Map-provoked musings
Looking at the map, aside from the general satisfaction I get from a beautiful map well done (and it better be, it took a long time to download! But it is!
) one of the first things I notice is, no cities are shown on it. Just as well, best not to tie Dathi's hands. A very important town at this stage might wind up being eclipsed over later generations and someplace not even mentioned yet turn out to be the new center.
First of all I do feel my assumption that Montreal will be the Big Maple of North America is reinforced. It's the obvious terminus of seaborne trade going up the Saint Lawrence itself of course. Now consider New England. It's a member of the Delian League. I figure the League must from time to time facilitate adjustments meant to deliberately throw opportunities the way of members that otherwise might, in a straight and simple competition, lose out, otherwise the loser members might reconsider their membership. So I do expect that a certain amount of trade ultimately originating in or destined for Canada will route through New England, and a certain amount of industrial development that might more naturally happen in Canada itself will be fostered there instead. Not without the New Englanders working hard to make these things happen of course, but assuming they are enterprising and energetic, Canada and NE will have a certain reciprocity. However, looking at the border with the USA, NE trade headed for Canada will funnel north, right toward Montreal, until and unless US relations improve so much that cutting across NY will seem safe and not a matter of feeding the enemy. But I expect channels, which I believe we've already seen described as being laid, northward from the NE coastal areas to Montreal will deepen and widen--canals, railroads, eventually surface highways. Montreal is clearly the queen city of the entire northeast.
The USA on the other hand, if it doesn't make a remarkably quick 180 degree turn and start obsequiously courting Canadian-British-Delian friendship, will be discouraged from investing too much in that dangerous angle. New York state, I suspect, and still more NYC, is in for eclipse. We've already been told Philadelphia revives as the financial center; to me that implies it will be a center of a lot of other stuff too, and on the Yankee side Pennsylvania in general will be the leading industrial state.
Sea traffic bound for the USA is going to be diverted past NY to the Chesapeake, much of it headed right up to the headwaters meaning near Philly, but Washington DC may redeem the hopes of George Washington and others and become a major commercial and industrial center in its own right as well as being the national capital. Meanwhile, I daresay the entire Chesapeake region will commercialize and industrialize beyond OTL levels, unless the general stagnation of the USA keeps that as modest or even less developed than OTL--but if it does, the whole country will be mired very deeply indeed in depression, and I expect the Chesapeake to be second only to Pennsylvania, at however high or low a level that is. So basically Virginia and Maryland will be among the industrial core states along with Penn.
The question of just what would happen to the deep South and the slavery issue is a very wide open one that it's up to Dathi to resolve. Consider though that while the world (especially Britain but also France and other European markets) is hungry for cotton, in addition to alternative sources to Dixie Britain and the rest of Europe had access to OTL, such as Egypt, BNA has for some time included Louisiana, Spanish Florida might be able to supply some of the demand, and so might Tejas and perhaps Rio Bravo. Of all these regions only Louisiana overlaps the traditional "cotton belt" I believe, but I daresay crops can be grown outside of that belt. Britain's anti-slavery stance as of midcentury of OTL can only be made firmer by the various commitments in North America made ITTL--to forbid enslavement of Louisianan Africans and to watch out for the interests of refugee ex-slaves in Florida, thus recruiting the exodus from slavery into de facto (and often, official) militias to defend the borders of the realm. If nevertheless the Delian League countenances the purchase and traffic in slave-grown US cotton, that trade must funnel through either Louisiana or Florida, or be expensively hauled over the mountains to ports on the Chesapeake. (Well, in Georgia and Alabama and the Carolinas, the option does exist to ship it directly from Atlantic ports there too--Alabama's having to be hauled by RR east, the more natural trade route for that state, and of course Mississippi, being down to the Gulf, across the rival borders. Alabama could only consider the eastern route for overriding political reasons and at great cost and I think it would be just out of the question for Mississippi to do it no matter how strong political feelings run.) Either Britain or Spain will thus get a cut in what profits there are to be had in selling Dixie cotton (or other products the South might propose to sell on the world market), the planters will get less, the northeastern (ie OTL Middle Atlantic states) merchant elite will get a shrunken share or be cut out the deal completely. Even if Britain and thus the Delian members generally were oblivious to the moral issues of buying US plantation products (as long as slavery is legal) the basic geopolitics of the marketplaces and routes cuts sharply into the OTL role of "King Cotton" in the USA. Since I don't expect the British to be oblivious, especially not local officials more or less answerable to local settlements of recently escaped slaves and their children and grandchildren, (a diaspora that fought creditably for the Empire in fighting for themselves, twice now in living memory) some land that ecologically speaking is prime land for such exports as cotton will simply languish uncultivated (Mississippian in particular) or crops that are not notoriously grown by slaves will take over because these can be sold over the borders--if the British are diligent, they'll make sure that they aren't in fact slave-grown.
