Slavery No One Debates That Slavery in

Slavery No one debates that slavery in the Southern United States was a terrible and inhumane practice. It was clearly unconscionable and horrible and we, undoubtedly, continue to feel the effects of this terrible and horrible institution in multiple ways even up to this very day. The effects of the American Civil War, however, were certainly just as terrible and every bit as pronounced.

More Americans died in the American Civil War than in any American war before or after ("American War Deaths"), and it terrible effects rocked the nation and brought it to the very brink of collapse. The terrible possibility to consider, then, is what if all of these lives could have been sparred? American slavery was an economic institution that, like any other one, was based on the laws of supply and demand.

Southern American plantations were agricultural centers that could only turn a profit through intense labor that required many hands tilling the fields in order to raise cash crops like tobacco and cotton successful. The success of the industry depended on a steady pool of cheap labor that could work the land and deliver the product so that it could be sent to industrial centers for processing into a useful product.

However, this system, which made slavery an institution that -- if it wasn't economically necessary -- was at least economically useful, would not continue forever. It is hardly surprising that the agricultural world would undergo such a revolution, considering that less than one hundred years before with Eli Whitney's creation of the cotton gin, the cotton industry in the south was born.

Certainly, as time passed and the industrialization of the United States continued at an ever-faster pace, technology would have been developed that would make the Southern dependence on the cheap manual labor obsolete. Indeed, since new technology would have destroyed the need for the system of slavery within American agriculture, one wonders if the horrors of Civil War could have simply been avoided by waiting until such a time as technology developed that would make slavery useless.

It is important to remember that after the death of slavery in the legal sense, the basic practice of it still continued: "Although chattel slavery had been illegal for three decades by the 1890s, southern blacks often felt that a new kind of de facto slavery had taken its place" (Schultz). The process of "sharecropping" as it was known in the South, created a system of de fact servitude that continued to keep blacks in a depressed and terrible situation.

Indeed, one can legitimately ask if the Civil War really effectively liberated blacks in anything more than name. This agricultural process continued for decades even the official institution of slavery itself had ended. Early in the 20th century, however, a revolution in technology changed the entire face of the South's agricultural economic system. New developments in agricultural equipment and technology, such as motorized tractors, made the same sort of workforce that was required only 20 years before completely unnecessary.

Due to the lessoned need for manpower, there were few and fewer jobs available in the South in agricultural work at this time. Also, industry in the North at this point was doing very well and there were more vacancies as a result of soldiers leaving for WWI: Railroad companies were so desperate for help that they paid African-Americans' travel expenses to the North.. northern labor agents traveled to the South to encourage blacks to leave and go find jobs in the North.

The Great Migration") At this point more and more blacks migrated to Northern cities where jobs at better pay were available. It was this event that effective destroyed the sharecropper system -- that terrible extension of slavery -- more than the Civil War did. Thus, while the Civil War succeeded in subduing the Southern Rebellion and ending the legal practice of slavery, it did little to destroy the terrible agricultural practices and repressive social structure that oppressed Southern black Americans.

In reality, it was the Great Migrations of blacks to Northern cities that ultimately ended agricultural servitude,.