The founders in 1776 were happy with things in 1788 and generally opposed the constitution. After reading the articles of confederation (yes I actually did that), there are some things that should have been cleaned up, but overall I think it was a good enough system that didn't need to be replaced.
It wasn't, then or in the 1860s, hence the strong, modern, adaptive federalism we have today that treats states as provinces and makes important things move quickly.
One could squint and say states matter today, but that's just admitting a need for glasses. They are ghosts of what they were, and increasingly need to be retired.
It will be nice when we put to pasture the policy-as-experiments across states for things that are clearly universally demanded: finance, health insurance, women's medical care, education, defense, gun control, decreased corporate control of the food supply, transportation, environmental regulation, and so forth. It's amazing how much the modern GOP has pushed folks towards this, may they continue their business Republican-led shenanigans to unite the country and encourage progress when otherwise we would be slovenly.
Why is this the case? Duplication of fixed costs are expensive.
Let's get rid of these crufty overindulgent home-owners-associations-on-steriods and federalize already.
While paragraph 3 may be in jest, the non-standization meant that some states did allow women to vote long before it was constitutionally mandated. Of course it also meant some people were enslaved long before it was explicitly constitutionally allowed.
Same with gay marriage. Methinks the GP is taking a LOT for granted about federal programs being implemented well and not subject to the same malaise of partisan gridlock that prevents them from coming into existence.
I think you have it backwards. The states should be given more power, and possibly broken up. There's no accountability once your number of constituents exceeds about 1M people.
The problem is that there are too few representatives and so they can build collations that explicitly exclude your interests while still representing you.
I think it would be much better to have some dual-system to send representatives to congress where you could either Vote or Petition to get a representative. If you Vote its basically the same as currently. But if you Petition you and ~150k other people do not get to Vote but the person you're petitioning for is your representative.
The states switched to the constitution because the confederation was too weak and didn't handle or clarify many important issues. Most of the founders were still around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_period. "...could not accomplish anything independent of the states. It had no chief executive, and no court system. Congress lacked the power to levy taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or effectively negotiate with foreign powers. The weakness of Congress proved self-reinforcing, as the leading political figures of the day served in state governments or foreign posts. The failure of the national government to handle the challenges facing the United States led to calls for reform and frequent talk of secession".
The people behind the constitution were not the same people behind the articles of confederation. Yes they were around, but they were happy back on their farms and businesses and didn't even realize what was going on until the constitution was nearly a done deal. They rushed back and eventually came up with the bill of rights.
I don't think this is right. I've read a bunch of people who didn't like The Constitution, but they weren't making full throated arguments for just keeping the status quo. Can you point me to arguments from "the founders in 1776" for just keeping the Articles in their form at the time?
It doesn't matter whether slavery would have been abolished, because what wouldn't have been legally enshrined without the Constitution were the 14th, 15th, and 24th amendments (and later civil rights laws that finally gave power to these amendments), and possibly the 19th amendment.
Well, yes, this is effectively restating my point. Barring the constitution, there was little conceivable way for slavery to be abolished under the Articles of Confederation because there would’ve been insufficient authority to impose that on the states, nor likely the justification to enforce the wholeness of their union.
It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case.
Modern capitalists prefer seasonal labor for agriculture. They don't have to feed/clothe/house people year round, and have no personal investment. Seasonal migrant agriculture labor cheap and easily exploited, with little legal protection. Slaves, like domestic a nimals (reprehensible as that simily is), must be treated well enough to keep working productively. There is no such need with migrant labor. If they are abused or killed it is easy to sweep under the rug. There'll be new migrants available next year.
NOTE: I'm not saying slavery is good, or even better than migrant labor. They are both highly unethical if you consider how corporations treat migrant labor today.
Go read a few slave narratives — Fredrick Douglass’s autobiography for one is great, extremely readable, and pretty short.
And just notice how often the writers mention not having enough food, or basic clothing. Then get back to us on the idea that slave owners would have taken even minimal care of slaves.
You’ve written how you think it ought to have worked. But that’s not how it actually worked.
Does it make logical sense to abuse and weaken your own property?
If they were too harsh with slaves they'd spend a lot more time and energy managing their behavior. Even in prison privileges are given so they can be taken away. Slave owners probably treated their slaves well enough, in aggregate, that they were capable to work productively and did not have immediate cause for revolt. The slave owners had to live in close proximity to their slaves after all.
The Hollywood portrayals of slavery as essentially unrelenting cruelty and sadism don't make sense, except for on TV. Any farmer would have known that you don't get the best work out of your horses or mules by abusing and starving them. There's a knee point of optimal treatment for all labor arrangements. The EVIL fact that slaves were property of their masters does not change this.
Many types of slaves existed and still exist in the history of humanity.
The slaves around Julias Ceasar probably had a different life than the average native Columbus slave (they where almost all quickly worked to death genocide style and he was a total sadist).
There is a different between enough food and feeling full. Most people want to eat enough to get fat. A slave would be given cheap food, enough that they can work. Starving a slave to death isn't a good use of them. However feeding them so much they get fat isn't economic as well.
Fredrick Douglas didn't have motivation to treat slavery fairly either. (few writers of the day did - thus making it hard for historians to figure out the truth, though in this area there is a lot more data than historians studying something of several thousand years ago).
> A slave would be given cheap food, enough that they can work. Starving a slave to death isn't a good use of them
You might want to check on accounts from e.g. Haiti where slaves' lives were considered very cheap and that's precisely why they were used for the dangerous labour around sugar production.
> Fredrick Douglas didn't have motivation to treat slavery fairly either. (few writers of the day did - thus making it hard for historians to figure out the truth, though in this area there is a lot more data than historians studying something of several thousand years ago).
