Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire OMG Another Civil War Thread!

The exponential growth of contton--and slavery--started around 1800. Before that, it was widely assumed that slavery would just wither away within a generation or so. Without cotton growing, it would not be worthwhile to keep slaves, and they would eventually be freed as they were in the North. In the Ordnance of 1787, it was declared that slavery would be illegal in the Northwest Territory. Nobody objected. Cotton hardened the positions on slavery. 75 years later there were shooting wars in Kansas over the question of whether slavery would be legal there. I have an essay written about 1830 in Virginia that discusses freeing the slaves--the government buying them. The essay concluded this was financially impossible because slaves represented more than half the assets of businesses (plantations) in the South.

Some say that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. But without slavery it never would have occurred.

The irony is that in the decades after the war, machines were invented to pick cotton (as opposed to ginning it) which would have made slavery too expensive to keep.

If the South had hired free whites to pick cotton, it would probably have only raised their cost of labor about 20%, all things consided, and we'd be a lot better off today. And (in my opinion), if air conditioning had not been invented, the South would have never recovered from the war.