[taxcontrol]

You claim that the southern plantation owners were anxious to get rid of their slaves when nothing could be farther from the truth

You miss interpret my comments.

I'm stating that using manual labor is the MOST expensive means of producing a crop - any crop. Platation owners were business men, greedy men. Argueably some of the most greedy ever as they earned their profits off the work and efforts of others - without compensating them for those efforts.

However, if there were a less expensive means of producing the crops, there is no doubt in my mind that plantations owners would have moved to reduce their slave holdings. Simply because it would have been expensive to maintain slaves.

Understand they would not have done so out of any charity, simple economics would have ruled the day. Given a choice between more expensive manual labor or less expensive machinery, farmers always have and always will choose the less expensive option.

[Non-Sequitur]

I might not have been clear in my reply. It was more than a simple economic question of what was the cheaper way to get in the crop. The very implement that they used to gather the cotton also represented a significant part of the slave owners personal wealth. On some of the larger plantations the value of the slaves exceeded the value of the land and implements. The plantation owners, therefore, had a very real reason not to automate their operations. Doing so would be destroying their own net worth by reducing the value of their slaves.