I am genuinely astonished at Southerners’ ability to hold views that simply aren’t so. The most recent example I’ve found was in the blog of a blogger whom I respect, roughly my contemporary, a Southerner born and bred with a lineage going back to the 17th century in the South. He made the claim that over time the states of the Confederacy would have themselves abolished slavery, one at a time.
When I quoted for him the passage in the Confederacy’s constitution that would have rendered such a process illegal, he resorted to a fallacious appeal to authority. He couldn’t handle the truth.
BTW, in the Confederacy’s constitution “negro slavery” is mentioned a half dozen times. “State sovereignty” is mentioned airily in the preamble but much of the Confederate constitution, just as is the case with the U. S. constitution, is a statement of the ways in which the power of the states is limited. So much for the idea that the American Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights.
I continue to be impressed with the truth Faulkner’s sad wisecrack that the past is not dead; it isn’t even past.
Slaves were not kept as a hobby. They were a means of production for a crop that was picked manually until the 1950’s, and cotton picking was labor intensive. The landowners were wealthy land barons, and they were not much different than landowners during feudal times.
Abolishing slavery would mean that they would have to change their business model from ownership of the means of production to rental of the means. How exactly this transformation to occur? The land owners would need workers, and assuming the newly freed slaves would be the workers, there are an entire raft of questions that would need to be answered.
Where would they live? How much would they be paid? What would the working conditions be like? Where would they purchase goods? The infrastructure to accommodate the freed slaves was with their former masters. Incidentally, these issues would need to be resolved before the cotton crop came in.
If the slaves migrated to the North en masse, they would have been treated worse than they were. (The North is as racist as the South wherever they have a substantial number of poor black people.) For the powerful landowners, this would have rendered their land useless and their power inert.
As long as they derived their wealth from the land, there was no way they could free the slaves. It would be as if Delta had to free all of its planes next Tuesday. Being compensated for the planes would not allow it to stay in business.
The problem was Reconstruction was a 50 year project. Had the US left Germany and Japan after WW2, things might be vastly different today. A beaten people need to be brought to understand that they have lost. The will to resist needs to be broken.
Also, the idea that powerful landowners would continue to exist as a constitutional, democratic, republic is nonsense. At best, the states would have become a confederation of principalities, and one of the powerful landowners would have conquered the other weaker wealthy landowners.