into one another.
The Blundering Generation school holds that while the differences were real, compromise had managed at least an uneasy peace for all the nation's prior history. Why should it fail now? They argue in various forms that individual actors either lacked the ability compromise or actively sought to heighten the contradictions in ways that the generations prior (there was a significant generational turnover in major politicians in the early 1850s) had refused to do. This usually, but not always, comes with a similar conviction that the war was a needless, tragic waste and generally implies it when not stated.
The Blundering Generation approach usually spent more of its time castigating antislavery Americans than it did Southern radicals, which is an interesting choice that just coincidentally echoed the complaints of proslavery southerners. It's largely fallen out of fashion for that reason, though one sees occasional throwbacks among cranks. (And more rarely, historians. Michael Holt identifies himself as a blundering generation guy.) We tend to see Blundering Generation ideas more popular during or in the wake of controversial wars. Holt has, at least occasionally, bitten the bullet the whole way and implied that we're being wrongly presentist in arguing the war was worthwhile because it sacrificed seven hundred thousand lives to free four million. I don't think that's very persuasive. He sounds like he's saying that we should't take emancipation as worth a war because nineteenth century Americans didn't, but that sounds downright perverse for a modern historian. However, I'm not familiar enough with Holt's work to really comment on the details. Maybe I'll know more once I read his book on the Whigs.
There are occasional points of genuine debate still around. One of the major cornerstones of the Blundering Generation argument is the notion that William Seward (Whig-NY) put his fellow Whig Archibald Dixon up to torpedoing a more moderate version of the Kansas-Nebraska Act because he expected it would unite the northern populace against slavery. Seward claimed that he'd done this. I don't think Dixon ever acknowledged it. Problem is that relations between antislavery Whigs like Seward and proslavery Whigs like Dixon were very toxic by early 1854 and it seems unlikely that even if Seward did make such a recommendation it would have decided Dixon.
Both of these debates have interesting and not always intuitive interactions with with trends in broader US historiography in the twentieth century. But that's going pretty far afield.
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Lincolns quotes on slavery are contradictory because moving to the extreme for a party primary and then the middle for a general election is not nearly as modern an invention as some would think.
Not exactly. It's certainly true that Lincoln would tailor his message to his political circumstances. Stephen Douglas called him on it during their debate series. But party primaries aren't really a thing like we know them in Lincoln's age. That stuff was usually handled at the national convention, which resulted in quite a few upsets and dark horses ending up on tickets and in the White House. Seward was the favorite in '60, but he was regarded as too extreme to carry the Lower North (states bordering slave states, generally more racist and less antislavery) given he'd spend much of a decade in the Senate as Mr. Antislavery and was especially associated with Higher Law doctrines. (The idea that a higher law than the constitution authorized antislavery action. He coined the phrase in his first speech to the Senate.)
Lincoln had a reputation as a moderate which he had genuinely earned, but not without exceptions. He's a firm, if sometimes understated, critic of slavery all the way back to the Lyceum Address. His form of antislavery was relatively mainstream at that point: lots of support for gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. On the other hand, he could make some pretty daring arguments for an antislavery guy. He opposed popular sovereignty in the Kansas-Nebraska Act because, in part, black Americans wouldn't have a vote in deciding their own fate.
Leaving aside Lincoln's political biography, there's also the issue that he made many of his statements regarding preserving the nation even with slavery undisturbed after the war began. When John C. Fremont, on his own authority, declared emancipation of slaves in Missouri Lincoln demanded the order be rescinded. When Fremont refused, Lincoln countermanded it himself. He thought Fremont would drive out the border states and consequently make the war unwinnable.
Which brings me to a point that I probably should have highlighted earlier. Antislavery Americans and abolitionists differed on their understanding of the Constitution and fundamental nature of the US government. Abolitionists often, though not always, considered the Constitution a fundamentally proslavery document. William Lloyd Garrison called it a covenant with death and burned it. They believed the American nation as then organized was built to preserve and defend bondage. This complicated their involvement in the political process immensely. But most antislavery Americans though that the Constitution was at least implicitly an emancipationist document. It had its faults, but by refusing to name slavery it denied national recognition of property in slaves. They considered it drafted by the founders with the expectation that over time its mechanisms would bring slavery to an end.
