There was no reason it could not have happened in the USA. Except that the group in power in the South insisted not only on the preservation of slavery, but also on its expansion.
There is some evidence that a plot was underway for the Supreme Court to declare slaveowners had the constitutional right to take their slaves not only into the territories, but also into any state. This would essentiallly have made all states slave states.
Those with this point of view in the south were the leading proponents of secession. Their POV had been gaining power for decades. As I’ve said in earlier posts, by 1860 the political elite in the Soouth saw slavery as a positive good, not as an evil to get rid of in the least disruptive way.
You can believe anything you wish, but my opinion is based on decades of studying the prewar and war periods, including a great many original sources.
I agree with you the war need not have happened. We just disaqree on who the responsible parties were for creating and environment in which the war became inevitable. I believe it is the southern fire-eaters. You believe in some nebulous conspiracy of northerners.
I happen to think the facts are on my side. You are welcome to continue believing otherwise.
BTW, every single one of the gradual and compensated emancipation plans you mention were rejected by slaveowners whenever they were proposed.
Jefferson stated very clearly that the slaveowner, due to the conditions in which he grew up and lived his life, was peculiarly susceptible to arrogance and hubris. I suspect this attitude, clearly seen in many though not all southern pols before the war, especially pretty much all the fire-eaters, was a major contributor to making war inevitable. They started believing they could push everybody around, just as they had always domineered over their slaves.
Didn’t work out that way.
I gave it some thought and would like to correct myself.
There was ANOTHER country where slavery was abolished by war.
The other place that relied on war to achieve emancipation was Haiti, and the results were even more dismal. French slaveholders had been brutal, but the understandably outraged slaves, who began revolting in 1790, proved to be just as brutal. The inability of slaveholders and slaves to do anything but fight each other, compounded by invasions of French, British and Spanish forces, convinced everybody that if they didn’t kill, they would be killed. The greatest champions of Haitian independence, like Toussaint Louverture, were brutal military dictators. After Toussaint was captured by Napoleon, Jean-Jacques Dessalines became president-for-life — until he was assassinated in 1806. Then there was a civil war between black generals Alexandre Péxtion and Henri Christophe. Although about 465,000 slaves were emancipated, the result of all this violence was a seemingly endless succession of bloody power struggles up to the present, rather than a free society that slaves had dreamed of when their revolt began.
Since the abolition of slavery in Haiti, the people there have had to endure some 200 revolutions, coups and civil wars. Endemic violence obliterated historical information about Haiti when, for instance, fighting destroyed government offices in 1869, 1879, 1883, 1888 and 1912. The National Palace was blown up several times. Plagued with dictators to the present day, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and among the poorest nations on earth.
in 1838 Great Britain achieved the most peaceful emancipation in the Western Hemisphere. There were some 800,000 slaves in its Caribbean colonies, the largest of which was Jamaica. The first organized anti-slavery campaign originated in Great Britain during the late 18th century when that maritime nation dominated the slave trade. Great abolitionists like Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Thomas Buxton overcame the opposition of powerful interest groups, demonstrated the moral evil of slavery and gained the moral high ground. Their patient, persistent campaigning achieved perhaps the most dramatic turn-around in public opinion, securing passage of an 1808 law to abolish the British slave trade, the support of the Royal Navy that launched a remarkable 60-year campaign to help suppress it, the support of British diplomats to negotiate anti-slavery treaties with other nations, and an 1833 law to phase out slavery in Great Britain’s Caribbean colonies. Within a few decades, the British people who had been complaisant or supportive of slavery became the most implacable foes of slavery.
British abolitionists recognized that after emancipation, most former slaveholders and former slaves were going to end up in the same society together. Former slaveholders had more power, and there wasn’t anybody to protect the former slaves, so it made sense to undermine incentives of the former slaveholders to avenge their losses. Accordingly, Parliament appropriated 20 million pounds to compensate former slaveholders for their slaves. From a moral standpoint, of course, the former slaves, not the former slaveholders, deserved compensation, but this way there was more likely to be peace, and the former slaves would be safer, and that’s how it worked out.
After emancipation, many blacks preferred to farm for themselves on a small scale where they were likely to benefit from their labor, rather than remain on plantations where they had been abused. There was considerable social progress. More former slaves got married, and husbands and wives lived together. Schools were established for former slaves and their children, and the former slaves formed self-help societies.
Plantation owners had to adapt in a free labor market. Some shut down, while others turned to labor-saving technologies that should have been introduced long ago. In Jamaica, for instance, planters began using animal-drawn plows and harrows adapted for their particular soil conditions. In British Guiana, planters built elevators to bring cut sugar cane to mill houses. Planters there equipped sugar mills with steam engines. Keep in mind that steam engines had propelled the Industrial Revolution during the previous century.
In Brazil, the largest market for slaves – about 40 percent of African slaves were shipped there — abolitionists raised funds to buy their freedom. Slaveholders resisted, but here and there slaveholders found it in their interest to cash out, and gradually slaveholding areas began to shrink. There was competition among towns, districts and provinces to become slave-free. As liberated areas expanded and became closer to more slaves, the number of runaways accelerated, relentlessly eroding the slave system. Brazilian authorities, like the British, appropriated funds to compensate slaveholders who liberated their slaves. Again, this wasn’t because the slaveholders deserved compensation. If anybody deserved compensation, it was the people who had been brutally enslaved and forced to work for nothing. But compensation undermined the incentives of former slaveholders to oppress former slaves, and the former slaves were safer. So slavery was gradually eroded through persistent anti-slavery action involving multiple strategies. In 1888, Brazil became the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, when there were some 1.5 million slaves remaining.
Some people have objected that the United States couldn’t have bought the freedom of slaves, because this would have cost too much. Buying the freedom of slaves more expensive than war? Nothing is more costly than war! The costs include people killed or disabled, destroyed property, high taxes, inflation, military expenditures, shortages, famines, diseases and long-term consequences that often include more wars!
Just consider some major costs of the U.S. Civil War. Altogether, an estimated 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died. Including the number of civilians killed – almost all of whom were Southerners – the total could exceed the 700,000 American deaths in all the other wars the United States has been involved with. In many communities, entire adult populations were wiped out. This was because of the practice of encouraging all the young men in a town to join the same fighting unit.
The financial cost of the Civil War was overwhelming. The North raised some $3 billion in taxes and loans. The Confederacy borrowed more than $2 billion. Both North and South printed plenty of paper money. People in the North endured the inflation of Greenbacks. In the South, there was a runaway inflation. An estimated $1 billion to $1.5 billion of property in the South was destroyed.
That kind of money could have bought the freedom of a lot of slaves and significantly undermined the slave system in the South!
I might add that emancipation probably could have been achieved without having to buy the freedom of all American slaves. Buying the freedom of slaves was one among several strategies for reducing the number of slaves and the area of slaveholder influence. Presumably the initial focus would have been on undermining slavery in border states, then gradually moving further south. As some point, the combined impact of many emancipation strategies would surely have led to the collapse of Southern slavery, as happened elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.
IT WASN’T WORTH IT. THE END COULD HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED WITHOUT BLOODSHED. I STILL BELIEVE THIS.