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The war would have still been fought over economic reasons which was the major cause for the war in the first place. We had already had one civil war in this country which was the Whiskey Rebellon fought for economic reasons. Our War for Independence was also fought for economic reasons.

As far a the South freeing the slaves over night, it just couldn't happen. The reason for this was the major land owners who controlled the economy of the South with cotton had the vast majority of their capital tied up in the ownership of slaves. I have some old records from my family dating back to pre-civil war where a slave in 1850 dollars was worth well over $200.00. Figure that in todays dollars. Also these people were cared for all of their lives and given the best medical care. I don't want to sound calous when I say this, but they were considered like your best race horse or like an expensive piece of property. They also received excellent medical care you don't let an investment like that just die off. The South also had a code of honor that prevented people from dumping the "to old to work" slaves off to fend for themselves. This was not true with factory workers in the North or in the tribes of our noble Native Americans who left their old to fend for themselves after they were considered no longer useful to the tribe.

However, farming was changing due to mechanization, and slavery was quickly being out moded and becoming to expensive due to the cradle to the grave requirement of owning and caring for slaves. It was becoming better for share cropping or hired hands since you didn't have to be responsible for them all of their lives.

In the North, the states that abolished slavery normally phased it out over a generation or two based on the idea that someone born after a certain date would be born free. Right or wrong at the time this was basically a fact or a way of life. On a whole, blacks who were successful in the South, basically felt the same way and saw no problem with the system. Although these people did not intermarry with whites, they still were prominet members of the community and treated as such. This included memberships in churchs and social organizations.

The major problem that faced the South was cotton. Cotton was not so important as much for the manufacture of clothes as it was for the manufacture of sails for ships which drove the worlds commerce. Cotton was just as important as oil or coal is today. Steam was taking over the powering of everything but at that time to make steam, most people used wood. As the use of steam came more refined so did the extraction of coal and finally oil to make steam and power. Cotton was on its way out and the South's economy was doomed anyway as a result of this. Prior to the US Civil War, the three strongest economies in the world were the Northern US, the Southern US and Austraia.

The South needed to change and the North was not going to let it as far as setting up an industrial base in the South or selling agricultural products to who it wanted to. This was the cause for the war.

Slavery would have died a natural death because it is too expensive in an industrialized economy. The evolution of the abolishment of slavery on its own was pre-empted by the civil war.

The animosity, the hatred, and the Jim Crow laws were mainly the results of the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War. Military districts as a result of reconstruction existed in name as late as 1958 in the South. My father was in one in Raleigh, NC.

This sounds reasonable.... Now, I had heard that laws were passed in many Southern states regarding the ability to educate and I am very sure that voting or owning property was strongly discouraged. And what you describe seems like a pleasant form of captivity but it is still captivity...

When you look at the history of slavery in other countries and compare it to the institution in the US, the indefensible element is the lack of a means for emancipation...

And no one, given the choice, would like to be treated like a horse....

I am also aware that at the beginning of the civil war, there were more millionaires in Alabama than New York so the economic struggle was definitely a part of the problem... I understand that there was some type of recession in the 1880's or 1890's.... Some time during that decade, there was a recession, the cattle industry was seriously damaged and the ability to find a job was made more difficult so a lot of the policies that were raced based were a result of economic necessity from a certain point of view...

I guess when I see this discussion, I see an interesting but also shameful chapter in our history and I only want to make sure that it is clear that I honor the soldiers but not the cause they stood for.... You could say the same for Vietnam, the Indian Wars, etc... But it is what brings us where we are today...

And to think that there moral imperatives were overridden by financial concerns... And that such an immoral institution would only be phased out because it was not economically beneficial...

Reminds me of segregation after WWII... The joke made about the US was that we were the country taking on the world's ultimate bigot with a segregated army...

And the confederate flag can mean different things to different people. I think that is OK.. I don't think, however, that the same people who use the "n" word every time they see me are going to convince me that everything is OK because there were black veterans that fought with confederacy... That is overreaching just a bit..

Cotton was King in 1860. Planters from the Deep South were convinced that their cotton plantations and slaves were essential to the world economy, and anti-slavery sentiment in the South had been in decline for thirty or forty years.

If cotton was King in 1860 I don't think sails were the main reason. The great boom in cotton came from clothing. Thanks to slavery and the cotton gin, cotton was was cheap. It was suited to the new machine spindles and looms. Sail and steam transportation brought cotton from the Americas to Europe and cheap clothing from there to the rest of the world.

Europeans and Americans gave up homespun woolens and linens or furs and leather or expensive silks for cheap machine-spun cotton clothing. The growing European clothing market and exports to other parts of the world would offset any decline in cotton sail production. The reason cotton declined as time went on was that too many people saw the profits and got into the business: Indians, Egyptians, Mexicans, Africans, Central Asians, and South Americans.

We can't imagine slavery in 21st century America. It's likely that slavery would have been abolished at some point in the last century and a half whatever happened, but it's not true that most slaveowners were looking to get out of the skin trade in 1860. Nor were Northerners trying to keep them in. We can say that smart Southerners should have seen the writing on the wall and sold off their slaves. But at the time that writing was unclear.

Southerners had the option of industrializing along with Northerners in the 1840s and 1850s. Some were keen to do so. But many slaveowners were frightened by the threat to slavery and circled the wagons to the point where compromises and buyouts weren't going to be accepted. It would have been nice if a price had been proposed and accepted for getting out of slavery, but that didn't happen, and wouldn't have happened given Southern fears of what would come next and the great confidence of the planters in the rule of King Cotton.

Also these people were cared for all of their lives and given the best medical care.

I don't want to sound calous when I say this, but they were considered like your best race horse or like an expensive piece of property.

On board the ships, slaves were handcuffed and their legs were shackled. They were chained together in groups of about fifty, crammed close together, forced to lie on their sides and often in their own waste. For meals, they were given a stew that contained horsebeans, boiled yams, and scraps of meat. Each group of ten ate from a single bucket. Sometimes slaves tried to starve themselves to death to escape the horrors, or were too sick to eat. -From Slavery: Voyage in Chains

They also received excellent medical care you don't let an investment like that just die off.

According to Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard slave ships, the punishment was severe if a slave refused to eat, for a dead or severely malnourished slave brought no profit. "Upon the Negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot, put on a shovel and placed so near their lips as to scorch and burn them." -From Slavery: Voyage in Chains

Yep, it sounds like they took real good of em.

They also received excellent medical care you don't let an investment like that just die off.

"Frustrated in their attempts to change the law, fire-eaters turned their efforts to breaking it. The most famous example of the illicit slave trade in the 1850's was the schooner Wanderer, owned by Charles A. L. Lamar, member of a famous and powerful southern family. Lamar orgnized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these pas the Wanderer, a fast yacht that took on a cargo of five hundred africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors

of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee imitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action and advocated repeal of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade. "Longer to yield to a sickly sentiment of pretended philanthropy and diseased mental aberration of 'higher law' fanatics," said the jurors in reference to opponents of the trade, "is weak and unwise." When northerners criticized the acquittal of Lamar, a southern newspaper denounced Yankee Hypocrisy: "What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North, and a Southern man violating . . . the law 'against the African slave trade in the South?" Lamar repurchased the Wanderer at public auction and went on with his slave-trading ventures until the Civil War, in which he was killed at the head of his regiment."

Battle Cry of Freedom, p 103, by James McPherson

Twenty percent of the Wanderer's cargo died on the way here.

Walt