Did the free market and industrialization end American slavery? (economy, education, federal government)

[GregW]

Many of the Northern factories and mines were also staffed by people effectively in the slave system of Company Towns using imported labor. This willingness to exploit people is only one of the reasons I despise big business.

[alphamale]

No. The 13th amendment did.

[2nd trick op]

Not only did industrialization weaken slavery, it also weakened the agrarian economy based upon subsistence farming and its successors, tenant farming and sharecropping. People were free to relocate rather than being chained to a family farm -- handed down over generations and likely losing fertility, but gaining utility as urbanization began to spread and real estate values rose. The emerging professions also provided opportunities for those seeking to escape agrarian peonage -- and many of them were women, formerly confined to little more than unpaid servitude.

[TheWiseWino]

Originally Posted by GregW

effectively in the slave system

Folks in company towns could and did form unions. Folks in those company towns who formed unions could and did strike for better wages and living conditions. Folks who lived in company towns, formed unions, struck for better wages, could leave the company town and go somewhere else they pleased. Folks who lived in company towns, formed unions, went on strike or left, could not only leave, they could leave with their families!

Now please tell me how this was "effectively" like slavery?

[TheWiseWino]

Originally Posted by 2nd trick op

industrialization weaken[ed] slavery

How, other than by allowing the United States to out produce the rebels in weapons of war, did industrialization weaken slavery when industrialization was dependent upon the very raw materials that slaves produced? Iron and steel didn't fuel industrialization in the U.S. textile mills did. By 1860 three times as many Americans earned a living in textiles(cotton) than in iron and steel manufacturing combined. Only mining employed more workers.

Writing for the New York Times, author Gene Dattel lays out the status of Cotton up until the first shots fired in the Civil War,

"On the eve of the Civil War there was no perceived threat to the existence of slavery; on the contrary, production levels had never been higher, and despite occasional drops in price, cotton was proving a reliably stable profit engine. Indeed, slave-produced cotton had become a formidable political and still-growing economic force: as early as 1838, a partner of Nicholas Biddle, America’s finance king, paid homage to cotton as a weapon: “Cotton … will be much more effective in bring … [England] to terms than all the disciplined troops America could bring into the field.”

In short, nothing weakened slavery other than the Civil War and the 13th Amendment.

[2nd trick op]

The people who moved into company towns did so voluntarily, because the alternatives were either stagnation on the farm or, in the case if immigrants, stagnation in a class-conscious society where they knew their place, and were kept in it.

And true progress often involves multiple generations; the descendants of people who moved into company towns often did far better.

This is the central feature of all human progress; the outcome was usually disappointing, but even if only marginally better, it was better than what came before.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally Posted by branh0913

Y I almost wish there was no Civil War, that way Abe Lincoln wouldn't be a hero, and capitalism itself would have been the hero.

Capitalism (Constitutional economics) would have been the hero if slavery had never existed in America after July 4, 1776, and Africans had been allowed to immigrate to the USA on their own terms, looking for a better life, like all the other immigrants who came from around the world. Capitalism would have been the hero if the South had used free labor, paying wages to hired workers, who were incentivized to produce as much as possible. Cotton was in demand throughout the world, and Southern Cotton was of value. Capitalism would have been the hero IF..... people in America had done the right thing and honored the tenets and ideals of their Constitution. America would have reaped many benefits.

But no.... it all had to play out the same old tired way. The 99 percent being duped into supporting and dying for the Antebellum feudalist one percenters who wanted to preserve their silly little aristocracy for nothing more than the benefit of THEIR OWN EGOS. In exchange for their support, the stupid 99s were given the pablum of the slavemaster philosophy, so that they continued to support the regime in the name of "Heritage" and protecting their wives and kids and way of life from "any unfair expectations" that negros were equal to them.

Not that the plantation owners didn't know field slavery was inefficient and doomed to be replaced by machines. But because they loved those HOUSE negros who nursed the babies and cleaned the house and opened the doors for Scarlett O'Hara when she came to the ball, and who did all the "womens' work" so that the mistress could devote herself to cards and big fancy balls and fashion excursions, to socializing and to the veneer of cheap religion and superficial "social work" for the local orphanage.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally Posted by redguard57

There is, of course, the side of the debate that says "yes" but in my view the evidence leans toward "no." Slavery was integral to the formation of modern capitalism.

Perhaps. But it didn't need to be integral.

[Led Zeppelin]

Originally Posted by RDM66

Nonsense! Too much education is a bad thing.

And not enough education is a bad thing.

[soUlwounD]

When people have to do 2-4 job to live I would not say slavery in america would not exist.