Also, the slavers will feel an even tighter pinch than OTL on the supply side of slavery--while I believe that by mid-century the supply of foreign-born slaves had largely been cut off, here it can only exist as a desperate trickle if at all. They are stuck with their existing stock of American-born slaves, who will have very dangerously uppity notions from the slaveholder's fearful viewpoint in view of the numerous and relatively nearby refuges they can hope to reach if they run.
So the potential profits of slavery are being throttled, the cost of slaveholding is rising...
You know, Douglas Adams once characterized the personalities of various nations, and he compared the USA (of his lifetime, OTL, mind) to a sullen teenager. Here, it's a sullen, very angry teenager still smarting from a few recent beatings. I share in hopes it may snap out of it yet, but in the meantime, I would not dare to predict the trajectory of race relations in the USA of this timeline. Only that the subject is charged up to a very high voltage.
Anyway the stagnation of the slave economy helps perhaps to offset the obvious dominance Dixie has based on a glance at the map or a count of electoral votes. It could be that what immigration the USA gets settles mainly in the North, in Pennsylvania and Virginia and Maryland, or in Ohio.
Or maybe the South extracts itself from the tailspin it is in by backing away from slavery. I think, in view of the very strained relations between the races there, often slaves will be freed and then encouraged to emigrate--not back to Africa, but right over the border to Florida or Louisiana. Perhaps quite a few will stay anyway, perhaps Southern society will transition over through tolerance to acceptance to inclusion of descendants of slaves as core Americans. (That would only be logical after all!) But I suspect that both for reasons of domestic bigotry and to be really convincing to skeptical foreign buyers answerable to Delian purchase guidelines that their products really aren't slave-grown, what agriculture there is in the South will be white-grown to a much greater degree than OTL. So maybe the South will become culturally more like the OTL Western states in certain respects, and politics will be less a matter of elite dominance and more a matter of a Free-Soiler like yeoman myth, leading to future progressive-style reformism not as massively distorted by racial apartheid as OTL--if only perhaps because the South practices "Grand Apartheid" and drives its African children right out. Into waiting and welcoming British or Spanish arms!
If I hope for the best for the USA, especially the South, I hope that the trends do not in fact drive the freedmen out but rather to an early and relatively peaceful emancipation movement that leaves the freed people free to acquire southwestern (this is the Old Southwest we are talking about and now the USA's only Southwest) land and buy in to an agricultural renaissance. So by sheer demography Dixie does wind up dominating the Union, but it is a Dixie of the softest dreams of the Civil Rights movement, black and white together.
That's my hope for the best. I don't count on it. But if it goes nearly as dark as we can imagine, the Africans have refuges where they can survive, rally, even push back from. And if they are driven out, the South will be much poorer in labor, though still pretty rich in good land.
Clearly Dixie is on a cusp, and with it the Union, and I won't predict which way it goes, only that whatever does happen will be precipitous and dramatic.
Turning to the other side of the border I've been talking about though, I'm pretty optimistic about both Louisiana and Florida, as I've already indicated at considerable length above and don't need to repeat here! Again a map-focused observation is, both Louisiana and Florida break up into obvious regions where the African diaspora will tend to concentrate. In Florida it will be West Florida, which OTL and even in this timeline is only weakly garrisoned by Spaniards, but is the obvious stopping place for slaves who have just made it over the border. It's land of a type that slaves local to the Spanish border area would be familiar with, and if the Spanish are even halfway astute and have some confidence of retaining the effective loyalty of these refugees and their children, they will encourage them to settle right there along the US border. Train them into militias, arm them, authorize them to protect themselves and to fall in with orders if things blow up with the USA again. And meanwhile there they are, the people whose physical work created the wealth the Cotton Kings claimed, knowing how to farm, how to build, and hungry and ambitious for the prospects of dignity and respect freedom brings them.
Nope, we just might not get a lot of white settlers in West Florida--and we won't miss them, we have these fine African-Americans to build a country of their own with no overseer looking over their shoulder but the stark necessity of protecting and caring for themselves.
That's West Florida, a region OTL that is amazingly thinly settled in its eastern reaches--look at a night view of Earth from space sometime, at the settlement patterns limned by city lights. The northeast corner of the Gulf of Mexico appears to reach almost to the Atlantic coast! I'm not sure why that is, but I think it underscores the point that South Florida, the peninsula that is, is a different world than West Florida--the OTL Panhandle plus the outlets of Alabama and Mississippi onto the Gulf.
