Hello Lyle,
A great question I think deserves asking because various people at the time routinely predicted that someday, out there in the unforeseen future, slavery would end.   Not exactly a timeframe.   Henry Wiencek rightly points out the continued profitablility of slavery, but it is also worth considering the importance of slavery to the political and social order of the south (if not to the US as a whole).  We often ask why so many southern white men, who did not own slaves and whose economic picture was negatively impacted by the competition from slavery, fought in 1861 to uphold an institution that did not evidently benefit them -- but that misses the point that slavery did benefit all whites by sustaining white supremacy.  I think this also explains the ambivalence of northerners on slavery and abolition -- emancipation would create a race problem that the institution of slavery resolved -- however morally questionable.

There was of course the fear among southerners that the north's population would continue to grow and eventually overwhelm whatever political advantage slavery provided and so force its will upon the south -- but eventhat it seems to me runs into this problem of race and equality.

David Kiracofe




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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Lyle E.Browning [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2012 5:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: The Peculiar Institution's End Without The Intervention Of The Civil War

The question of the day is whether slavery would have died out on its own had not the Civil War intervened. The arguments against that happening were inbuilt cultural intransigence, the southern agrarian system that required cheap labor to be competitive (still being played out today albeit globally), and the lack of mechanization. The arguments for it were the changing cultural mores, and the beginnings of agricultural mechanization. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin with the hope that southern slavery would disappear, but the unintended consequence was that southern planters put more acreage into cotton now that a fast and efficient means of removing seeds from the money part of the crop was available.

Greece and Rome both had vast support systems based on slavery that retarded development of more efficient means of doing things. Both had some leanings in those directions such as the aqueduct system that delivered water but one only occasionally sees internal plumbing whereas water delivery was by the slaves who lugged water from nodes to houses.

How much simple economics plays into the equation is debatable. VA owners were selling their slaves as they were no longer profitable. The smarter owners were hiring their industrially trained slaves for higher rates than low end laborer types. Ruffin's 1832 work rejuvenates southern tobacco monoculture killed soils back to life.

After the Civil War, southern agriculture took a massive hit with owners and former slaves working out a system that for all intents and purposes was an extension of chattel slavery, but with a massive dose of either paternalistic capitalism or amoral capitalism, depending upon the personalities of the owners.

Former slave were already astutely looking for opportunities in railroad construction and entirely in a paradigm shift, to the industrial iron belts of the north for manufacturing and assembly plants. The effect of the various out-migrations was to deplete the labor force that had consisted almost entirely of African-Americans.

Advances in metallurgy were slowly pushing things along. Gristmills moved from entirely wooden to metal wheeled with wooden teeth to entirely metal gearing due to those advances. Similar advances in power equipment from steam engines and finally the coup de grace was delivered by the introduction of the marriage of the internal combustion engine with a wagon frame, ie, a gas powered tractor. These tractors were produced by a variety of vendors (over 900 such around 1900) but were Darwined out to the current big 5 or however many are thus constituted.

The issue becomes whether mechanical power for farming was something the South did or whether it was a product of mid-west small farms seeking a competitive edge with their 400 acre farms that pushed the advancement of mechanical means in agriculture. The result was that y the 1930's, mechanization was starting to make real inroads into the system. The 1930's saw the sale of rubber tired tractors for the first time exceed those of the steam-engine inspired metal cleated wheels with the advantages the rubber tire had along with advances in agricultural mechanization that resulted in niche markets that required manual labor. Cotton, potatoes, peanuts and rice were among them. However, mechanization caught them in the 1940's and 50's with combine harvesters that picked, plucked and bagged the product with 3, then 2, then 1 person on the machines, reducing the need for vast numbers of farm laborers to do that work. The last hold-out is the sweet potato. But, a firm in Ely, England has a prototype sweet potato picker that will pick and grade the potatoes to separate the big, middle and seed potatoes thus leaving the proverbial 500 Mexicans out of work when this comes on-line within the next year or so. You saw it first here so remember it as it will be big news in the ag-biz world shortly;) In short, how a trip to see the Ely Cathedral lantern resulted in a tour of an engineering company near the train station that is inventing and prototyping the machinery for production.

But, had the Civil War not happened, how likely was the mechanization to happen. I think we need to look at where the genesis for mechanization took place and I suspect that slavery had little to do with it, but with much to benefit from the abolition of it regardless.

What are your thoughts? With apologies for such a broadbrush approach in advance.

Lyle Browning
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