AHC: tip the balance of power in favour of Slave States

Another potential PoD:

In 1805 the Governor of the Indiana Territory William Henry Harrison attempted to push through legislation to legalise slavery in the territory. Legalising slavery in the Northwest Ordinance had been a project of his for a while as he thought it would encourage settlement and make the territories more economically viable. Earlier that year he, along with the Indiana Territory Representative Benjamin Parke, had lobbied Congress to temporarily suspect article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance which prohibited slavery as well as give the territories the right to choose whether or not to legalise slavery (I have seen conflicting accounts of whether they were successful). When Congress granted the Indiana Territory its own elected legislature in 1805 there was only a single anti-slavery candidate elected. Harrison's proposed Bill to legalise slavery was blocked by the representatives due to a disagreement over establishing a separate Illinois territory which Harrison was staunchly opposed to (although would eventually happen when those representatives lobbied Congress directly). Now lets say that during this time the legislation passes, either due to the representatives dropping their demand for a separate territory or Harrison deciding to support them, and as a result slavery is legalised in what was basically the western half of the Northwest Ordinance. Because of this there's much more southern migration into this/these territories and as a result Indiana and Illinois have a chance to be incorporated as Slave States or revert to Slave States down the line (as Illinois attempted to do I believe).
 
Make the North have slaves too, suddenly the Northern resources are an asset. What would these slaves be used for?

Household servants and what farmers. I thought wheat was not great for slavery, but someone claimed it was done.

To meet the challenge, the North must love slavery. Since they would not be needed for economic reasons (no one needs household servants), then they must love slavery for ideological reasons. A 1740s POD that doesn't butterfly the revolution should do nicely.
 
Does that have to be bad news for the South? Would poor immigrant communities want free Blacks to be able to move north and compete with them for jobs?

In OTl the resistance was to the expansion of slavery into the North. No one really cared about it continuing in the South and this had a lot to do with it. Lincoln would have let them keep their slaves forever.

But if we look at the South, the states that rebelled all had a large slave owning population. With free population growing faster than slaves, fewer freemen are going to own slaves. Support will drop until it becomes like in the Upper South- a quaint relic. Slavery was dead in Delaware, Missouri, Maryland and western Virginia and North Carolina and Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.

The areas of large slave populations was falling fast
 
In OTl the resistance was to the expansion of slavery into the North. No one really cared about it continuing in the South and this had a lot to do with it. Lincoln would have let them keep their slaves forever.

But if we look at the South, the states that rebelled all had a large slave owning population. With free population growing faster than slaves, fewer freemen are going to own slaves. Support will drop until it becomes like in the Upper South- a quaint relic. Slavery was dead in Delaware, Missouri, Maryland and western Virginia and North Carolina and Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.

The areas of large slave populations was falling fast

Yet even Delaware clung stubbornly onto it right through to 1865.

Having fewer slaves does not imply readiness to abolish. After all, if the Blacks should cease to be slaves, what would their status be? As racial equality was unthinkable, wouldn't they have to stay in at least de facto slavery, whether it went on being callled that or not?
 
Make the North have slaves too, suddenly the Northern resources are an asset. What would these slaves be used for?

Household servants and what farmers. I thought wheat was not great for slavery, but someone claimed it was done.

To meet the challenge, the North must love slavery. Since they would not be needed for economic reasons (no one needs household servants), then they must love slavery for ideological reasons. A 1740s POD that doesn't butterfly the revolution should do nicely.

The north did have slaves IOTL, mostly in New York (the tobacco plantations).

Slavery_in_the_13_colonies.jpg

The number of slaves in 1770 (yes, Maryland and Delaware are very wonky).

Possibly New York and maybe New Jersey remain slave states, because reasons. I just don't see the rest of the north doing so, because of economic and religious reasons. For the slave states to stay dominant, the POD needs to be before independence.
 
Yet even Delaware clung stubbornly onto it right through to 1865.

Having fewer slaves does not imply readiness to abolish. After all, if the Blacks should cease to be slaves, what would their status be? As racial equality was unthinkable, wouldn't they have to stay in at least de facto slavery, whether it went on being callled that or not?


