What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Malthus]

we did and do have tobacco farms up here. guess just not as cash crop-y as cotton to "justify" slavery

Slavery is useful (as in, creates an economic advantage) for all sorts of agriculture, but you are right: nothing had as big an impact as "King Cotton".

The northern states and Canada too could take or leave slavery a lot more easily than the US south.

[Valmy]

The South had no peoblem harvesting cotton after the slaves were freed...well until the boll weevil anyway.

[Malthus]

The South had no peoblem harvesting cotton after the slaves were freed...well until the boll weevil anyway.

Yeah, but didn't they basically keep a sort of serfdom going with sharecropping arrangements and 'Jim Crow' laws for decades after slavery formally ended?

No doubt cotton could be harvested while paying a fair wage, but it was apparently very labour intensive, so stiffing the labour force directly boosted profits more than in other common industries, as the cost of labour was a big fraction of the cost of cotton production.

At least, this is the account I have heard as to why slavery was more attractive in the US South than elsewhere, such as the US North and Canada. 

[Razgovory]

The American south was hardly the only place that required labor intensive agricultural practices.  Sugar plantations required a lot of labor and European states maintained slavery in the Caribbean well into the 19th century.

[Threviel]

Wasn't it mostly because of diseases that slavery was more attractive in the south? White folks died like flies on the fields and all that.

[Valmy]

Wasn't it mostly because of diseases that slavery was more attractive in the south? White folks died like flies on the fields and all that.

Absolutely not. That was the Caribbean. I mean seasoning was a process that everybody in the colonies had to deal with, plenty of people died in the northern colonies as well, but once that was done it was no problem. Small white farmers, and plantations based on indentured servants and tenants, flourished.

But that did not make slavery less attractive, in fact it made it more so in many ways. For example only a tiny percentage of slave ships actually sold slaves in the American South, they didn't need to sell more because the enslaved people were not dying in mass numbers like in the Caribbean (yes...it was not like black people weren't also dying like flies...) and their population would grow naturally in the more habitable climate. 

[Valmy]

Yeah, but didn't they basically keep a sort of serfdom going with sharecropping arrangements and 'Jim Crow' laws for decades after slavery formally ended?

Well they didn't need Jim Crow laws for that. Sharecropping worked on both the black and white population. No slavery required. I mean northern industrialists and large landowners found few issues getting cheap labor for profitability and when the time came neither did the southern ones.

No doubt cotton could be harvested while paying a fair wage, but it was apparently very labour intensive, so stiffing the labour force directly boosted profits more than in other common industries, as the cost of labour was a big fraction of the cost of cotton production.

Well the South contained large numbers of uneducated people in a pretty primitive economy. It always would have been some kind of tenant relationship. Though the enormous economic disruption of the war certainly helped get

At least, this is the account I have heard as to why slavery was more attractive in the US South than elsewhere, such as the US North and Canada. 

Slavery would have been massively attractive to the North if they had thought about it a bit. As the South showed during the Civil War it is amazing how cheaply you can make manufactured goods using slave labor.

I think it is really complicated. Just going for a strict economic determinism I think obscures several issues. Especially when people start focusing on the cotton boom and its peculiarities for slavery's success. I mean slavery was already there and was already extremely successful and there was no reason it would not have continued to be so.

If there had been no successful slave system already in the place the cotton boom would still have happened without slavery. Likewise, with no cotton boom slavery would have continued to prosper. That is my view anyway.

[Oexmelin]

There is a lot to say here, but, briefly:

The plantation system predated chattel slavery - in places like Cyprus, first, then in the Canary Islands. What chattel slavery made, was the high concentration of labor, at a scale unprecedented in Europe and the Mediterranean world. It's not that there was something inherent about sugar cultivation that made it susceptible to slavery. It is that slavery allowed sugar cultivation to take place at such a large scale. Once that system was in place, it got applied to a bunch of other crops: in the French Illinois country, for instance, enslaved workers tended wheat fields; in South Carolina, rice paddies.

Rural enslaved workers were generally worked to death. A relatively small proportion of enslaved people were sold to the mainland colonies, because these were generally unimportant backwaters compared with the moneymaking colonies of the Caribbean, where there was a thriving slave market, precisely because they were worked to death. The main consumers of slaves on the mainland were the Chesapeake (for tobacco plantations, which could still be profitable with smaller number of enslaved people), and South Carolina, itself an offshoot of Barbados, for the rice plantation. That being said, about 16% of New York's population, on the eve of the Revolution, were enslaved: slavery was not simply a labor thing: it had become a status thing, as it became racialized.

[crazy canuck]

Here is an interesting piece describing the transition from white indentured servants to black slaves in Virginia.

https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/indentured_servants_in_colonial_virginia

There are a number of positions explained in the article, one is a straight economic view. white servants continued to be imported but slaves became more economical as the supply increased and the price of a slave for life dropped in comparison to the price of a short term contract servant.  Another view is informed by a racialized process mentioned by Oex - it was politically safer to have a black underclass.   

[Razgovory]

There is a lot to say here, but, briefly:

The plantation system predated chattel slavery - in places like Cyprus, first, then in the Canary Islands. What chattel slavery made, was the high concentration of labor, at a scale unprecedented in Europe and the Mediterranean world. It's not that there was something inherent about sugar cultivation that made it susceptible to slavery. It is that slavery allowed sugar cultivation to take place at such a large scale. Once that system was in place, it got applied to a bunch of other crops: in the French Illinois country, for instance, enslaved workers tended wheat fields; in South Carolina, rice paddies.

Rural enslaved workers were generally worked to death. A relatively small proportion of enslaved people were sold to the mainland colonies, because these were generally unimportant backwaters compared with the moneymaking colonies of the Caribbean, where there was a thriving slave market, precisely because they were worked to death. The main consumers of slaves on the mainland were the Chesapeake (for tobacco plantations, which could still be profitable with smaller number of enslaved people), and South Carolina, itself an offshoot of Barbados, for the rice plantation. That being said, about 16% of New York's population, on the eve of the Revolution, were enslaved: slavery was not simply a labor thing: it had become a status thing, as it became racialized.

Why did the "disease narrative" become the dominate explanation of the high turnover of slaves?

[The Brain]

Please, this thread is about Trump, not US crimes against humanity.

[Valmy]

Why did the "disease narrative" become the dominate explanation of the high turnover of slaves?

Is that a narrative?

[Razgovory]

Why did the "disease narrative" become the dominate explanation of the high turnover of slaves?

Is that a narrative?

It's what I was taught.

[Valmy]

Why did the "disease narrative" become the dominate explanation of the high turnover of slaves?

Is that a narrative?

It's what I was taught.

I am surprised you were taught much about it at all. In College?

I mean disease was a huge problem in the Carribean colonies but the horrific treatment of the enslaved people (and the very dangerous work they were doing) usually dominates any discussion of those colonies and how slavery went.

[Threviel]

Interesting, thanks guys. I don't remember where I read it, but I remember the argument as slavery and some disease, possibly yellow fever, had the same borders. In the north yellow fever wasn't present and therefore slavery wasn't necessary.

There was even an argument that plantation houses were built on hills because they were windier and the mosquitoes didn't like it.