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I have done extensive work on this topic. First, in terms of slavery, you need to understand it was NOTHING like pre-modern slavery in terms of brutality or even length, pre-modern slaves were really closer to indentured servants, taken as prisoners of war, who would be freed after a period of time. We had a whole abolition movement over this difference. Economically, slavery was not going to die out, it was reinvigorated and turned into a major economic engine for the agricultural sector of the entire US by Eli Whitney's cotton gin. Culturally, the white supremacist power structure was unable to conceive of anything but slavery as a normalized part of life. Last year Jacobin Magazine published a very good issue commemorating the abolition of slavery, their Issue 18 (https://www.jacobinmag.com/storeissues) that was surprisingly good. I have a lot of issues with that publication for all kinds of reasons but they did a good job here. Another useful tool is the first episode of Ken Burns's CIVIL WAR miniseries, though the rest of the series is pretty spotty in terms of his fetish for Shelby Foote. Finally, consider for your own uses checking out the journalism by Marx and Engels that they did on this topic, they wrote a good deal. There was a big fuss some time ago from Lawrence and Wishart, the CPGB publisher, about the Marxist internet archive having all the material up but you can get around this by using the Wayback Machine and going to this link ( https://web.archive.org/web/20130614233905/http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1861/us-civil-war ). The Foners, Du Bois, and Lerone Bennett Jr have some great material worth checking out also. Date: Wed, 18 May 2016 15:37:12 +1200 From: John Edmundson <johnedmunds...@gmail.com> To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> Subject: [Marxism] Request re ACW, ante-bellum South etc Message-ID: <CAOu2+PLpW0JL+WT223QHoBKcn9D8ANm_XVqTF+j5GN=jd3y...@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Hi, I'm teaching a bunch of 16-18 year old history students and we're looking at the causes and consequences of the American Civil War. We have started looking at the nature of the Southern States pre-war and the nature of US chattel slavery. They need to understand issues like the idea that if the Union had not pressured the South (over things like Lincoln's plan to not expand slavery into new states), slavery might have died out anyway. At this stage I have suggested to them that chattel slavery was more robust and flexible than pre-modern slavery (eg slave owners could hire out their slaves to the railway building companies etc) and that therefor the institution could conceivably have survived a lot longer. I pointed out to them that slave owners could choose to make more "conventional" investment choices but chose to reinvest in slaves and cotton lands as a means of achieving a return - that "unfree" slave labour is different from "unfree" peasant labour in that it can be sold to another slaver where a peasant is bound to the land. I've suggested that in many ways US slavery was a distorted version of capitalism rather than a whole different pre-modern economic system. However I feel a bit out of my depth here and have been improvising a bit. I wonder if anyone could point me to some accessible online resources on this question (and the Civil War issue itself) that I could use. Obviously when we come to the consequences, I'll be looking at reconstruction, the enduring legacy (Jim Crow etc), ongoing loyalty to the Southern flag with all that that suggests, popular culture (music etc). I know there are lots of US people on this list and y'all know about this stuff . . . Thanks in anticipation, John -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
