Sunday, January 20, 2019

If We Had Lost the Civil War

What would have happened if we had lost the Civil War or had never fought it? A history of Brazil, which abolished slavery in 1888, provides one likely outcome.

By 1880 the United States and Brazil would have been the last two western nations where a rich man could own enslaved women. World opinion would have isolated the two nations politically, and they would not have made natural allies. Brazil was led by a monarchy.

For many years abolitionists would have been banding tightly together in the North and in the Border States. The Republican party, backed by abolitionists, would have achieved a tight grip on the House, Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court. Most enslaved people would have left the border states, led out by free people of color and white sympathizers, or they would have gathered in intimidating numbers in and around the major cities of Tennessee and Kentucky. More than a million black people would have already freed themselves or been freed. 

In places like Virginia and North Carolina, support for slavery would begin to fail. 

In the Deep South, where a financial way of life depended entirely on slavery,  the authorities, frightened, would have begun taking extreme steps to stop escaping slaves and anyone who aided them. Militia would have begun legally killing and maiming people in Mississippi and Georgia in an attempt to intimidate the abolitionists. But the abolitionists would have continued working more and more openly. 

When the federal government proclaimed an end to slavery in 1885, outright opposition in the main remaining slave states would have collapsed in favor of a call for gradualism. In effect, a Jim Crow era would have stabilized the South with slavery gone but white men still in control. Black people would have been expected to sign contracts to work as submissive laborers on white-owned farms and so on, not too different from what actually happened after Reconstruction ended. Voting by people of color would have been suppressed in the South, as it still is today, but the suppression would become less effective over time. 

Attempts to steal free labor will never end, but the will to resist is strong.   

No comments: