raharris1973
Well-known member
The alternate history challenge this time is to have North - South sectional tensions, likely over slavery, or issues related to and inseperable from slavery, get so bad that southern states secede from the USA [sound like OTL so far], but with the following proviso: In this timeline, there is no US-Mexican war, no resulting US annexation of Mexico's northern provinces/territories of Alta California and Santa Fe de Nuevo Mexico from between the Rio Grande and the Pacific Ocean, and thus no debate between Slave states and Free states in the east on whether slavery should be legal in those lands.
The debate over legality or lack of legality of slavery in lands acquired in the Mexican war was not the first thing to make slavery a sectionally divisive issue, but it catalyzed debate over slavery and defensiveness and paranoia over protection of slaveholder property rights in a way that had been put on ice since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, reopening and restoring an issue to national political salience that the Whig-Democrat divide was almost designed to ignore. The debate over slavery extension, starting over California and New Mexico (then Utah) territory, spurred the limitationist Wilmot Proviso, the forerunner of the 'Free Soil' movement, which turned out to be a far broader and more influential political argument and coalition for antislavery and abolitionist folk to align themselves with than the pure abolitionism the Liberty Party represented. The Wilmot Proviso spurred southern reaction to keep open first, Mexican Cession territories open to slavery via the mechanism of Popular Sovereignty (Compromise of 1850), and later the Great Plains by the same means (1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act), and then all territories by judicial fiat (Dred Scott).
I am not saying you cannot have a southern secession in the 1860s or later) without the annexation of the American southwest from Mexico, but you would have to construct an alternate path to substitute for some key catalysts and milestones at a minimum. So you "win" the challenge if you can make a southern secession happen by no later than 1880. And you double win it if you can have the southern secession rebellion get crushed by the north and result in the forceful abolition of slavery, but within all the parameters outlined above.
The debate over legality or lack of legality of slavery in lands acquired in the Mexican war was not the first thing to make slavery a sectionally divisive issue, but it catalyzed debate over slavery and defensiveness and paranoia over protection of slaveholder property rights in a way that had been put on ice since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, reopening and restoring an issue to national political salience that the Whig-Democrat divide was almost designed to ignore. The debate over slavery extension, starting over California and New Mexico (then Utah) territory, spurred the limitationist Wilmot Proviso, the forerunner of the 'Free Soil' movement, which turned out to be a far broader and more influential political argument and coalition for antislavery and abolitionist folk to align themselves with than the pure abolitionism the Liberty Party represented. The Wilmot Proviso spurred southern reaction to keep open first, Mexican Cession territories open to slavery via the mechanism of Popular Sovereignty (Compromise of 1850), and later the Great Plains by the same means (1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act), and then all territories by judicial fiat (Dred Scott).
I am not saying you cannot have a southern secession in the 1860s or later) without the annexation of the American southwest from Mexico, but you would have to construct an alternate path to substitute for some key catalysts and milestones at a minimum. So you "win" the challenge if you can make a southern secession happen by no later than 1880. And you double win it if you can have the southern secession rebellion get crushed by the north and result in the forceful abolition of slavery, but within all the parameters outlined above.