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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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In order for this to continue to be profitable, the territory under the yoke of slavery had to continually expand, which perhaps explains the growth of rabid pro-slavery ideology of politicians from these states in this era who started to justify slavery as a moral good).

Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?

In general, I think you're missing the massive impact of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath -- the genocide of all white inhabitants of Haiti by Jacques Dessalines created an existential fear in the South (shared by both slaveholders and yeomen farmers who did not participate in slavery) that abolition would result in the bloody death of everyone they knew. This fear was periodically amplified by the German Coast Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, and the attack on Harper's Ferry. This is why Jefferson wrote his famous letter to John Holmes, calling the Missouri Compromise a "fire bell in the night" and "knell of the Union". The most important quote from that letter gets a lot less attention than it deserves:

The cession of that kind of property [slavery], for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle[trifle] which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.

That was his entire argument against immediate abolition, and in favor of gradual emancipation. This thinking also led to the proposed solution: to spread slavery further and further into the western territories. The reasoning goes: the more evenly distributed the slave population was, the less concentrated the slave population in the Deep South was, the less the risk of a genocide when they are inevitably freed. That at least was the initial reasoning -- the cognitive dissonance between 'slavery must end' and 'we must spread it' led to the rise of racism (i.e., slavery isn't bad because the slaves deserve to be treated this way, whether 'Curse of Ham' or genetic inferiority) as well as an incredibly paranoid totalitarian treatment of slaves in the South (e.g., the ban on teaching slaves to read/write was specifically due to Nat Turner being a literate black who was inspired by reading about the Haitian Revolution).

In other words, the political extremism of the South was motivated less by the greed of the plantation class, and more by the overwhelming fear of a slave revolt. Whether that fear was justified is debatable -- though at least John Brown thought the fears were justified, as his final message asserted that "the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood" -- but the fact and reality of such fears is I think undeniable.

There are, it seems, immediately obvious solutions to "emancipation will cause white genocide" and the south rejected all of the ones that would entail freeing any slaves, including "just kill every black man, woman, and child in the USA". Attachment to slavery was a pretty big deal in understanding southern thinking.

I agree that attachment to slavery was a big deal, but it doesn't have to be for you to choose not to commit massacres. You could just be opposed to massacres.

Yes, they could be- but they also opposed things like gradual emancipation as happened in parts of Latin America, government buy back schemes, repatriation, etc.

I have always been ignorant of this. Why did the US not buy back slaves? I haven't seen anything about opposition to the plan from the south.

Because the south wanted to keep its slaves and then lost a war.

Can you expand on this? I can understand your later argument (that expanding slavery = increased profits from the slave trade), but why would expanding slavery be necessary for the profitability of existing cotton plantations?

Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.

I'm not sure I buy the slave revolt argument fully. The south was continually expanding its slave population to work new plantations. You see an exponential (in the mathematical sense) of the enslaved population from ~700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860. Now during that time the number and size of slave states also increased substantially, but if you look at this map, the percentage of enslaved peoples in Eastern counties doesn't seem to really decrease with Western expansion. Looks to me like the economics of the plantation were more important than the fear of slave revolt.

However, I do see your argument that this was a powerfully motivating political force behind Southern Extremism. Funnily enough, the Republican Party also didn't really want black people to stick around in the union: Lincoln was a strong proponent of colonization and repatriation of African-Americans to Liberia.

Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.

This is difficult to square with the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of slavery were from the Deep South. The necessary/intractable evil view survived the longest in the Upper South and the only Southern Slave State to get even mildly close to abolishing on its own was Virginia. Publicola actually misses this, too: The reason Southern emancipationists wanted to 'spread out' slavery wasn't to dilute the possibility of post-emancipation genocide, but to draw as many slaveowners out of Virginia as possible so the emancipationists could have any shot at all at winning elections.

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