I'm reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa right now, and Rodney offers that the inherent opportunity for sabotage in more advanced machinery means transitioning beyond a certain stage in development requires "free" workers, that slaves require high degrees of surveillance and are limited to using tools that are hard to destroy.
This is a convincing argument to me for why a transition away from slavery has a material requirement for free workers under capitalism when it comes to factories, but there was still (and is still) a ton of labour that is ultimately performed without advanced machinery, principally agriculture.
I suppose my question is, wouldn't a maximally beneficial set-up for the bourgeoisie have been one in which the cities had free worlers, but the countryside still was allowed slaves to pick oranges etc? (I do know that most agricultural labour has been replaced by complex, easily sabotage-able machinery now, but that was not true in the 19th century)
(and if anyone has any recommended reading on the topic that's appreciated too)
well the south didn't have an industrial economy. The agrarian economy of the south had different material conditions and they were more aristocrat than capitalist in their economic interest
they also wanted to expand slavery to more states not just maintain it as they wanted a country ran to cater to the interests of the cotton economy not a country that was organised to benefit industrial production. This pushed the interests of slavery and capital at odds similar to how in Europe the bourgeoise had conflict with the feudal system