CSA try to sell or exterminate their slaves
- Thread starter walmart
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Well, assuming they ship the blacks back to Africa, which they tried to, they would have a much more cohesive society (no KKK, for example, and no segregation). Meanwhile, you would have the blacks in Africa, which they would have land to farm and some relative educational superiority over the natives and could even try to enstablish some governments (as Us protectorates, thus shielded from the european imperialism of the era). Honestly, i don't know why the post CW states didn't try to give this opportunity to the newly freed slaves.
Shipping 3.5 million people across the Atlantic would be very costly - assuming the ex-slaves (most of whom were native-born) would even want this option.
In any event, the South's whole economy was based on very cheap (slave) labor. It would make little sense for Confederates to want to destroy that source of labor. Who would harvest the cotton without them?
because Southerners decide to commit economic suicide? Slaves represented in real terms $1.2 billion 1860 US dollars. That was the whole point of fighting the war to begin with for the southern elites. Winning was the only way to save their investment. So unless the British come up with several hundred million dollars or the US does (still cheaper than fighting the war, and Lincoln if memory serves did discuss this idea) this is simply not going to happen.
Also, even in the states with the harshest slave codes, you could still be charged with murder for just killing a slave. Even escaped slaves were not routinely killed.. Tortured, badly treated and subject to nasty hardships, but not murdered. Southerners were products of their age, and mass murder for racial supremacy is simply not within the imagination of people in 1860.
It took the 20th Century to come up with industrialized mass murder and massive ethnic cleansing
Shadowwolf
Banned
What a horrible idea....
In 1863 the CSA had no way to export any slave to a foreign country due to the blockade and the loss of the Mississippi River, thus they could not move them.
So...
If the CSA tried to kill their slaves; I could see the war would evolve into a crusade against the South. By 1863 the Confederates would not have the time to kill that many, and anger and disgust would be so great that Americans would cue up to fight to stop the slaughter. Heck, I could even see the Great Powers intervening on the USA side to stop the killing.
This would lead to a much more extreme Reconstruction after the war ended. CSA leaders, (both military and civil), and slave owners would probably executed. Large portions of the South would given to the remaining freed slaves and the whites living there would be removed and dispersed.
What a terrible, horrible, awful mess.
In 1863 the CSA had no way to export any slave to a foreign country due to the blockade and the loss of the Mississippi River, thus they could not move them.
So...
If the CSA tried to kill their slaves; I could see the war would evolve into a crusade against the South. By 1863 the Confederates would not have the time to kill that many, and anger and disgust would be so great that Americans would cue up to fight to stop the slaughter. Heck, I could even see the Great Powers intervening on the USA side to stop the killing.
This would lead to a much more extreme Reconstruction after the war ended. CSA leaders, (both military and civil), and slave owners would probably executed. Large portions of the South would given to the remaining freed slaves and the whites living there would be removed and dispersed.
What a terrible, horrible, awful mess.
The Cheyenne massacred at Sand Creek in 1864 would probably disagree.
I agree with the rest of your assessment however. Keeping the black population in the CSA, as slaves, was the whole point of there being a CSA in the first place, as the very often cited Cornerstone Speech made clear (I am aware that there were other factors, but the vast majority of them boiled down to slavery in the end, and the Southern elites of the time had actually a very clear perception of this).
I am not sure. Many Northerners did not see the former slaves as fully human (a few seem to have trouble with it to this day) and, while disgusted by Southern brutality, may not be motivate to go to the extreme to avenge it.
After all, a part of the drive for Abolitionism was not to have black people around, slave or otherwise.
Your scenario would be the analogue of the Morgenthau Plan with Israel established in the Rhineland, something that the Allies (including a Soviet Union in a very unforgiving mood) thought too extreme (I don't think that a Jewish state on formerly German land was ever considered even marginally in the immediate WWII aftermath), and that after crimes to a scale where whatever the Confederacy may try would pale.
Well blacks were already the majority in some parts of the south, so its not exactly a complete comparison.
On the other hand the initial premise of the CSA trying to eliminate the slaves doesn't make any sense in the first place.
True, but they won't after an attempt at extermination, although I strongly agree with you that the premise just does not make sense. Of course, any comparison between the Confederacy and Nazi Germany would have to be taken with a grain of salt.
I pointed out the Western world in 1860 was not above racially motivated mass murder when it suited their interests, as the fate of Native Americans amply shows. I cannot see any way whatsoever in which mass murder of the slaves or former slaves would suit the interests of the Confederate or former Confederate elites. They needed the black people "in their place", that is at the bottom of the social ladder, but still very much alive in North America (this holds both before and after the war btw).
Riain
Banned
What about expelling them from the South? In the final days of WW2 huge numbers of people were forcibly uprooted and marched all around Europe. Perhaps the CSA could organize mass uprooting migrations and march about to be emancipated slaves into Union states or Mexico and make them someone else's problem.
Though of course as everyone has said the base idea of the government up and doing this is rather mad and outright ASB there could be some room to imagine a lessened version. Some group who sees the writing on the wall and gets very scared of all these free black people running about so they decide to kill off as many as they can.
That could make for something interesting
That could make for something interesting
RousseauX
Donor
That's dumb because 1) Getting rid of the slaves defeats the whole point of the war and 2) The south did insure white dominance after 1876 all the way up until the 1960s OTL.
ok, to clarify, ORGANIZED mass murder is not within the imagination
the conquest of North America from the Native Americans was never a coordinated and planned effort. The most coordination was the Indian removal (Trail of Tears), which is ethnic cleansing and the high death rate in that was due more to incompetence instead of design
And the anti-slave trade patrols of the RN (the USN had begun to seriously participate in this activity during the Buchanan administration). So selling the slaves isn't an option - the new owners would have no way of moving them to wherever they were required.
You also make an enemy of the UK.
How come?
As you said, they're off at war. And they live in pretty isolated areas.
There's a lot of room for a worse KKK to really mess things up as the CSA collapses.