“The people who started the war didn’t think slavery was going to die on the vine. They saw it as an institution that their children and grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would benefit from.”
Some, certainly. Sort of the mid-nineteenth century version of the Obama voter.
“So if the South had won then would you have thought the 600,000 lives were worth it?”
Of course not. What an insulting thing to say.
But even if they had won, slavery was already on its way out. The soil simply wouldn’t sustain agriculture at that pace with those crops, and the industrial revolution was making slave labor largely obsolete.
And yet all those same crops continue to be grown to this day.
and the industrial revolution was making slave labor largely obsolete.
Cotton farming wasn't mechanized until the 1940s. Not coincidentally, that's when sharecropping, the debt-peonage labor system that replaced slavery, began to die out.
How so? Slaves worked the Tredgare Iron Works in Richmond. Slaves built the railroads throughout the south. Slaves mined coal in Virginia, Kentucky and Alabama.
"The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat...to which the African race is altogether better adapted. The production of rice, sugar, and cotton is no better adapted to slave labor than the digging, washing, and quarrying of the gold mines."
-- Jefferson Davis speech in the US Senate in 1850.