The abolitionist movement's peak was significantly delayed due to the tragic deaths of Arthur and Lewis Tappan in the winter of 1832-33; thus, William Lloyd Garrison cannot help found the American Anti-Slavery Society in Dec. 1833 as OTL; this would have significant knock-on effects later.
The controversy over the Republic of Texas, and it's proposed admission as a U.S. state, still happened largely as OTL, except that William Henry Harrison was able to live for another 5 years after taking office; the Mexican-American War wouldn't happen exactly as it did IOTL, although Texas was still admitted. James Polk would narrowly become President in 1848(over Zachary Taylor, who succeeded Harrison but unlike OTL, he stuck to his original plan of just annexing the Oregon Country(California, contrary to popular belief, was an afterthought, and ITTL, Texas was already in the Union); Mexico was left alone, and Polk died in Nov. 1853.
However, the relative failure of Manifest Destiny did not prevent major problems from occurring in the U.S.-not in the least. By the 1850s, slavery was beginning to boom in the South, and, as the Free Soil movement had yet to successfully coalesce ITTL, slavery would eventually be able to extend into certain parts of Indiana by 1855, and Illinois was forced to allow slavery in certain of it's southern counties by order of the state Supreme Court in 1858-as a result, free men's working wages and rural employment began to suffer in both of these states.
During this time, William Walker, Lysander Spooner, and other filibusters would try to carve out their own holdings in the Western Hemisphere; some, like Walker, were pro-slavery and would happily accept annexation if it meant preserving slavery-others, however, such as Spooner, were anti-slavery and would prefer to be left alone unless slavery could be kept out of their territory.
But even here, there was resistance: During the latter half of the 1850s, a particularly radical group of abolitionists, and some allies(including a fair number of the remaining Mormons who didn't leave for Mexico's Lago Salado area), unhappy with a lack of progress, set up the Kansas Colony as a protest against what they saw as corruption and injustice run rampant in America; there were no restrictions on citizenship(even Native Americans may become citizens), and there were even provisions for equitable working conditions(for men, at least-women were discouraged, but not formally forbidden from working, as had begun to be the case in some Southern states). But it lasted only just over a decade before President Breckinridge, during his last year in office, sends in the Army to quell the "rebels"-by the end of 1870, the Kansas Colony is no more. New England, previously, had threatened to secede in 1865 over the growth of slavery, but the Yankees backed down, only after being promised that slavery would not be able to extend to their territory; Congress would sign a bill to that affect.
The death of the Kansas Colony, coupled with the forcing of slavery on Illinois and Indiana and the resulting negative effects on free men's wages, begins to cause some to question capitalism, and during the 1860s, Karl Marx's Das Kapital started to become a noticeable favorite amongst working class people, particularly amongst immigrants in the Northeast and some townsfolk in the territories; this worried the Northern elite, but the Southerners did not yet notice.....for now.
But not all hope was lost-in the increasingly muddled political climate of Mexico, several hundreds of thousands of Anglo-American seeking to avoid slavery had been, along with a few blacks, some Welsh and Italians, and even a small number of Chinese, were able to make their way to the Californias and the territories east of there between the Gold Rush of 1848 and the end of the 1860s. With the outbreak of the Mexican Civil War in 1871, the Californians decided that they wanted no part in the fighting and decided to break away from Mexico altogether, becoming a recognized independent country by 1875, the year the Mexican Civil War ended, as had New Mexico in 1874. The mostly Mormon settlers of the Great Basin, themselves feeling abandoned by Mexico, went the same way just three years after California; by 1884, Sonora, too, had left, taking the northern half of Chihuahua with it.
And the end of the Kansas War didn't bring any real lasting peace to the United States-indeed, they would soon face a new enemy.
While the U.S. was floundering, Canada was beginning to come on to the world stage-after a largely bloodless but still strongly nationalistic revolt, the country was allowed to become fully independent in 1848, provided that Newfoundland and the Maritimes be able to go their own way without interference-after a period of structuring and putting their government together, as well as gaining a population boost from immigrants(many of whom, particularly where the Irish and Italians are concerned, would have otherwise settled in America), the Confederation of Canada was formally created in 1862, and the last (formal) links with the British Crown were severed; initially formed with just Ontario and Quebec, the Maritime Colonies would join in 1866, with British Columbia being brought into the fold in 1869 as Cascadia.
Canada would be drawn into war with the United States in the fall of 1872 after it was discovered that Canadian abolitionists had been responsible for setting off a destructive slave revolt in Mississippi during the prior winter which resulted in the death of a son of Miss. Senator Jefferson Davis; President Andrew Johnson, although a moderate Democrat, still won the November elections handily riding on a wave of hawkish sentiment.
