I neither see antebellum Southerners as less moral than other humans nor am I a statist. It is simply factual, though, that the Southern economy was based entirely on slave labor and that the South was not going to voluntarily throw their entire economy into collapse. I’m not saying this is right or wrong, but it is human nature. No society has ever voluntarily destroyed its own economic basis.
You are making invalid assumptions. You discuss what would have happened as mechanization of plantation and farming methods, but you fail to realize that there was little incentive to mechanize the plantations and farms. Slave labor, once the initial purchase was made, was cheap to maintain. Further, slave labor had a tendency to replenish itself. The initial investment was already made; why would plantation owners make another large scale investment in machinery to replace the slaves?
I am quite sure that, deep down, most Southerners recognized the moral implications of slavery. They also rationalized those moral implications away in order to maintain their economy. We do much the same today. Our economy is based on fossil fule utilization. Fossil fuel utilization is not without its harmful effects. Even discounting the whole global warming non-issue, fossil fuel use has caused pollution, which in turn has caused human suffering and death. We don’t normally worry about such suffering and death, though, do we? We consider it an acceptable cost relative to the economic benefit of the ability to utilize fossil fuels. I believe that antebellum Southerners likely might have felt the same way.
The Civil War was NOT about tariffs. If it was, it would have occurred back in the 1820’s rather than in the 1860’s. The South was able to come to a compromise on the tariff issue precisely because the tariff, while damaging to the Southern economy, did not undermine the economic basis of the South. So long as the South had slavery, its economy was viable.
I am speaking in the short term here, of course. The elimination of slavery (along with the war itself) forced the South to build an economy that was based more on industry and was less reliant on cash crops. That, ultimately, was beneficial to the South in the long run. It’s hard to look toward long term benefit, though, when your economy is in the process of collapsing, so I don’t think it’s very likely that the South would have given up slavery voluntarily.
Efficiency, which often exceeds even moral reservations.
Not to neglect also the reservations of many in freeing large numbers of slaves without some semblance of their adjustments to making do in free market economics. A consideration of which the North was completely negligent of, and uninterested in.
BullSh1t. Tradesmen doctors clerks merchants farmers were white and drove the economy of the South, some of the crapo that is thrown around here is both stupid and hilarious to read. If you are buying this revisionist bull you need to find another web site.