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

"According to the federal census of 1830, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves in Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia."

I, uh, never would have imagined.

http://www.uwec.edu/Geography/Ivogeler/w188/south/charles/charles3.htm

 

Eh... Slaves were expensive. A slave in the prime of his life working as a field hand cost $1200 in Texas in the late 1850s (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/yps01) And you had to feed them enough, and house them well enough, so that your valuable investment didn't up and die on you. Or at least keep strong enough so they were able to do the work.

In contrast, a field hand in Massachusetts in 1870 cost $20 a month. (http://history.vineyard.net/dukes1870.htm) It's a little apples and oranges, of course, but with the flood of immigrants streaming into the county at the time, they'd be interchangeable cogs.

Throw in the fact that the promised land in our alternative reality is no longer Canada but one step over the border into the shrunken United States and keeping slaves would be even more expensive. You're going to have to spend more to treat them better. Even if some sort of treaty for returning escaped slaves came into existence between the CSA and the USA, the north isn't going to return them for free.

As for the resurgence of slavery into South America or the Caribbean? Eh. France and particularly Britain would have frowned on that, and in most scenarios, the CSA would need to depend on remaining on their good graces.

Slave-owners were the most vile, evil scum of the earth. The CSA were traitors. Sherman, in my opinion, was a little too soft-hearted in his approach. That being said, if the British Empire in the 19th century, which otherwise exploited native peoples all around the globe to a fantastic degree, abandoned slavery, it probably wasn't all that workable economically.

 

Just look in every newsroom that publishes a newspaper!

 

All of them, or just the ones in 1860 (but not the ones in, say, 1776)?

 

Ah, touché. I hadn't thought about it that way.

Well... Around 49% of the founding fathers were estimated to have owned slaves. And thousands of escaped slaves and free Black men fought for the British, who promised liberty for them and delivered it to a limited degree after the war. (For example, Sierra Leone was founded in part by Black loyalists.) And for the African Americans of 1776, life would have been better - after a few decades - if the colonies had remained in the British empire.

So is George Washington vile, evil scum for having slaves? If he'd beaten Martha bloody every few months, he'd be a pariah today. Or if he had prisoners tortured, regularly put on the rack, he'd be like a little Stalin. But we excuse him for treating human beings like property because "that's how things were back then," blah blah blah. Or hooray! He freed them in his will! Or he was such a piss-poor estate manager he was always going broke anyway and so he must not have worked them that hard...

But yeah - sitting here in the citadel of moral purity - I'd have to say he was a vile, evil guy just for that (albeit, one who did some good in the world.)

 

I don't know how anyone could defend a slave owner like George Washington.

 

Which is why I saw this era as the likely target. 1920s were chock full of race riots.

 

Were they worse than the Civil War Draft Riots?

 

Yes, they were. The Civil War draft riots had an economical basis behind them. The rioters were more worried about feeding themselves and their families than being sent to die because some distant states that they'd never seen before or would ever see wanted to leave the country in order to cling to their slaves.

The rioters also were worried that they would have to compete for jobs with an influx of freed blacks, and, most importantly, they were majorly pissed off that the rich could buy their way out of the draft while paying $300 or buying a substitute. The blacks who were caught up in the violence bore the brunt of their economic anger.

Compare that with the race riots in the first half of the 20th century, that was based more upon flat-out racism than economic factors. Such as when Jack Johnson beat Jim Jeffries in 1910. Whites rioted because Johnson wasn't "put in his place" by the "Great White Hope".

 

I think that's a great way of putting it.
Look at the mush on the front page of its web site right now.
Slate is concern trolling dressed up in wool crepe and a scarf dashingly wrapped about the neck.
Not tightly enough, unfortunately.

 

All I know is Starman just outed himself as Harry Turtledove.

The balkanization of the U.S. over slavery is one of his main themes and they're also a pretty good read, if you like that sort of thing.

 

Collectively, slavery was horrible for the economy. But it was very good for the people who owned the slaves (and ran the South). Bad economic systems throughout the course of history have been propped up in the same way. Moreover, there was no way the slave owners were going to walk away from the investment already made in the slaves. Slaves were not just what the slave owners used to create wealth, slaves were their wealth, what they borrowed against, had their money tied up in, etc. So there is really no plausible scenario where you talk the slave owners in the South into abolition.

Also, comparisons to other countries don't work for me either. Nowhere else in the world had anything like American federalism, where states were, to a large degree, free to do what they wanted. Once the ruling class in London decided slavery was bad, that was the end of slavery in the British Empire, tough shit if anyone there didn't like it. But no U.S. President had that kind of power, nor did any prominent politician (including Lincoln) seriously advance immediate abolition.

The only alternative to war, in my opinion, would have been an eminent domain strategy, where the slaves were bought (and immediately freed) by the federal government. Slave owners knew time was not on their side. Slavery didn't travel well and the overwhelming number of states that were going to join the Union would do so as free states. The fugitive slave act and the Dred Scott decision gave the South a small window to negotiate from something resembling a position of strength. (neither was going to last long, and as more and more slaves found freedom in the North, running the police state the South was basically running was going to get a lot tougher). The South blundered their position badly, and chose to be traitors instead.