The war, however, did not at all go well for the U.S.-by the summer of 1874, mainly thanks to the resolve of the Canadian army & volunteer militias, the Americans had lost the Red River Valley, Upper Michigan, the Iron Triangle[in Hennepin-OTL's Minnesota], and a large chunk of northern Wisconsin, as well as the northern third of the Dakota Territory to the Canadians, particularly after two badly executed offensives in which tens of thousands of American men died fruitlessly(General George McClellan, who led the Maritime campaign, would commit suicide in October 1877, his reputation utterly ruined). Johnson took much of the blame for losing and resigned in Sept., 1874, and his successor, Vice President Salmon Chase, wasn't much more popular; only the likeability of steel magnate and one-time Senator from New York, Cornelius Vanderbilt, would save the Democrats at all.
Apart from Johnson's perceived failure, much derision also began to turn towards elements of society who had opposed the war, particularly immigrants and labor activists. And the bloody St. Louis Railroad Strike in August 1878 would only serve as a powderkeg for further violence & unrest down the road.
Around this time, the abolitionist movement began to increasingly couple themselves with labor activists as they began to find much in common, which greatly worried the elite on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line; this would only rapidly accelerate after all new territories were opened to slavery in 1881.
Between 1880 and 1884, riding a nearly unprecendented wave of fear, several states enacted laws that banned free blacks from their territory altogether, including even Pennsylvania and Nebraska where no slavery existed at the time; immigrants, particularly Italians and Frenchmen, were also targeted in many areas on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. And in many cases, these laws were coupled with anti-labor provisions, the harshest of which were almost always found in the Lower South, and in the occupied Nicaragua were uprisings had been a problem for some time.
All the while, as industrialization kept apace, the American worker continued to suffer an ever stagnant economic situation; and no worse was this problem evident than in the few urban centers of the South, where slave labor was not rarely used in industrial settings; although most slaves were not quite as efficient and slaves were algo rather often more prone to disobedience(and sabotage, etc.) than free workers, they did not have to be paid at all, which was seen as a huge benefit to those that engaged in it.....even as white workers found it even more difficult to gain meaningful employment than up North.
Things began to come to a head in January 1887 when a free mixed race woman named Joanna Micheaux shot and killed President Thomas Michaels while he was speaking to a crowd in New Armagh[OTL's Neenah], Wisconsin; she was executed three weeks later.
Upon revelations that Micheaux, the Hennepin-born daughter of a Quebecois fur trapper and a free black woman from Louisiana, had not only been involved in the "Underground Railroad", together with other free people of color, but was also a member of an anarcho-socialist group, the conservatives in Congress reacted harshly; by the end of 1888, proposed laws to restrict the movement of non-white citizens nationwide, as well as what were basically attacks on abolitionists and socialists, were already being circulated thru Congress. This wave would culminate in the Tillman-Stephens Act of 1892, which not only stripped full citizenship from the remaining free African-Americans and certain other groups(Latinos, sadly, also found themselves targeted, after having avoided large-scale persecution for decades), but even put African-Americans at risk for being enslaved for the most trivial offenses; some protests broke out in the Northeast and in the Far West, but they amounted to naught, and the bill became law in Feb., 1893.
But no amount of distraction could prevent people from noticing that the economy was starting to get deep into trouble; the expansion of slavery was not only increasingly putting free men out of work, it was also causing a huge financial bubble as speculation over land in particular, amongst other things, grew wildly out of control. The first signs of trouble came late in 1893 when a stock market panic gripped the country following reports that the boll weevil, long dreaded by cotton planters, had made it to Texas and southern Louisiana and was responsible for what had been a previously mysterious sudden cotton shortfall. The economy stabilized by 1895, but now it was becoming quite clear to many that slavery was endangering the stability of the U.S. economy in favor of the continued prosperity of a few.
In 1898, driven by peaking reactionary xenophobia(and very large doses of money from wealthy donors, many of them Southern planters), the conservatives in Congress forced through a bill which put a moratorium on all immigration coming to the U.S., with only the exception of approved refugees and those others who could sufficiently prove, in the opinions of authorities, that they were integratable(which would be a difficult task for many, sadly!). By this point, though, increasingly politically involved moderate and liberal sections of the American public were now convinced that these laws were mainly serving as distractions from the real problems which Americans faced-during the 1890s, support for both massive labor reforms and abolition began to rapidly climb as toleration of slavery fell apart in many areas of the country.
Fearing the increasingly possible prospect of an outright collapse of the American political system, many moderate members of the splintering Democratic Party and those in the dying Whigs came together to form the Populist Party in 1892; the Whigs would be gone by December of that year.
