The South and North (Civil War Era)....?

If the south had industrialized and gotten away from depending upon large plantations for their economy, would they have needed as many slaves?The South and North (Civil War Era)....?
If the south had industrialized, they would not have needed as many slaves. A factory is not as labor intensive as a plantation. However, a factory still needs workers. If the factory owners discovered that they could get workers for free, they might have used slaves in the factories. The less the factory owners had to pay for labor, the more profit they would make.



Picking cotton is a labor intensive job. The plantation owners discovered that they could get people to do this job without paying the people (slaves). If the plantation owners paid workers instead of using slaves, the plantations would still have exited. The plantation owners would just have made less profit.



Plantations continued to exist after the civil war and after the slaves were freed.The South and North (Civil War Era)....?
The question you pose may be analogous to the issue of whether industrial production will remain labor intensive if slave labor practices are not abolished in some global trading nations which presently allow exploitative and unfair working conditions.



It is very difficult to answer that type of speculative inquiry posed in your thought provoking question accurately, especially since technological changes can impact the quantity of workers required in a factory. The South before the Civil War was still very agrarian; had industrialization occurred there first, possibly a Civil War might never have taken place. Or perhaps the South would possibly have been able to beat the North in an armed conflict.



It seems basically impossible in my opinion to know accurately whether the South would have needed as much labor had that part of the country become industrialized prior to the Civil War. Recall that many wealthy slave holders in the South obtained wealth from the work of slaves who labored outside of plantations; some slaves worked as highly skilled craftsmen in urban settings for instance. If industrialization did not require as many slaves, the pre-Civil War South might simply have continued to permit agrarian slavery and urban artisan slavery alongside increased industrial output because of the profit incentives slave workers provided to the wealthy.



It is also a matter of debate whether a slave holding system would have been able to co-exist with industrialization over the long term.