Read and respond to the article “The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South” by Alfred Conrad and John Meyer. Some historians and others have argued that slavery was a dying institution in the mid-1800s and that it would have died out on its own even if the Civil War had not been fought. Discuss how the findings of Conrad and Meyer address this argument on the viability (or lack thereof) of an economy based on slave labor. Would slavery have gone away without the coercive correction of the Civil War?
