Smokedraw01 said:

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So how much did a mass uprising and John Brown play during Reconstruction? Or was that just pure bitterness?

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Pure vindictiveness.

aalan94 said:

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Emancipation without war is a pipe dream. As BQ rightfully notes, you can't emancipate without compensation, and then you're in the moral slippery zone of giving money to the slave owner, but not the slave. And you have to give him something. What will the slave do? How will he feed himself. He'll either starve, or go back to work at the same old job, under another cash-based, but still exploitative system, which is what ultimately happened.

I think the only possible way to make it work is to do what the Northern states did with their smaller slave populations: emancipate them gradually, by freeing new born slaves and then freeing the others at a date in the future. In my research for my book, I came across a New York family that still had a slave as late as 1820, when the old lady died and they were probating her will.

But that solution, cumbersome as it is, could barely function in a society where you have few slaves, they're all domestic, and they stop being a slave on Day X and on Day Y they return to the job with nominal wages. It doesn't work in the south, with large plantation property. First of all, the owner-turned-employer would have to negotiate separate contracts, wages, or whatever, or - as is more probable - would say here's your wage, take it or starve.

The south is chronically short of cash, which is a huge limitation to this. You can't pay your newly-freed slave on the credit you get at the London Cotton exchange. Yes, there are workarounds to a lot of these problems, but this becomes complex economics, disruptive change, etc.

The sad reality is that war, evil as it is in all forms, cleaned up the problem about as tidy as anything else could have done. The tragedy is that it impoverished the south for 100+ years (with Texas somewhat excepted), hurting white and black alike. But history works that way. This is why you can't project moral absolutes back into the past, because they simply don't work out.

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This thread is very good and there are some really good posts on this thread, like always Aalan just knocks it out of the park.

The bolded part above is really sad but very true. Brazil was able to migrate away from slavery without a civil war, but it wasn't pretty and it wasn't always nice. There were some big differences, namely in size and also the different and more lax societal mores that took place in Brazil. As glorious as the South was, it was an arch racist society, terribly so and the fear of the Haitian revolutions 1804 massacre and other rebellions was ever present. (Which is a whole other interesting topic, but the majority of the former slave holders were massacred only after the French made it clear they wanted to reestablish slavery by force and started a tremendously harsh reconquering of the island, all after lying).

The southern laws against and dim view towards manumission basically meant that there was just a tiny, insignificant free black populace in the South, basically with no power and not much of anything. Equally there was not the racial mixing in the numbers such as what was seen in Caribbean or in Brazil. Hence no mulatto class either to speak of. In Brazil the law abolishing slavery came late, and even with a greatly reduced slave population it did cause terrible upheaval, it gave no consideration to the slaves and none to the former owners. And relegated former slaves to still ever present hard times. But it was a clean break without a war.

The only thing that I could even remotely think that might have avoided the war in terms of slavery is some kind of imposition of an less corrupt and closed ended "Economienda" system for the slaves to last 20 to 40 years that incorporated the southern planters and slave owners in a joint venture with the Federal government, but the mechanics would probably not have worked and the cash needed probably wasn't present. Possibly another way to avoid the war was for the north to just let the south go, but the economic consequences would have been exceedingly rough for both parties and likely trade and political differences, not to mention the runaway slave situation, would have ended up in some kind of a war.

Like in Brazil, slavery was destined to end at some point in the near, by historical standards, future. How it ended in the south would have probably been very unpleasant as well even without the war.

Bighunter43 said:

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Smoke draw...here is a great link from Smithsonian Magazine on the impact of John Brown...it goes into quite a bit of detail of the raid and trial, and subsequent fallout.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/john-browns-day-of-reckoning-139165084/

Here is a good record of the trial:

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/witnesses-and-testimony-trial-john-brown

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I haven't found anything in the Smithsonian Mag very compelling in the last five years or so. The tone has become, in my opinion, decidedly "anti-" everything traditional and patriotic. I get it, they are trying to present multiple perspectives, but the tone is very derisive to any traditional/conservative narrative. YMMV

Sounds like National Geographic, they've turned the same way with the extra spin that climate change is impacting every negative trend in the natural world.

My wife used to get Smithsonian and I got NG, she dropped Smithsonian many years ago but I kept getting NG until recently. In the last few years I would play the drinking game while reading of taking a drink every time they wrote "climate change." I had to give it up for fear of becoming an alcoholic.

^ ouch....

Nobody likes a quitter