What would it take/Is it possible for the states north of the Mason-Dixon line, along with the states around the Great Lakes to leave the Union in the 1850s onwards?
What would it take/Is it possible for the states north of the Mason-Dixon line, along with the states around the Great Lakes to leave the Union in the 1850s onwards?
Maybe if, instead of adding on more free than slave states, they added on more slave states to the union, leading to the north being angry about the number of slave states, and wanting to succeed
Not really. What reason would they have to leave?
I think that this is why its a AHC
Okay, the standard go-to is a stronger Dredd-Scott decision that effectively overwrites anti-slave clauses in the free states. I'm really not sure how likely this is, however, without some significant changes to the American political culture.
What you really need is a way for the Northern states to feel like a persecuted minority within the Federal government. Perhapse something to keep the northern electorate splintered between multiple parties rather than coalescing into the Republican Party, so the Southern Dems dominate the government even more.
But the Northern states made up a majority of the population. It's a bit tough to feel like a persecuted minority when you have most of the wealth, all of the immigrants, and most of the industry. The 1860 election demonstrated this quite clearly, when Lincoln was elected without winning a single state south of the Mason Dixon Line. New York alone had more people than the entire Deep South combined.
I'm sorry, Alabama, it's just not working out...
Best,
I can't imagine the North *as a whole* seceding. What I can just barely see is a serious secession movement in some of the more antislavery Northern states if the Republicans are defeated in 1860. (Say, the election goes into the House and Breckinridge is elected, or a deadlock in the House leads to Lane, as the vice-president chosen by the Senate, becoming president.) The feeling will grow among some northern antislavery men that the "slave power" in alliance with northern "doughfaces" will always dominate the Union, and such sentiment grows further if the administration gets the US into a war in Mexico or the Caribbean, or if the Supreme Court seems to be moving toward legalizing slavery in the North by recognizing the slaveholders' right to "transit or sojourn" with their human "property." *Even then* I think most antislavery Northerners will hope for one last chance to set things right in 1864.
While northern disunionism was not limited to Garrisonians--some other antislavery men occasionally at least toyed with it--it was certainly a minority view, even among Radicals. Consider the views of Massachusetts Radical Henry Wilson (later Vice-President under Grant) when asked to support an 1857 "Disunion Convention" at Worcester: he advised the convention to "leave all the impotent and puerile threats against the Union to the Southern slave propagandists..." http://books.google.com/books?id=Wl38uYb85DgC&pg=PA141 But that was after the Republicans had in 1856 made a strong showing for a new party, and could hope for victory in 1860. If that hoped is dashed, things could change....
Exactly. If 80% of the country is leaving, then it's not secession, it's expelling the other 20%.
Unlike secessionist sentiment in the South, talk of secession in the North was limited to a tiny fringe of radicals. And honestly, people in the North just cared less about slavery. It didn't matter to them whether it was legal or not, because they were never going to own slaves. For the vast majority of northerners, it wasn't worth it to leave the country just because some southerners insisted on keeping human beings as property.