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Counterfactuals are lots of fun...
But for my money, the really great mistake was not having the religious fundamentalists of New England secede during the War of 1812, as nearly happened. It would have clearly been better for everyone in the long run.
https://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2012/06/15/new-england-succession
Somehow nearly everywhere else in the West managed to draw down slavery peacefully despite the massive amounts of money involved and how ingrained it was socially. Slavery was ubiquitous, and yet somehow everyone else managed to move past it.
Now, it could be that there was something uniquely horrible or monstrous about Southerners at the time, although they don't seem especially unusual if you read deeply about them. No saints, of course, but not really all that unusual people for the time. What does seem unusual for the time, however, is that Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban, and though the particular beliefs of their descendants clearly drifted over time, the core tendency of a great many of them towards intensely held spiteful extremism, with a sharp inclination towards fire and brimstone and apocalypse and Manicheanism and radicalism and sharpening confrontation, clearly never did.
I'm glad slavery ended, and I'm sorry that America ended up relying on the absolutely worst, most disastrous, most scarring way to end it. America certainly would be hugely better off if the South hadn't been dragged along as, essentially, a wrecked, impoverished internal colony from the time of the end of the Civil War until World War 2, with all the damaged legacy that left for people in the South, both black and white. But ignoring or even praising the role of religious extremists in bringing about the most violent, scarring way to end slavery is both unfortunate and typical, and has itself left a disastrous legacy in American politics.
It's probably no accident that the British, who wisely marginalized and broke the back of their Puritan Bolsheviks by the end of their civil war, were actually able to wind down slavery without resorting to bloodshed.
Of course, maybe I'm playing a little fast and loose with details here and slagging off entire groups of people somewhat lazily in a situation that really does demand incredible nuance, but hey, if that's what we're doing, that's what we're doing.
Why the percentage of the South that were slaves and not the U.S. as a whole? You didn't divide those other countries into the pro-slave and anti-slave factions. Seems like a stolen base, especially when it was the anti-slave half of the U.S. that precipitated the end of slavery, just like in those other countries that weren't carved up for stats.
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I'd say the unique factor in the south wasn't awfulness per se; but a planter aristocratic class who's entire position depended on directly chattel slavery right in their back yards.
In the rest of the western world, the owning class was insulated from whatever they owned by a couple layers of middle class professional technocrats. "Doing business? How dreadfully plebeian my dear, now pass the port and deal me another hand".
I think the crops grown by slaves were a rather substantial part of the exports of the slave states which didn’t industrialize as quickly as the north did. Being dependent on the output of slaves to keep the economy running would make slavery a politically important institution. Proposing to end slavery in the southern states would be like trying to shut down oil fields in Texas or fracking in Oklahoma today — that industry makes too much money to be shut down without major problems.
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The British were able to end slavery because (a) many slavers (or those more broadly involved in the triangle passage) were ‘new money’ with less political influence on Parliament than their wealth might suggest and (b) the domestic slave-owning constituency was pretty limited (I think there were fewer than 10,000 slaves in Britain, and the aforementioned Caribbean plantation owning class was not hugely powerful) and the terms of manumission very generous.
I remember being struck by the grandeur of Bristol, a mere provincial English city, the first time I visited. It was all funded by the slave trade, but the Gloucestershire and wider West Country merchants who made the riches (and who lent the famous arr me hearty “pirate accent” its affect) weren’t the highest status people in the realm, and it would take another century for their descendants to climb the class ladder to the top.
The idea that Bristol's wealth (or Britain's more broadly) was "all funded by the slave trade" is a nonsense.
The slave trade never contributed more than roughly 12% of Bristol's total trade clearances, and that only for a brief period between 1728 and 1732. This may underestimate the trade's economic impact, especially indirectly, but otherwise the trade was consistently <10% of total clearances (pg.4).
To be clear, the slave trade certainly contributed to Bristol's overall trade and economic importance during the 18th century, but it did not fund all, or even most, of it. There's a really good literature review of the historiography of slavery's importance to Britain's economic growth here. (Highly recommended if this topic interests you.)
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