How could the South have been different?
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  How could the South have been different?
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Potus
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« on: November 18, 2014, 05:43:33 PM »

A few weeks ago, we discussed the colonial roots of the original 13 colonies. The early influences that shaped culture in those colonies sowed the seeds of the Civil War long before we were even a nation.

One concept stuck out to me. The Northeast was much more stable and sustainability-minded because the religious immigrants came as family units. While the South attracted get-rich-quick types of young single men, the North attracted existing families. This changed regional priorities because the North cared about sustaining their families and their children. The South focused on accumulation of material wealth.

I think that sort of mentality in the South is what led them to be so heavily dependent on slavery. Mass production of cash crops, which needed tending by slaves, was the bedrock of the Southern economy. The slavery question wouldn't have been so large had the cash crop economy not been so prevalent.


This line of thought brings me to my question. How do you all believe the South could have been different and how?
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justfollowingtheelections
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« Reply #1 on: November 18, 2014, 06:19:42 PM »

It's an interesting question but I don't really know how to answer it.  Geography (the distance between say Boston and Europe is smaller than it is from the South which made it easier for European immigrants to get there and therefore for cities to grow) and climate (I suspect that the climate of the South was ideal for the agricultural production that perpetuated slavery) I think played a big role in how each region developed.
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Deus Naturae
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« Reply #2 on: November 18, 2014, 08:19:38 PM »

Eh, I don't really agree with the analysis in the OP. The North had plenty of ambitious youngsters looking to get rich, just in different ways than those in the South.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sawyer.html

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So, the difference IMO wasn't that the North was focused on "sustainability" while the South was obsessed with wealth, or that the Southern economy was based on mass production (the North had plenty of that too, just in the form of manufacturing rather than agriculture), but rather than the Northern economy was characterized by greater enterprise and upward mobility while the Southern economy was much less diversified and based more on inheritance. If anything, the "get-rich-quick" mentality was more prevalent in the North, where such plans could actually work, as opposed to the far more stratified South. These differences were mainly the result of climate/geography (as stated above by Blagohair), differing modes of production (a result of climate/geography), and fluid vs. stratified social hierarchies (largely a result of their respective modes of production), not the "religious family unit."

Since it ultimately all goes back to climate etc I don't think there's much that could've happened to change how things turned out short of some sort of random climate catastrophe.
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memphis
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« Reply #3 on: November 18, 2014, 09:52:40 PM »

Eh, I don't really agree with the analysis in the OP. The North had plenty of ambitious youngsters looking to get rich, just in different ways than those in the South.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sawyer.html

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Your examples are two hundred years after the time period he's talking about. A better counterexample would be the Dutch beginnings of New York State.
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TNF
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« Reply #4 on: January 20, 2015, 01:38:03 PM »

Georgia was initially off limits to slavery, if I recall correctly. Had that continued to be the case, slavery would be severely limited in terms of future growth prospects (because colonial Georgia contained what, all of the Deep South?) and it would probably have made earlier emancipation more plausible in the antebellum South. Perhaps Georgia doesn't allow slavery within its borders and the events of the Revolution go ahead as they did, but the anti-slavery mood immediately after the Revolution is stronger and manages to abolish slavery not just in the traditional 'Northern' states but also in Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and maybe even Virginia. At that point, slavery gets confined to North Carolina (which would be another good candidate for early abolition, given its Scots-Irish frontiersmen and reliance upon tobacco rather than cotton), Tennessee (which may just enter as a free state if the above states are all non-slave), and South Carolina, which would probably be the last state to abolish slavery on account of well, it being South Carolina.

So then you have a kind of situation where slavery is gone in the states before the 1820s. Black people are no longer in bondage, but they're not free in the sense that we understand it, and are probably subject to disenfranchisement (as is the majority of the white population, North and South) and discrimination. Capitalism develops in the North and the South, rather than only the former, and immigration brings Irish and German migrants not just to places like New York and Chicago, but also Charleston and Atlanta, radically shaking up the demographics of those areas and making them more or less unrecognizable after a generation or so. The great revolutionary movements of the middle of the century are thus not concerned with slavery (as it's been abolished) but with securing universal suffrage (mostly likely for white men only) and probably a 10 hour day movement not unlike what sprang up in England around the same period.

So instead of the struggle against the Slave Power, you have an earlier struggle against the Money Power, and some kind of American variant of the Chartists, which would be fairly strong in a post-slavocracy South on account of all of the yeoman farmers denied the vote there. Perhaps an alliance between Northern artisans and southern yeomen results in a universal male suffrage being placed into the constitution in the 1850s? I'm not sure, but I'd think that it would be a totally different society we're talking about, one less averse to more explicitly class-oriented politics and coalitions and one that is, simultaneously, behind with regard to the rights of freedmen, who might not get the vote until the late 20th Century.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #5 on: January 20, 2015, 04:33:26 PM »

There's actually a fairly quirky butterfly one could get to have Georgia remain slave free for longer.  George Whitfield had lobbied hard to get slavery made legal in Georgia because he felt he needed slave labor to make his Georgia orphanage for boys into a self-sustaining enterprise.  Without Whitfield, it is doubtful the province would have ended its ban on slave labor as early as it did.  He wasn't the only one agitating for the change, just the most influential.
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