Total nonsense. Slavery was dying. The advent of machinery was speeding up the obsolescence.
The cotton gin introduced an artificial bump in the need for manpower, but after a time, even that became redundant.
Bleeding hearts just can't see that slavery was not that important an issue.
All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding?
The advent of machinery was speeding up the obsolescence.
What machinery was that?
The cotton gin introduced an artificial bump in the need for manpower, but after a time, even that became redundant.
The cotton gin made slavery profitable by automating the removal of the seeds from the cotton boll. However, harvesting the cotton was a manual process and remained so till the 1940's.
Bleeding hearts just can't see that slavery was not that important an issue.
The southern leadership of the time would disagree with you.
Machinery which was only in use in the North.
In fact, the southern economy was doing quite well in 1860, even if it weas more fragile than southern leaders suspected. They had passed largely unaffected by the Crash of 1857, for example. French and British mills were ever hungrier for southern cotton - replaceable by Egyptian and Indian cotton as it turned out, but only because necessity forced the issue.
Ultimately, yes, the southern slave-based economy would have been difficult to sustain. But there is no reason to believe it could not have been sustained for at least another full generation.
I could not disagree more with your suggestion that "slavery was not that important an issue." It was the issue that couldn't be compromised. That got men to kill each other in Bleeding Kansas or beat each other on the Senate floor or hijack US arsenals. I would agree that it was not the ONLY issue. But it was the one that finally pushed the country over the abyss.
The number of slaves in the United States increased about 15% (3.5 million to 4.0 million) from 1850 to 1860. The machinery that would have serious undermined the use of agricultural slave labor was not developed for another 80 years.
"Total nonsense. Slavery was dying. The advent of machinery was speeding up the obsolescence."
This is part of the reason why slavery was not that important a reason for secession. The northern example of paying people hourly wages without benefits (Industrial Revolution) proved cheaper than raising workers from birth and supporting them past their useful working life.
Second, only five percent of Americans owned more than slaves and only another two percent owned more than three.
Slavery worked against the Southern whites economically but they fought with everything they had for secession. Why? Because they hated northern attitudes and their states' loss of power in Washington. Northerners fought not to free the slaves but because they were conscripted to preserve the Union.