The overlooked, underrated, and forgotten ...

[marct]

Hi Tequila,

I'd like some more backup on the idea that slavery was dying as an economic institution. I'll have to wait until I get home, but most of my texts on this indicate just the opposite.

It depends on how you measure it, really. To a large extent, slavery was economically untenable outside of cotton (and a few other crops, but mainly cotton). Check out the number of slaves sold to other states from Virginia and North Carolina - that was the "crop" I was referring to . You will also need to look at the increased availability of cotton in India, and the fights between the UK cotton factories and the Indian cotton industry.

When I said it was "dying", it might have been more accurate to say that it had been diagnosed early on with a terminal disease . The real problem with it was the cost and, once the Brits managed to destroy the Indian cotton industry, that gave them an alternate source under their own control (as an example, look at how quickly they shifted once the Northern blockades were underway).

Also, the aforementioned westward expansion of the U.S. was driven to a large extent by slavery, or specifically the influence of slaveowners interested in maintaining a proslavery majority by carving out more slave states from Mexico and the West. The history of the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War and its backers, as well as the filibuster movement which sought to carve out an empire of American slavery in the Caribbean and Central America, points this out.

Sure, and I agree - that was a lot of the political impetus. Still and all, that is dependent upon the economic base, which was dependent on cotton. I'll agree that if the US had expanded into the Caribbean, then that would have given a second crop, sugar cane, that would be quite salable and continue to support slavery. But it's hard to grow sugar cane outside of that area.

Another point is that by the 1850's there was an increasing resistance to "Buying American" in the European markets because of slavery. This was one of the factors that helped to push the British into destroying the cotton industry in India and using their raw cotton.

There are a couple of other things to consider, again at the economic level. Up until about the 1820's or so, the vast majority of wealth produced in the US came from the agrarian South. Gradually, that shifted over to manufacturing in the North, and corn and ranching in the West (neither of which works well with slavery). You also had mass waves of immigrants coming into the North, but very few going into the South, so the entire population demographic was changing. Part of the reason for trying to carve out the new slave states was to maintain parity in the Senate, since it had been lost in Congress.

But this push to grab new slave states in Mexico and the Caribbean could only garner so much support at the national level. How much longer would it be likely that the increasingly populated North and West would support the South through wars of aggression? Sure, you had the Mexican campaign, but do you really think that Congress would have gone for an attack on Spanish colonies in the 1850's-1860's? I really doubt that Britain would have stood by and let that happen.

BTW, I ever said that slavery wasn't an issue, just that it wasn't the root cause.

Marc