Conservative Colorado School Board Member: U.S. "Excpetional" Because We Ended Slavery Voluntarily (healthcare, politician)
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Slave owners were doing well economically pre-civil war. What was so unsustainable about it?
On what planet?
Slave owners appeared to be doing well. But, like most farmers, they were up to their eyeballs in debt. That's why slaves were used as collateral for loans. Loans from Northern bankers. The South had an agrarian economy. They were land rich, but capital poor. The North's economy was land poor, but capital rich. Each year when they sold their crops, they paid back their loans, and spent their profits. When it came time to plant, they borrowed the money to do so. Poor land management practices were already leading to lower crop yields.
As invested in slavery as the Confederacy was, it doesn't change the fact that slavery was economically unsustainable as new inventions came along as the result of the Industrial Revolution, and as the farming practices of that era were also unsustainable.
Capital investment into slaves had not gotten anywhere near the ROI for those so invested, so ending the practice ad absolutum was economic suicide. And the trend line in slavery investment/spending from 1820-1860 was not showing signs of dramatic decrease or wild upheaval of the labor model.
And industrialization would have meant for the slave owning states the same as it did for free states - higher productivity with available labor. It wasn't an either-or choice with industrialization, it was "why-not-both" situation. Get your ROI from depreciable assets before simply abandoning them for new technology. This is not new thinking, and slavery had a good 30-40 years before industrialization would have done much to it.
I think history of the civil war and slavery has been blurred since the history books started trying to explain the north and south side of what the civil war was about. Heroes and or villains in the war and which side was RIGHT.
Slavery in many countries took political changes and ideas to make that happen.
In Britain they ending up having to pay to remove slavery to the owners and then completely removed it later this was around 1833. 30 years later we went to war over it along with other UNRESOLVED issues since the forming of the states etc.
Even some union states like NJ had split ideologies and was not just about the SOUTH.
Slavery ended after Americans killed themselves their brothers and sisters, and black men fought along with white men to keep liberty an idea for all mankind. Not all slaves were black and not all slavery was a color. Slavery was not about race but an IDEA. The idea that HUMAN BEINGS could be your slave need to end. That GOES so far back into history circa BC! In the end it was about power not about color. If you had money and power you had slaves and that is what Americans died for.
Americans choose to die for an idea some did it for slavery, land, protection, money and states rights.
Capital investment into slaves had not gotten anywhere near the ROI for those so invested, so ending the practice ad absolutum was economic suicide. And the trend line in slavery investment/spending from 1820-1860 was not showing signs of dramatic decrease or wild upheaval of the labor model.
And industrialization would have meant for the slave owning states the same as it did for free states - higher productivity with available labor. It wasn't an either-or choice with industrialization, it was "why-not-both" situation. Get your ROI from depreciable assets before simply abandoning them for new technology. This is not new thinking, and slavery had a good 30-40 years before industrialization would have done much to it.
No one is talking about ending the practice ad absolutum. No one says slavery wouldn't have taken decades to have been driven out. It would have taken decades, unless the government stepped in and agreed to compensate slave owners for the loss of slaves. Not an unprecedented idea, since Great Britain had done exactly that with its colonies.
And the Industrial Revolution was just building up steam at this point, so its impact on slavery hadn't begun.
And industrialization didn't mean the same thing for North and South, as the economies of the two regions were fundamentally different.
And this was more efficient than free labor provided by slaves???
It is not free when one has to feed, cloth, house and provide health needs to get that "free" labor. They were finding it was getting more and more expensive and slaves are not free to begin with one has to buy them and good healthy slaves cost a lot of money. Far cheaper using other methods for labor.
Housing, clothing, food, and guards...cost money. That's why prisons are so expensive.
First of all prisons today provide way better conditions than slave owners, second free labor or labor for food and shelter is still cheaper than hired hands.
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