Is it possible that the United States could have abolished slavery in a gradual manner that would have prevented a war?
One huge factor overwhelmed any progress towards gradual emancipation: cotton.
By 1860, the Southern states of the U.S. produced most of the cotton grown in the world. Of the 5.4 million bales of cotton produced in the U.S. in 1860, 1.6 million went to mills all over the country, most of them in New England. Some 3.8 million bales were sent abroad; the U.S. provided 77 percent of the cotton consumed by textile mills in Britain.
I can’t find a number for the value of U.S. cotton production, but plainly it was in the millions of dollars, much of which poured into the hands of the plantation owners who built those grand houses you saw in “Gone with the Wind.” Cotton profits stocked cellars with fine wines and libraries with old books from South Carolina to Texas. The upper South was less dependent on cotton but participated in the industry as well by selling surplus slaves to the booming plantations in the cotton belt.
Northern businessmen profited as well, both from the textile business and from the financing and shipping of exports.
Cotton was the world’s largest industrial enterprise, and it depended on slave labor.
Some people suggest that the abolition of slavery in the British Empire (in the West Indies and southern Africa) could have been a template for American compensated emancipation. The British government committed twenty million pounds (then worth about 100 million dollars) to buy the freedom of about 800,000 slaves. The U.S. had four million enslaved people in a more vibrant economy, so presumably the cost could have been on the order of half a billion dollars at least and possibly several times that much. The federal government at the time had total revenues of only thirty or forty million dollars a year. No such pot of gold was available.
The last serious discussion of emancipation in the South before the Civil War was in the Virginia legislature in 1832, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave uprising in 1831. There was serious interest in trying to get rid of slavery once and for all, but no one could figure out how to pay for it, and the issue was put off for another day.
Attitudes towards slavery hardened in subsequent years, with Southerners ever more committed to slavery and opposed to abolition.
It is commonplace today to suppose that slavery would have died out in due course. But experts are skeptical. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, in their “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” suggest:
“But in the southern United States, slavery continued with undiminished vigor. Indeed, in this region it became more and more deeply entrenched during the last three decades of the antebellum era. With servitude crumbling all around them, and with their peculiar institution under increasing attack from abolitionists in the North, southern politicians moved to strengthen the legal bulwarks of their system.”
” . . . There was little to encourage the view that southern slavery was on the brink of its own dissolution.”
Tragically, absent a rather unlikely and sudden change of heart on the part of thousands of slave owners, there was probably no peaceful and harmonious solution to the problem of American chattel slavery. It was a problem from hell.