4. Long-term, Southern politicians with vision (there were some) need to realize that the accounting of free states v. slave states is never going to work for them and need to find a way to broaden their faction. One way they could do it is by bringing in more states that are outside the norm and have reason to fear a standardizing national culture and robust federal government. Mormon Utah, French Catholic Quebec, Latin New Mexico/Arizona. It would be in their interests to have these states admitted with government systems that were explicitly Mormon, French Catholic, and Hispanic Catholic. Maybe even an explicitly Native American state in Oklahoma. It would be interesting to see what an attempt at something like that would look like, and what would actually happen.
Or, alternatively, the old standby of splitting Texas up into multiple states.
Much as it pains me to say it, Brigham Young would probably have been willing to declare Utah a slave state and even to try to figure out a way to get some actual slaveholdings in the area if it meant admission as a state. OTL, he was opposed to mining and mining culture, thought it attracted the wrong people and was a temptation to the Saints, so I could see him making some kind of deal where mining was allowed to proceed but only on the basis that the miners were slaves. Probably mining would even be legally restricted to slaves. Which is horrible, but neither history nor alt-history have to turn out the way we like.
Here's the thing: why would Quebec or the proposed Hispanic states be willing to support a bunch of virulently anti-Catholic slaveholders? How does it benefit them? In Quebec's case in particular, the much more obvious move would be to ally with the Northern states that it historically conducted most of its trade with.
Also, I didn't get a chance to address it in this chapter but the war has exposed some serious shortcomings with American slavery that even the Southerners are starting to sweat over. The most obvious one has been the complete closure of European markets to Southern cotton (and Britain's development of independent sources in Egypt and India), but two far more critical ones are just now beginning to be realized with the war's end:
1. I was not being facetious when I described the raiding actions in the Gulf states as devastating. A good percentage of the plantations within 30 miles of the coast have been raided and/or put to the torch. Furthermore, the slaves in those states were not stupid- many of them fled to the coast to be liberated by the Royal or Imperial Marines. I have been working on a rough number of slaves freed by the war, and I've come up with 40% of Florida's and Louisiana's population, 30% of Texas, 25% of Mississippi, and Alabama, 10% of North and South Carolina, and 5% each of Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, for a grand total of 555,535 freed slaves out of an 1860 population of 3,950,546, with Mississippi and Louisiana being the biggest losers by far.
The effects of this are going to be quite dramatic, with the slave population having lost a full decade of growth just as the pent-up immigration surge from Europe finally starts landing again. For starters, the price of slaves, particularly females of child-bearing age, is going to shoot through the stratosphere (Lee's about to find out that he (or rather, his wife) is now far wealthier than he/she was five years ago), and many land owners, particularly in the Deep South, may find themselves resorting to immigrants to fill the labor gap.
2. Kansas has finally entered the Union as a slave state (well what did you expect? This is a Douglas administration trying to cater to Southern Democrats), and... well as can probably be predicted, slave labor there just is not that economically viable. None of the prophicized plantations have come to pass and there frankly is no need to own a slave to take in a harvest every fall when you can hire a bunch of Irishmen to do it for a far cheaper price. The settlers streaming into the territory are not bringing slaves with them, and more worryingly, they're voting Republican. At this point, the South is starting to come to terms with the hard reality that even if
Dred Scott vs. Sanford allows slavery in every territory, and even if all those territories are somehow founded as slave states,
they're not going to stay slave states. Nevada and Nebraska are growing by leaps and bounds and chafing to get into the Union (Nevada's 1864 accession was postponed TTL) and it's almost a given that both are going to be Free states, as are Colorado and Utah just behind them. Southerners are already panicking and reaching for their almanacs and drawing any number of divisions to Texas, Virginia, or Florida that they can dream up, but even the most hard-line Dixiecrat can see that they're going to permanently lose the Senate by the century's end unless a miracle happens.