Civil war delayed by 10 years

how about a 9 year delay, so it coincides with the franco-prussian war?

that could ad some interesting political twists

If there is a Franco-Prussian War.

It occurs to me that if there's no ACW going on, Napoleon III won't be able to install Maximilian in Mexico. So unless he finds another throne before 1870 (and the supply is limited) he'll then be an obvious choice for the throne of Spain. So no Hohenzollern candidature and probably no FPW, unless it can be triggered by something else.
 
It wouldn't even be a civil war.

Just a bunch of hicks causing trouble and then put down by the US.

I honestly think that's a pretty good summary of the scenario. The longer the Civil War is delayed the less of a fight it will be. Ten years is enough that the largest war possible will still resemble the Canadian rebellions more than OTL's Civil War.
 
The ACW was hardly the first total war, there had already been plenty of wars in which the civilian population was a legitimate target and saw the mobilisation of all resources for the war effort.

Civilians have been targeted since the Old Stone Age. That wasn't my point. But I am curious as to what war you would see pre-ACW as one that involved the full mobilization of all resources, the entire economy, and populace?

Not sure I follow. Afaics, slaves in transit will be recoverable if they do a runner, as they would be had they fled from a Slave to a Free State, but I don't really see why Lemmon would take that much more enforcing than the FSL did.

It's hardly going to bring slaves into the North in any numbers, so Northern farmers aren't going to have to compete with slave labour on any scale. I agree it will cause a lot of unnecessary irritation, but compared with Kansas-Nebraska it's just an annoyance.

If the Kansas Constitution is moot, it's passing strange that the South pushed so hard to get Lecompton passed. They obviously thought it mattered. But I don't see how either DS or Lemmon will help much if all a State's Sheriffs etc are antislavery. Whatever the law may say, very few slaveholders are going to take expensive property there in such circs.

I'm sorry I don't have the source or remember the precise details of the case,:eek: but in this period post-Scott there was a family of runaways who were captured and ordered returned to their Southern owners (IDK, but it might have happened in Massachusetts:eek:) by a Federal judge. To force the return required a large number of Federal troops to get the family to a ship in the face of mass protests. The entire enterprise (I do remember this quite clearly) cost $100,000!:rolleyes: Your tax dollars at work...:p
 
I'm sorry I don't have the source or remember the precise details of the case,:eek: but in this period post-Scott there was a family of runaways who were captured and ordered returned to their Southern owners (IDK, but it might have happened in Massachusetts:eek:) by a Federal judge. To force the return required a large number of Federal troops to get the family to a ship in the face of mass protests. The entire enterprise (I do remember this quite clearly) cost $100,000!:rolleyes: Your tax dollars at work...:p


You're probably thinking of Anthony Burns in 1854.

My point, though, was that for every such case there were many more where the slave concerned was simply taken back without much trouble - ie most northerners most of the time seem to have obeyed the law. And whilst the matter never came to a test, I suspect the same would have been true (following a Lemmon decision) in the case of slaves who tried to escape whilst accompanying their masters to Saratoga Springs or wherever.

Afaics, the Territorial issue had pretty much reached its limit. Even had Breckinridge been elected, the US Army in 1861 was only about 16,000 men - far too small to enforce a Federal slave code even in the unlikely event of Congress enacting one. Nor can I easily imagine a Congress with a Northern majority agreeing to pay for a larger army if it was likely to be employed for such a purpose. Any such attempt would have failed as Radical Reconstruction was to fail, and for the same reason - insufficient military manpower.

In short, the North had won its essential point. There was no danger of any Slave states being erected in Nebraska, the Dakotas or points west. There might just possibly be one in New Mexico, but that was only a maybe, and in any case few Northern farmers were likely to ever want to go there, so they could live with it. There would still have been occasional fights over fugitive slaves, but that alone wasn't even remotely likely to cause a war.
 
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