Lincoln was one of the latter school. By preserving the United States, Lincoln understood himself as preserving an order which would ultimately destroy slavery. So preservation of the Union isn't abolition of slavery in the sense of the 13th amendment or so forth, but to Lincoln and others saving the nation meant saving not just the nation as it was, but the nation as they saw it steadily becoming: a nation without slavery. The two are somewhat intertwined.
Its also made up of (very) mild historian jargon so a lot of people could misinterpret it as supporting the State's Rights myth if they were so inclined.
Indeed. There's always going to be a tension between communicating accurate history to specialist standards and doing so in ways that laypeople will understand. Bad actors find it very easy to exploit this sort of thing.
One gets the same thing when talking about antislavery racism: "Oh, they weren't really against slavery because they hated black people."
No, it wasn't necessary in the nineteenth century to be a racial egalitarian to oppose slavery because they're quite clear about their understanding that slavery was bad for whites, especially poor whites, and corrosive of white republicanism and white morality. These are not admirable arguments and it's not fun to think of them as typical of a movement that has our sympathy, but ignoring them leads to frequent misunderstandings and leaves one vulnerable to the latter-day white supremacists to rehearse their own versions of proslavery argument.
It's also a place where the context of society of the time is critically important.
From the early twenty-first century the whole Liberia project, for instance, sounds horribly racist. Just viewing from that perspective isn't really fair to the American Colonization Society and the others involved.
Very true, though I also sometimes see the other way around where support for the ACS is taken as a sign that someone's pretty antislavery. I think this neglects that the group's mission amounted to ridding the continent of free blacks, something lots of Upper South whites could get behind while still ultimately believing in slavery forever. The group is a clear mixed bag that could be contextually radical antislavery (especially early on) or a quasi-humanitarian fig leaf disguising a real intention to perpetuate the institution.
I suppose that makes it a little bit like personal manumissions: good for an individual or two (quite a bit better than colonization, which most black Americans who had a choice outright refused) but not really doing much to change the system. Maybe with the removal it's somewhere between that and manumission laws that required the freedpeople to quit the state to retain their freedom. Certainly the structure matches, but "off to Liberia" seems to ask a lot more than "off to Pennsylvania" even if both are kind of exile.
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Different poster; new claims. I suppose the precise origin doesn't matter that much, but I don't want to be accused of putting words in someone else's mouth by implication.
Claim: Southern planters were totally up for some kind of gradual, compensated emancipation.
Answer: If they were, they didn't act it. While you can dig up a few southerners who will make an occasional noise about this kind of thing in the antebellum, these are almost universally statements about a program that might be acceptable at some later date. Sentiments like this actually become rarer as you get closer to the Civil War, though. They were most common in the period around and immediately after the Revolution, when tobacco prices fell and stayed low. Most of the slave-grown cash crop of the American South was tobacco grown in the Chesapeake back then.
Cotton was a minor player by comparison, confined to a narrow strip of land along the South Carolina and Georgia coast, the lowcountry, and adjacent Sea Islands. Carolina and Georgian leaders were much more committed to slavery's perpetuation even then. Their profits hadn't cratered and South Carolina's delegates to the Constitutional Convention insisted their state would not ratify the Constitution should it include an immediate prohibition on the African slave trade. They wanted, and secured, at least twenty-five years during which Congress was prohibited from outlawing that trade. This provision, almost unique in the Constitution, was unable to be amended. The only other words with such protection guarantee states equal representation in the Senate. That's how huge a deal it was. Both states subsequently took on tens of thousands of slaves from the bellies of ships, enough that by the time the trade was officially prohibited (at the earliest possible time under the Constitution, the start of 1808) South Carolina was well on its way to regaining its status as a slave majority society from colonial times.
I mention SC and GA here in particular because the Revolution greatly disrupted their systems of slavery. Many of their slaves took up with the British and left with them. With the system in turmoil and apparently insecure, this would have been an ideal time for homegrown emancipationists to strike. Yet both states chose not to undo a wrong they had done, but rather to keep on doing it. Then the cotton gin made short-staple cotton that one could grow in the upcountry into a viable crop, vastly expanding the area in which slaves could be tortured into higher and higher yields for the great profit of their white enslavers.
Defenses of slavery generally took two tacts. The first and for a long time most popular was the necessary evil argument. Enslavers did a bad thing, which was bad for them (almost always worse for them than for the slaves) but they had inherited the system and had it somehow forced upon them. They could not do without it and the consequences of emancipation would involve both their personal ruin and the complete destruction of their societies. Emancipation was, in a sense, the terrorist nuke of the 18th and 19th century South.
