RAR/ Alt-Hist: Preventing the U.S. Civil War

[Zinegata]

Couldn't we just introduce sufficiently advanced technology in, say, 1000 CE, which would (in the fullness of time) obviate the need for slavery by the 1860s? Or would that create too much risk that the US would never even exist in such a divergent timeline?

It wouldn't work. The technology already existed for low-level mechanized farming and factories during the Civil War. The issue is that the slave-owners were simply making too much money from the system to give it up. And no technology can really supplant a system where the slave-owner essentially puts in zero inputs. Someone who has slaves and land essentially just gets free money forever.

This is why factories only worked in the northern non-slave states. Chattel slavery doesn't work in a factory, because the slave-owner has to pay for the slave's food and clothing from other sources. By contrast everything a slave needs to live is produced by the plantation - food is grown on the same land as the cash crops. This is why Southern plantation owners were in fact often richer than Northern capitalists.

Any attempt to prevent the Civil War must ultimately resolve and eliminate slavery as an economic system within the United States. The root cause of the war wasn't the moral question of slavery as often portrayed, but rather the economic disruption caused by the slavery system on what was a capital-based American economy.

This is why "Bleeding Kansas" was not fought between slave owners and abolitionists as popularly claimed by many Southern revisionists. Rather, the opposition to Southern slave-owners in Kansas were from "Free Soil" supporters, who believed (correctly) that small farms would not be viable in a state that allowed rich slave plantations. New Orleans -the South's largest city - likewise pretty much surrendered without a fight for much the same reason. The population of the city consisted largely of European immigrants - among them were the founders of Budweiser - and they found the attempts by the rich slave-owners to dominate their capital-based industries (e.g. beer brewing) to be singularly tyrannical.

[LaCroix]

Maybe the north could invent Nylon early? Industrial production of that (and Viscose/Lycra/etc soon after) would certainly bring cotton prices down.

[Elheru Aran]

Maybe the north could invent Nylon early? Industrial production of that (and Viscose/Lycra/etc soon after) would certainly bring cotton prices down.

Doesn't that require some pretty high end chemistry, though?

[LaCroix]

Maybe the north could invent Nylon early? Industrial production of that (and Viscose/Lycra/etc soon after) would certainly bring cotton prices down.

Doesn't that require some pretty high end chemistry, though?

True, but it's pretty much the only thing that could challenge the plantation economics (as it was proposed). You'd also need to ruin the prices for sugar and tobacco - if one cash crop (cotton) would go belly-up, you'd need to keep them from switching.

You'd be in a better position to make this happen if you were the Ruler of England - make the remaining Commonwealth produce cotton, sugar and tobacco like there's no tomorrow, and the US south plantation economy will go belly up (as it did).

[Lord Revan]

Unless you introduce it so early that it essentially prevents the southern Plantation owner elite from forming to begin with. It's only gonna accelerate the problems that lead to the Civil War, we must remember that anyone with any real power in the South was a member of that elite and had vast sums of money and/or prestige tied to keeping the Platation system running as it had.

the South had practically no industry when the Civil War started and IIRC the elite was reluctant to fund it even when it became apparent that they'd loose the war if they didn't fund it, as they had too much invested in the cotton plantations.

[cmdrjones]

Rouge 9's thread in Testing brought to mind a Facebook post I saw the other day to which someone commented that James Buchanan was responsible for not preventing the Civil War, and that made for some interesting thinking.

Now that we're past that highly scholarly preamble...

The American Civil War, 1860-65. We can stipulate that the ultimate causes were a.) the legality of slavery in the United States, b.) states' rights in relation thereof, c.) economic issues in relation thereof contextualized with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the increasing primacy of the Northern states versus the agriculturally based economy of the South.

With that in mind, how could the Civil War have been prevented? Was it James Buchanan's fault for being an epically shitty President? Was it the Southern states' fault for trying to jack the government over the past fifty years to support their broken system? Was conflict inevitable, or could it have been prevented?

If you like, imagine this as one of Zor's RARs. You're in charge of a Foundation type think-tank. You are going to be sent back in time to a year of your choosing, the only stipulation is that it has to be before South Carolina fires on Fort Sumter and the states secede. You have the ear of various politicians throughout this time, and they will take your advice seriously with minimal questions about who you actually are. Being in multiple places at the same time may be difficult, so you may have a number of agents that will follow your orders in helping you manipulate society and government in order to prevent outright war from happening. Skirmishes are permissible, but loss of life is undesirable in general (and along these lines, no assassinating people like John Calhoun).

Emancipating the slaves is a secondary goal; if you can prevent the war from happening and emancipate the slaves at the same time, great. If you do not emancipate the slaves before 1859, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and various other atrocities such as Bloody Kansas will still happen. This will not help the situation. If you cannot emancipate them without the war happening, you lose.

Discover, Isolate and demonstrate the existence of ebola....
Kidding, sort of...

The only way to prevent it would be to undercut the economic draw of slavery and emphasize the moral evil of it while providing a "trap door" so to speak... if one could prevent the war of 1812, then the animosity between the British and Americans would not be there and thus american anti-slavery elements could cooperate with those in britain to get slavery removed in the US as well as in Britain, hopefully at the same time.

I think preventing the war of 1812 hinges on ensuring the USA remains hostile to Napoleon, I start a newspaper and detail his atrocities in excrutciating detail....
then move to get economic incentives to the South to emancipate and if possible re-emigrate their slaves to Liberia, that would require technology.... so if you could get several key industrial developments to come around a little earlier... you might make slavery less profitable and thus easier to give up.