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To: DiogenesLamp

Perhaps for the first 10 years after the war, but the industrial revolution was upon the entire continent and human capital was becoming less valuable.

The railroads were the consumers of human capital and were primarily in non-slave territories. I suspect they would have the bigger impact over the next 10 years (1875-1885).

The southern States remained agricultural and needed westward expansion to help grow.

There may have even been a charismatic figure that helped negotiate a new union by about 1885. It only takes a generation to forget prior wars.


43 posted on 04/08/2018 10:09:00 AM PDT by CodeToad (The Democrats haven't been this pissed off since the Republiverycans took their slaves away.)
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To: CodeToad
Perhaps for the first 10 years after the war, but the industrial revolution was upon the entire continent and human capital was becoming less valuable.

Yes, the value of slave labor would have declined to the point where it wasn't economically feasible, but it would have probably been longer than ten years before it got to this point. I've always estimated between 20 and 80 years to fully eliminate slavery, but 10 years of continued economic values is probably as good a guess as any.

The southern States remained agricultural and needed westward expansion to help grow.

If you are talking about slave plantations, it wasn't possible for them to expand to the west. There wasn't enough water to support that sort of farming, and agriculture only works in parts of the west today because of irrigation systems that wouldn't have been available until the 1920s or 1930s.

This is one of the funny things I learned in the last few years. People of the time claimed to be worried about slavery in the territories, but it simply wasn't possible to grow plantation crops in any of them. I couldn't be done, even if they had tried.


57 posted on 04/08/2018 7:57:52 PM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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