| Im not really contesting that the US banned slavery after other countries, or that there was significant resistance. I certainly agree with the US having unique issues with slavery and the aftermath. In fact, I think my point highlights that fact, but tries to dig at what some of those issues are. Im not sure what conclusions we should draw from the difference in dates and how hard abolition was US, aside from the fact that slavery was more economically entrenched in the south than most other places. After all, the north abolished slavery it in 1804, long before Mexico or Canada. Similarly, the number of slaves in Mexico ranged between 20,000 and 45,000 prior to abolition. Historians estimate that Canada had fewer than 4,000 slaves. These numbers are both far fewer than the 4 million slaves who toiled in the U.S. south.
Both Canada and Mexico also paid the owners of the freed slaves compensation, as did many other countries [1]. Lastly, as a minor note, I think that saying it took the US 4 years and 650k lives is an understatement. The abolishment movement in the US predates the revolutionary war and formation of the country itself, so I think it would be fair say it easily took 100+ years. I think there is also something to be said about the rise of racial inferiority as a post-hoc justification for slavery in the south, which I understand to be primarily an American invention, but I'm not sure if or where it fits in. Prior to this, most civilizations held that the only justification needed to hold slaves was the power to do so. Most also held that other races were inferior, but the two concepts were unrelated, with independent reasoning. [edit]
After writing this, another thought occurred to me. Perhaps one of the main reasons why the abolition of slavery in the US was so protracted and bloody was the weakness of the federal government. This both limited the ability to finance compensation, but also meant there was no monopoly on military power to enforce abolition on resistant states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensated_emancipation >cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931615 What a beautiful song |
still digesting the rest of your reply, but on this point: prior to the civil war, the US army had made its units up out of people from the local area. In the run up to the civil war, some of these units defected en masse, with their command structure intact. Ever since, the army has been careful to rotate geographically diverse people through each unit, ensuring spatial and temporal mixing.
(if chatter surrounding events of the past few years {Bundy, Floyd, J6} is to be believed, the army is not worried about the ability of its officer corps to distinguish between legal and illegal orders as it is the inclinations of potential splinters at the squad level)