What if the Civil War Never Happened?

[Music] the road to the civil war was one long chain of compromises and attempts to keep an unstable balance from toppling over it's almost insane to imagine the history of the united states going any other way than the civil war slave power and the influence the aristocratic plantations had on southern politics made secession to protect itself inevitable what if in an alternate timeline one change shaped early america in such a way that slavery doesn't become a behemoth in the south and so it never secedes to protect it and yes the south seceded to protect slavery they even say so here and here and here and anywhere else just research it yourself so what if the civil war never happened i know it sounds crazy how does one change lead to the south and never seceding well it's not one change it's one invention the cotton gin cotton was the oil in the antebellum south but it wasn't always like that during colonial times cotton was easy to grow but it was difficult to harvest farm hands or slaves would need to pluck each seed of cotton from the stalk that seed is what is used for clothes and textiles even with slave labor not much cotting could be harvested to be profitable and so it just wasn't worth it to plant instead tobacco was farmed as the ideal cash crop but by the turn of the 18th century tobacco stopped being as good of an investment also and with that slaves the reason why the founding fathers appeared to just kick the issue of slavery down the road wasn't just because they needed to keep the colonies united or even because some owned slaves but because it was a common conception at the time that slavery was on its way out peacefully being discontinued for more profitable solutions by the 1790s the us outlawed the import of slaves and started cracking down on ships in the atlantic which did so but this all changed in 1793 with the cotton gin the cotton gin was invented to make the time-consuming process of picking individual cotton pieces obsolete now more seeds could be harvested and more cotton could be produced at an industrial scale long story short this single invention vastly multiplied the production of cotton and made it a fantastic investment colonists expanded west as fast as they could buying up much of the land the plant as much cotton as possible plantations grew and the southern mississippi river became the best property in the south we can even see the effects of this in the demographics of the region today by the early 19th century the south was the largest producer of cotton in the world selling it to britain europe and especially the north who replaced their wool for cotton to make into textiles and clothing and with new money there came a new power a class of southern plantation owners who now had such vast amounts of wealth they could influence the government the culture and even the laws to protect their economic system the south became ruled by an aristocracy in a way the institution that was on its way out was now a permanent system in the south and losing that system was now never going to happen peacefully in this alternate timeline the cot engine or anything like it simply isn't invented that's it the reason i'm choosing this as the divergence is simply well what other option is there if the south mass-produced cotton in any way then slave politics continues surviving there is no piece of legislation that simply ends the practice peacefully as long as it's profitable and really neither side wanted to balance was the solution not ending it at least for most people i'll talk about this later we'll begin this alternate timeline somewhere in the 1820s and 30s without cotton becoming the gold mine for the south like in our timeline it'd be harder and harder for plantations to financially justify the use of slave labor that money not being used to pay labor was still being used to house and feed them cotton was so lucrative that the richest owners could afford to house vast numbers of slaves but tobacco couldn't provide an income to do so on such a massive scale it might be over a period of decades but the practice of slavery slowly dies out naturally simply because it's too costly it's probably replaced by a similar system we saw in the reconstructed south where freed slaves came back to the fields they worked but this time with a minimum amount of payment this certainly isn't a happy scenario where everyone gets along or even can feed their family but the economic behemoth of slavery is killed before it really divides the nation and also people aren't being enslaved anymore while the inevitable expansion of the us to the west doesn't change manifest destiny and all what might change is the inclusion of new states themselves for four decades leading up to the civil war this balance between free enslaved states dominated the creation of states the struggle between slave and free over who would control seats in congress the missouri compromise established a border between these two factions with any state below the 3630 parallel allowing slavery and above it free excluding missouri since missouri was brought into the union as a slave state maine was then created to equal things out perfectly balanced oh you knew i was going to make that joke in this alternate scenario there is no need for maine to exist as a state instead it remains a part of massachusetts now as for texas alternate texas after its independence is annexed immediately by the united states following its revolution instead of remaining a nation for a decade the reason why texas was a nation for so long wasn't just because the us didn't want a war with mexico but it was because texas was a slave state northerners didn't want another slave state added without a new free state of their own and that didn't come to be until the 1840s then once texas was included it remained the massively large state we know and love today the funny thing was though the rest of america thought texas would have been too big as a state and wanted to break it up into five separate ones however this would have ruined the balance so texas kept its gigantic size in this scenario without the balance needed texas might have actually just been split into five separate states you can imagine how that's divided up in any way ironically the lone star state might have just become multiple stars on the american flag the old border is seen as a thing of the distant past like the northwest territory if this did happen earlier the mexican-american war would occur a decade earlier than in our timeline as mexico still would see texas as its territory borders are fun and all but the biggest change that happens is inside the united states a change that fundamentally alters the economic and social core of the 19th century us it's often said that the north was able to industrialize while the south relied on cotton but the thing was the north was only able to industrialize so quickly because of southern cotton the north's main industry was textiles in fact for the first half of the 1800s textiles and other cotton related industries were almost 50 percent of the us economy both north and south relied heavily on slave pick cotton just for different reasons without this cheap amount of resources to make clothing out of the north would need to stick to what they've always used wool which is far more expensive to produce gotta feed those sheep and there'd be less wool available than cotton this goes for britain and europe too by the way but we'll talk about those ramifications later without mass cotton plantations the entire united states has a far smaller economy but while the norse would understandably be smaller without cheap textiles the south practically doesn't have one in a world without the cotton gin in our timeline by the time of the war the north had 17 million people and the south had 13 million but 4 million of those were slaves without slavery being practical the population of slaves is dramatically smaller in an alternate timeline after the cotton gin was invented the slave population quadrupled in size meaning that the south might have 5 million less people than the north states like mississippi alabama and arkansas were settled mainly due to their soil this alternate south is far less populated poor economically since it doesn't sell cotton to the north and with that more isolated from the north as well which brings up an interesting perspective even in a world without the coningen and the eventual decline of slavery willingly by the south there still would be a divide culturally between north and south simply because of geography and population the great lakes and bountiful rivers allowed for transportation and expansion into places like ohio and illinois decades before the south could do the same considering they had to trek through humid forests their waterways didn't go east to west like the ohio or the great lakes they go north to south long story short the south would really just be separated from the rest of the nation divided from the north by climate geography and economics to form its own culture as well simply because of the cars that the settlers were dealt with so what about the destiny of the now