this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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I mean, I noted that over half the Founding Fathers were outright abolitionists, and that Washington was of a similar thinking.
The hypocrisy is hard to deny for the slave-owners, however (Washington included), and Jefferson and Madison were unambiguously pieces of shit for their positions on slavery in a time when slavery was becoming increasingly contentious.
Abolitionism was gaining traction, and it would have been optimistically great if it had taken hold with a new country and leaders spearheading that change. However I would note that while the fight against slavery was growing then, look where we are with inherent racism that's stemmed from that divide, STILL, even after all the strife and war and political fighting.
Honestly, if the cotton gin had been invented just 10-20 years later, we might have ended up with a very different America.
That sparked a memory of someone's video or something that actually explored that alternative history, and the conclusion was it wouldn't have changed the slavery part, just how they were used. I think it was AlternativeHistoryHub?
Now maybe have a society that was already anti-slavery before colonization would have worked, but then you have to go back and change even more stuff before they got here.
The thing is, the reason why slavery died in the North and not the South was not exclusively moral, but largely economic - slavery had ceased to be economically viable in the production of most agricultural work. The cotton gin made cotton, a very labor-intensive crop, immensely more profitable, and you see a sharp reversal in the lukewarm growth of abolitionism in the early US South compared with the post-1800 US South, to the point where, by the 1830s, slavery was more entrenched in the South, both economically and philosophically, than it was 40 years before.
The whole subject of colonial economics and such is very complex, so I'll just say that your point does sound valid, I just don't know if that alone would be enough. But one thing you did raise, how morality wasn't the main factor... so really most everyone back then were assholes when it came to different races. Which supports my point that overcoming that would take far more than a few leaders casting away their slaves, and like I said, we still have racism issues in the damn 21st century where things ought to be so much better logically.
Maybe humans just suck collectively.