Alternate American Civil War?

So, as we all know, the American Civil War was rather odd in that the southern states sought to break away from the Union into their own country, making it more a rebellion than anything else. So, would it have been possible, with a reasonable POD (sometime in the 1850s?), to have a civil war in which the southern states simply wish to fight to reform the government more to their liking? Like, perhaps, force Lincoln out of office and put their own president in his spot?
 

nooblet

Banned
So, as we all know, the American Civil War was rather odd in that the southern states sought to break away from the Union into their own country, making it more a rebellion than anything else. So, would it have been possible, with a reasonable POD (sometime in the 1850s?), to have a civil war in which the southern states simply wish to fight to reform the government more to their liking? Like, perhaps, force Lincoln out of office and put their own president in his spot?

There is no way the South is going to accept coexistence with the North. The goal was always for the South to impose its will on the North, and re-unite the country under the CSA.
 
There is no way the South is going to accept coexistence with the North. The goal was always for the South to impose its will on the North, and re-unite the country under the CSA.

This is very dubious. Some secessionists in 1860-1 did hope to make the CSA the basis for a "new" United States (the provision of the Confederate Constitution allowing the admission of new states could theoretically open the door for this) but Davis (though many Confederate radicals worried that he was a closet "reconstructionist") closed the door to any such possibility in his inauguration speech http://books.google.com/books?id=nclUO7ZPoGgC&pg=PA39 arguing that a nation needed homogeneity for unity and that without an essential similarity among the states, antagonisms would develop which "must and should result in separation."

There is simply no way that the North, which greatly outnumbered the South in population, could have been conquered, converted to slavery, and accepted as members of the CSA. The most the South could have hoped for was the creation of a "Northwest Confederacy" that would make a separate peace with the CSA, as I discuss at https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/0-Sfu4em7-s/nmB3jEoT5YMJ but even this was never a realistic possibility.
 
There's always the "Rebel North" topic where the North secedes against an increasingly anti-abolitionist US government.

That's where the "Rivers of War" book series was going before it died. A Southern dominated Federal government leads to the North rebelling under the claim of state's rights.
 
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