The Qing Dynasty is about to end

Chapter 710: Lincoln, your "color" is a little wrong!

"Advanced?" Davis was almost amused. "Why did the Russians abolish serfdom? Advanced things should be retained!"

Xianfeng smiled and waved his hands: "Mr. President, you are wrong! The abolition of serfdom in Russia shows its progress. It shows that Russian peasants have grown and improved under serfdom and have the conditions to gain greater freedom. Otherwise, the Tsar would not have taken the initiative to start serfdom reform! In fact, serfdom in European countries was abolished by the serf owners. It seems that no country abolished serfdom because of serf uprisings, right?"

Davis, Hammond, Breckenridge and others all thought hard and it seemed to be true! I have never heard of any country where serfs rebelled to become tenants.
Xianfeng smiled and said, "What does this prove? This proves the superiority of serfdom! Serfdom can develop into a tenant-rent system, and serfs will gradually evolve into tenant farmers or workers. Of course, this evolution process is not a matter of one or two generations. In addition, do you know what system serfdom developed from?"

"Well." Davis tilted his head and thought for a moment, "It should be slavery, right?"

Hammond said, "It must be slavery! I know there were slaves in ancient Rome and ancient Greece, but they disappeared in the Middle Ages. They must have turned slaves into serfs!"

"Yes, yes!" Xianfeng clapped his hands. "Slaves evolved into serfs. This is the progress of society! And social progress must be gradual. Isn't this the case in advanced European countries? First there was slavery, then serfdom, and then the serfs were liberated and made tenants and workers. So now, if the United States wants to abolish slavery, shouldn't it turn slaves into serfs? Otherwise, what can they become? They can't become workers and go to northern factories to compete with white workers for jobs, right?"

"That makes sense!" Davis slammed the table. "If Lincoln wanted to allow black slaves to work in factories, white workers in the North would not support him!"

Breckenridge laughed and said, "If those poor white people in the North knew that they would fight to the death, in the end they would only produce millions of cheap blacks to steal their jobs, the Northern Army would surely collapse!"

Raymond frowned and asked: "What is the difference between serfs and slaves?"

This question stumped Davis and Breckenridge, white masters in the southern United States! Their ancestors were all middle and lower class freemen in the Old World. They didn't understand the superiority of serfdom, nor could they tell the difference between serfs and slaves.
Fortunately, they still had Zhao Si, the senior White House adviser - that is, Xianfeng.

Xianfeng was not only a slave owner, but also a serf owner and a large landlord. He certainly knew how to distinguish between slaves, serfs and tenants.

Xianfeng immediately explained: "Slaves are the property of their masters, just like livestock and tools. They can be bought, sold, given away, or even executed at will! Although the personal freedom of serfs is restricted, the masters cannot kill them at will. They can only be transferred together with the land, and cannot be bought or sold separately. In addition, slaves have no means of production, and the fruits of their labor are also at the disposal of their masters. Serfs can keep the surplus products after paying rent to the lord, or they can rent 'shares of land' and perform labor service as rent in kind."

Xianfeng smiled coldly: "That is to say, if you turn black slaves into serfs, you can't kill them at will in the future, nor can you separate them from the land and buy and sell them. You have to give them a small piece of land as a share, and use the share to exchange them for coolies to help you plant and pick cotton."

Having said this, Xianfeng paused again, his eyes swept across the faces of the white slave masters, taking in all the ugly faces of these people, and then he smiled faintly and said: "Slavery has existed in most countries in the Old World, but after a long period of evolution and development, it was gradually replaced by serfdom. This is not because the slaves are kind, nor because the slaves' resistance is so fierce. From what I know, there has never been a slave who rebelled to become a serf. All the slaves who successfully rebelled became slave owners! So there is only one reason why slavery was replaced by serfdom, that is, serfdom is more economical than slavery, and it allows the owner of the land to gain more benefits."

There was dead silence in the Oval Office.

President Davis' cigar smoke slowly swirled in the room, like a thin veil that obscured the worried faces of the white gentlemen.

"But can black people be good serfs?" Davis finally spoke up, with a hint of sarcasm in his tone. "Even when they are slaves, they are often lazy. If they become serfs, won't they be even more lawless?"

Xianfeng smiled slightly, took a sip of the teacup, and then said slowly: "Mr. President, what you said is wrong. Slaves are lazy because they know that no matter how hard they work, their fate will not change. But serfs are different. They own part of the harvest from the land they plant. You masters can also give them some reward mechanism, so that the more they work, the more they get."

