unfortunately for you/the damnyankee loonies (like heyworth), the FACTS are that BOTH the steam-driven & animal-powered machines WORKED just FINE (both here in the USA & abroad. the FUNNIEST thing that any of the loonies said was that the steam-powered machines wouldn't "work here in America, even though they did work OK in England". i darn near fell out of my chair laughing AT him, for that particular piece of STUPIDITY!) & the machines would have KILLED chattel slavery (MY GUESS within 5-10 years) absent the WBTS.
the reason you & the other unionists will NOT accept this, is that it means that the WBTS was NOT necessary/wise/SMART as a northern response to freeing slaves.
ALSO, i have numerous times posted ORIGIONAL documentation that PROVES that neither the lincoln coven of thugs OR the general public in the north "cared a damn about the plight of the slaves".
so the REAL reason that the north failed to let the south leave the union PEACEFULLY is simply that the north wanted us under their boot, and subservient, PERMANENTLY. (the damnyankees are still, a century & 1/2 later,trying to keep us under their boot heel.).
free dixie,sw
Okay, then one more time, I'll ask you to explain. You claim that the south's impoverishment after the war delayed the mechanization of cotton, even though the machines already existed. Why, then, wasn't cotton mechanized in California until the 1940s? Why wasn't cotton mechanized, in fact, anywhere in the world until the 1940s? And why are the Rust Brothers credited all over the place with inventing the first practical cotton picker in the late 1930s?
As for the tractors, as Dr. Pete Daniel pointed out (the REAL agricultural curator at the Smithsonian, and author of real, published books on mechanization of southern agriculture), that the early steam tractors weren't used for plowing. They were heavy, expensive and required trained crews to run them. When they were used, they were generally used to power belt driven machines like threshers. The simplest way of dismissing your argument is merely to point out that the north (supposedly enriched at southern expense by the war) didn't have tractors doing the plowing until the 1910s, at the earliest. Curiously, that's the same time tractors starting appearing in the south, too. Go figure.
So, have you contacted Lubar to prove your accusation that I've lied about what he said denying your arguments yet? What are you afraid of?
As long as we're guessing my guess is that slavery would have ended in the South in the near future (5 or 10 years is as good as any guess) without the CW, not because of farm machinery but just because world opinion was rapidly changing on the matter. (Brazil was the last to free its slaves in this hemisphere, in 1890, and it had a huge slave population). Many of the Confederate leaders knew this and welcomed it (including Lee and Davis).
The Founding Fathers expected slavery to die out in a generation in this country. That's why they didn't deal with the problem. It was the cotton gin and the spinning jenny which made cotton so valuable and it was very labor intensive to plant and pick.
England deserves most of the credit for the anti-slavery movement (Wilberforce, et al,) but the US was not far behind. Until this movement gained force slavery had the approval of religion and law. There had always been slavery. It was an accepted social phenomenon. That changed during the mid-19th Century.