freed slaves themselves at the time of the american revolution slaves made up 20 of the total population assuming that the institution doesn't increase after the 1790s the black population of america doesn't explode like it did in the days of the antebellum south so while the population probably grows it doesn't as rapidly as in our timeline since the south would still be agrarian they'd be paid cheap wages to work in the fields much like it was after the civil war racial policies probably wouldn't allow blacks to own much land and they'd still be second-class citizens the difference here is even though they're not enslaved the political rights of blacks in america are pretty much ignored north and south slavery was much a dividing and driving issue that once it became a part of this great national conflict then the treatment of blacks afterward were paid attention to by the north but without slavery or more importantly to the north the political power of slavery then the north simply doesn't care to put the time and effort into protecting the well-being of freed blacks in this remote part of the nation that means laws such as the 14th and 15th amendments created post-war would never have the political backing or need to be implemented so early blacks might not have true rights for decades further in this alternate timeline this is the 19th century where the fundamental idea was that whites and blacks were too far different to be in one considered nation their treatment and conditions would be pretty similar to the chinese in california the conditions and injustices done upon them not really a concern for the rest of the country would this change in the 20th century perhaps however without that emotional attachment from the civil war civil rights is far harder to achieve or gain a national platform along with other reasons i'm going to get to later so continuing on it is an alternate 1861 by this time abe lincoln never becomes president for many reasons the most important is lincoln only really won because at the time of his election the race was split between four different candidates and also half of the country refused to have him on the ballot and without the institution of slavery i doubt such a mess of a race would happen and allow lincoln to win if he ever ran at all by now for decades without slave power the line of politicians and presidents would be so dramatically changed that i can't even predict it i doubt buchanan would have even gone to office you probably heard the comments saying that before the civil war americans saw themselves more as ohioans or virginians or new yorkers than a part of any bigger nation and overall that was true they saw themselves as a part of their states that were simply united how united they were was only tested by the civil war and in the end that unity was not simply a bunch of states together but one single nation without that test of a war between the states those states might continue on seeing themselves as more independent from not just the federal government but from one another that's one of the main things now missing from this alternate world the revolution was the creation of the country but the civil war was almost a rebirth a baptism by fire that defined how this new us would be in the next century the idea is that the american civilization was the shining city on a hill and an experiment for god and democracy was something that became finalized in the union cause for the south they had their own religious and moral reasons for rebelling but the way the union viewed the war to keep that experiment of united republic alive continued on and evolved afterwards to redefine how america would see itself on the global stage and it wasn't just that mindset that was created from the war the war invited the federal government to have broader oversight such as creating a new national currency and perhaps unconstitutional laws on criticism of the government during wartime none of those might exist in such an alternate timeline as america ages without the centralized government birthed from war americans see themselves as a part of an alliance more than an actual country as the rise of the modern nation state takes place across the world in places like germany and italy perhaps the us might attempt to centralize federal power however that be a massive debate just as it is now this type of mindset really transforms the united states on the international stage without such federal unity how would the nation react to an inevitable world war if one ever happens at all things get murky 20 years on from an event that in this timeline didn't happen the war basically set the stage for republicans in office for 40 years from the 1860s to 1914 there had only been two democrat presidents counting the two terms of grover cleveland and wilder wilson so that's a bit of change politically speaking of woodrow wilson like i said such a change happens to american politics i doubt we'd ever see wilson become president and with that oh boy a lot changes that might be a video in itself but just imagine a united states that is less of an interventionist power for the sake of protecting democracy this doctrine is called wilsonianism for a reason wilson was the one who first started using intervention as an excuse to replace european colonialism with american democracy more like puppet governments that served u.s interests we'd probably see a us more involved in its own affairs and less prone to being a world power but that's just a shot in the dark the conundrum was not a very complex invention and i doubt that even if eli whitney didn't invent it that it simply wouldn't have been invented at some point this entire scenario is based on the idea that this one thing doesn't get invented yet it easily could have still happened because of the demand of cotton the gin was invented in use for a reason and it was to make cotton usable and profitable on a mass scale it was the fuel for a rapidly industrializing world and laid the groundwork for an economy based around factories and wage labor rather than working at home these factories brought people into the cities and created the modern world textiles were at the forefront of all of that and that wouldn't have happened in britain and the north without southern cotton so take in the entire scenario you've seen and imagine if somehow this invention still didn't happen however unlikely that be then the most vital resource to britain's textile factories ground zero of the entire industrial revolution doesn't happen either with this alternate timeline without the gin slavery dies off naturally but also so does the spark that led to the west's rapid rise in industry in modernization the antebellum south is often seen as something isolated from the progress of the rest of the world stuck in a time of agriculture while the north built factories but it was actually just the first part in a massive machine the plantation owners were the oil barons of their time and their power came from selling their slave pick cotton to places around the world which saw the practice as abhorrent yet at the same time profited and improved their own societies from it if you want to make some connections with today diamonds are shiny and expensive but are often mined by slave labor in africa from warlords we have cheap clothes and products today but only because of labor paid practically nothing in china or third world nations we fund and prop up horrendous regimes simply because they give us the resources we want i'm not saying chinese factory workers face the same conditions that literal slaves did back in the south what i'm saying is that people often have this disconnect with the origins of the products they enjoy the north saw slavery as horrendous but at the same time kept those that supported it in power by buying their cotton they seemed to have this idea that once cotton was out of the south it was somehow clean but of course it wasn't it was still picked by slaves so what we're left with is a world where an abhorrent practice ends very soon but at the same time industrialization is delayed or perhaps it doesn't happen to the extent that it did society going into the 1900s resembles how it did a century prior more agriculture smaller industry and less technological improvement the us without bloodshed doesn't become a more centralized nation and is even more divided between states and regions this invention and the entire war itself really created the modern us and in part the modern world might not exist at all in a way this invention caused such pain and suffering for americans of all races in slavery or war it ended up leading to this our modernized connected world all because cotton makes very nice shirts certainly something to ponder this is cody of alternate history hub [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: Civil War, Civil War history, civil war alternate history, alternate history, alternate history hub, alternatehistoryhub civil war, what if the civil war never happened, what if the south never secedded, southern secession, alternate history slavery, slavery in the south, civil war alternate scenario, what if the south won the civil war

