1780: Jeffersons Plan Passes

Highlander

Banned
1780: No Slavery in the West/Jeffersons Plan Passes

A couple of questions I'd like to pose to you.

One is something I found interesting - according to a source, the law which would have disallowed slaves in the Old Northwest was only passed by one vote. The person who was supposed to have voted no was bedridden and couldn't.

What would this have meant if slavery was not allowed to expand past the Appalachians? Equally, from the same PoD, what if Jeffersons proposal for the division of states had passed?
 
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I think you're saying it wrong, without meaning to.

Slavery was banned in the Old Northwest. The vote in question was whether slavery would be banned in the West, i.e. all new states. And rather than passing by one, the vote failed by one, indeed because of the sudden illness of one of the New Jersey delegates who had been strongly in the antislavery camp.
 
This has always fascinated me.

At a guess I would expect existing communities practicing plantation slavery (West Florida and Louisiana) to be found exempt from this, especially as they would be acquired later and so not actually be part of the Jefferson Plan's mandate.

If these areas are lumped into pseudo-Mississippi and sort-of-Alabama, and possibly even if not, I suspect you will have the territorial or state legislatures legalizing slavery. The land's just too suited to cotton growing, cotton is too profitable, and slavery too convenient for cotton economically.

That still leaves dramatic changes. Even if Tennessee follows suit, the one-for-one policy of Slave and Free states just won't happen. Long run, it will be clear that slavery is a localized system in a minority of states, easing the constant struggle of the 1820s-60s. Of course, rising abolitionism will create tension, but it's likely to be a less divisive factor.

Eventual slave states: Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, [2-3 Whoknowswhats in OTL Mississippi and Alabama], Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. Ironically, Missouri and even Kansas might still go Slave just because it's economically suited and fewer people may care.
 
You'll have to give me a point of reference here; I'm not familiar with the plan you speak of.

If I'm interpereting Admiral Matt's post correctly:

This plan, if passed OTL, would have prohibited the expansion of slavery beyond the original 13 but came up one vote short OTL?

If that's the case, I think slavery's abolished in the U.S. no later than 1800 and without a four year civil war to do it.

Now, citizenship, voting rights, etc...that's something to ponder, the when and the how. I'd hope it would be timely and peaceful, but it could just as easily be a protracted struggle and sometimes violent.

Something like that, in 1780...it changes the course of U.S. history quite profoundly, with ripples within ripples.
 

Highlander

Banned
I think you're saying it wrong, without meaning to.

Slavery was banned in the Old Northwest. The vote in question was whether slavery would be banned in the West, i.e. all new states. And rather than passing by one, the vote failed by one, indeed because of the sudden illness of one of the New Jersey delegates who had been strongly in the antislavery camp.

Yes, exactly. It's been a long day.

You'll have to give me a point of reference here; I'm not familiar with the plan you speak of.

Jefferson proposed to split the Northwest Territory into ten states.

It's been a common theme in many of my maps. :)
 
If I'm interpereting Admiral Matt's post correctly:

This plan, if passed OTL, would have prohibited the expansion of slavery beyond the original 13 but came up one vote short OTL?

You are indeed.

If that's the case, I think slavery's abolished in the U.S. no later than 1800 and without a four year civil war to do it.

That happens not to be the case. Even in this timeline, by eighteen hundred you only have four Free States: Massachusetts, Vermont, plus Tennessee and Kentucky. Pennsylvania is gradually emancipating it's slaves at this time, but Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island are still just toying with the idea. New York and New Jersey are rock solid slave states.

You have to wait a generation and a half before it even becomes obvious that the North will be entirely free-states. Absolute ridiculous best case: Slavery begins to be phased out nationally in the late 1840s. I wouldn't hold my breath, though.
 
I remember reading that Jefferson's Southwestern Ordinance of 1784 originally was to have banned the spread of slavery west of the Appalachians. But the states that owned said land (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia) protested and this clause was removed. But said book also mentioned that were it to be included, these states would have ignored it and imported slaves to these territories, perhaps calling them "indentured servants" to create a loophole in the law...
 
The consequences for U.S. territorial growth here could be interesting, as could the possibly changed fate for the indigenous inhabitants of the U.S. southeast. If there is no slavery in "Alabama", is there no trail of tears?
 

Highlander

Banned
The consequences for U.S. territorial growth here could be interesting, as could the possibly changed fate for the indigenous inhabitants of the U.S. southeast. If there is no slavery in "Alabama", is there no trail of tears?

That's a good point. So maybe indigenous people do better in the South?

The person who said their would be massive butterflies here is right - it would make it kind of hard to write a timeline.

But that's never stopped someone from trying before! :D My only problem, as has been the problem with all of my timeline attempts, is finding the right PoD.
 
That's a good point. So maybe indigenous people do better in the South?

The person who said their would be massive butterflies here is right - it would make it kind of hard to write a timeline.