And after the Presidencies of William Bailey and Jeremiah Corbin failed to fix any problems, the Populist Party ticket of Lawrence Benton/Robert Bryan narrowly won election in 1900, over Arkansas Democrat Wade Hampton IV; Benton, a great nephew of Thomas H. Benton, a much loved Missouri governor some decades earlier, had campaigned on a ticket promising to both hold Revolutionaries at bay and to improve the lives of the working class.
The Populists, however, failed to get much done; Benton would die of a stroke in Feb. 1904 and Vice-President Bryan took his place. Bryan, although genuinely down to earth, was rather passive and had a difficult time even getting part of his agenda passed. He only really won the next election mainly thanks to the "sympathy vote" and essentially floundered during his second term; upon his exit from office, he would move to rural Oregon, where a sister of his owned a homestead.
By 1905, it was clear that the American system was in serious peril-rising from the final split in the Democratic Party the year prior, were the National Salvationists, a hardline rightist party which built itself on a platform of white supremacy, xenophobia, and agitation against labor interests. The Socialist Party, formed in 1892, would see it's first electoral votes cast in 1900, and they made a remarkable showing in 1904, winning all of New England and the states of Oregon and Washington as well.
The final straw came in 1907 when a second market panic rode through the United States; this time around, even the planters felt the effects of the emerging depression, although the hardest hit, of course, were the people of the working classes. Over the next year, hundreds of thousands of protestors hit the streets demanding change.....and those looking for revolution found their man: Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana.
Born in 1855[as in OTL], Debs had been a socialist from an early age[in our world, Debs did not become one until middle age] and was also involved in the Underground Railroad for a time, helping smuggle escaped slaves, often to Canada, and occasionally to one of the Western republics. He was first elected to the Indiana state senate in 1894, a position he held for over a decade prior to his 1908 Presidential run. Popular with both abolitionists and labor unionists, as well as immigrants who could still vote, Debs sought to fix what he saw as a completely broken American political system, and his oratory skills and passionate rhetoric helped win him many admirers.
But at the same time, the Socialists faced a challenge from the opposite end of the political spectrum: the National Salvation ticket of John Tillman, the ex-governor of Mississippi, and publisher Alexander Vallandigham of Virginia.
Meanwhile, the Democrats nominated Michael Parker, a former Congressman from Ohio, coupled with James Mifflin, one of Oregon's two currently seated Senators, while the Populists refused to renominate the incumbent President Bryan and chose Joel Bradley, the former governor of Wyoming, and currently seated Congressman Gregory Davidson of New Hampshire instead.
This race was, as many commentators argued, the most heated contest since 1824-and despite Debs coming out in first amongst the popular vote, no clear winner emerged in the Electoral College, forcing a deadlock. But to the horror of many, the third place finishers, the National Salvationists, had somehow managed to win enough House votes to gain the White House, despite having only one state outside the South[Nebraska, where they only won 27% of the vote]. President Tillman quickly turned out to be every bit the authoritarian that many leftists and centrists had feared, and even went so far as to allow political prisoners to be sold into slavery in Southern plantations, amongst other thngs.
And after the essentially completely fraudulent election of 1912, when Tillman announced that no more elections would be held until the "pernicious race-mixing, Satan worshipping, cannabis-smoking Communists" were dealt with, it sent the United States into a final death spiral.
On the night of December 7, 1912, Communist radicals, many of them immigrants or the sons(and daughters) of immigrants, staged protests & revolts in New York City, Chicago, New Berlin[OTL Milwaukee, WI], Douglas[OTL Omaha], Philadelphia, Nebraska, and Detroit, and quickly overpowered local law enforcement in all cases-they then telegraphed their demands to President Tillman; he and his Vice-President were to step down, apologize to the American people, and retire from politics altogether. He instead sent in the Army, with orders to shoot anyone in defiance of law & order, armed or not; the next day, more protests and riots broke out, and even tens of thousands of enlisted men, along with a number of officers began to desert their posts. That very same day, the governors of all of the states of New England, as well as Oregon, Idaho, Washington, New Jersey and Wisconsin declared that Tillman's administration was illegimate, and, therefore, they could not comply with his orders; thus, the American Civil War was begun....
As of the spring of 1916, both Tillman and Vallandigham were dead-executed as the revolutionaries drove into Washington, D.C. in November of 1915-and the Socialists had taken over most of America, with the exception of much of the South which would fight for another few years.
Nevertheless, by 1919, the old America was gone. The President Pro-Tem of the Senate, Populist Henry Matthews from Illinois, would oversee end of slavery before he turned the keys to the White House over to Eugene Debs, whom many considered to be the rightful winner of the 1908 elections. On May 9th, 1919, the United Socialist States of America was formally created, with Debs as the first President of the new Union.....