I've never understood why people believed that slavery would have ultimately been rendered extinct in the USA for reasons of economic forces. My knowledge of human nature, and of the American people, refutes that notion absolutely.

The fact that de facto slavery continued for several generations after the 13th Amendment puts that lie to shame. Or at least it should.

Ditto to what everybody above me said.

Actually, economic considerations would have ended slavery eventually. You folks underestimate the impact of capitalism-as-religion.I's just that we'd only be getting around to it nowadays, in my opinion. Not to mention that (again, in my opinion) such would have even further ingrained racism--we wouldn't have been "freed," we'd have been disposed of as ineffective.

I see your point but I think that we would just have adapted a new form of slavery. Look at the economic exploitation that capitalism-as-religion is increasingly bringing about today. I think it would be similar to the "freedom" that ex-slaves experienced under Jim Crow. That is to say, in little more than name. That's cheap labor conservatives for you.

The academic debate over the economics of slavery and the effect that Northern capitalism might have had on Southern chattel slavery absent the Civil War has been going on for -oh- fifty years. I don't think there are *any* historians of the antebellum period be they Left, Right, White, Black, Foreign, American, whatever who have not thought, written and argued about the subject in detail.

I don't think that economic reasons solely would have been needed, because the abolitionist movement had a good head of steam at the time of the War, and to mangle a quote that I can't place, 'there is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come.'On the other hand, it was economics that truly ended slavery including the de facto slavery of Jim Crow. It wasn't that you couldn't make money oppressing people -- it was that the oppressed people were getting money, and people with money don't stay oppressed for long. There are other people who want a shot at that money who will deal with them, if they have enough money to dictate terms.The key to freeing a people is to teach them how to get rich. (The wealth gain has to be sustainable, or they just get swindled out if it right off the bat and they are back to square one.) That is my main worry for freedom in Iraq -- when the oil dollars run out because crude is made obsolete (either by lack of demand, or because the organic production methods are perfected) then they are going to be missing the money part of freedom if they don't have something to fall back on, and then they will be right back into totalitarianism.