Lyle,
You can probably date when, but I suspect that as slaves themselves
became a cash crop, southerners could choose to raise slaves as workers,
while the machines tended the fields ...
It's a horrifying thought that had the south not been defeated, US labor
could have become slave labor ... no jobs, just buy slaves ... lowest
possible labor cost ...
Anne Pemberton
On 5/7/2012 3:41 PM, Lyle E. Browning wrote:
> ALRIGHT YOU LOT,
>
> Stop hijacking my original post's intent;) I'm not concerned with why people fought. That they did is evident.
>
> What I am concerned with is whether the mechanization of farming would have resulted in the destruction of slavery. If you look at the census figs, some 70-90% of the population at any given time were on farms until the 20th century. Now it's about 3%. If that trajectory had followed WITHOUT the intervention of the Civil War, slavery would, in my view, have become superfluous. Slaveowners bought and used people because until the second agricultural revolution that brought animal power and towed equipment into the picture, they were all that they had. And due to the peculiarities of some of the southern crops, intensive hand labor was needed. But if you progressively add equipment that paid for itself quickly, did more per day and did it more efficiently and with less cost than slaves could do it, it seems to me that even the dimmest person would at some point see that keeping all those folks housed, fed and supervised, not to mention the social issues raised by bondage, would make no economic sense.
>
> So can you please respond to that thesis and turn your considerable guns upon it rather than the usual arguments;)
>
> Lyle Browning
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Anne Pemberton
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