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...
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…
