What really gets me is that after the US abolished slavery, most of the world followed suit.
See, you'd think that, wouldn't you? But as it turns out US was one of the last 'civilized' countries to abolish slavery completely.
1335 Sweden
1416 Republic of Ragusa (Croatia)
1588 The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
1569-ish England most definitely doesn't have slavery. The colonies on the other hand...
1723 Russia abolishes outright slavery. Abolishes a much lighter serfdom (sefs had many legal rights (though were still 'second class' citizens), owned property and had to work for their liege only part of the time, or in the 19 century often just paid rent, like tenant farmers) in 1861.
1761 Portugal
1794 France. Back in 1806 for several colonies.
1804 Haiti
1807 Prussia
1810 Mexico (on paper)
1811 Spain and most colonies
1814 Uruguay
1822 Greece
1823 Chile
1824 The Federal Republic of Central America
1829 Mexico (actually)
1830 Uruguay
1831 Bolivia
1833 British Empire. All of it.
1846 Tunisia (not even a "civilized" country, BTW and still before the American south)
1848 Denmark
1848 Slavery abolished in all French and Danish colonies
1851 New Granada (Colombia)
1852 The Hawaiian Kingdom
1853 Argentina
1854 Peru
1854 Venezuela
1855 Moldavia
1856 Wallachia
1865 United States
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1873 Puerto Rico
1882 Ottoman Empire
1886 Cuba
1888 Brazil
1880s-1920s All of South East Asia except, ironically...
1959 Tibet. By the "oppressive" Chinese communists no less. (<sarcasm> Way to oppress them with schools, roads and hospitals, China! </sarcasm> Not that there weren't separate problems that China caused all on it's own.)
No one wanted another civil war in their hands, atleast in the Western countries.
Actually slavery was only one of a number of issues in that war, such as disputes over import tariffs, and the increasing power of the centralized government. In fact 3 slave owning states were part of the Union. Abolition was really more of Lincoln's personal crusade, and could have been postponed for another decade had Douglas won instead of Lincoln.
European nations, that had very low slave-to-freemen ratios to begin with, had no real fear of slave uprisings. What worried them were
nationalists and later
socialists . Neither were particularly fueled by former slaves (slaves were intentionally mixed from all over Africa to have no common culture (actually what they were going for was that slaves would have no common language other than that of their "masters"), and the ranks of socialists were mostly filled with urban workers, while freed slaves tended to remain rural) .
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Topic: Slavery - The (Not) Game (Read 12719 times)