Id: sWr8ikxXg9I

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/dixiedownunder]

We'd probably have to rethink the whole subreddit

[u/Afin12]

I feel like had the civil war never happened there still would have been conflict over the ownership of land. Pretty much everything west of Kansas was still unincorporated territory, with the exception of California, and even California would have probably been up for grabs in a contentious contest between the two new countries. If the north and south didn't fight over slavery, they would have fought over establishment of new states. Technically speaking everything was owned by the Union government in Washington DC, but you better believe that Richmond didn't have designs on establishing a larger nation in the southwest.

Lincoln said it, we are going to be all one thing, or the other. There is not two ways about it.

[u/RomanHood]

There are different scenarios of the war not happening, and different answers to the what-if. (I haven’t watched the above video yet).

If the south never seceded at all and they agree to get along with Lincoln, I think it’s fair to say the legality of slavery would have lasted well into the 20th century but would have become a dead-letter thing by the mid-1860s because the cultural-institutional value of slavery in the south would have diminished rapidly (slave assets were CLEARLY a bubble in 1861). With Lincoln and the south getting along, slavery would have gained extra-super-duper legal protections that not even the FSA of 1850 could compare to, but the same things would have also pricked the bubble.

If the south still secedes but Lincoln simply lets them go and they live in harmony, I think they would “reconcile” and be back in the union pretty damn quickly (within 10 years maybe), the bubble would still be pricked and so slavery’s cultural-institutional dominance would shrivel up anyway, and getting rid of the slaves—maybe by exporting them and sending them all back to Africa—might even be a condition of the south rejoining the union. Or it could be by way of colonizing South America and sending them down there. The south would swiftly seek to rejoin the union because, mainly, out of the union they’re unable to stand on their own in relation to the world as the rest of the world gains newfound diplomatic and economic power to pressure them to get rid of slavery.