Sapper Redux said:
Jabin said:
Didn't the southern states have enough votes, at least in the Senate, to hold off forever abolition or any other restriction on slavery?
If so, they were incredibly stupid to secede. They gained nothing by starting a war that they could not win.
Their fear was the restriction of slavery in the territories. That meant (way down the line), enough free states to economically and politically hem them in. There was also a conspiratorial belief that the Republican Party was planning to encourage slave revolts and end slavery immediately.
This. The slave states - 14 of them if you count the ones that didn't secede - would have had the votes to block ratification of the 13th Amendment if their legislatures voted as a block. (With 49 states - remember, no WV if VA doesn't secede - you need 13 to block the 3/4 mark for ratification.)
But without expansion of slavery into the territories, they eventually wouldn't have been able to block federal legislation that would have greatly reduced the economic value of slavery and slaves. Things like repeal of the Fugitive Slave Act, possibly a federal version of the personal liberty laws enacted by many Northern states, maybe even a federal ban on the buying and selling of slaves across state lines.
The slave states saw this coming, even under the Missouri Compromise law, and especially when California came in as a free state. There just wasn't enough land south of the line, which is why they pushed so hard for the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise.
The other reason restriction of slavery in the territories would eventually endanger slavery in the states where it already existed. Most of the capital in those states was tied up in two things - land, and slaves. And the prime crop, cotton, is known for exhausting the soil on which it is grown. In the long term, this could be managed, even at the time, by crop rotation. But crop rotation meant reduced income, and reduced income meant possibly being unable to maintain the kind of lifestyle necessary to maintain or improve one's social standing amongst the planter class.
And if the soil is exhausted with no new land to exploit, the value of the capital investment in slaves and land is going to plummet. What happens then? It would happen eventually anyway, because you can't grow cotton in west Texas, NM, or AZ, or north of a certain lattitude, either. But maybe they discover chemical fertilizer before that happens. Who knows? And what happens when the mechanical cotton picker is invented in the 1920s? At any rate, the socially and politically dominant planter class is going to have a huge capital investment in slaves, that would have to either be repurposed or become almost worthless.)
Overall, I would say that secession and the resulting Civil War hastened the eventual end of slavery in the U.S. by a generation, maybe two.