Quote:No way is that the worst case.  Worst case is that Slavery would still be around today.  Racism is still rampant in the south.  And giving more generations of the south slavery to grow up on, it would only get much worse.

 

I imagine, barring any wars, that slavery in the south would last until at least the 1960's.  If not much later.  Moves away from slavery were made because of the Emancipation Proclamation.  If the North just let the south secede 'peacefully' we'd probably have slavery around still today.  Assuming of course a foreign nation didn't take over the confederacy or the union in some time after that.

 

I think that even if the North had allowed the South to secede, there was no way to avoid a whole lot of bloodshed, with hundreds of thousands of people killed and lots of property destroyed.  

 

Of course we are totally speculating, but, I think slavery might well have ended in a bloody slave rebellion around the 1870s or 1880s.   I think the abolitionist movement would have evolved into a movement to arm and educate the slaves.    A slave rebellion had already happened in Haiti, and Nat Turner had led a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831 that had killed 60 white people.  God knows how many slaves were killed during and after that rebellion. 

 

Even if the South had managed to secede, the abolitionist movement in the North would not have given up. 

 

600,000 soldiers were killed in the Civil War.   I think more people than that would have been killed in a massive slave rebellion.  

 

And no, there was no way the South was going to give up slavery.   On an average plantation, where the rich people lived and from which the political class was drawn, the value of the slaves exceeded the value of the land and all the farm implements.   Give up their slaves?   You might as well ask a cattleman to give up his cattle.  

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