The necessary evil argument involves a lot of tapdancing around the fact that the white "sufferers" suffer mostly from all this money people keep throwing at them. This is a bit like complaining about all the amazing sex you get to have each night, which was of course also a benefit of owning enslaved women. An enslaved woman's fertility and sexual appeal were considered a significant part of her value to the enslaver, whether he chose to rape her or simply allowed the slaves to arrange their own procreation.
The necessary evil argument was inherently weak in the face of even a tentative abolitionist movement. While it was never completely eclipsed, especially in the Upper South (roughly the non-Cotton states), beginning in the 1820s and increasingly in the 1830s it was replaced by the positive good argument. This approach stressed all the good done to the slave, good and hard. Enslavers brought them from "babarism" and educated them in civilization and Christianity. Left to their own devices, the enslaved would inevitably sink into squallor, poverty, brutality, and madness. You could trust a slave, but a free black person naturally became a shifty, no-good criminal. If you have drawn a connection between this and modern American attitudes toward crime, you have drawn correctly.
By the eve of the Civil War, the positive good argument was received wisdom. It removed the awkwardness of conceding a point to abolitionists and then opposing them all the same. It allowed enslavers to own up to the fact that they preferred slavery now and slavery forever, and would happily frolic in the fountains of money it produced for them...when not taken by other frolics involving whipping, as one enslaver infamously described his own predilections.
One could take from this that the Lower South had a serious slavery problem, but the Upper South at least had qualms. Maybe they did, but it doesn't take long to find abstract qualms at either latitude that never translate into action. How much credit do you want to give to good intentions that translate into nothing at all is up to you. I take them as a bit of theater one enacts for one's own benefit or to sound properly high-minded while still following the ever popular path of whatever one actually felt like doing. As a practical matter, one can and often did trade in various necessary evil ideas while remaining in favor of the perpetual continuation of slavery. A famous practitioner of that art was Robert E. Lee. Lee's own requirements for accepting an emancipation scheme included divine intervention.
No, I'm not kidding. While a relatively orthodox Episcopalian of the nineteenth century did believe that the Christian God could intervene in the world, he also wouldn't have expected to hold his breath and be fine waiting until it happened. And Lee demanded the right kind of divine intervention: his god could not use Yankees as his instrument, even to simply persuade Southerners. Rather they must endure in absolute silence, until such time as the enslavers themselves decided the propriety and means of ending slavery.
But let's take an ideal case: almost no slaves, the state population of free blacks almost completely overwhelming its enslaved population, and only a tiny minority of whites owning even one slave. Let's call it Delaware because that's what it is. Delaware in 1860 looked a great deal like a New England or Mid-Atlantic state quite close to gradual, compensated emancipation in the late eighteenth century. It looked enough like that that southern politicians often worried about it going out of the South. Its politicians, like those of other border states, often made for the key swing votes to pass compromises that they understood as ultimately injurious to slavery. (And which antislavery Americans -the actual ones, not the ones who played antislavery for their diaries' benefit- understood as the flipside of Lower North politicians who would betray the nation in order to appease proslavery radicals.)
At the end of 1860, South Carolina passes its ordinance of secession. Seven other states follow before Lincoln even takes office. The remainder of the Upper South, sans the Border States, follow when Lincoln calls for volunteers to suppress the rebellion that has just turned into a shooting war. The decisions of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland were somewhat in doubt. Delaware's legislature met and promptly declared that having been first into the Union, Delaware aimed to be the last out.
So Lincoln proposed to Delaware that the state adopt one of those compensated, gradual emancipation plans. He offered to get federal money for the compensation and it would, as these things did, not actually free any slaves for some years to come. The normal formula was that all slaves born after X date (usually the Fourth of July) in a given year a ways down the road would be freed on their 18th or 25th birthday. The exact numbers could vary a bit. The idea was that if you didn't want to give up your slaves, you would lose none that you already had. You would further be compensated for your investment in slave property with the labor of the minor slaves thereafter. If that didn't sweeten things enough, Lincoln was offering federal funds to pay some kind of cash bounty for the freedpeople direct to their owners.
Delaware, and other border states, told him to go to hell.
But maybe Delaware was an oddity. It was weirdly situated. Maybe there's some kind of paradox going on where the fact that slavery is more entrenched elsewhere would make enslavers more amenable to selling some off to the government or whatever. Probably in exchange for getting them off the continent, which everyone who was white and counted agreed belonged to the white man. This was the notional goal of the American Colonization Society, which had some (Upper South, most famously Henry Clay) slaveholder patrons.
