I feel like stirring the pot this morning.. If the Civil War was never fought...

Certainly, if someone makes a well-structured argument, particularly about something I had not put thought into in the first place. In particular, it may cause me to understand the weaknesses in my own position, and re-evaluate it.

 

http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Noose-tied-on-Ole-Miss-integration-statue-5245153.php

 

You reasoned yourself into these positions.
That took time and some measure of intellectual discipline.
You're going to blow all up because some Ivy League egghead read some abstruse tract even he doesn't seem to understand?

 

I don't know. Take the point of divergence as 1861. Both the South and Lincoln back off and some sort of lasting compromise is forged. No war and slavery for the next few decades is confined to the slave states in 1860 but not expanding into the territories or any new states. That being said, I think it ends between 1900 and 1920, with a soft landing or a bloody, destructive one?

A lot of factors contribute to making slavery unprofitable. Artificial silk goes into commercial production in the 1900s, reducing the need for cotton. Factory workers plucked from the swarm of immigrants in the 1870s and 1880s are cheaper, when you take into account you to don't have to feed and board them. And with the expansion of the west, and increasing population densities in the north, there are lots more places to run off to, and a lot more abolitionists to help escaping slaves.

So, slave owners gradually free their slaves, turning them into sharecroppers. Or you have a bloody series of revolts, with the North unwilling to help out.

 

If slavery were legal why wouldn't Henry Ford have built his production lines in Mobile Alabama rather than Detroit?

 

Can't really accept the premise of the question. It would have taken a civil war to end it and that war would have taken place at some point.

 

If this debate interests you, I suggest reading some of Harry Turtledove's stuff. He's written full fiction series about it, some of which are more science fiction-y than others.

 

Since slavery is still around, it seems reasonable to guess that slavery would still be a thing.

While the Civil War was a miserable, terrible thing, it happened but if it hadn't when it did, it would have happened later.

The states were spoiling for a fight.

 

It probably wouldn't have been an institutional thing for much longer. Given the explosion of technology over the next 40 years, large-scale slavery quickly would have become far less profitable -- if not downright unprofitable -- and therefore likely would have died out and been outlawed by 1900.

 

Considering it took until 1920 for enough people in the country to be persuaded that women should be given the right to vote, I'd think that slavery in some form in the South would have continued because it was that much of an institution in the region. It might have become a rarer thing because of economic factors, but I think it still would have existed in some form, barring a wide-scale revolt.

 

Don't even get me started on what a disaster that has turned out to be.

 

The path to the Civil War is chock full of bad decisions, but even slavery aside - in many ways the Civil War was a war that was destined to be fought on some level, much like World War I. So much change, economic, political and societal - hell, we still have states resisting federal primacy.