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Repeal the Fugitive Slave Act.
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Repeal all of the Southern tariffs so that they’d feel less of a need for slaves.
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Create a voluntary collection of money to purchase the slaves from the owners and set them free.
What else?
Perhaps the Congress could have negotiated a compromise with the South - something along the lines of a twenty year transition to all slaves being freed.
If today’s mentality of the future never being a worry (ahem - deficit, debts) prevailed then, then the South might have agreed in the present. Of course, the South could have eventually renegged regardless.
Other than that, the only other thing I can think of is to arm the slaves covertly - which would have serious blowback. (I seriously doubt more than a handful of the slaves would even want to fight.)
What about in the present day? Let’s say another country (France - just for fun) started enslaving the gypsies. The Frenchies being overwhelming dead set internally on enslaving them. What could the rest of the world do to stop them?
On second thought, I think the only thing that would have worked (other than the Civil War and other than just waiting it out for decades) was the slaves themselves resisting. Yes, the odds would be overwhelmingly daunting - but resistance from within is the best way to change policy.
Not necessarily resisting violently - but resisting nonetheless. Just refusing to work. (on strike.) Damned with the consequences. And then go from there.
What would the South had done then? Kill some? Beat some? Well, that probably would have intensified the resistance.
Legalize save sales in the North, but don’t allow slave holding. That way you can have manumission even if it isn’t legal in the South.
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Become rich, or get a group of people to pool their money.
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Buy a tobacco/cotton/whatever plantation.
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Buy slaves.
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Free said slaves, giving them shares in the plantation.
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Free men working for their own profit outperform slavery-based competition.
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Go back to step 1, with the newly-wealthy ex-slaves buying up the next property/more slaves, etc.
{The people at 1 keep some of the shares at 4, so they make a profit out of it, too}
Read on the history of Abolitionism. Public campaigns aim to change the perception of slavery and make slave owners look bad. Takes decades, but societal pressure can have a powerful effect. There were many drives to change laws, but also private initiatives:
- ‘slave-free produce’ consumer action groups, promoting alternatives to slave plantation sugar.
- WP mentions something interesting: One particular project of the abolitionists was the negotiation with African chieftains for the purchase of land in West African kingdoms for the establishment of ‘Freetown’ - a settlement for former slaves of the British Empire and the United States, back in west Africa. This privately negotiated settlement became later the capital of Sierra Leone.
And there’s surely more.
Thank you, everyone, for the responses so far! They’ve been very interesting. My column this week will be on Abraham Lincoln (due to his birthday) and how he was a bad leader, so I was going to include some things about why his Civil War wasn’t necessary to end slavery. But now I may end up doing a separate column on getting rid of slavery in these methods because I’m sure I’ll get many angry e-mails about the Civil War comment.
Thank you!
Another question, though:
Assuming the South was forced to depend on slave labor due to the tariff legislation and their being not as industrialized as the South, what reason would they have had to simply use imports (without the tariffs) when slaves were free?
Develop technology more quickly so that it would be unprofitable to force humans to do labor that machines can do.
Develop technology more quickly so that it would be unprofitable to force humans to do labor that machines can do.
This Wikipedia article claims (with sources) that invention of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin led to increase of number of slaves.
That’s correct. Slavery was phased out everywhere else in the western world because it was out-competed by free markets. It just persisted longer in the southern US because it was particularly profitable there after the invention of the cotton gin.
When people think about the slaves they think about African slaves and particularly African slaves that were taken from Africa to Europe and the Americas. But all types of people were slaves centuries before they started taking them from Africa.
Slave ownership did not stop over night and there was no law that was passed or repealed that freed the slaves over night. From what I know it was a fairly slow process of some slaves becoming more free as time went on and other areas taking a longer time.
You will still find forms of slavery today.
Slavery is inefficient. It yields enormous agency problems, and is extremely costly. It’s relatively safe to assume that slavery would have ended on its own if the institution wasn’t entirely supported by the state and protected by its police force.
Why is that, though? I don’t understand how a technology can lead to more slaves, unless the new slaves were able to have better lives after the invention due to not having to get hurt while picking cotton.
If it was so costly, why didn’t slaveowners simply buy technology from the North that made owning slaves unimportant?
The cotton gin boosted the marginal productivity of slaves.
Most technology, however, by making jobs more complicated and difficult to monitor, would likely have increased the opportunity cost of slaves. Slaves can’t work in a shipyard, for example–there’s no way to prevent them from sabotaging the ships.
Before the cotton gin it required so much labor to separate the seeds from the fiber that growing cotton wasn’t really that profitable. After the invention of the cotton gin it became hugely profitable to produce cotton in the southern US and export it to Europe.
Capital has zero productivity without labor; it produces nothing on its own. The introduction of the cotton gin elevated the marginal productivity of labor and therefore increased the demand for labor (slaves) in the south. But it’s hard to imagine slavery remaining profitable without the explicit support of the states police force, which suppressed rebellions, and returned all slaves to their “masters.”
Slaves are an enormous fixed investment. You have to feed and cloth them, and without the government’s police force, you would have to assemble your own private security force in order to prevent rebellions, them murdering you in the middle of the night, escaping, etc. I think it’s safe to assume that under such a condition, where the government doesn’t defend slave owners, employing wage labor would be relatively profitable/more efficient (would also eliminate the agency costs I mentioned earlier). But many whites supported slavery because they didn’t want to compete with blacks in the labor market, which is why, in my opinion, slavery lasted for so long in the U.S.
In other words, the government subsidized slavery in order to arbitrarily elevate the wages of the white majority.