The ACS scared the crap out of Lower South planters. So long as it exiled free blacks, they didn't mind it much. But as soon as it came after slaves things changed. When the ACS petitioned Congress for some funds in the 1830s, this promoted fiery outrage. The enslavers understood this as the thin end of a wedge that would pry open the Treasury for schemes to appropriate money for the government to directly buy slaves. That would collapse slave prices, ruining the tremendous investment in capital that most major planters had, and force emancipation by other means. It might even lead to direct federal mandates that you must sell to the government, thus enacting a kind of abolition outright.
The exceptions to this trend were generally either forced into silence and impotence by social censure or driven from their homes by lynch mob violence. Sometimes the mobs could be quite frisky. It was generally the convention that if some white man fled, you let him go once it looked like he wasn't coming back. Elijah Lovejoy found Missourians less accommodating. He ran an antislavery newspaper in the Show Me State. A mob destroyed his press. He moved over the Mississippi to Alton, Illinois and got a new press. The mob followed, joined by some locals (southern Illinois had a lot of white inhabitants who were late of Southern states, almost enough to make the Land of Lincoln into a slave state itself) and went for his press again. Lovejoy was killed defending it and, incidentally, himself. Many people take his death as subtext for Lincoln's Lyceum Address.
Claim: Slavery was on the way out anyway because it wasn't economically sustainable.
Answer: Untrue, at least for the future forseeable to antebellum southern whites. This claim actually has an impressive pedigree. The first proper historian of the American South, Ulrich Bonell Phillips, argued it. This served to make the Civil War a needless tragedy, since slavery would have somehow fixed itself anyway. However, while parts of the South struggled with low crop yields and exhausted soil the truth is that the 1850s were an economic bonanza. The ten largest cotton crops and thus ten biggest years of the antebellum Southern economy were the 1851-60. Even before that, the 1840s had been relatively good to the section. The boom was so big that it helped insulate the South from the economic contraction of the late 1850s.
While plantation agriculture is customarily a bit hard on the soil, and cotton especially so, the South had plenty of avenues open to it for internal expansion. Large portions of Texas suited to cotton and sugar had yet to be fully developed. The expanding plantation frontiers were there and in Arkansas. Furthermore, southerners even into the late 1850s expected that the United States would eventually have new conquests to the South, most especially Cuba but also parts of Mexico, which would be suited to the cultivation of major cash crops. If they did not come into the Union by the customary conquest, then they would come by the equally customary method of some Americans briefly overthrowing a weak establishment of a distant government and then inviting the United States to come and collect them, real estate and all. It worked for Texas and California, after all.
But let's say there are no new frontiers and the soil is wearing out. South Carolina was where the cotton boom hit first and soil ran out fastest. The state's enslavers had serious issues with their white population moving on to greener pastures, but cotton cultivation remained profitable even with smaller yields. Planters simply took to more careful cultivation. If they could not have the boom years back, then they could still have ample profits given sufficent prudence. And all the while they could blame their woes on Yankees sucking money out of the state.
A shortage of capital was typical in nineteenth century America. Southerners came to oppose the Bank of the United States in part because it would not give out enough easy money fast enough for their liking. They chartered state banks with leaky pockets and fly by night private banks with leakier pockets still. The crash in the 1830s busted most of them and led to many underwater enslavers decamping with their human chattels for Texas, beyond the reach of creditors.
This left enslavers much more in thrall to European financiers, but this did not dampen their enthusiasm for slavery. Rather it led them to take the same lesson than South Carolina had a decade before: bloodsucking abolitionists were raiding their pockets and they needed to double down on slavery.
If slavery's not on its way out economically, and a generation and more of historians agree it was not, then maybe it was on its way out politically? It's possible in hindsight to see as much. Southerners opted to try disunion because they expected to be politically eclipsed as the years went on and further expected that the schemes devised to preserve their slavery in the Union, chiefly nullification but also control of the Democratic Party, were not viable. South Carolina got ahead of the pack and proved the first one nonviable back in the early 1830s.
