The Long Standing Demographic Problem

[Union8448]

Statistics of the United States, (including mortality, property, etc.) in 1860 (census.gov)
The Southern areas couldn't get out of the 18th century infant mortality pattern. The bulk of the US population lived in Districts I and III and infant mortality was less there and following the long term trend downward. The eastern states in the south couldn't match that pattern.
The explanation is beyond our reach. But the factors that have to be considered are women having children a few years later in the northeast. Smallpox was under control. Production of milk, cheese and eggs was probably increasing. In the north, the enslaved women made up a large percentage of the child bearing women and they probably lived in very harsh conditions. The disease environment in what was then the southwest was very bad. And that kept any advantage those states could have developed to a minimum.
It would take considerable arithmetic computation, but I think many white families in the south were aware of this trend. And those that could, were leaving for the west and the north especially Texas and Missouri.
As the clouds of war gathered in the US, the Atlantic States in the north had more people of the industrial age and more potential taxpayers. The potential states of the Confederacy still had a population that was still very young.
Eventually the consequences became unmistakable. The paid labor states had an enormous advantage in military and farming age men. And the paid labor states had a large class of working age women not ready to start their families.
I suspect the problem was going to persist until maternal health, insect control and better vaccination programs developed in the south.
A war of any kind was only going to make matters worse. That would be especially true if families with means, or newly freed slaves who had the ability, left the southern regions.

 

[5fish]

The Southern

I think poverty in the South is the big difference between them and the North. I think you would find the North had bigger middle class as a percentage of it population that the South did. The immigrations many were moving West to cheap land and to make their wealth and others stayed in the cities working in the factories to achieve their dreams.

 

[5fish]

1850 seems to be when the started to leave the South behind economically. Click the link...

Digital History

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu

Even at the bottom of the economic hierarchy, prospects for advancement increased markedly after 1850. During the 1830s and 1840s, less than one unskilled worker in ten managed in the course of a decade to advance to a white-collar job. After 1850, the percentage doubled. The sons of unskilled laborers were even more likely to advance to skilled or white-collar employment. Even the poorest unskilled laborers often were able to acquire a house and a savings account.

 

[5fish]

Here a Southern view... Click the link...

Digital History

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu

The southern economy generated enormous wealth and was critical to the economic growth of the entire United States. Well over half of the richest 1 percent of Americans in 1860 lived in the South. Even more important, southern agriculture helped finance early 19th century American economic growth. Before the Civil War, the South grew 60 percent of the world’s cotton, provided over half of all U.S. export earnings, and furnished 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Cotton exports paid for a substantial share of the capital and technology that laid the basis for America’s industrial revolution.

 

[5fish]

, left the southern regions.

Using slaves in agriculture seems to be a profitable endeavor thought-out history...

Latifundium, Hacienda and Plantation... and Slaves...

Laitfundiums, Haciendas, and Southern Plantations are large estates or ranches and are powered by slaves or peonage systems. The Latifunidiums were large Roman estates, Haciendas were Latin American large estates and South Plantation was from the Southern United States. I argue these three...

www.jggscivilwartalk.online

 

[5fish]

By the 1850 wealth was concentrating in fewer hands just like what happen at the end of Roman... Click on the link...

Digital History

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu

There are indications that during the last decade before the Civil War slave ownership became increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. As soil erosion and exhaustion diminished the availability of cotton land, scarcity and heavy demand forced the price of land and slaves to rise beyond the reach of most, and in newer cotton-growing regions, yeomen farmers were pushed off the land as planters expanded their holdings. In Louisiana, for example, nearly half of all rural white families owned no land. During the 1850s, the percentage of the total white population owning slaves declined significantly. By 1860, the proportion of whites holding slaves had fallen from about one-third to one-fourth. As slave and land ownership grew more concentrated, a growing number of whites were forced by economic pressure to leave the land and move to urban centers.

 

[5fish]

Here is a look at Southern economic classes... Click on the link...

Southern Society

web-clear.unt.edu

Middle Class:
Most southerners were in the Middle Class and were considered yeoman farmers, holding only a few acres and living in modest homes and cabins, raising hogs and chickens, and growing corn and cotton. Few yeoman farmers had any slaves and if they did own slaves, it was only one or two. Yeoman farming families owned an average of fifty acres and produced for themselves most of what they needed. These farmers traded farm produce like milk and eggs for needed services such as shoemaking and blacksmithing. Most people in this class admired the planter class and hoped to one day join those ranks. Though only a few held any slaves, almost all middle class southerners supported the slave system because they enjoyed the privileged status that a racially based society bestowed on them, and they feared that they would have to compete with the slaves for land and work if African Americans were free.

