Re:Internal Documents Show Apple Is Capable of Implementing ...
by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Friday March 29, 2019 @04:32PM
(#19525380)
I agree with what you say. I meant my comment mainly about the North. There, like you said, the factories made slavery uneconomical. Because their livelihoods did not depend on slavery, people were able to take a more objective look at the morality of slavery and come to the conclusion that it was an evil.
In the South, people's livelihood depending on slavery. Because of that, their minds did all sorts of rationalizations as to why slavery was not that bad.
>The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
The other thing that made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom was the racial aspect. If a serf had some skill and went to a town and somehow became a craftsman, people could not look at the him and know he had once been a serf. Because of the racial aspect, ex-slaves could not escape people immediately knowing that they had been slaves.
It was actually quite the opposite. Pre-industrialization, serfdom and slavery were basically equivalent. You hand a local lord and if you worked for him you got food and shelter. Your alternative was to run off into the wilderness and fend for yourself, which frequently meant starving or freezing to death or being mauled by a bear. Unsurprisingly not many people chose that.
Then factories show up and suddenly your alternative is to run off and go work in the factory. Naturally many people started preferring to do that, which turned the plantations upside down because their economic system was based on the workers not having anywhere else to go.
Their response was brutal. Chains to keep slaves from running away, hunting runaway slaves with dogs, savage beatings, etc. None of that stuff was really commonplace before industrialization. The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
But that response was as futile as it was brutish. The factories made slavery uneconomical. You can't defeat supply and demand with chains and whips. All they do is cause the slaves to want to run away more.
The factories destroyed slavery directly, by out-competing it. It's questionable whether the war was even net positive -- that was a whole lot of blood spilled over an economic system that couldn't have sustained itself much longer in any event.