AHC: Southern secession from the USA, without the Mexican war/Mexican cession as a catalyzing issue?

[raharris1973]

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.

 

[zaffre]

This is a nice little challenge and not, I think, horribly difficult. Southwestern expansion catalyzed the slavery debate but was really not a necessary precursor - in a world where the remaining territories are even more clearly slated to tip the sectional balance, southern paranoia and desire to break out of ‘containment’ inevitably scales up in response. Southern politicians look for bargaining chips that northern politicians struggle to give them.

With how institutionally southern the Supreme Court was, it’s incredibly easy to imagine a Dred Scott / Lemmon equivalent still being provoked (counterfactuals in general are hard to prove, but I think it’s deceptively hard to prove that Taney needed war after-effects to go off the deep end) which is in itself sufficient to mobilize a northern anti-slavery party, or tip an existing party that way. The Whigs in particular are inherently unwieldy and without the Mexican-American War just don’t have enough piles of skulls to go around.

Once that northern party wins - which they inevitably will, in the medium term, because of how the electoral math works - the south will try to secede and there will be civil war.

Q.E.D.

 

[Indicus]

Stephen Douglas wanted to organize Kansas-Nebraska as early as 1844, in order to establish a transcontinental railroad with its eastern terminus in Chicago. That would still be an issue here, albeit here the railroad would have to go through Oregon. And Douglas would still need southern votes to organize the territory, so he would have to satisfy the South here as well.

Even if he did organize Kansas-Nebraska without repealing the Missouri Compromise, proslavery Missourians would still try to avoid the possibility of the state being surrounded on three sides by free states by forcing the issue - by electoral fraud to establish a proslavery legislature, or by just bringing in slaves anyways with the aim of sending a case over it to the Supreme Court. With the Missouri Compromise in tatters, the formation of a Republican-style party is inevitable.

 

[Roger II]

Honestly it sounds like the harder thing is for there to *not* be a Southern secession push. Maybe the key here is a failed Texan revolution or as part of the no Mexican War PoD Texas manages to figure out how to stay independent, so they lose that slave state and slave states are sufficiently outnumbered that everyone but the firirest of the fire-eaters concede that it's doomed.

EDIT: The other option I can think of is Egyptian or Indian cotton production coming online at scale c. 1830/40/50 so southern elites can't become delusional about "King Cotton"

 

[raharris1973]

This is a nice little challenge and not, I think, horribly difficult. Southwestern expansion catalyzed the slavery debate but was really not a necessary precursor - in a world where the remaining territories are even more clearly slated to tip the sectional balance, southern paranoia and desire to break out of ‘containment’ inevitably scales up in response. Southern politicians look for bargaining chips that northern politicians struggle to give them.

With how institutionally southern the Supreme Court was, it’s incredibly easy to imagine a Dred Scott / Lemmon equivalent still being provoked (counterfactuals in general are hard to prove, but I think it’s deceptively hard to prove that Taney needed war after-effects to go off the deep end) which is in itself sufficient to mobilize a northern anti-slavery party, or tip an existing party that way. The Whigs in particular are inherently unwieldy and without the Mexican-American War just don’t have enough piles of skulls to go around.

Once that northern party wins - which they inevitably will, in the medium term, because of how the electoral math works - the south will try to secede and there will be civil war.

Q.E.D.

If we accept this is the way the American political (and judicial) back-and-forth goes in the event of no Mex-Am war and annexation of the Southwest....does the lack of California gold and Nevada silver in the federal treasury make a defeat for the Union significantly more likely than in OTL?

If part of the avoidance of the Mex-Am war is no American annexation of the Republic of Texas, could the existence of an independent Republic of Texas as a pro-CSA tilting neutral, not supporting the US blockade, significantly increase the CSA's chances for survival?

Honestly it sounds like the harder thing is for there to *not* be a Southern secession push. Maybe the key here is a failed Texan revolution or as part of the no Mexican War PoD Texas manages to figure out how to stay independent, so they lose that slave state and slave states are sufficiently outnumbered that everyone but the firirest of the fire-eaters concede that it's [secession & rebellion?] doomed.

