So? Why would a bigger Mexican cession delay the admission of California? California's admission was rushed because of a fear that the Californians would go it alone. That's not any less true here.
Point being that the admission of California on OTL terms was not set in stone, and was actively under consideration for a change as late as 1859 with the Colorado proposal.
They also lost industry because planters were opposed to industrialization due to a recognition of the political threat the emergence of an industrial class and free laborers would pose. Efforts at setting up steel development in Birmingham were blocked in the 1850s by local politicos, for example.
Actually, the Planters were not opposed to industrialization; this is a common misconception born of the "State's Rights" defense invented Post War.
Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation by John Majewski makes this point well:
States’ rights ideology, though, eventually lost to a more expansive vision of the Confederate central state. As Table 6 shows, the Confederate government chartered and subsidized four important lines to improve the movement of troops and supplies. Loans and appropriations for these lines amounted to almost $3.5 million, a significant sum given that a severe shortage of iron and other supplies necessarily limited southern railroad building. Jefferson Davis, who strongly backed these national projects, argued that military necessity rather than commercial ambition motivated national investment in these lines. The constitutional prohibition of funding internal improvements ‘‘for commercial purposes’’ was thus irrelevant. That Davis took this position during the Civil War followed naturally from his position on national railroads in the antebellum era. Like Wigfall, he believed that military necessity justified national railroad investment. As a U.S. senator, Davis told his colleagues in 1859 that a Pacific railroad ‘‘is to be absolutely necessary in time of war, and hence within the Constitutional power of the General Government.’’ Davis was more right than he realized. When the Republican-controlled Congress heavily subsidized the nation’s first transcontinental railroad in 1862, military considerations constituted a key justification. Even after the Civil War, the military considered the transcontinental railroad as an essential tool for subjugating the Sioux and other Native Americans resisting western settlement.
When the Confederate Congress endorsed Davis’s position on railroads, outraged supporters of states’ rights strongly objected. Their petition against national railroads—inserted into the official record of the Confederate Congress—argued that the railroads in question might well have military value, ‘‘but the same may be said of any other road within our limits, great or small.’’ The constitutional prohibition against national internal improvements, the petition recognized, was essentially worthless if the ‘‘military value’’ argument carried the day. Essentially giving the Confederate government a means of avoiding almost any constitutional restrictions, the ‘‘military value’’ doctrine threatened to become the Confederacy’s version of the ‘‘general welfare’’ clause that had done so much to justify the growth of government in the old Union. The elastic nature of ‘‘military value,’’ however, hardly bothered the vast majority of representatives in the Confederate Congress. The bills for the railroad lines passed overwhelmingly in 1862 and 1863. As political scientist Richard Franklin Bensel has argued, the constitutional limitations on the Confederate central government ‘‘turned out to be little more than cosmetic adornments.’’
People are still going to bring lawsuits, and the Supreme Court still was mandated to hear appeals at the time. The cases are going to get to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is not required to hear them and, without the inflamed sectional tendencies working against moderation, will be operating under much less pressure to lean one way of the other. Dredd Scott could have a much more limited ruling, presuming it still appears before the Supreme Court.
The Whigs are going to dissolve eventually because popular opinion is going to force a split.
Besides Slavery, there was no other issue that presented the prospect of dividing the Whigs. If Slavery is settled, the Whigs will stay around.
Except even extending the Missouri Compromise line to the pacific was a bridge too far for northerners. It wasn't *just* the issue of the plains that motivated the north.
And yet, they were willing to sign onto the Compromise of 1850 and enough Northerners signed onto the later Popular Sovereignty concept to get it passed. California Gold fields and Plains are still theirs here, which was the focus of the Free Soil Movement, besides excluding Slavery from their own States.
You seem to be of the opinion that the reason the extension failed was because of southerners not getting enough states? That doesn't make sense. The Wilmot proviso passing the house and the compromise line failing shows that much of the reasons was to do with not wanting *any* expansion of slavery.
It was a large factor, especially when you look at who was voting for what with the Compromise Line vote.
If three additional slave states was too much for the north to tolerate, why would an even *greater* number of slave states be tolerated?
