Slavery lasted longer than it should have naturally. The explosion in the cotton trade created a bloated and exhaustive system of slave, master, law, and politics that made many people wealthy at the expense of slaves and non-wealthy free people. I believe that the Abolitionist movement counteracted against ending slavery by creating a resistance to the Abolitionist by the slave states. Abolitionists were promoting illegal activity against a legal system which in turn created a backlash of legal activities, via politics and the law, to increase the slavery system. This was evil of sectionalism. It gave a geographical base of operations to the opposing ideas and created a never ending cycle of resistance. The Abolitionist were given a free hand to operate from areas sympatric to them to agitate, across state lines, the slave system. What started as a movement to eliminate un- Christian practices, turned into conflicts between two political forces trying to control the economics of states- the free vs. the slave.

The Civil War too lasted longer than it should have naturally. The South was losing its will by 1863, but a decision by Abraham Lincoln to sign into law the E.P. and enlist black men into the armed forces in combat rolls gave the South a second wind to resist. The South was now backed into a corner to fight to the end; their loss would mean the total loss of land, property, power, ideals and social order. This is when the death rates went through the roof and the fighting became extremely desperate. Was Lincoln premature in his actions? Imagine the loss of Vicksburg and Gettysburg , to the Southern mind, without the cloud of the E.P. hanging over it.

Let’s look at another country in the Western Hemisphere with a very large slave system, Brazil. In the 19th Century (1801-1850), fifty-five percent of all slaves disembarking in the Americas landed in Brazil, about 1.7 million. Brazil ended the slave trade in 1850. In 1871 the sons of slaves were freed. In 1885, slaves aged over 60 years were freed. By 1888, due to poor conditions for cotton growth, and the use of European immigrant labor, slavery was officially ended. There was no sectional war to end slavery, it died a natural death.

How many lives would have been spared had there been no resistance as it occurred to slavery in the United States? Would the slave suffered less had the natural forces of economics been left to control history?

Is there such a thing as natural forces in history?

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David Upton