>The problem with letting the South go from
>the standpoint of abolitionists (John Brown
>et al.) would be that it would have been
>an imperial power all over the Western
>Hemisphere expanding like a land
>vampire into Mexico, Meso-America
>even South America. The economic
>nature of slavery made it rapacious
>in its need for land ( see my other
>post under this thread for Marx's
>analysis of this dynamic).
>
But some radical abolitionists (including Garrison) argued in the years leading up to the war that the North should secede from the south. This was more than just a moral fastidiousness, a concern that we not sully ourselves by association with slaveowners: if slaves could simply cross a border and be free, with no concern that a federal govenment was going to send them back, slavery in the border states would quickly become untenable. It would force the plantation owners to essentially turn their operations into concentration camps, with expensive guards watching the slave's every move. (and this was before electrified fences or even barbed wire, for that matter) Profits would go out the window.
Add to that what we now know - that large scale plantation agriculture could never expand past the 100th meridian (the water just isn't there) and slavery would have faced erosion both from without and within. Rebellions would have gotten larger and harder to control (with northern blacks and abolitionists free to support them). Eventually, slaves would have won their freedom - but on their own, without it being imposed by a forign power, which allowed the southern aristocracy to reimpose it in all but name a few years later.
Jim Baird
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