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Jefferson Davis was already preparing his slaves, as were many southern slave holders, to be freed men. He had provided schools for them, he alotted them lands to grow and sell their vegetables and keep their money and learn how to manage it, and he let them set up their own court systems to deal with criminals in their midst.

Slavery in the South was doomed anyway, and would have died off within a few more decades.

Slavery was dependent upon abundant cheap land, because slave labor is so inefficient. A slave works just hard enough to avoid punishment. A free man farming his own land works harder, because he's working for himself. Consequently, he can pay more for land than a slave owner and still make a profit.

As the US's population expanded, and the available farmland was bought up, the slave owners would have been squeezed out unless they managed to get special legislation passed to protect their status from competition.

Exactly! The slave owners already knew the days of slavery would not last long. Remember the mid-1800’s was the beginning of industrial innovations much more efficient. The first cotton harvester was patented in 1850, and even though it took years to perfect the horse pulled one and then put an engine to it, it was still more efficient than hand picking.

Jefferson Davis was a scholar all his life and the Army used him as a labor innovator, even. He was much more of scholar than Abraham Lincoln ever was, as were many plantation owners.

It always amazes me that the north turns up its nose and presents southerners as ignorant when they had built so much more wealth and had a better standard of living. AND they hide their heads when it’s pointed out that before, during and AFTER the war, slaves were still held in the north and had to also be FORCED to release their slaves because of the great Emancipation Act. OR that the standard of living in the south is STILL much better than the ghettos in the cities of the north. NOR do they even acknowledge that when the north had no more slave labor that they used children as laborers in their factories and a law had to passed to put the quaitus to that!

And something that is quietly amusing to me, is the great apologist in our White House today has gone all over the planet apologizing for the US, when was his arabic/muslim ancestors in Kenya that were selling off the indigenous black Africans on the slave markets on the road to Mombassa because they would not convert to Islam...and we haven’t heard him squeak out an apology for that anywhere!

Amazing, isn’t it?

Slavery in the South was doomed anyway, and would have died off within a few more decades.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I submit to you that not a single Southern leader of the rebellion, military or civilian, believed that slavery was on its way out in 1861.

Slavery was dependent upon abundant cheap land, because slave labor is so inefficient. A slave works just hard enough to avoid punishment.

So what alternative to slavery was available to the large-scale plantation owners? Hire free labor? From where? Where was this vast supply of labor to be found? And free labor expected to be paid. And if labor was in short supply then the price went up. Slave labor was reliable. It was cheap. And it could be sold for cash money in market where demand usually outstripped supply.

Which is why they found the prospect of being frozen out of the western territories serious enough to rebel over.