[rockrr]

It needed and had to be done away with, but it would have happened before 1900 without a bloody failed second war of Independence.

If you can supply a single shred of evidence to support that claim I would love to see it. The confeds were determined to head in an entirely opposite direction - expanding slave states and territories.

How does that possibly square with your contention that they were working toward (eventual) emancipation?

[FreeAtlanta]

Slavery wasn't practical and it offended many slave owners who did it just to be competitive. Most paid their slaves a small salary and many free slaves bought their own freedom with those wages. Automation was coming on strong - the cotton gin, steam engines and soon to come combustion engines. Good people were looking for a better way. There were more good people than bad, so generational slavery was doomed.

Now, unfortunately, we have slavery to credit card and mortgage companies, slavery of hookers to their pimps, and slavery to our masters the federal government. Do you support the revolution that happened Tuesday and will continue over the next few years? Are you a rebel?

[AnAmericanMother]

Read Eugene Genovese. He's a socialist (if not a commie) but a respected historian just the same. His thesis was that slavery would have fallen of its own weight as soon as the Industrial Revolution got a good foothold in the South. He wrote a whole book on it, with facts and figures.

That was not my area of concentration (I wrote my thesis on the military side, really) but I read the book. It was 30 years ago, so I don't remember the title, but I know it was by Genovese.