What if the Civil War never happened?

The recent onslaught of blue and red maps of the US conjured up a rather obvious comparison:A country divided, today: A country divided, 140 years ago: Perhaps I'm reading bit into the comparison, but I've ended up wondering what North America would look like politically and culturally if when the Southern states tried to secede, the North would have simply said, "OK, do your own thing."It's a pretty open ended question. Any thoughts, as general or detailed as you want to make them?

I think the only way we can unite the country (if we even want to) is to start having discussions about values. If people have an argumnet about facts it's usualy easy to find the facts. If people disagree on how to go about accomplishing a goal careful analisis can deturmnane the proper stratigy. But when people disagree about values it's almost impossible to come to a resolution. If the red states think homosexuality, abotion or whatever is wrong it's going to be realy hard to change their minds.Notice I said "realy hard" and "almost impossible" not "actualy impossible" fortunately people can change their values when they find out the facts or stratagys they based them on are wrong. Why do you think I brought up that nightmare thread on homosexuality?This message has been edited by The Dread Dormammu, 11-19-2004 06:22 AM

Bad idea. We'd be seeing slaves in the southern states still.

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I don't think they would still have slavery. Wasn't there pressure from Britan and other conutrys to abolish slavery. Do you realy think that the U.S. is soley responsible for abolishing slavery the world over? I don't think institutionalized slavery could exsist in a 21st century world.But feel free to prove me wrong (by argueing; Not by institutionlaizing slavery please).

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I don't think institutionalized slavery could exsist in a 21st century world.

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There are tens of thousands of women who are slaves and abused in the European sex trade (more worldwide). It is largely legal (prostitution that is) and the slavery is institutionalized.

Ohhhh... I hope you're not suggesting that legalized prostitution is a form of slavery, or that it helps slavery. They are two totally separate things.That is unless we want to point out the even larger European and US work trade (sweat shops, etc etc) and then say that all businesses are a form of, or help, slavery.People seem to like focusing on the sex trade because its more sexy, but there are more people shipped around in containers to do totally different work.If anything I think we see exactly what slavery would have become in the south... indentured servitude. That is what we are looking at today.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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Ohhhh... I hope you're not suggesting that legalized prostitution is a form of slavery, or that it helps slavery. They are two totally separate things.

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That is not what I wished to imply. The problem is that Albania in particular is a source of forced sex slaves that end up in countries that allow prostitution. One of the national unions in Germany (verdi) wanted to unionize all prostitutes to help combat this or at least protect women who have been brought into the country against their will to work in the sex trade among other things. My point was more that there is widespread slavery in the 21st century which Dread implied could not exist.

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That is unless we want to point out the even larger European and US work trade (sweat shops, etc etc) and then say that all businesses are a form of, or help, slavery.

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In fact, this is a larger problem than sex slavery in terms of the number of people affected and in many places is just as much a form of slavery or at least indentured servitude. I don't know that the sex trade is the primary focus of attention. Naiomi Campbell's No Logo and similar books and organizations focus completely on indentured servitude of sweat shop workers and the impacts is has both on them and the countries that benefit from their labor.

There are problems with slave labor and conditions almost as bad within the commodity coffee and chocolate industries at the level of the growers and harvesters.There have never been widespread problems at the high end of these products because to produce high quality you need high skill, which you generally don't get from slaves.So, don't buy Hershey's or Maxwell House.

I think it just goes to show that the concept of institutional slavery not being possible in the 21st century is not supportable.

Lam, I think you're missing some huge historical situations here. Morality aside, slavery is only economically viable for an agricultural nation, which the antebellum south was, using pre-industrial methods. It was profitable for large landowners to keep large numbers of workers when the only way to grow cotton and the other agricultural commodities was by manual labor.With advent of farming machinery those legions of workers became unneeded and a profit-killing expense. Why feed and house a bunch of slaves when a threshing machine, a tractor for plowing, etc. can get all the work done and be operated by a very few men? It isn't economical.The argument may be made that fewer slaves (to operate machinery, etc.) could be kept profitably. Again, this is not true. If only a few days for a small part of the year require the services of workers (which is the case with industrial agriculture) then the expense of keeping those slaves around for the rest of the year is prohibitive. It's better to hire what you need as you need it, which is the situation with migrant workers today. They are an underclass doing the hard labor of agriculture, but they're responsible for feeding and housing themselves. The same applies to sharecropping. Get the same work out of people without the added problems of caring for them.The question of very few slaves for housework and the like (perhaps as a status symbol) is more problematic. I have no comment on that, but I find it unlikely an entire system of servitude would survive for this limited need.

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If only a few days for a small part of the year require the services of workers (which is the case with industrial agriculture) then the expense of keeping those slaves around for the rest of the year is prohibitive.

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...except with chocolate and coffee and a few other products that are produced in tropical or sub-tropical regions which are also third-world economies, slaves can be used year round.Remember, just because it isn't harvest time doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of work to be done on a plantation.

Perhaps true, but we were discussing the survival of slavery in some still existing CSA. Slavery is only profitable when there is no other way to do things except to use loads of manual labor, and that would not be the case in the hypothetical CSA.Environmental and other conditions in other parts of the world may make large scale agricultural slavery, as existed in the American south, still profitable, but it would only be under very unusual circumstances.Employing people and paying them a below subsistence wage will always be more economical then slavery.

This topic reminds me of a very fun (in a guilty pleasure kind of way) book I read some time ago called "Guns of the South" by Harry Turtledove. It is an alternative history where the CSA won the war with the help of 21 century South African neo-nazis. Sort of a ridiculous premise, I understand, but actually a better read than anticipated and relevant to this topic.Rather than focusing on the winning of the war (which is what I thought it was to be) the war is over rather quickly and the focus is on "So now what do we do?" from the CSA perspective. Hopefully without giving too much away a portion of the book deals with the point that slavery just couldn't persist. And the gradual elimination of slavery led to a reasonably powerful, organized labor class of former slaves (the decision to end slavery from within rather than by force resulted in certain changes in differences in this history's black/white relationship in the south). A few decades after the end of the war there is an illegal immigration problem from the United States because so many black people are wanting the relative prosperity they could find in the south compared to the factories in the north without any minimum wage.Anyway, at the very least it is a fun read, and I found it to be pretty insightful in many parts.

I think the south would not have been able to continue financially. The value of Confederate money was less than the paper it was printed on, they had no industry to speak of...all they had was cotton and slaves. Given enough time, they would have had to reform themselves or collapse...probably collapse. Either way, I don't think slavery would have continued to today, and many border states would probably have tried to rejoin the northern union anyways.

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"Of course...we all create god in our own image" - Willard Decker, Star Trek: The Motion Picturehttp://perditionsgate.bravepages.com

Well, there are many types of work today that can use year round labor force. Mining for coals and other things for example. Picking grapes is another example.Here is a hypothetical situation. Wouldn't it be possible for us to see large southern plantations with slaves turn into big corporations that own slaves to produce, mine, and do whatever else they need to do?Here is a somewhat more realistic possibility the way I see it. Remember South Africa? Even with a black majority, the country was almost a white dominated society for a long time until only a few years ago. With a black minority society like that, we'd be seeing blacks in the south with next to no rights.Regardless, I am one of those that is convinced that the civil war was a just war.

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Hate world.Revenge soon!