Because they would be matched, on a 1:1 basis, with Free States, as had been the case since the Missouri Compromise. A lot of the panic from both sides in the 1850s was a result of fearing the other was about to solidify their dominance within the Union.
There's a difference between "end it in the south" abolitionism and "containment" abolitionism though. It took the Civil War to pass the Thirteenth Amendment. But the general idea of opposing an *expansion* of slavery was present decades sooner. It was major reason why there was so much opposition to the Texas annexation and the Mexican War to begin with. Without those things, Slavery was contained and condemned to death in the South as the soils got used up.
It was present, but remained very much a minority position. How else could the 1850 and 1854 Compromises have occurred, given Northern dominance of the House?
Delegates to conventions were allocated by state population. Northern factions of parties will have more people.
They will also be Party men, seeking to keep the party and thus their power intact.
I should have been cleared: my point was that Delaware in the coming decades would see a change because the planters were barely hanging on as things stood.
I see that as questionable, given Delaware was one of the last holdouts to abolish Slavery even after the bloodiest war in American history galvanized opinion in favor of Abolitionism.
And I focused on Maryland and Missouri, states with burgeoning industrial cities that got a heck of a lot more immigrants than Kentucky did.
Equally so, the underlying trends were still not conducive to such movements. There is no inherent contradiction between industrialism and Slave holding
Okay.
First, Southern elites (who are the only people who really matter in southern politics, to be frank) weren't exactly the most economic in their thinking. They had a whole silly ideology about their own nobility which they convinced themselves of. Even if the economic conditions change, they're not going to tolerate a big change to the social order. The boll weevil could undermine the profitability of cotton, but that's not the same as the planters being willing to give up slavery without kicking and screaming.
I'd recommend, besides Majewski, reading
Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World by Adrian Brettle. The Southern political elite dreamed of constructing an industrial empire, and during the war engaged in a fair bit of what we would call State Capitalism to help achieve that. Little know fact is that in the 1840s, something like a third to 40% of American iron output was from the Upper South and mostly from Slave labor; the Cotton boom ended that because it became more profitable to switch "labor" into cash crop production.
In other words, they were well aware of and did respond to trends in economics, nor were they opposed to industrialization in of itself. Once it becomes clear that's the economically most beneficial path, they'll go to that and once the costs of maintaining slavery are too much, they'll end it in favor of Jim Crow. We don't really have to speculate on what a Post-Slavery social order in the South will look like because the violence of the 1890s and institution of Jim Crow Laws showed exactly what, why and how they would institute such a replacement system.
As a separate matter, white sharecropping first emerged in the south prior to the Civil War in parts of Mississippi and Tennessee. The trend in the antebellum period was further consolidation of who owned slaves in the south and of land ownership. Even separate from slavery, the semi-feudal hierarchy was getting even more entrenched, not less.
James Henry Hammond, a member of the Senate, made the Mud Sill speech. Alexander Stephens made the Cornerstone Speech. The ideas of southern political society were deeply entrenched and feudal and they aren't going away.
Whites also were increasingly conscripted into slave patrols down south, which fostered some resentment.
If anything, the stubbornness of the planters, the economic hit the planters would face because of the Boll Weevil, the gradual growth of the sharecropping system seem, and outside pressures by northern antislavery agitators seem likely to foster some sort of uprising among the yeomen against the planters over time. Just think of
the Dorr Rebellion from 1842 in Rhode Island.
Yes, I can see such political tensions eventually contributing to the end of Slavery in the South. However, that further precludes the Civil War, because at that point, whom is left to fight it for the Planters? Slavery was ultimately untenable,
both on moral and economic grounds, but that it required a civil war to end it is something I'm not convinced of.
Let's say the Boll Weevil comes in sometime in the 1870s, and ruins the Cotton fields. Most Planters will begin switching over to Factory work for their Slaves while leasing their ex-fields to Yeoman farmers, on the Sharecropper basis. By the 1890s, resentments over the ownership of land, the economic advantages of free labor and international pressure will start to really make themselves felt, I suspect.