They might cling to it but the thread is about expanding slave owner power. That power was almost gone in Delaware and it was weak in those areas where slavery was weak. Its not just the status of the freedmen, its compensation to the slave owner

Little Known fact: There were still slaves in New Jersey in 1865

It was not until 1846 that New Jersey abolished slavery, but it qualified it by redefining former slaves as apprentices who were "apprenticed for life" to their masters.[18][21] Slavery did not truly end in the state until it was ended nationally in 1865 after the American Civil War and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_New_Jersey

but again, the question is about expanding slave owner power not keeping some vestiges of slavery. The latter can last for a long time through inertia but for the institution to thrive, the number of people owning slaves must rise

 
Make the North have slaves too, suddenly the Northern resources are an asset. What would these slaves be used for?

Household servants and what farmers. I thought wheat was not great for slavery, but someone claimed it was done.

To meet the challenge, the North must love slavery. Since they would not be needed for economic reasons (no one needs household servants), then they must love slavery for ideological reasons. A 1740s POD that doesn't butterfly the revolution should do nicely.

Slaves would be quite useful for factory work. Butterfly away the spread of abolitionist sentiment in the North until after the area had started industrialising in earnest, and you might well get factory owners shipping in slaves to man their factories, leading to the institution becoming too economically entrenched to easily get rid of.
 
Slaves would be quite useful for factory work. Butterfly away the spread of abolitionist sentiment in the North until after the area had started industrialising in earnest, and you might well get factory owners shipping in slaves to man their factories, leading to the institution becoming too economically entrenched to easily get rid of.

Factory work is too late, the abolitionist sentiment is there before the industrial revolution. We need to find our POD make the North love slavery beforehand. That's why I suggested these small scale things, the slaves wouldn't be essential to the economy, but the ideology of racism can be sufficiently entrenched.
 
The reality is that slavery ended in the north functionally long before it was abolished because it simply was not economically competitive. The numbers of slaves in the Upper South was decreasing in the decades before the ACW not because folks in Virginia, North Carolina or Tennessee were becoming more abolitionist, but because slavery was becoming uneconomic. Unless you have a Draka like society, especially as you industrialize, slave labor is less efficient and uneconomic. For crops like corn and wheat, as you have more mechanized (horse powered) machinery you don't need the sort of permanent slave population on your farm you need if you are doing rice, cotton, or tobacco.
 
The reality is that slavery ended in the north functionally long before it was abolished because it simply was not economically competitive. The numbers of slaves in the Upper South was decreasing in the decades before the ACW not because folks in Virginia, North Carolina or Tennessee were becoming more abolitionist, but because slavery was becoming uneconomic. Unless you have a Draka like society, especially as you industrialize, slave labor is less efficient and uneconomic. For crops like corn and wheat, as you have more mechanized (horse powered) machinery you don't need the sort of permanent slave population on your farm you need if you are doing rice, cotton, or tobacco.
That's oversimplifying things to the point of inaccuracy. Slavery was more limited in the north because there was a limited supply of slaves imported into the US of A at all. In circumstances where the number of slaves is limited, the supply of slaves is naturally going to move to the most profitable use. That doesn't mean that other uses are unprofitable in comparison to free labour, it means that slaveowners cannot compete with other slaveowners.

For instance, there were parts of the North where slavery was still in place and profitable right up until the time it was abolished for political, not economic reasons, such as New York in wheat plantations along the Hudson, and also slavery in New Jersey. Where slavery was legal, the use of slaves in crops such as wheat remained proftiable right up to the ACW (eg in Virginia).

To answer the original question in this thread, the way to tip the balance in favour of slave states would be to muck about with how long slaves are permitted to be imported into the USA. The compromise constitutional position was to have the international slave trade permitted to operate for 20 years. In that twenty-year window, a large number of slaves were imported into the USA. If the compromise had been reached for a thirty-year window instead of twenty, a much larger number of slaves would have been imported, strengthening slavery both within existing states and, as a side-effect, tipping the balance in favour of some states which flirted with legalising slavery in OTL but failed, such as Indiana and Illinois.
 
It might have a minor effect but won't address the root of the problem. The free population is growing much faster than the slave population. This is because the free population grows by births and immigration while slaves have to be born. The slavers need to bring that back into balance. They can either import more slaves or restrict immigrants

It more than that - the white immigrant population went mainly to the free states. In 1860, New York had over 4 times as many immigrants as all 11 states that would form the Confederacy. Pennsylvania or Ohio or Illinois or Wisconsin or Massachusetts each had more immigrants than all 11 states that would form the Confederacy.
 