 

[Union8448]

Slavery over produced all the semi-durable commodities like cotton. The ordinary people were very poor. Nutritional sufficiency and maternal health were problems, most likely. Children could not get out of the vulnerable years, because they probably weren't able to put on weight. That had been a national problem earlier in the 19th century. But in the southern areas, with slavery providing a pool of disease that could be spread by mosquitos and bad water, the problem persisted.
The south could not exist in a democracy of one man, one votes, with a region that was out growing and out voting the south.
No matter how the US Civil War turned out, by 1880 the US paid labor states would have been in a position to crush the Confederacy in a few months.

 

[5fish]

Slavery over produced all the semi-durable commodities like cotton

Here is work by Fogol... look through...

Fogel, a “Time on the Cross.”

Here is a Noble economist that said Slavery by the numbers was not that bad... Link: https://acton.org/pub/commentary/2019/04/17/secular-jew-makes-surprising-discovery-about-christians-and-american Robert Fogel (1922-2013), the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, was president of Cornell...

www.jggscivilwartalk.online

 

[Union8448]

Did Fogel experience slavery? Or was he ginning up rhetoric from old records never meant to depict the conditions of slavery?
No matter what Fogel wrote, after the revolutions in Dominica and Jamaica, there were very few people from Europe joining the slave economy. Many northern families who moved to south, found conditions there intolerable and left. How many enslaved people by 1860 were so light skinned that they could disappear in a large city. One could think of Sally Hemmings children by Jefferson. Though born enslaved one daughter passed as white in Washington, D.C. and one son moved to Wisconsin and changed his last name to Jefferson.
We don't know what the problems were in the south. But the suspects would have to women giving birth very early in their lives, poor nutritional standards in the south, and extreme poverty creating a disease pool in which pathogens could be spread by insects or through contaminated water.
I doubt Fogel ever bothered to explain what the census claimed in 1860. The facts supported the assertion that the 18th century pattern of very high birth rates and high rates of infant mortality persisted in the south.
The real pattern is probably that many southern farmers practiced a walk away style of agriculture in which they made minimal investment in the fertility of the land, and readily moved away to northern Texas or the northern half of Missouri.

 

[Union8448]

Slavery was a very hard system to use in a large city in the south. When I last checked the % of population enslaved in Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis and New Orleans was small.

 

[5fish]

Slavery was a very hard system to use in a large city in the south. When I last checked the % of population enslaved in Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis and New Orleans was small.

I can see that, only the upper class will have slaves and you do not need many to run a household... In some of those cities, you have immigrants to do the household labor. I bet it was easier to fire the help than deal with bad-behaving slaves...

 

[5fish]

When I last checked the % of population enslaved

Even Free Black men labor had a hard time competing with immigrant labor... The article is slated a little bit politically...

"Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are" Black Americans on Immigration

Booker T. Washington in his famous 1895 Atlanta exposition speech pleaded with industrialists not to look to European immigrants to man their new factories but rather to the black and white labor supply in the South.

cis.org

Douglass commented on this in an 1853 article:

"The old avocations, by which colored men obtained a livelihood, are rapidly, unceasingly and inevitably passing into other hands; every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place; and so we believe it will continue to be until the last prop is levelled beneath us . . . It is evident, painfully evident to every reflecting mind that the means of living, for colored men, are becoming more and more precarious and limited. Employments and callings, formerly monopolized by us, are so no longer.
White men are becoming house-servants, cooks and stewards on vessels — at hotels. They are becoming porters, stevedores, wood sawyers, hod carriers, brick makers, white washers and barbers, so that the blacks can scarcely find the means of subsistence — a few years ago, and a white barber would have been a curiosity — now their poles stand on every street. Formerly blacks were almost the exclusive coachmen in wealthy families . . .Without the means of living, life is a curse, and leaves us at the mercy of the oppressor to become his debased slaves."5

 

[Union8448]

I can see that, only the upper class will have slaves and you do not need many to run a household... In some of those cities, you have immigrants to do the household labor. I bet it was easier to fire the help than deal with bad-behaving slaves...

The immigrant could be fired. The light colored enslaved person might disappear at any time. It was about the same.