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infrogmationI wrote this elsewhere a while back. As this seems a better place for things I wrote that I might wish to find again later, copying it here.
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Today's "Lost Cause" myth to expose: That slavery in the US South was supposedly "fading out" or a "dying institution" before the American Civil War.
(For those not up on it, the "Lost Cause" movement was a romanticization of the Confederacy in the US South decades after the Civil War was over, including major rewrites of history, especially in constructing counter narratives to deny that the war was about slavery, even though when the original Confederate leaders were actually seceding and fighting the war they clearly and repeatedly announced that was exactly what it was about.)
One of the "Lost Cause" myths still sometimes heard is that slavery was slowly fading away thanks to industrialization, so it would have been gone soon anyways even if there were no Civil War.
On a global scale, that slavery was diminishing by 1860 was certainly true. In the US slave states, however, this was certainly untrue! (The Southern slave owning political elite did however fear it might start to fade eventually, which is a reason they favored expanding their institution into new territory to help it thrive. ) Humans as commodities to be owned, bought and sold was not only thriving, it was bigger business than ever.
Perhaps the best way to show slavery was NOT "fading away" in the US South is simple economics: quantity and price. 1830 census showed about 2 million slaves; by 1860 that had almost doubled. But despite much increased supply, price per slave continued to rise. Here's a nice chart of average price of a slave over time from the site linked below. Note that on the eve of the Civil War, far from being in decline, both supply and price per unit were at all time highs.
(The dips in price are interesting, if tangential, stories in themselves: for example the Panic of 1837 was triggered by something much like subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago, except that instead of investors buying dubious overvalued bundled mortgages on houses they bought dubious overvalued bundled mortgages on slaves.)
https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
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Today's "Lost Cause" myth to expose: That slavery in the US South was supposedly "fading out" or a "dying institution" before the American Civil War.
(For those not up on it, the "Lost Cause" movement was a romanticization of the Confederacy in the US South decades after the Civil War was over, including major rewrites of history, especially in constructing counter narratives to deny that the war was about slavery, even though when the original Confederate leaders were actually seceding and fighting the war they clearly and repeatedly announced that was exactly what it was about.)
One of the "Lost Cause" myths still sometimes heard is that slavery was slowly fading away thanks to industrialization, so it would have been gone soon anyways even if there were no Civil War.
On a global scale, that slavery was diminishing by 1860 was certainly true. In the US slave states, however, this was certainly untrue! (The Southern slave owning political elite did however fear it might start to fade eventually, which is a reason they favored expanding their institution into new territory to help it thrive. ) Humans as commodities to be owned, bought and sold was not only thriving, it was bigger business than ever.
Perhaps the best way to show slavery was NOT "fading away" in the US South is simple economics: quantity and price. 1830 census showed about 2 million slaves; by 1860 that had almost doubled. But despite much increased supply, price per slave continued to rise. Here's a nice chart of average price of a slave over time from the site linked below. Note that on the eve of the Civil War, far from being in decline, both supply and price per unit were at all time highs.
(The dips in price are interesting, if tangential, stories in themselves: for example the Panic of 1837 was triggered by something much like subprime mortgage crisis of a decade ago, except that instead of investors buying dubious overvalued bundled mortgages on houses they bought dubious overvalued bundled mortgages on slaves.)
https://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php
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Date: 2026-05-05 05:12 pm (UTC)https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/was-slavery-on-the-way-out/