There was quite a bit of support for letting the CSA just leave, and then throwing Kentucky, Maryland, and Virginia after them. Horace Greely was the editor that wrote the headline above.
What if the CSA wasn't a scam? What if somebody wrote a book explaining why both sides would be better off apart and then enough people agreed?
In the election the secessionists control the balance of power and introduce a bill to let the states leave the Union on request. How can the people trying to start the CSA with them in charge stop that? Maybe they use the old Articles of Confederation, maybe they agree to do something else.
So the CSA agrees to pay their prewar debts to the Northern bankers and stops trying to annex territory against the wishes of the inhabitants. Then what is there to fight about?
Slavery? Sure, the abolitionists want to fight, but who else? The Northern bankers are happy, the Northern unions are happy, the westerners are happy, and the southerners are happy. The slave owners aren't happy because the slave population is growing fast and there isn't much territory to expand into any more. The price of slaves will fall for the next forty years about as much as it had risen over the last forty years. This looks an awfull lot like defeat to them, as bad as if the Republicans had won the election.
The USA agrees to send back any slaves, or to pay for them, if the CSA agrees not to smuggle goods across the border to the USA. Neither side honors this agreement, or both sides honor this agreement. Makes no difference as long as they don't fight.
The CSA becomes a peacefull, boring, agricultural society where nothing ever happens again for at least for the next hundred years.
Now, what happens to the USA? What happened in OTL when the CSA representatives and senators weren't there to stop them?
1. Transcontinental railroad immediately. California can ship agricultural products to the USA cheaply a few years earlier. Ditto the northern route to Washington and Oregon. The southern route might get built with British money if it weren't for the USA tariffs on imports and exports to the Confederacy.
2. Higher tariffs on some imports like tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton. Which are now grown in California. This happens slowly. California hasn't built the system of dams and aquaducts they did in OTL. The CSA retaliates by levying tariffs on corn imports and the price of feeding slaves goes up even more.
We also have higher tariffs on manufactured imports from Britain, or maybe we don't. Without the bad feelings built up by the British aid to the CSA, would the USA have built up it's industry on a tariff base?
3. Homestead Act immediately. America imports of immigrants and sends them to the frontier just like in OTL. We also would have had a million less dead soldiers and civilians. The Indian wars would have ended a generation earlier. Probably a lot of southerners without plantations full of slaves would move to the West. Certainly, a lot more southerners would still be alive.
4. Landgrant College Act immediately. America rapidly industrialises just like in OTL. More students and teachers in this ATL.
5. Larger navy to protect merchant marine. This is built up more slowly and is kept up longer, not as in OTL. We do have to worry about war with the CSA and the UK in a way we did not in OTL.
6. Larger USA standing army. Not as in OTL. This declines in size as it becomes obvious that the CSA has no interest in starting a war with the USA.
7. Less economic connection between the USA and the CSA. The USA is taking less and less imports from the CSA in favor of California, and the USA is no longer making loans to the CSA planters in favor of Britain. Sometimes the British just take over the loans from the USA banks, sometimes the British loan money to the CSA planters at lower rates of interest and the CSA planters pay off the USA bankers.
8. Less progress on gauge standardisation. The 'southern guage' may actually predominate in the CSA. That reduces trade with the USA even more. The CSA may be economically less important to the USA than Canada.
9. Acquisition of Alaska, just as in OTL. The USA has a lot more money without the civil war. This is a permanent effect.
10. We might buy Labrador from Newfoundland. They kept trying to sell it to us, we might have accepted. For that matter, we might have agreed to annex Newfoundland itself.
11. We might have set up more colonies in Africa for our freed slaves. Northerners didn't like freed slaves much either. Namibia wasn't claimed at the time. We could have bought out any trading interests there and it was certainly a more healthy climate than Liberia. Probably would have made the Boers nervous, not that the British would have cared what happened to the Voortrekkers. The British just wanted Capetown as a naval base.
12. Faster expansion into the Pacific with a bigger navy. Hawaii more quickly? What about New Caledonia and Samoa and Fiji and New Guinea? Nauru, etc?