But the 1850s are full of Southern victories. They got a draconian Fugitive Slave Law the overruled Personal Liberty Laws. They secured slavery for the future of Utah and New Mexico. They had broken the more antislavery of the two national parties. If their victories alienated Yankee voters and harmed the northern wing of the Democracy, then that only increased Southern control of the nation's dominant party. Roger Taney assured them that slavery could never be barred from a territory. In 1860, the state of Virginia was purusing a case through the courts, Lemmon vs. New York, which likely would have given over another Dred Scott-style ruling effectively giving slaveholders unlimited right to move through and reside in free states without loss of slave property. If they prevailed there, then the very idea of a free state would become meaningless.
They didn't all think that was enough, obviously. Many saw their legal and political victories as hollow. Yankees nullified the Fugitive Slave Act anyway. The attempt to impose slavery on Kansas led to a tense struggle that further alienated the North for what seemed to be only the narrow interests of Missouri's slaveholders. New territory, by filibustering or ordinary conquest, could open still more wounds. But Southern successes and likely northern impotence even with Lincoln in the White House were enough together that even Lower South states had sizable Unionist movements right through the secession conventions.
However, Southern Unionism for at least a decade had been a perishable good. It was ultimately contingent on what the South considered good behavior on the part of the North. This explicitly, in various platforms, demanded enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. It frequently also included further concessions down the road. In 1860, it meant that the Democracy had to call for a federal slave code for the territories, explicitly making both slavery into a national institution and imposing it on all territories in the land. When the party's northern wing, seeing its destruction in the proposal, balked, the Democracy split and the homely lawyer from Illinois won the election.
When would industrialization have taken over? We can't say exactly. Quite a bit of industrial activity took place in the postwar South, but much of that was facilitated by the outcome of the war. Without the destruction, dislocation, and eventual availability of freedpeople re-enslaved by the penal system as easily exploited labor it seems unlikely that it would have come as soon or strongly. The same workforce would have been picking cotton instead. That was, incidentally, another major use of prison labor.
We do know that the first practical mechanical cotton harvester didn't roll off the lines until 1944. By this point we have quite a bit more water under the bridge, but I think it's fair to assume given what we know that absent the Civil War slaves would have picked cotton until at least that date. We also know that however traditional we imagine enslavers, slavery itself proves a remarkably versatile institution. The Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond employed slaves. It's likely that if industry expanded into the enslaved South, far more outfits would have followed its example. Furthermore the expansion of western settlement might very well have seen slave miners as well as slaves in new cotton fields along rivers in New Mexico and Arizona. Most of the nation's cotton today is grown in California, where prewar Southerners including James Gadsden (of Gadsden Purchase) expected they might eventually move.
Without the war but with a proslavery verdict in Lemmon vs. New York, we might also see slaves brought into the Lower North where they would work growing wheat, hemp, and other staples. The sections borders had a great deal of economic activity passing both ways and generally proslavery residents in the nearer reaches, so it might not have proved hard at all to set up a plantation or expand the hiring of slaves across state lines. Something of the opposite had already happened, with plenty of Northerners investing in southern ventures. Indiana's senator Jesse Bright owned and operated a plantation across the river in Kentucky. Illinois' Stephen Douglas had an interest in a plantation in Mississippi. New York banks held numerous plantation mortgages and shpis built by and owned in the North carried the staple crops to Europe.
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All things considered, US involvement in WWI was pretty light - we came in on the tail-end of the conflict. Edit: I don't think the "manpower" needs would've meaningfully impacted slavery in any way. Hell, it possibly would've been expanded into more industries - it's not like any slave owners would be getting sent overseas to fight, but they could've started using slaves in industries where the white workers were drafted.
If we'd continued to be a slavery practicing nation all the way to WWII?
Shit, I wonder if we would've been part of the Axis.
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A friend of mine and I discussed that and our private guesses were that slavery would have continued well into the 1900s, but eventually collapse due to the manpower needs of both World Wars. May I ask your take on this?
I suspect that we'd be able to buy people today. Probably you could still buy people in Brazil and at least Cuba. US-flagged ships were a significant part of the Atlantic slave trade even after we outlawed it because we refused to let the Royal Navy board them and make sure they didn't have any human cargo. We insisted that our Navy would do that, but the formation tasked for it was not always so tasked and was generally neglected. (There was a boom in slave imports when the Royal Navy got diverted to fight in the Opium Wars, which tells you the kind of difference they made.) Since Cuban and sometimes Brazilian slavery went through slaves at such a prodigious rate, they needed lots of replacements. Suddenly no one was delivering, which put a strain on their systems.