Breckenridge frowned: "But what if they are still lazy?"

"Still lazy? Then punish them!" Xianfeng put down his coffee cup and tapped the table with his fingertips. "Serfdom is not laissez-faire. The lord has the right to punish disobedient serfs, but he cannot execute them at will. Besides, slaves are bachelors and don't even own their own lives. The ultimate punishment is beating them to death. But if you beat slaves to death, the slave owners will lose their property. Are you really willing to do that? Serfs are not bachelors. Serfs can have families, wives and children. They have to work hard to support their families! If they are lazy every day, their wives and children will starve to death! Slaves don't have wives. Even if they have children, they are your slave owners' property. No one would destroy another property just because one property is not useful, right?"

Raymond nodded thoughtfully: "So... serfdom is actually giving black slaves some hope and making them work hard?"

"Yes." Xianfeng smiled, "Let them feel that as long as they work hard on the land, they can support their families, and even save some money to redeem themselves, and then buy a small piece of land to be self-employed. In this way, they will not always think about running away and being lazy." Davis put out the cigar in his hand, coughed and said, "Perhaps we can try to pass a Serfdom Act first, allowing and encouraging slave owners to convert black slaves into serfs. If the effect is good, then we can roll it out across the board."

"We can also announce," Xianfeng smiled, "that any black people who become serfs, as long as they work diligently for ten years and prove that they can really be independent, can apply to become free tenants and can contract a piece of land from their masters to cultivate it themselves."

Davis' eyes widened. "Isn't this encouraging black people to rebel? They will think they will be free in ten years!"

"But ten years later..." Xianfeng said softly, "the war will have ended long ago. By then, whether to make them tenant farmers or find reasons to extend the contract is up to us. The law can be amended! In addition, I can assure you that the tenant system is definitely more profitable than the serf system! Otherwise, the serf system in the Old World would not have been transformed into the tenant system one by one!"

The room was silent for a moment, and then Breckenridge laughed out loud: "Great! This way, the blacks will feel hopeful and won't rush to rebel. And the North will lose its excuse to attack them! As for us... we lose nothing!"

Xianfeng nodded and said with a smile: "I have to ask the North again, what do they want the black slaves to become? Do they want them to work in factories in the North?"

Davis slowly exhaled a smoke ring and narrowed his eyes: "That's what we'll do."

At the same time, in the temporary presidential palace in New York, Lincoln was staring at the southern states on the map with a frown.

"If the South really practices serfdom..." he murmured in a low voice, "then wouldn't our slogan of 'freeing the slaves' become a joke?"

Secretary of State Seward sneered: "They are just continuing to enslave black people under a different name."

"But ordinary Northerners don't understand this." Treasury Secretary Chase was worried, "They will think that since the South has 'abolished slavery', why should we still fight?"

Lincoln was silent for a moment, then suddenly looked up and asked, "Where is Senator O'Connor? Hasn't he always advocated complete abolition of slavery?"

O'Connor stood up from the corner, his blue eyes sparkling with justice: "Mr. President, the South is playing word games! Serfdom is a variant of slavery, and as for the free tenants ten years later, they are also a variant of serfdom. We must expose them!"

"How do we expose it?" General Sherman sneered. "Should we tell the workers in the North: 'Hey, don't believe what the South says, they just turned the blacks from slaves into serfs'? But the workers will ask what we want to turn the black slaves into? If the black slaves don't grow cotton in the fields, what else can they do? Are we really going to let them work in the factory?"

There was silence in the room.

Lincoln rubbed his temple and said slowly: "The workers don't really care what will become of the slaves. What they care about is what will become of themselves."

"President, what do you want the workers to become?" New York Governor Morgan looked at Lincoln a little warily.

Lincoln, you don't want the workers to become the owners of the factory! Why is your face red?

Lincoln pondered for a while, then looked at the "representatives of capital" in front of him and frowned, saying, "What I mean is that we should learn from the Chinese United Farms in California, Oregon, and Washington Territory on the west coast, and give the federal land in the Midwest to American citizens or foreign immigrants who are willing to fight for the United States! Let the white proletarians have the opportunity to become small farmers and own one or two hundred acres of land by fighting for America!"

Most people in the room frowned - learn from the Chinese on the West Coast? Giving good land to poor people, isn't this... the way of the European "ghosts"?
(End of this chapter)