The American version of this resulted in a bloody Civil War, took 30+ years longer to get done and is still causing problems to this day. I'd say the British people made a prudent deal with this particular devil.You don't think it caused any lasting problems in the countries where it actually happened?
Even today France has one of the world's largest military forces. Back then it not only had a large army and navy, but also a huge empire.Sure, but it seems like by 1947 there were a couple years around that point where the french military wasn't really at it's peak capacity...
Compensate slave owners??Actually there was a lot of discussion of compensating slave owners leading up to the civil war. It was actually because of the war that the slaves were emancipated without compensation - the way the emancipation proclamation worked from a legal standpoint is that slaves would actually be seized by the union as property and then freed on the basis that it would be immoral for the US government to actually keep slaves.
How else are you going to get it done? Note that this is well before universal suffrage, so the property/investment owning classes (i.e. those most likely to benefit from the compensation) are the only ones eligible to vote for the government paying the compensationWell, slavery was abolished in every country in the world, I'm assuming most of those didn't involve compensation, although not every country was democratic either.
it did avoid a civil war or further armed insurrections by some of the more slave-happy British colonies.I seriously doubt you would have had a US civil war in support of slavery in other British colonies. Most of the "slave happy" colonies would have been in the west Indies where blacks probably made up a majority of the population, you wouldn't have had a large pool of people to fight. And it sounds like a lot of the people compensated were in the UK
The 1780 Act prohibited further importation of slaves into Pennsylvania, but it also respected the property rights of PA slaveholders by not freeing slaves already held in the state. It changed the legal status of future children born to enslaved PA mothers from "slave" to "indentured servant," but required those children to work for the mother's master until age 28. To verify that no additional slaves were imported, the Act created a registry of all slaves in the state. Slaveholders who failed to register their slaves annually, or who did it improperly, lost their slaves to manumission.[2]I heard African American History professor Dr. Gerald Horne make a fairly cogent argument (in a radio interview I can't find) that the U.S. would have become more progressive and better off had the colonies lost the Revolutionary War and followed a peaceful path to independence similar to Canada.
Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, said, the American revolt of 1776 against British rule “was basically a successful revolt of racist settlers. It was akin to Rhodesia, in 1965, assuming that Ian Smith and his cabal had triumphed. It was akin to the revolt of the French settlers in Algeria, in the 1950s and 1960s, assuming those French settlers had triumphed.” Dr. Horne explores the racist roots on the American Revolution in his new book, Negroes of the Crown. “It was very difficult to construct a progressive republic in North America after what was basically a racist revolt,” said Horne. “The revolt was motivated in no small part by the fact that abolitionism was growing in London…. This is one of the many reasons more Africans by an order of magnitude fought against the rebels in 1776, than fought alongside them.”It certainly seems to me that we don't get a very accurate representation of early U.S History in our text books, at least not as it concerns slavery and racism.
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posted by Bwithh at 5:17 PM on February 27