Replies

If you count the income produced by slaves, and the value of those slaves, then the average Deep South slave owning family was considerably more prosperous than their northern farmer and factory-worker cousins.

That's like saying factory owners are more prosperous than someone running a cottage industry. Slaves represented a considerable investment, so of course a slave-owning family was more prosperous--they had to be to own slaves.

Even in hi-tech California, where low-cost Mexican workers are available to harvest crops, there is relatively little farm mechanization going on. Why should a farmer buy a million dollar harvester, when he can hire a few Mexicans dirt cheap?

It is sometimes not a question of buying a harvester. Some crops do not lend themselves to mechanical harvesting. I grew up on a tobacco farm, and to my knowledge, there has been no successful mechanical harvester ever developed for the crop, even though the crop is labor intensive and labor costs were the greatest expense.

Many produce crops cannot be successfully harvested without destroying the plant, and because the crop does not ripen all at once.

Smokin' Joe: "That's like saying factory owners are more prosperous than someone running a cottage industry. Slaves represented a considerable investment, so of course a slave-owning family was more prosperous--they had to be to own slaves."

Agreed.
What's being debated here are two questions:
A) How important was slavery to the South? and
B) Would slavery have "withered away" and died out on its own, peacefully, had there been no Civil War?

Some of those who defend the Southern Cause wish to minimize slavery's importance for the Civil War, and assert slavery would have naturally died out on its own, even had there been no war.

And there are factual arguments to be made, as you may have read on this thread.
For two examples, it is a fact that:

Only 5% of Southerners owned slaves, and
Very few of the Confederate States' Declarations of Secession mentioned slavery as a cause.

From facts such as these they build a case that the Civil War was not all about slavery, but really was about States Rights against Federal power -- a War of Northern Aggression in which the South was defending the US Constitution!

Well, the truth is, it was all about slavery, indeed, for those states who began the secessions, it was only about slavery.
There was no "northern aggression" then for them to point to, only the insult and potential threat to slavery represented by the election of Abraham Lincoln.
And Lincoln had not even taken office yet.

We can see this more clearly if we look closer at the two "facts" cited above.

Yes overall, only 5% of Southern whites owned slaves.
But that 5% were heads-of-housholds out of the entire Southern white population of 8 million.
So, if we first look at an average family size of say, six or eight members, then 5% quickly becomes 30% to 40% of Southern households owned slaves.
Next we consider that slave populations ranged from barely 10% of the total in Border States like Maryland and Missouri, to over 50% in Deep South states like South Carolina and Mississippi. For the average to be say 35%, then some states and counties must have been in the range of 2/3 -- 67% of white households owning slaves.
For such people, slavery was not just an option or luxury, it was a necessity -- and any perceived challenge to slavery would be met with violence.
The claim that most Declarations of Secession did not mention slavery is misleading, since it implies the Declarations did mention some other reasons.
In fact, most Declarations of Secession listed no reasons at all, they simply declared themselves seceded, period.
For those state conventions which felt it necessary to produce a document of explanations, all of them made clear that a perceived threat against slavery was their prime motive.
Most mentioned no other reasons.

Smokin' Joe: "Many produce crops cannot be successfully harvested without destroying the plant, and because the crop does not ripen all at once."

Again agreed, but only up to a point.
In this day and age technology can do amazing things, including distinguish between ripe-enough and not-yet-ripe-enough produce.
But the question is: at what cost?
If it takes a million dollars to purchase an automatic harvester for delicate produce -- plus tens of thousands per year to operate and repair it -- what farmer would spend such sums if he could hire workers for a few thousand dollars per season?

So, considering that the Deep South was willing to bet everything on a War for Independence to protect slavery in 1860, I see no reason to suppose they would have abolished slavery peacefully on their own just a few decades later.