13. Faster Panama canal? With the technology of the day, probably a Nicaragua canal.
What if the CSA wasn't a scam? What if somebody wrote a book explaining why both sides would be better off apart and then enough people agreed?
In the election the secessionists control the balance of power and introduce a bill to let the states leave the Union on request. How can the people trying to start the CSA with them in charge stop that? Maybe they use the old Articles of Confederation, maybe they agree to do something else.
So the CSA agrees to pay their prewar debts to the Northern bankers and stops trying to annex territory against the wishes of the inhabitants. Then what is there to fight about?
Slavery? Sure, the abolitionists want to fight, but who else? The Northern bankers are happy, the Northern unions are happy, the westerners are happy, and the southerners are happy. The slave owners aren't happy because the slave population is growing fast and there isn't much territory to expand into any more. The price of slaves will fall for the next forty years about as much as it had risen over the last forty years. This looks an awfull lot like defeat to them, as bad as if the Republicans had won the election.
The USA agrees to send back any slaves, or to pay for them, if the CSA agrees not to smuggle goods across the border to the USA. Neither side honors this agreement, or both sides honor this agreement. Makes no difference as long as they don't fight.
The CSA becomes a peacefull, boring, agricultural society where nothing ever happens again for at least for the next hundred years.
Now, what happens to the USA? What happened in OTL when the CSA representatives and senators weren't there to stop them?
1. Transcontinental railroad immediately. California can ship agricultural products to the USA cheaply a few years earlier. Ditto the northern route to Washington and Oregon. The southern route might get built with British money if it weren't for the USA tariffs on imports and exports to the Confederacy.
2. Higher tariffs on some imports like tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton. Which are now grown in California. This happens slowly. California hasn't built the system of dams and aquaducts they did in OTL. The CSA retaliates by levying tariffs on corn imports and the price of feeding slaves goes up even more.
We also have higher tariffs on manufactured imports from Britain, or maybe we don't. Without the bad feelings built up by the British aid to the CSA, would the USA have built up it's industry on a tariff base?
3. Homestead Act immediately. America imports of immigrants and sends them to the frontier just like in OTL. We also would have had a million less dead soldiers and civilians. The Indian wars would have ended a generation earlier. Probably a lot of southerners without plantations full of slaves would move to the West. Certainly, a lot more southerners would still be alive.
4. Landgrant College Act immediately. America rapidly industrialises just like in OTL. More students and teachers in this ATL.
5. Larger navy to protect merchant marine. This is built up more slowly and is kept up longer, not as in OTL. We do have to worry about war with the CSA and the UK in a way we did not in OTL.
6. Larger USA standing army. Not as in OTL. This declines in size as it becomes obvious that the CSA has no interest in starting a war with the USA.
7. Less economic connection between the USA and the CSA. The USA is taking less and less imports from the CSA in favor of California, and the USA is no longer making loans to the CSA planters in favor of Britain. Sometimes the British just take over the loans from the USA banks, sometimes the British loan money to the CSA planters at lower rates of interest and the CSA planters pay off the USA bankers.
8. Less progress on gauge standardisation. The 'southern guage' may actually predominate in the CSA. That reduces trade with the USA even more. The CSA may be economically less important to the USA than Canada.
9. Acquisition of Alaska, just as in OTL. The USA has a lot more money without the civil war. This is a permanent effect.
10. We might buy Labrador from Newfoundland. They kept trying to sell it to us, we might have accepted. For that matter, we might have agreed to annex Newfoundland itself.
11. We might have set up more colonies in Africa for our freed slaves. Northerners didn't like freed slaves much either. Namibia wasn't claimed at the time. We could have bought out any trading interests there and it was certainly a more healthy climate than Liberia. Probably would have made the Boers nervous, not that the British would have cared what happened to the Voortrekkers. The British just wanted Capetown as a naval base.
12. Faster expansion into the Pacific with a bigger navy. Hawaii more quickly? What about New Caledonia and Samoa and Fiji and New Guinea? Nauru, etc?
13. Faster Panama canal? With the technology of the day, probably a Nicaragua canal.