Humans started enslaving other humans sometime in the dim mists of prehistory. Until the late 18th century, few thought this practice odd or morally objectionable. People who were enslaved were unhappy about their condition, but the existence of slavery itself went largely unchallenged.
I think it's important to consider the influence of evangelical Christians on the abolition of slavery. William Wilberforce in Britain, and William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Finney, David Walker, Angelina Grimke and others in the US, looked at slavery as an affront to God.
My vote for the answer to the question: Why did legal slavery end in the 19th century?: It, like most events in history, was a confluence of many factors, the least of which was not the western civilization technological advancements of what has become known as the Industrial Revolution. Those engines were powerful drivers of the Enlightenment. As a species, we have tended to find in our thoughts loftier ideals when more of us have the leisure to think on such matters than having to worry about satisfying the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
That, in and of itself, would not explain the traction gained in the forces for the abolition of slavery during that period, but certainly made it easier. Why did rice production in the United States shift from the swamps and marshes of the Carolinas, where malaria was rampant, to what became Arkansas and the Texas Gulf Coast?
In the United States, it can be argued that other great tributaries were the Louisiana Purchase, the War with Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the subsequent housekeeping tidiness of the Gadsden Purchase, and the opening of territory to migrants of European descent into the Great Plains, and that vast expanse with scarce rainfall neither well suited for the 160 acre farms of the Eastern Seaboard, nor the larger plantations of the South. But the accelerant of that migration was the discovery of gold on the western edge of the North American Continent and the economic times in which it took place in the rest of the United States that made the injection of that resource and its increase in the nation’s money supply a main driver. Just as the discovery and exploitation of gold and silver in South America in the Western Hemisphere 300 years earlier, with the developing trade routes between there and the Orient spurred by the Chinese Empire’s insistence that taxes be paid in metal specie, not paper or goods, had influenced the transfer of wealth across the Atlantic before.
As to counterfactuals, they have never been a favorite of mine. I have never liked the questions that begin “What if …?” I prefer the questions that begin “What did …?” I find myself gaining more insight by trying to answer the latter than the former.
I think it's important to consider the influence of evangelical Christians on the abolition of slavery. William Wilberforce in Britain, and William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Finney, David Walker, Angelina Grimke and others in the US, looked at slavery as an affront to God.
My vote for the answer to the question: Why did legal slavery end in the 19th century?: It, like most events in history, was a confluence of many factors, the least of which was not the western civilization technological advancements of what has become known as the Industrial Revolution. Those engines were powerful drivers of the Enlightenment. As a species, we have tended to find in our thoughts loftier ideals when more of us have the leisure to think on such matters than having to worry about satisfying the lower rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
That, in and of itself, would not explain the traction gained in the forces for the abolition of slavery during that period, but certainly made it easier. Why did rice production in the United States shift from the swamps and marshes of the Carolinas, where malaria was rampant, to what became Arkansas and the Texas Gulf Coast?
In the United States, it can be argued that other great tributaries were the Louisiana Purchase, the War with Mexico, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the subsequent housekeeping tidiness of the Gadsden Purchase, and the opening of territory to migrants of European descent into the Great Plains, and that vast expanse with scarce rainfall neither well suited for the 160 acre farms of the Eastern Seaboard, nor the larger plantations of the South. But the accelerant of that migration was the discovery of gold on the western edge of the North American Continent and the economic times in which it took place in the rest of the United States that made the injection of that resource and its increase in the nation’s money supply a main driver. Just as the discovery and exploitation of gold and silver in South America in the Western Hemisphere 300 years earlier, with the developing trade routes between there and the Orient spurred by the Chinese Empire’s insistence that taxes be paid in metal specie, not paper or goods, had influenced the transfer of wealth across the Atlantic before.
As to counterfactuals, they have never been a favorite of mine. I have never liked the questions that begin “What if …?” I prefer the questions that begin “What did …?” I find myself gaining more insight by trying to answer the latter than the former.