BlondieBC
Banned
You make a good point, it really did take a catastrophic war to take the wind out of the US sails. Would it be possible to have that sort of conflict earlier in US history or to stop the expansionist mentality? Someone mentioned a US based on the articles of confederation for example.
I don't think you can move the conflict early enough (1800 or so), but I guess you could change the ARW and get the USA never to form. But then you are more preventing the USA from forming than preventing expansion.
Also keep in mind the USA had little net immigration from the ARW for a generation or so. It was local population growth. It seems like it was closer to 1840 before you see large white inflows again. And this is part of the problem in keeping the USA contained. These people are no longer "European", much less British. They are generations removed from Europe, sometimes up to 8 or so generations. The USA had a lot of luck. We had the native population greatly lowered by disease and kept low. We had few epidemics like Europe to low enough population density. We had high birth rates. I can't give you the exact numbers for 1800, but in Poland in the late 1800, farmers were down to 8.5 acres of land. In the USA, you often had 40-160 acres. Maybe more. And each kid could simply move west. And we had taken away the effective bases need for competitors. France lacked the surplus population. The UK was down to the Halifax to Toronto base. Central Mexico was far away. Natives were few.
And lets get back to the pattern. You have a lot of kids because you have a lot of food and few disease. Six kids per family was common, making it to adult hood. So take a village in say Eastern Tennessee in 1750 that has all the good land in production. Twenty five years later, you have 3 times as many families, so there is not enough land. But be it 25 or 100 miles west, you have open land of the same type. So every 15-25 years, you see about half the village move as a group west. Normally, entire extended families. Clans might be a good word. So up to several hundred people with perhaps 50 combat capable soldiers move west. Repeat. Such is the pattern of my family. If you look at a map, an realize that by the ARW, there were multiple counties west of the British control line, you will see how it was easy for about 1810 to have the population ready to cross the Mississippi. With lots of empty land, you skip more marginal land which will be settle latter. It is only after things start to fill up a bit, and we hit the more combat capable tribes that we get around to expelling the Cherokee. It was just not worth the effort with enough empty land.
Now IMO, what happens if you can fix the slavery issue and avoid the ACW, is that the USA keeps up this pattern. Another war for emptish land, purchasing land, or the Texas side solution will happen. My guess is we take Canada west of Ontario. The UK only had an army of 250K in the Napoleonic war. By 1860, the USA can field a million plus if we get mad. While people argue the UK would send the entire might of the empire to fight a long war, they will compromise. It can playout a lot of different ways, and some pretty odd ways, but the USA is larger. Maybe we keep Borneo. Maybe the Mosquito coast. Cuba is possible or another chunk of Mexico.
The problem for foreign powers is the same. The USA has many small free militias. Each of these village moving west is really a self supporting light infantry platoon or company. You can have hundreds of these family/military units moving in any given year. They have to be stopped by force, which is expensive, compared to the largely free USA forces. It is not that Mexico could not raise an army. It is that it is very expensive to keep many regiments of Mexicans soldiers in Texas. Or without ACW, in say the Baja. Same for the UK in the Great Plains or British Columbia. Same for Spain in Cuba. And for the families, they have strong motivation to move. They either take a huge cut in lifestyle by splitting the family farm 2-3 ways or they move to an open area. It is like water flowing across the land. And the problem for the UK is the RN can't cut off the flow.
It would be much like there being a way to get directly from Germany to South Africa via some Star Trek like technology. The UK would have never been able to hold South Africa. Add in some disease killing sub-Sahara blacks (lower the population by 90%), you end up with a big German/Dutch blob swallowing much of a continent. And there would be little that foreign powers could do to stop it.