The argument that slavery would've died due to being unprofitable always struck me as kind of weird. I mean, at a certain level, slaves were a status symbol more than an economic one. Even if you get to the situation where the cotton plantation system is totally untenable and plantation slavery shrinks, why would the old Southern planting class ever advocate abolishing their own household slaves? Having 5-10 in the household is the ultimate way of showing off (that your wealth is so extensive that you can keep 5-10 men in food and lodging). It just doesn't seem logical that even if plantation slavery died off, that that'd lead to the abolition of slavery.
Seriously. Sharecropping replaced slavery to dominate the South's agrarian economy (i.e. the South's economy), and that survived well into the 50's and early 60's. Why on earth would southern large landowners that dominated the political system through that period want to accept a system of even feudal-like wage paying or sharing crops with the blacks who worked the field when an "improved" system like slavery would only increase profits?
For that matter, one of the greatest weakening forces to sharecropping was the mass migration of blacks to northern factories during WWI and II. In the former case at least such migration was often combatted by force and roadblocks (literally) by southern law enforcement. Gee, if the powers that be then would've taken such measures of overt force and constraint to protect their economic interest (i.e. keeping blacks there so labor remained cheap and plentiful), do you think they'd oppose an even stronger system of keeping blacks
litterally tied to the land? I think not.
