Patito de Hule

I wonder if slavery had been the only issue there would have been the Civil War?

You say that slavery is the root clause, but . . .

Slavery did not cause the Plantation economy any more than the Plantation economy caused slavery. They went hand-in-hand. And though it is not so much in vogue any more, there are those who would say that economics is at the root of every social revolution.

States Rights is another such issue. It did not pop up because of slavery nor was slavery an effect of the states rights issue. There were threats of secession and of nullification in New England before slavery became attached to states rights.

Again the 3/5 compromise in the constitution caused great tension. In the mind of the North it gave the South an unfair advantage in Congress. Part of the Missouri Compromise was to keep the Senate at par between the North and South. But by restricting slavery below Mason Dixon the South soon would have no territory to expand slavery in to. Here economics again played an important part--as the soil aged in the east, and slaves could no longer be imported, selling them west became profitable.

So yes. Slavery was the most important and persistent issue, but slavery would have died out from its sheer moral repugnance anyway. But without constitutional issues (states rights kept popping up in different contexts), and without the economic issues, the country would not have become so drastically sectionalized.

The root cause of the rebellion was the synergy that slavery supplied to all the other issues.

tjadams

Very well said and written & I agree.

sculptingman

I disagree.
The plantation economy would never have occurred without slaves. Labor would have had to be PAID, which would have made it less profitable, and rendered plantation goods no less costly than those grown by independent small operators.

The result of no slavery would have been the creation of a middle class farming society... with higher overall wages spread more evenly thru the population, which would have promoted a consumer economy, which would have driven industrialization.

Precisely what happened in the North.

Saying they went hand and hand is not an argument for equal causation by both any more than a chicken/ egg analogy...
The root paradox of the chicken egg analogy is the false premise that they are two things... the egg IS the chicken,-- the same thing, at two different points in time.

Plantation economy and slavery are, therefore, two parts of the same construct.

Without slavery, no plantations.

pinguin

Interesting argument but, unfortuntelly it is false.

You can have plantations without slaves. For that all you need is a poor population and the serv system. You apply on them a feudal system of servitude, and they are payed in stuff rather than money, and when they are payed with money it is always little.

Actually, that was the way most of the Spanish Colonies worked.

The slaves were expensive and poors were cheaper.

The only reason why in the United States that economics didn't work it was because it was a region with very low density, and there wasn't a large mass of poors to exploit it cheaply.

Richard Stanbery

Pinguin, you are right on the money...

We are in the middle of a new form of slavery in America today...And just like you say, it is a slavery of the poors. It will work just fine in America now though, and it does, this system of the "New economic slavery". We dont have legal slavery anymore, but we have something almost as cheap, and that is illegal aliens who are worked for very low wages, under the table. The government is willing to look the other way as long as the rich American ruling class is making $$$ on it.

Thats why the government dont really try to do something about the illegal immigration. I mean, hey we know how to build fences and secure borders. I can tell you that the US Army knows how to secure a border. But the government dont want the Mexican border secured, because of the free, or almost free labor in the form of the illegals. Rich guys with political pull make too much money from this.

Making the big farms and produce growers (and illegal sweat shop owners) pay minimum wages to legal workers would be costly. So, bribes Im sure are made, political favors done, and the government (groups within the government) pretends not to see, or be able to do anything about the illegals problem of the border. The illegals are taken advantage of, and only the rich who work them make any money. They are not paid a fair wage, or given the benifit of safety codes, or any of the labor law protections. The modern day US government is still allowing a defacto form of slavery and ethnic abuse to go on with a blind eye. It is the American way.

The government just looks the other way while the illegals are exploited today, just like it has for so many years. Just like it did when it was the rich Carpetbaggers who were taking advantage of the Southern blacks with the "Jim Crowe laws". Yeah, I know all about them. I remember black kids being bussed out of the county to school into the 1970s, long after it was supposed to be illegal. Seggregation, racsism, discrimination, it went on openly and unchecked for decades into the 20th century. That stuff went on from 1865 until, well, pretty recently that anything much was really done about it. 1964 didnt end racism in America, not really. Not by a long shot.

But in America, $$$ and political connections talks, law, justice, and everything else walks. It has always been so, and so it was with slavery.

Its kind of how in the 1800s the US government pretended not to be able to do something about slavery either. Its all the same. Money changes hands, political favors are done, and injustices and corruptions go unchecked. The laws are a joke, as they only are applied to the poor. The rich growers who employ illegals are seldom raided, or fined or punished in some meaningful way.

I mean, hey, if we are going to let the illegals come into America, then ok let them come in. But take thier picture, make them citizens, and lets just see them treated like real people rather than some semi-criminal status person to be taken advantage of in a defacto new form of slavery. Lets really be America for a change, and live up to our own PR hype. Lets be the land of freedom and opportunity for everybody, and no more authorities in Washington turning a blind eye to racism, discrimination, and exploitation of the illegals just because it makes money for a small minority of the ultra rich with good political connections.

On a lighter note...I wish Vid were around to read this thread. He might find it amusing that someone called me a communist in this thread.

Im still laughng at that one. Where are you Vid?

tksensei

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Ai-ya~

sculptingman

That does not argue against my position, Pinquin... my position is that SLAVERY was the culprit.
And it was not the population density that prevented the Spanish colonial model from working the the States...
It was the fact that there was already a large population of poor WHITES...

The model you suggest can only occur in a situation where the ALL the poor can be treated equally badly, with the privileged class all equally privileged.

For example, British plantations in India were as you describe, but then there were no British field workers... only British owners and managers.


That situation did not exist in the States. We had a large population of poor whites, who OWNED PROPERTY.
In that environment, Plantation economics could not work without slavery.

In the US, Whites could not be paid as poorly as were former slaves in Haiti- they would simply MOVE to the frontier, clear and claim land for themselves, and get a better life for their efforts. The free access to other options and personal property ownership made Slavery the only potentially workable option for large scale plantation monoculture.

I would point out, for example, that one of the first slaves brought to America was in the Jamestown colony.
He fairly quickly managed to secure his own freedom, accrue some money and claim land for a farm of his own.
At which point, the only way he could make the farm pay was to buy his OWN slaves... because any paid labor would ask too much, and if offered too little, could simply move a few miles west and take some land from some Indians.

The ready availability of free land is not only what made slavery a necessary model, early on... it is also what created the Unique American mindset of a class-free culture... the idea that aristocracy was meaningless.


BTW- Slave plantations also could not have worked without industrial augmentation. Without the advent of the Cotton Gin and other mechanized processing of agricultural production Slavery would have died out as economically infeasible. ( as you point out, in Spanish and British colonies a poor native underclass is actually cheaper than slaves.- but only in the absence of real mechanization of the most time consuming aspects of crop processing )

Bismarck

How can a society foundered on slavery be class-free?

And, riddle me this: if the civil war was all about slavery why, when the north won, was slavery not abolished?

Lucius

Apparently, it was not all about slavery.

sylla1

Arguably, at the beginning slavery per se was not even an issue; the obvious cause of the war was the secession.

Given that the Confederation proved harder to defeat than expected and with the perspective of a British (and even French) intervention as a real threat, the anti-slavery policy of the Union seems like a good strategy for preventing any interference from those overtly antislavery powers.