The end of slavery almost always requires a pretty titanic social shock when the party capable of doing it is also the direct enslaving party. Like Zhangar I'm skeptical that the WWI labor shortage could do it. I would expect maybe some short-term stresses, but given how the late 19th and earlty 20th century are a really, really vicious time for white supremacy, I have my doubts.
WWII is a better candidate, but I'm still not convinced. The United States put women into factories, but then worked hard to get them back out and turn them back into housewives. It's possible there would have been some kind of draft of slave labor, which actually happened at least in isolated instances in the wartime South, but I don't think that either that or factory labor necessarily contain emancipatory potential.
Also as Zhangar notes, a United States that kept slavery has a radically different later nineteenth century. It's impossible to say how domestic politics would have developed. I don't think the antislavery movement would have just gone away, but I can see some paths by which it could have been actively suppressed. The South was already doing that. Toss in 19th century labor violence, and we just happen to have the perfect scabs here. They'll scab forever because they can't ever leave. Convict leasing made corporations into slaveholders. It would be easy enough in a world with actual outright slavery still around for the railroads, factories, and the like to get in on the action.
Then you're probably looking at quite a bit more political violence to keep antislavery suppressed, along with increasingly authoritarian calls for something to be done. Things start to look pretty Weimar and the United States had at least one of the world's first successful fascist movements (the Klan and company) so there we are. But it didn't happen, so we can only speculate.
S$+&, I wonder if we would've been part of the Axis.
My guess is we would have been a parochial fascist-aligned backwater, like Spain.
Would the slave-holding USA passed the United Kingdom in industrialization as the world's most prominent economy and naval power?
Without the Civil War as it was, could there be a different Civil War later, where the anti-slavery states would be fighting for the states' right to ban slavery in opposition to pro-slavery forced federal laws?
Would the slave-holding USA passed the United Kingdom in industrialization as the world's most prominent economy and naval power?
I'm guessing not.
IIRC, the North passed all that great pro-capitalist legislation after the South seceded.
S$+&, I wonder if we would've been part of the Axis.My guess is we would have been a parochial fascist-aligned backwater, like Spain.
agreed.
Huh, I need to go reread my sources. Can I ask what yours are, Samnell?
S$+~, I wonder if we would've been part of the Axis.
We'll never know. Michigan-born Henry Ford was a longtime Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite. IBM helped design the numbering system for the camps. Then again, just because some whites believed blacks inferior to them didn't mean they were necessarily pro-Nazism; white South Africans who supported Apartheid still fought against the Axis. Conversely, this guy wasn't a cosplayer.
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Huh, I need to go reread my sources. Can I ask what yours are, Samnell?
Before I share, I want to say that I really enjoy your screen name.
I covered a lot of ground, but this should handle the main points: You can find stuff about the economic viability in William W. Freehling's Road to Disunion volumes (especially the second) and Ed Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told. Baptist is new and a very good read, but also pretty demanding emotionally. He's great for the capital issues that enslavers had, as well as the source of my increasing tendency to refer to planters that way and a few other verbal ticks I think are probably a good way to remind us of what really went on. If you're offended by the occasional swear word in non-fiction, then you should know going in that the opening to chapter seven includes quite a few f#~@s. It's a literary choice on Baptist's part to help jar us out of the pop culture consensus narrative of the plantation, which he uses as a touchstone to write a great panorama of such a place. I thought it was amazing, but there's been something of a generational divide in the historians I've read discussing it.
Freehling discusses the limits of white Southern antislavery beliefs. He has a thematic chapter in the first volume about the use of violence to police antislavery dissent in the South too. Freehling's argument is actually that the most important element in getting the South to secession was an overwhelming need to prevent white dissent from taking hold in the slave states, so he's rarely far away from it. I don't know if I completely agree with him, but it was certainly an important factor and it deeply overlaps with all the other likely candidates, so hard to really separate them out.
You can find a treatment of the transition from Necessary Evil to Positive Good thinking in Freehling's Prelude to the Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina 1816-1836. It's a bit easier to read than Road to Disunion, and a lot shorter, but also both older and further removed from the war. Suppression of white dissent remains an element, but not as significant as in Road. I'm actually reading Prelude right now, but what's left is basically the epilogue.
Incidentally, if you like to get history through biography then Freehling writes really good biographical sketches. He sometimes gets a bit too carried away with them, to the point where some read him as attributing everything to some personal eccentricity, but I think that takes the criticism a bit too far. Freehling has a very interesting and, I think, persuasive take on Roger Taney in Road volume two. Going to keep it in mind when I read other treatments.