If the Spanish do revive, and either send out more emigrants to colonize themselves or settle Europeans from other sources in their possession, I suspect South Florida will be where they will go. And meanwhile, what about Cuba? OTL slavery continued there very long into the 19th century--here although Spain is not I think a formal Delian League member, that's the direction they are being pulled in. Abolition of slavery in Cuba is going to be on the agenda, or Spain will be on a collision course both with Britain and those valuable ex-slaves garrisoning the US frontier for them.
I suspect the upshot will be, peninsular Florida will be drawn into a similar orbit to emancipated Cuba, and West Florida will be a very distinctive place.
One that will have a lot in common with the southernmost part of Louisiana, the delta country and New Orleans and its immediate hinterland--I suspect New Orleans will become an increasingly African-run as well as African-populated region--non-Africans will of course be prominent there as well, but there will be no question, in southern Louisiana, of African inferiority.
Going north from there on the other hand, the Principality claims a lot of land that is basically sparsely settled by anyone, where native peoples will come to terms and receive some priority and protection, and otherwise will look a lot like Canadian land, open to European settlers. Who had better learn to be at least tolerant of dark-skinned people of various origins to be sure! But as with Spanish Florida, I expect a sharp demographic polarization, with the Africans living mainly on the river itself across from where they escaped from, or gravitating down it south to swell up New Orleans or perhaps migrate to West Florida.
So in general the African diaspora will tend to cut across national boundaries and define an alternative power center, and there will be many regions where without any doubt they will advance to fill all social roles exactly comparable to white people, indeed dominant in their own spheres, and this will pose sharp challenges to any reactionary slaveholding or just racially domineering regimes out there. In places where OTL the African diaspora had technical legal equality but was held down anyway, here they have both examples to look up to and allies to call on, and no nation-state that repressively tries to close their borders to this influence will be favored by the Delian powers--if they don't provoke open intervention by Britain directly, they will be wide open to subversive, revolutionary filibustering.
Turning my eyes westward--well I don't know what to make of Mexico's realistic prospects as opposed to the fizzy fantasies I was indulging in upthread. But looking at the British/Mexican border zones in the Rocky Mountain areas, I think I may have written off Reno (here, Reno, California!) too easily. I would like to see a map of the good railroad routes that are most doable remaining over that northern border, but no matter how they meander, I think they'd come into the Great Basin considerably south of the latitude of the confluence of the Columbia and Williamette rivers where I speculatively sited upthread in place of Portland, a city called Vancouver. The Oregon country will indeed still be the prime first destination--but British California goes so far east, I do believe a branch headed for Donner Pass by way of Washoe and Tahoe as was so highly favored OTL can completely skirt Mexican territory and still hold to an optimal route. In other words, that same railroad I live next to will exist, and soon, and between the Gold Rush and California's generally glittering prospects, will soon equal if not supplant the Oregon branch of the route. San Francisco and the Central Valley and the coastlands down to the Mexican border will be a major focus of settlement, soon, and when the railroad comes through I think it will first favor this OTL favored route rather than attempt the daunting challenges of a coastwise "spur" (ever driven up the US 101 to Humboldt County and beyond? There's this place called "Confusion Hill," and the railroad company has given up repairing the parts that keep getting washed out) or even driving up from Oregon's twisty southern inland valleys past Yreka and Mt Shasta--sure that will be a major route eventually, to complete the circuit, but I believe initially it will radiate out from a point northwest of Salt Lake (in Mexico, but barely) across the basin directly to California on one line and to Oregon on another.
As for Oregon, I suspect the center of gravity of settlement will start out at the Portland/Speculative Vancouver site, but gradually the Puget Sound area will draw off more and more settlement and eventually eclipse, or at any rate balance, the original Oregonian core. Assuming that is that relations with the Indians there are not so good, from the Indian point of view anyway, that settlement is massively impeded.
----I feel I should try to fill in some more speculative development and try to summarize it all, but also that I've gone on more than long enough and there's room and time later. Most of all, I want to see where Dathi really wants to take all this.
If I'm going to be scrappy about anything, it would be the renaissance of the African diaspora, at least in Louisiana and West Florida themselves. To be sure, the more successful these zones are, the more leverage that gives African-Americans to settle and prosper wherever they might feel like going, so it wouldn't be just a Gulf Coast homeland--and with that kind of broad success, plenty of other people would be attracted there too and even these diasporan heartlands might not be majority-African. I suspect people of African descent will be well integrated all across BNA, and if the USA gets its head screwed on right they will be there too, especially in their whilom exilic land of bondage but now their long home, Dixieland.