So one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Slave Power is the end of the slave trade and the increasing scarcity of slaves. So how can this be prevented? Ideally without going all the way back to the constitution?

IOTL the US prohibited the slave trade in 1807 at the earliest time that the Constitution permitted, although enforcement of the ban wouldn't always be effectively enforced, and had made several restrictions on it beforehand effectively limiting the trade to foreign vessels. How plausible is it to delay or prevent this? Say that my earlier suggestion that the Indiana Territories legalise slavery goes through and Congress follows this up by suspending the prohibition on slavery in the Northwest Ordinance for 10-20 years for the purpose of promoting settlement and economic development. As a result, when the prohibition on the Slave Trade is being debated they decide to push back the date of it coming into effect by 5-10 years, or water it down in some way, in order to encourage slave-owners to settle in the ordinance by keeping the cost low.

Alternatively would it be possible for the US to reopen the slave trade down the line? I know that some of the fire-eaters suggested doing that, but I'm under the impression that was more to piss off the North and they wouldn't have been in a position to do it even if they were serious.

One idea I have is to critically undermine British attempts to prohibit the slave trade, due to them becoming entangled in continental affairs and thus having to scale back and later abandon the blockade of Africa due to the costs, which means that the slave trade is able to de facto reassert itself due to American unwillingness to take up the slack eventually leading to the slave trade being formally reintroduced.
 
I'm also wondering what possible effect preventing the Tariff of Abominations and the Panic of 1837 might have on Slave Power? The former was, or was at least seen as, benefiting the North at the expense of the South whilst the later, although it did affect all of the states to varying degrees, was devastating for the South. If we imagine a timeline where the tariff is never implemented and the US maintains a more free trade oriented policy as well as having the charter for the Bank of the United States renewed instead of vetoed, which may provide a more reliable response to the Crisis, then as a result there are a number of things that could happen.

Firstly, it would prevent the nullification crisis and the threat of South Carolina seceding, which was arguable a precursor to the Confederate Secession.

Secondly, it would strengthen the South economically at the expense of the North (bonus points if this leads to a Northern nullification crisis of sorts), which in turn could lead to somewhat redressing the balance of immigrants between the North and the South.

Thirdly, with a more prosperous South slave-owners would have access to more capital and would thus be willing to invest into new areas, such as setting up new plantations in the territories, which in turn means more pro-slavery settlers in the west.
 
Instead of adding new states, divide new territory between the original 13. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia have favorable geographical positions for acquiring more land (and by extension getting more population as white settlers seek out land in the west). This population growth (plus 3/5ths compromise and electoral college) allows those states to maintain control of the federal government indefinitely.
 
What I never understood is why the South always wanted to have at least as many slave states than free states. This seems logical on the face of it, but in fact it doesn't make sense.

As @Fiver pointed out, most of these new slave states had actually no slaves at all, and would become free states as soon as possible.
 
-Indiana territorial representative Benjamin Parke succeeds in legalizing slavery there
-Little Egypt (Southern Illinois) uses famine which garnered its nickname to extract concessions towards pro-slavery views in state constitution
-Southern states become more aggressive about western settlement and push harder into Missouri and Texas
-Texas divides into 5 states
-Cuba taken by filibuster
-Senate passes amended Guadalupe Hidalgo treaty with Baja California, Sonora, and Chihuahua in US hands
-Gadsden Purchase nabs Tamapulias, Coahuila, and Nuevo Leon
-Arizona territory organized earlier
 
The reason for the desire for equal slave and free states has to do with the US Senate. The House of Representatives is based on population, and even with the 3/5 clause (a slave counted as 3/5 of a person for purposes of House seats) the free states had a larger population and therefore representatives than the slaves states and this trend was continuing to increase the gap. Sure, some of the "free" representatives were Democrats and more likely to be sympathetic to the south, but this was not a guarantee. On the other hand, each state has two senators no matter the population. By keeping the number of free and slave states equal it meant that slave senators would always be 50%, which gave them an ability to hold up any legislation they did not like. Assuming you have a slave state friendly president and you have some legislation passed the slave states don't like, the odds of the Senate getting enough defection from slave state senators to override the veto (2/3 needed) are slim. Of course, there is nothing to prevent a state admitted as a slave state later doing away with slavery - and when that happened the senators from that state are unlikely to be in lockstep with the deep south.

The unsolved problem for the slave states was how to ensure that a state admitted as a slave state did not go free at some time in the future.
 
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