James McPherson briefly discusses Lincoln's efforts at compensated emancipation during the war in Battle Cry of Freedom, which everyone interested in the war should read anyway. It's starting to get a tiny bit dated, isn't as strong on the antebellum as I'd like, and it's a bit too heavy into moving soldiers along on the map (the maps are good) but you'll come out with a decent understanding of what happened and why. Most of my Maryland stuff from a prior post is heavily dependent on McPherson. McPherson also discusses Lemmon v. New York.
If you're curious about Lee's proslavery beliefs, then the go-to place is Alan Nolan's Lee Considered. There's also some fairly damning primary source material that Nolan didn't use revealing Lee's personal involvement in abusing slaves (whipping, not raping so far as we know) which I initially found in Foner's Forever Free but is also on the internet in various places. Turns out the dude liked to keep his hands clean, but took an interest in making sure the lash was well applied. I suspect there's quite a bit more in Elizabeth Pryor's Reading the Man but I haven't found Lee personally interesting enough to get into it yet.
Southern ideas about expansionism are examined in Robert Mays' The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire and also in Manifest Destiny's Underworld, which is essentially a history of filibustering in general. Do not read them back to back, though. Made it very hard for me to separate out the two and see what Mays had to say that was new from the older book. There's also a brief treatment of it in McPherson.
For Delaware stuff, you can get the stats yourself from the UVA census browser. I also have the original tabulations (not microdata, but tallies down to county level) somewhere from the Census Bureau and can dig up a link if you'd like. They're in big PDF files, numbered rather than named, and a bit of a pain to navigate, but really an embarrassment of riches. I've got the same for 1850, but after that censuses become somewhat less robust and eventually you get into stuff that's just outright gone.
My broad read on the late antebellum (Mexican War onward) is most informed by Freehling and David Potter's The Impending Crisis. The latter work is showing its age, but the professionals I read still treat it as an essential touchstone even if a few of his points are pretty dated and probably a little too heavy on the conservative white guy in the Civil Rights Era attitude. Still, he has a very incisive understanding of the antislavery movement's less appealing side. McPherson's chapters hit all the high points, but they really can't do the events justice. His treatment on the Kansas-Nebraska Act is almost bizarrely sparse. Elizabeth Varon's Disunion! works as a very good, contemporary companion to both Potter and Freehling, with a bit more of a history of ideas approach. If you dig that kind of thing, then you'd probably be into Eric Foner's Story of American Freedom, but it's not really an antebellum book. I see occasional references to Michael Holt's work, but I'm not familiar with it yet. He's somewhat more known now as one of the few guys who took the Whig party seriously enough to do a devoted study of it.
IIRC, the North passed all that great pro-capitalist legislation after the South seceded.
There's some of that, like the Morrill Tariff and the Pacific Railroad, but quite a lot of the capitalist infrastructure was created by state action before the war. Much of it was financed initially by the proceeds of loans to expand slave labor camps. Yankee industrialization was sort of the scraps left behind when Dixie enslaving was finished for quite a while, arguably into the 1850s. But northerners felt confident of their future as a modern, free labor society a bit before that. This is definitely a factor, though far from the only one, in increasing acceptance of antislavery politics before the Mexican War.
The stuff about Lee is interesting.
I'm in Virginia, where Lee's so aggressively lionized we have a f&%~ing state holiday celebrating his birthday.
In Virginia, it was Lee-Jackson-King day until 2000, when even the Virginia Legislature went "that's pretty messed up." Now our Lee-Jackson Day is the Friday before Martin Luther King Day.
Sigh.
We may not have gone full on fascist. Fascism can be seen as an attempt by the elites to create a nationalistic alternative to communism - keep the masses from turning on the bosses by firing them up with racist and patriotic fervor. I have a hard time seeing much communist appeal in a slave country. You can't begin to risk raising the consciousness of the workers at the bottom.
I haven't delved much (or at all) into alternate history books, but I distinctly remember reading the back blurb of one where the Confederate States of America (who had won the war) were overthrown by a Marxist-inspired slave revolt. Maybe with W.E.B. DuBois as president? But I might have that part wrong.
I tend to be fairly skeptical of arguments that place a great deal of emphasis on slavery per se retarding industrial development. Maybe it has some effect, but it has seemed to me that there are too many examples in history - ancient and modern - of successful employment of slave labor in manufacturing, industrial, or proto-industrial pursuits.