But that's never stopped someone from trying before! :D My only problem, as has been the problem with all of my timeline attempts, is finding the right PoD.

In my experience, it's better to come up with a future you like and then backstory your way to it. History is never as simple as two roads diverging in a wood. :)
 
My only problem, as has been the problem with all of my timeline attempts, is finding the right PoD.

Uhm, but, this whole subject screams just one enormously perfect POD. One guy got sick, and a quarter of a nation turned to the crutch of slavery? How much better of a POD could you ask for?
 
A few things:

1. It wasn't 1780, but rather 1784, with the Ordinance for Territorial Governance.

2. Slavery isn't going to be kept out of Alabama and Mississippi. What will happen is that a bunch of planters will move into the future states from Georgia and South Carolina and, when 1800 rolls around, there'll be a large calamity as these territories try to enter the Union around them being allowed to keep their slaves.

3. Kentucky and Tennessee, on the other hand, might very well end up as free states.

4. This is going to drastically alter slavery politics in the US. I've been planning to use this as a PoD for a while to end slavery more or less peacefully. The very first change is that worries about keeping slave-state/free-state numbers in balance are out the window. Free states, or states with active manumission statutes, are going to start in the majority right away. Might the US end up getting bigger, without the worry about balance in the Senate?

5. Slavery will continue more or less as it did in the states in which it already existed. However, I like to think of butterflying Eli Whitney's need to move from New England to the South (he was broke and had no job prospects -- I'm sure it's possible to butterfly that with a PoD a decade earlier) so the ATL equivalent of his cotton gin doesn't get invented for a few years. Since tobacco (the main product of Virginia planters at the time) burns out the soil even worse than cotton, plantation economies were 'on the way out' at the time. George Washington himself had taken to planting grain.

If the planters of Virginia, by around 1800 or so, really start to feel the bite of soil exhaustion, and cotton doesn't present itself as a viable alternative yet, they may be amicable to manumission, an issue that arose occasionally in Virginia right through the 1830's. If Virginia gets rid of slavery by 1810, this is going to vastly butterfly the economic development of the Upper South. Prosperous small farmers growing cotton, tobacco, and other cash crops will drive early industrialization and urbanization in the Chesapeake Bay and upper Ohio River Valley, which will have spill-over effects along the entire Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio watershed.

Depending on where the planters end up going after freeing their slaves, the South ITTL will be even more against protectionism because the majority of its population, instead of merely the wealthiest part, will now depend on primary exports to England for sustenance. Since there's no longer the moral flaw of slavery to harp over in the political arena, the Federalist/Whig/Republican platform of economic nationalism may simply never catch on, instead of being delayed until the rise of industrialism outside the northern coastal areas.

Overall, we'd live in a much, much better world today. We may talk about the 1860's as the decade of civil rights instead of the 1960's. Frederich Douglass would fill in the role of Martin Luther King Jr. Without a war of conquest being needed to free blacks in the South, Southern attitudes towards blacks will be vastly more receptive.
 
Also, the Cherokee and all are probably still screwed, unless they miraculously get a president who defends their rights to the utmost. Unlikely at best.

It's not like owning slaves turned Georgia into Archona Province. There was a big group of people with cutting edge technology that wanted land, and a much smaller group with a lot of land and the occasional musket. What do you expect?

The northern states, Australia, southern China, most of Russia, Brazil, Argentina, heck, even Canada or the Bantu over most of habitable Africa.... It's just the march of history. The many become more; the State is triumphant. If you expect everybody to act like Kiwis or Quakers you're going to be disappointed.
 
A dozen more states mostly dominated by small free-holding farmers = longer Democratic-Republican dominance of the House and Senate.

That makes sense, I guess, but I'm not sure that would have been the case in practice. Much later, Republicans would feel that Alaskan statehood would advantage the Democrats, and Democrats felt that Hawaiian statehood would advantage the Republicans. In reality, the reverse happened.
 
That makes sense, I guess, but I'm not sure that would have been the case in practice. Much later, Republicans would feel that Alaskan statehood would advantage the Democrats, and Democrats felt that Hawaiian statehood would advantage the Republicans. In reality, the reverse happened.

Who supported who was much clearer in the first party system. The Federalists were almost exclusively the minority party of wealthy merchants and financiers in Northern urban areas. With a mostly agrarian west chock full of new states, the structure of the Confederacy would lend itself towards dominance by whoever could politically control this west. The people Jefferson had had the most success with in the past just so happened to be those small farmers and laborers.
 
Who supported who was much clearer in the first party system. The Federalists were almost exclusively the minority party of wealthy merchants and financiers in Northern urban areas. With a mostly agrarian west chock full of new states, the structure of the Confederacy would lend itself towards dominance by whoever could politically control this west. The people Jefferson had had the most success with in the past just so happened to be those small farmers and laborers.

But wouldn't smaller, western states be faster to urbanize than larger ones?
 
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