There was no plan to replace slavery in the South. The leaders in the South envisioned slavery lasting indefinitely. They saw no moral issue, or at the very least were able to rationalize away any moral issue with slavery. There was no indication in the antebellum South, despite the arguments from “lost causers” that slavery was dying. In fact, at the start of the war, slavery was as strong as ever.
I think a valid analogy (not perfect, mind you, but illustrative) would be the analogy between slavery in the antebellum South and fossil fuels today. The economy of today is in a very real way based on fossil fuel consumption, most especially consumption of oil. All transport of goods requires oil. Nearly all energy needed for manufacture of goods requires fossil fuels of one type or another (except for areas, such as the Niagara area in NY where hydroelectric power is readily available, but these are limited.) Think about the economic implications if fossil fuels were to suddenly disappear. Our economy would essentially collapse. Do you think that we would give up fossil fuel usage voluntarily?
Similarly, the antebellum South’s economy was based on slave labor. The disappearance of slave labor did cause an economic collapse and required complete restructuring of the Southern economy. How likely was it that those in power would have given up slave labor voluntarily? There’s a reason that the antebellum South was one of the last bastions of slavery, at least among Western nations. Southerners were not morally inferior to other people inhabiting Western nations; their economy was based on slavery, and they saw no reasonable alternatives to it.
When slavery became economically untenable in the North it was gradually phased out. Yet it was fine for Yankees to impose crushing tariffs on the South for goods and services that benefitted them.
As mechanization of plantation and farming methods came to the fore in the South, it’s reasonable to expect that the moral implications of slavery would have become more and more obvious...unless you see Southerners as somehow less human than their upstanding Yankee counterparts.
Or are you just a fan of statism?
Thank you for your input. Not all Southerners were slave owners obviously so what was the lot of the average white Southerner, a farmer that this, not a member of the mercantile class? How did they feel about slavery?