Well, as a generality that one's way outta my league, but the American slaveholders seemed to have been a particularly anti-industrializing, anti-modernizing bunch. IIRC, there were a couple of voices for Southern industrialization that were repeatedly and pointedly ignored by the majority of the Southern elite, but maybe they would've been won over given time.
They appeared to not have cared too much for public schools, either. Don't think they had any until Reconstruction. In my recent readings, I keep running into a story about Oakland shipyard companies during WW II setting up schools to teach the sharecropper migrants to read.
I haven't delved much (or at all) into alternate history books, but I distinctly remember reading the back blurb of one where the Confederate States of America (who had won the war) were overthrown by a Marxist-inspired slave revolt. Maybe with W.E.B. DuBois as president? But I might have that part wrong.
That would be the 'Southern Victory' series of alternative history books by Harry Turtledove. How Few Remain is the first chapter of 11 books in total. Custer doesn't get his cavalry massacred at Little Big Horn.
The Great War Trilogy is World War 1. Potential interest herein is a second Mormon rebellion, 'Red' slaves rebelling in the CSA, trench warfare, early AFVs (tanks), the USA invading Canada and Custer as a cantankerous old bastard of a general. US capital finally moves from D.C. to Philadelphia.
American Empire is the interwar period. Roosevelt has been a popular president, an economically crushing and socially humiliating treaty is enforced by the USA on the CSA, Custer is appointed governor-general of Canada while a disgruntled veteran of the Great War arises to the leadership of the Freedom Party in the South. The Great Depression and the advent of radio leads to unpleasantries. At the end, Kaiser Wilheim II dies, tensions rise in Europe with France demanding Alsace-Lorraine back and the Germans tell 'em to sod off. The UK, France and the CSA declare war on Germany, with Russia joining in a few days later. At the end the CSA launches a surprise attack on Philadelphia, expanding the war.
Settling Accounts is World War 2. One guess as to which population group the Fascists of the CSA attempt genocide upon. In the end, the USA and Germany are the top dogs of the western food chain.
Well, as a generality that one's way outta my league, but the American slaveholders seemed to have been a particularly anti-industrializing, anti-modernizing bunch. IIRC, there were a couple of voices for Southern industrialization that were repeatedly and pointedly ignored by the majority of the Southern elite, but maybe they would've been won over given time.
There's a lot of agrarian rhetoric, but that's very common in nineteenth century American discourse regardless of section. In practice, there was less interest in industrialization in the South because they were making massive piles of cash from slavery. SC made some efforts at getting local textile mills up before Nullification, and a few more after, but they didn't last long.
You wouldn't have had factories just pop up in the cotton states, but Virginia was already making a go of it at the Tredegar Iron Works. Whether they could compete longterm industrialization in the free states or not isn't something we know for sure, but cotton production dropped dramatically when you couldn't torture the slaves into more picking anymore. The same calibrated pain systems could work in any industry.
They appeared to not have cared too much for public schools, either. Don't think they had any until Reconstruction.
I'm not positive, but I think you're right. At any rate, public schools were rare in the South compared to northern states of similar vintage.
The catch is, that workers, even underpaid, are also customers that purchase products. For industrial development you also need to develop markets. Slave-based industrialization might also reduce wages of non-slave workers hampering the development of the market for mass produced goods.
The catch is, that workers, even underpaid, are also customers that purchase products. For industrial development you also need to develop markets. Slave-based industrialization might also reduce wages of non-slave workers hampering the development of the market for mass produced goods.
That's all true so far as it goes, but it only means that you must maintain a non-slave population as well. Slave societies have rarely had any trouble doing this.
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I tend to be fairly skeptical of arguments that place a great deal of emphasis on slavery per se retarding industrial development. Maybe it has some effect, but it has seemed to me that there are too many examples in history - ancient and modern - of successful employment of slave labor in manufacturing, industrial, or proto-industrial pursuits.
As I see it, the biggest problem is in rate of innovation. By keeping a large portion of your population in uneducated squalor you are essentially eliminating any chance of them developing new technologies... leaving a smaller free population to do so at a slower rate than if everyone were able to contribute. The increasing rate of technological advancement from the Dark Ages up to now has been a direct result of an ever growing educated population. Of course, this is really a difference in education rather than freedom, but it'd be difficult to keep a highly educated population enslaved.