This was a point of view that was represented without data.
Here are the facts:
- The South had led early emancipation efforts, especially in Virginia.
- The South’s money crops were cotton and tobacco.
- Crop rotation was known and practiced at least to a limited extent because plantations were self-sufficient, growing food for people and livestock.
- The cotton gin made slaves’s lives easier, and fewer were required.
- Now, in 1831, the first practical reaper was invented by Cyrus McCormick, who was born in Virginia. This cut time and slave effort for standing crops, such as wheat.
- Few people owned slaves.
- The South was markedly less racist than the north, as noted by many travelers, both foreign and domestic, throughout the years.
Against the facts were these issues:
- Although the South was less racist, it was difficult for free blacks to make a living. This had to do with paying blacks less for equal work and certain work not being available to blacks—just as in the North. Southerners felt responsible for the slaves and knew that they lacked the understanding of the enormity of the task of complete self-care. They needed to be taught these things and to be allowed to increase self-care gradually—as was being done by Northern states even into the Civil War.
- The plantations, where almost all slaves lived, looked rich, but the wealth was not in cash: it was in land, livestock, and slaves. Many struggled with cash flow, even taking severe economies when not extending hospitality (when it didn’t show). The plantations would not continue to exist with simultaneous loss of slave wealth plus wages required for replacing them—even with the former slaves. In that case, everyone was out of a job. Where would they go to make a living?
The answer, of course, was mechanization. But this was a slow evolution.
- The planter had to find money to buy a cotton gin—impossible on plantations that were already mortgaged.
- The workforce had to be carefully reduced. The slaves knew the hard times of free blacks. Many, especially house slaves, prided themselves on the plantation to which they belonged. So, after eliminating some positions with the cotton gin (unless the owner bought more land), it would be field hands who were sold. The positions could also be eliminated by the natural attrition of deaths.
- The reaper would vacate fewer positions because those crops were grown on fewer acres, but there would be some sales.
- But the final emancipations would need to be slaves who paid for their own freedom but chose to stay as paid employees.
That was the only way the plantations would survive. The South was willing, but it wanted to do it its own way and in its own timing—just as Northern states were doing.
All the South wanted was the state independence already allowed to the North.