So this is your explanation for why they might *not* secede? Not having Texas as a slave state [and potentially it not even existing as a slaveholding Anglo society] southerners simply calculate they do not have the population and land area and wealth to sustain a secessionist rebellion from the USA? Or did you mean something different or opposite from this?

The Whigs in particular are inherently unwieldy and without the Mexican-American War just don’t have enough piles of skulls to go around.

puzzled by this metaphor?

The other option I can think of is Egyptian or Indian cotton production coming online at scale c. 1830/40/50 so southern elites can't become delusional about "King Cotton"

So without the delusion, the southerners don't assume they will get British or French foreign aid, like the American Revolutionaries did, they are therefore no confident in winning just by themselves, so decide not to secede revolt?

 

[zaffre]

puzzled by this metaphor?

Bit rich of the 1840s Democrats to criticize anyone for this, but to be fair they were not wrong.

To your broader point, in the sense that no southwestern expansion probably *delays* the Civil War, the North obviously benefits more from that, demographically and economically.

 

[raharris1973]

in the sense that no southwestern expansion probably *delays* the Civil War

What kind of a delay, ie, how many electoral cycles, is probable before a Republican or de facto Republican (committed free soil party) EC Presidential victory is likely in a no southwest scenario?

Bit rich of the 1840s Democrats to criticize anyone for this, but to be fair they were not wrong.

Ah, pile of skulls referring to always running a General for President.

 

[raharris1973]

Without an American California, I wonder if settlement and development, and statehood, of Oregon (statehood 1858), and especially Washington (statehood only 1889!) would have been more rapid since those areas, agriculturally rich and with a wealth of marine and forestry resources, would have been the full extent of the US Pacific coast? On the other hand, they lacked one element that accelerated the rush to settle/develop California, gold!

 

[Visigoethe]

Obviously the South would try to balance things out by pushing into Kansas but is there potential for conflict in other areas? Would the pro-Southern sympathies in Oregon be taken advantage of?

 

[raharris1973]

Since my four respondents are all weighing in saying a southern secession is still possible, even likely, without a Mexican-American war [although Roger II allows a secession *might* be derailed], I will roll forward and assume there is a mid-nineteenth century southern secession and Civil War, even in the alternate timeline where William Henry Harrison lived through his Presidential term and consecutive Whig presidencies in the 1840s opposed to Texas annexation prevented annexation long enough for Texas to lose interest in being annexed, thus negating the Mexican-American war.

Let's imagine that southern paranoia about imbalance in the Senate by the late 1850s forces through something like the Kansas-Nebraska Act and 'Popular Sovereignty' and 'Bleeding Kansas' proxy warfare, and Taney Court overreach provoking the emergence of 'Republican' Free Soil politics in the north. The Republic of Texas cites the emergence of Free Soil and abolition politics as one reason for its loss of interest in being annexed into the USA by the 1850s [the key factor enabling this stance is simply the growth of its agricultural export profits, above all cotton, but also cattle products, providing sufficient revenue to make republic financially solvent]. If not in 1860, by 1864, or 1868 at the latest we have the no slavery expansion, 'Republican' candidate win the Presidency and their party get the House majority.

This causes secession and Civil War.

Under these circumstances, I would repeat my question:

could the existence of an independent Republic of Texas as a pro-CSA tilting neutral, not supporting the US blockade, significantly increase the CSA's chances for survival?

Presuming not, and the Union still prevails in about four years or less, would a lot of slaveholders have transferred or sold their human property to Texas or purchased lands in Texas, with a rush of Confederate supporters fleeing the falling Confederacy for asylum in Texas at the end of war? Could the availability of the 'outlet' of Texas, still under old familiar southern laws on slavery, tariffs, and other questions, weaken the Ku Kluxers and redeemers in the south and the overall resistance to reconstruction? What timescale would Texas be on for its own emancipation?