How does an ex-slave treat slavery "fairly"? He lived that shit, he knows how despicable it is. What other side is there to present? The economic interests of the slaveowners?
There were lots of different slaves, with lots of different treatment. You cannot count a few examples and extrapolate to all slaves.
>How does an ex-slave treat slavery "fairly"? He lived that shit, he knows how despicable it is.
He can exaggerate how bad it was for one thing. It is well known that people's memories are not exact to what happened, and it is likely he would remember dramatic incidents and not the day to day reality.
Try reading "uncle tom's Cabin" - a book that was written with the intent to start the civil war to end slavery. Despite that intent to presents a picture of slavery that was in general much nicer for the slave owners.
Don't take anything of the above as statement that slavery was good. Only that it wasn't in general as bad as what you see on TV.
The industrial revolution radically increased slavery.
Read the history of the cotton gin and then how steam power made larger transportation easier and expanded populations to consume cotton and tobacco. Industrially produced guns and other tools helped "manage" slaves and later prisoners.
Post-civil war, industrial prison system instituted chain gangs to recreate "legal" slavery and forced prison labor still exists in many states.
Not really. It increased some types of slavery as before steam power those parts you name were not economical. However slaves were a major way to grow food prior to the industrial revolution. Industry created machine that needed only a few trained crew to operate. That you only needed a few meant that the slave master could do all the work without having to watch the slaves (who did tend to rebel or not work hard if you didn't watch them closely). You couldn't have a lone slave run a machine in general because the slave not being watched would find it easy to run away - possibly with the machine.
The US south ended slavery with the civil war, but most places in the world had a peaceful end. It wouldn't have been peaceful if it was economical as the rich would have fought to keep it.
No citation but in times of inflation the reasoning makes sense to me: a slave would not earn a wage, but the owner would have to provide a roof/bed/food + pay for whatever transportation was needed to/from work + pay for healthcare in case the return on investment would be worth it (probably would?).
An (immigrant) worker gets none of that and might barely be able to get by even without counting the healthcare (in the US).
Sounds to me like a slave might indeed be cheaper in some/many situations than a minimum wage worker. I'm not convinced either way.
A migrant is more expensive when you have work to do. However a migrant is free when you have no work - they go elsewhere. A slave you need to feed year round, even when it is raining and thus you cannot work.
A slave also needs more management. Migrants and free workers will get themselves to the job and in general work. A slave has no motivation to work harder so you need some form of "slave driver" to keep them working. If you try to move your slaves around like migrants move, then you need a manager to go with the slaves to keep them working - migrants manage themselves.
A slave is cheaper if you have a lot of repetitive, low-skill, year round work that must be done by hand. However most of that type of labor is easy for the industrial revolution to automate.
You added a note to try to cover yourself but no, slavery is not comparable, not the same as migratory workers. Migratory workers have it very hard & it's to the shame of America how we treat those vulnerable people at our borders. For migratory workers, generally no one kidnaps their children, rapes them as part of their job, forces them to carry their children to term, murders them, sold them off. It's basically one step away from the classic "black people had it better as slaves" comment.
> It would have ended because the Industrial Revolution made slave labor un-economic, in the worst case.
…except slavery still exists all over the place in industrialized countries? There’s nothing incompatible between industrialization and slavery, as myriad historic and contemporary examples have shown.
1) in the USA slavery would have eventually ended due to the economics. Steam engines are cheap compared to human manual labor.
2) Migrant labor is the replacement for slave labor in the USA. These are workers who do not legally exist and thus are subject to the worst of exploitations by employers and criminal concerns.
3) Human beings of all races have a pretty bad record of how they may treat other races/tribes/outgroups. Genghis Kahn killed and raped so many people that he altered the genetic profile of humans. African tribes routinely enslaved each other. Arabs took white slaves. People can be dicks. The list goes on and on: cruelty is a part of the universal human condition.
As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race, even if that wasn't the complete reason for the Civil war.
> As bad as the USA, it's the only country to go to civil war to free slaves of another race
"free slaves of another race"? Some of those going to war were people of that race. On both sides.
This is also a bit ahistorical as Lincoln was willing to allow slavery in order to keep the union. It was really the south who chose to go to war in order to guarantee slavery would stay; the north chose to go to war in order to keep the union. The slavery issue was used by the north, initially, to keep the anti-slavery UK from siding with the south.
Eh, the US went to a civil war because half of the country (the south) started attacking national (i.e. union) armories/forts.
Of course there was some lead up to that but the actual flashpoint is that the south started it and they didn't do so to free northern slaves. Northern congressmen were not pushing for any bills that removed slavery from the south and etc; there wasn't an imminent (i.e. during Lincoln's presidency) existential threat that the North would end slavery in the South except the one the South manufactured.
Not in a form that could replace slaves. The first traction engines were not until around the civil war time, and those were not practical for many tasks that slaves did. Steam trains did exist, but the idea of running a train engine off of tracks didn't really come around until the 1850s - just before the war - and those were very limited machines that couldn't work most soils.
Even at that, the steam engine was in the process of replacing slaves for many tasks. There were just a lot of tasks left that the steam engine wasn't yet practical to replace slaves - but that would have happened anyway.
The industrial revolution predated the abolition of slavery in the US by decades. Indeed, one of the (not very high minded!) gripes of the northern states was that their industrial economies had to compete on an uneven playing field, against states with free labor.
>But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.
The founders wrote reams upon reams discussing exactly what they wanted to do with the constitution and how they intended each and every bit of the constitution to work toward that goal. The intent was basically "we need just a little more centralization in order to deal with the truly national issues."
The government they created to replace the articles of confederation was weak by the standards of the time let alone modern ones.
But the writers of the constitution in 1788 wanted a strong one because the existing weak one sucked.