Writer's Block: Change of Law

[uberreiniger]

[Error: unknown template qotd]I'm going to be not very creative in my answer and would have made slavery illegal in the United States from the get-go. Would have prevented a lot of poverty, misery, and death that have existed here ever since then. Wouldn't have necessarily prevented the American Civil War though. Would have made it much more unlikely, granted, but not necessarily prevented it as a whole.

Comments

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

Would have been interesting to see an American administration in 1776 try to outlaw slavery. :)

If it worked, it would have likely broken the economy of the South. Not that that's a bad thing.... :)

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Plus, Thomas Jefferson trying to do basic household chores; hilarity ensues. Everybody would have come out a winner on that one.

[tempested-bird.livejournal.com]

An interesting answer.

I'm pretty sure that if slavery was illegal from the get-go, America as we know it today wouldn't exist because back then, the entire structure of the economy and commerce was built on the use of slave-labour.

That said, I'm sure there would probably be other really shitty and discriminatory laws and policies that would've passed.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

They could have always fallen back to hating those dirty papists :) But seriously, yes America would be very, very different. It's impossible to separate everything positive about America from all the bad things that went into its making.

[thelettuceman.livejournal.com]

Hardly. If it wasn't slavery, it would have been the form of indentured servitude that was in existence prior to the utilization and spreading of African-American "Slaves", making it just as likely to continue poverty, misery, and death, as you believe it.

For the Civil War, nothing could have stopped it, and slavery wasn't nearly as large a part of it as Recons and white liberals would want one to believe. It was the culmination of years of bureaucratic and administrative differences in addition to advances in social and technological capability.

Slavery didn't become an issue in the Civil War until 1863. It was used as a cover story and moral excuse by abolitionist northerners and has been pushed to the forefront in modern text-books for the sheer fact that people indoctrinate their children to be as politically correct as possible. That, and no one really cares to learn.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

All this I am aware of. Without the battle standard of slavery for both sides to rally populist support around, however, the course of events might have been very different. Quite possible that they would have culminated in the same violent fashion, but an entirely different means of arriving.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I'm curious what you might recommend as reading material to correct the bias of the usual scholarly sources?

My admittedly unprofessional opinion is that without slavery, much of those bureaucratic and technological/social differences would have been lessened. If someone is a person (Dred Scott case), indentured servitude becomes less onerous. Without the 'free' labor, Southern society has to adapt and evolve much faster than it did.

But I'm curious about the other side of the coin.