Why did the South Resist Abolition? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

They could have easily transitioned the blacks to indentured servitude or simply kept rates so low that generally they suffered a very small hit to the bottom line

Something you are missing here in your conceptualisation of slavery is that, as it was practiced in the United States, it is not simply a system of forced labour. Whilst you are quite right that there other systems of unfree labour you can construct that have similarly low costs of operation, slavery has features and characteristics with economic significance beyond labour and production value. Specifically, slavery is also a form and crucially a source of capital.

In the antebellum South, a slave was both a worker and a piece of property; a slave labourer has value in terms of reducing the long-term costs of employment, yes, but also as something you can buy and sell. In that sense, a slave is a little bit like a house in the modern world - you can make money from renting out a house own but the house itself also has an inherent financial value. Unlike a house though, slaves have the capacity to reproduce their value by having children. A slave owner could purchase two young adult slaves who might then have, say, two or three children who survive to adulthood; those children are born the property of the slave owner and he is now entitled to sell them onto someone else. In essence, the slave owner doubles his investment because even though the original slaves will depreciate in value with age, he now has two or three young slaves who will likely end up being worth more than their parents were at that age due to an ever-increasing demand for slave labour.

So the economic value of slaves transcends their labour value. They can also be highly profitable investments in and of themselves; slave owners in states like Virginia made a great deal of money from selling on their 'surplus stock' of slaves down to the plantations of the Lower South where cash crop farmers had an ever increasing demand for more and more workers. For all slave owners, slaves had value as investments. For the southern white elite then, abolition presented a challenge beyond the loss of an easily controllable workforce: if you abolished legal recognition of Human property, you also abolished the means by which slave owners could recover their investment. The abolition of slavery also meant the abolition of a huge amount of wealth in the Southern economy; with abolition, slaveholders suddenly stood to lose huge quantities of wealth. Someone with, say, $10,000 worth of slaves and only $5,000 worth of cash and other property would see their financial worth - what they could get if they sold all of their property and pooled it with their cash - diminish from $15,000 to just that $5,000 over night. You would also lose expected future wealth because you will no longer own the future children of your now ex-slaves.

So there is a very strong economic dimension to resisting abolition beyond the simple labour question. Indeed, when slavery was abolished and the Confederacy defeated, ex-slave owners went to great lengths to try and construct new systems of domination that can be seen as attempts to replace slavery (highly exploitative, debt-bonding sharecropping being the most endearing); yet these were not enough alone to replace the huge quantities of wealth wiped out throughout the region.

Was it simply a cultural issue? Did the Plantation holder need the distinction of the Slave vs Free to keep the poor white farmer in line politically?

Politics and culture are certainly also factors, yes. In the antebellum South, we see the emergence of an aggressively pro-slavery ideology among the white planter elite. Slavery is not simply construed as a necessary evil, or even as a mildly benign institution; by the end of the 19th Century it has been construed as a moral good, even a moral necessity, in the culture of the planter class. We see in the United States the development of what historians refer to as a paternalistic culture, in which descendants of black Africans are held to be fundamentally inferior to white people and in need of the strong, firm guidance of white masters for their own well-being. The slave system is conceptualised as one in which the white slave-owner is a benevolent but firm parent, providing for his deficient and child-like slaves. Though it is has been sharply debated over the decades to what extent these beliefs were in any way reflected in practice, certain the notion that this was the case permeated Southern white culture. Think of books like Gone With the Wind, being written nearly a century later, which still look at slave - master relations through what would seem to many today bizarrely rose-tinted lenses.

In that context then, the idea of setting millions of black people free en masse would have been reprehensible to many in the white elite (indeed, it was also reprehensible to some anti-slavery advocates; it was by no means an oxymoron to be anti-slavery but also anti-black), who conceived Africans and their descendants as an inherently uncivilised people. Likewise, freeing black people from bondage meant undermining that racist ideology in some meaningful way; freeing slaves en masse also meant inviting them to pursue other rights, to move freely, to seek their own employment on their own terms and so on - all of which would threaten both the economic and political order. Some were fearful that a large free black population - which would have outnumbered the white population in many parts of the South - might come to dominate, or even violently repress, the white population (during slavery, many states placed strict restrictions on free blacks living in their area, fearing they were agitators of revolt and rebellion).

And of course, you are right that slavery helped to enhance social distinctions between poor whites and slaves; the abolition of slavery risked, in the mind of the elite at least, undermining that distinction and thus agitating less affluent whites. But the experience of slave holding had also become an intimate part of southern culture for a significant portion of society (and it is important to remember that small-scale slaveholding was the norm; most slave owners were not also plantation owners). Owning a slave represented membership in a certain Southern cultural institution. For a man to own slaves reflected his patriarchal leadership and domination over his own affairs; it truly made him the master of all he surveyed. Likewise, slave ownership implied some degree of a leisurely, 'civilised' life - particularly on larger estates, slaves could be left to do dirty, demeaning and difficult work, so that their owners might live in contentment and comfort off their labour in pursuit of activities more becoming of their station. Slavery as an institution was a fundamental part of that culture by the 1860s, not merely the use of forced labour in general.

Slavery had become a fundamental part of the South's economy, political order and cultural institutions. For the South, the continuation of slavery was essential for prosperity, for social order and for political security; acquiescence to an alternative way of life was unthinkable to many. For decades after, you can trace in sections of southern white culture a clear pining for an idyllic, more cultured and prosperous era when slavery still existed as a system (an era which, as it happens, exists only in fantasy and literature - there was nothing idyllic or benign about southern slavery). Whilst the Civil War was very much about slavery, we can also say that at least for the South it was a very much about slavery as a particular and specific societal order (what Kenneth Stampp famously called 'the peculiar institution' in 1956), rather than about forced labour in general.