California split?

JJohnson

Banned
For the timeline I'm writing I'm trying to change things up a bit and am debating whether to split California or not into 2 states. In this timeline, the US does grab Baja, Sonora, Chihuahua, and the Republic of the Rio Grande. Should I leave OTL California and have the Baja California as its own state (with perhaps San Diego as its capital)? Or divide California at 36°30' to continue the Missouri Compromise line?
 
If you divide California along the Missouri compromise line then you will have problems with getting enough water for the new southern state. That could hurt its growth. Looking at the current canals and water system, I always liked the idea of just chopping off the two southernmost counties of California which are San Diego and Imperial and adding them to the entire Baja peninsula for a new state. The population of the new Southern California would be centered around the San Diego-Tijuana metro area, with a total state population of about 7.3 million based on the people there today. There would still be something like the All-American canal for their water, while the northern state will still have the water from the Central Valley, and the Colorado River Aqueduct. You'd just eliminate the Coachella canal.
 
On a very related note, is it possible that California as it is may had been splitted, and how?


There was a movement in California in 1859 to detach the southern "cow counties" from the state and make them a "Territory of Colorado." This has often been seen simply as a pro-slavery move, because any such territory would be slave territory under the *Dred Scott* decision (and the idea of division was backed by the pro-Southern "Chivalry" wing of the state Democratic party) but the Hispanic southern Californian politicians who promoted the idea were probably less interested in introducing slavery than in augmenting their own political power and not having to pay state taxes, from which they felt they were getting very little benefit. However, there was little chance that the US House of Representatives, controlled by Republicans by this time, would assent to such a division.
 
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