How would a defeated Northern secession be seen today?

Consider a more slavery-friendly early 19th century, such that the free states feel the need to secede from the 'slave power'. After a war similar to the OTL civil war, the secessionist movement is crushed and placed under a reconstruction roughly similar to our own. The U.S. abolishes slavery in the 1890s or 1910s.

In this scenario, how would the Northern secessionist movement be seen today? As far as I can tell, current attitudes towards the OTL Confederacy is based both on their representation of 'slave power' and as traitors to the Union. How would perception of an ATL northern Confederacy be different with the same 'treason' aspect, but with the benefit of vindication in hindsight over the slavery issue?
 
It’d be regarded as somewhat complicated. On one hand they committed treason on the other they did so for a just reason.

Any lost cause types up north would be considered more legitimate than the neo-Confederates of OTL.
 

althisfan

Banned
i don't see how the South could stop a Northern seccession just as they werent' able to secede. The Free States have too much manpower and economic power, including huge industrial capacity the South doesn't have.
 
i don't see how the South could stop a Northern seccession just as they werent' able to secede. The Free States have too much manpower and economic power, including huge industrial capacity the South doesn't have.

Not to derail the thread, but what if there simply were more slave states? Say, for example, that the Northwest Ordinance never prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, and slavery became a modest part of the economy there (from what I understand, it was ironically the planters of the South who wanted to limit the spread of slavery, out of fear of new competition). There's 6 slave states. Maybe. Or the borders are just drawn differently. If northern Illinois is left as southern Wisconsin, then that state would be much more pro-South. Perhaps the other states could be similarly drawn, maybe a state drawn from southern Indiana and Ohio? Then, lets delay or prevent entirely the Erie Canal, so that the Great Lakes region is not so closely linked to NYC. Lets also have St. Louis beat Chicago as the rail hub for the Midwest, further linking the region to the slave economy.
 

Philip

Donor
It’d be regarded as somewhat complicated. On one hand they committed treason on the other they did so for a just reason.

This seems correct. I can see a standard essay question for Ethics 101 here. Given that it lead to 500,000 deaths, was the North's decision to secede a moral one? Does the North's failure in the war affect the morality of the decision?
 
Consider a more slavery-friendly early 19th century, such that the free states feel the need to secede from the 'slave power'. After a war similar to the OTL civil war, the secessionist movement is crushed and placed under a reconstruction roughly similar to our own. The U.S. abolishes slavery in the 1890s or 1910s.

In this scenario, how would the Northern secessionist movement be seen today? As far as I can tell, current attitudes towards the OTL Confederacy is based both on their representation of 'slave power' and as traitors to the Union. How would perception of an ATL northern Confederacy be different with the same 'treason' aspect, but with the benefit of vindication in hindsight over the slavery issue?

They would be viewed as losing the battle but winning the war because slavery went away eventually
 

althisfan

Banned
Not to derail the thread, but what if there simply were more slave states? Say, for example, that the Northwest Ordinance never prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, and slavery became a modest part of the economy there (from what I understand, it was ironically the planters of the South who wanted to limit the spread of slavery, out of fear of new competition). There's 6 slave states. Maybe. Or the borders are just drawn differently. If northern Illinois is left as southern Wisconsin, then that state would be much more pro-South. Perhaps the other states could be similarly drawn, maybe a state drawn from southern Indiana and Ohio? Then, lets delay or prevent entirely the Erie Canal, so that the Great Lakes region is not so closely linked to NYC. Lets also have St. Louis beat Chicago as the rail hub for the Midwest, further linking the region to the slave economy.
That would be amazing to consider. I would love a timeline like that.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
If slavery is later abolished anyway, one may assume that historiography will attribute this to the influence of the North. The Northern stance will be vindicated by history, and the tendency to slander secessionists as "traitors" will be far less prevalent than in OTL. At worst, they'll be seen as akin to John Brown (using the wrong methods to fight for a just cause, but ultimately seen as representing "the right side of history").
 

RousseauX

Donor
i don't see how the South could stop a Northern seccession just as they werent' able to secede. The Free States have too much manpower and economic power, including huge industrial capacity the South doesn't have.
A plausible scenario would be if only New England secedes and the remaining free states remains with the federal government and views them as too extreme. Short of like the otl border states
 
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Although some Yankee traditionalists still claim they support traitors like Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln to celebrate "Northern Heritage" and the North's cultural distinctiveness, Americans widely perceive the "War of Northern Treachery" as an attack on property rights and the Constitution. States rights activists have led the movement to take down statues of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriett Beecher Stowe, which some Yankee "nationalists" have decried as an attack on their culture. They can shut up already - they lost that war 150 years ago!
 

althisfan

Banned
Although some Yankee traditionalists still claim they support traitors like Grant, Sherman, and Lincoln to celebrate "Northern Heritage" and the North's cultural distinctiveness, Americans widely perceive the "War of Northern Treachery" as an attack on property rights and the Constitution. States rights activists have led the movement to take down statues of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriett Beecher Stowe, which some Yankee "nationalists" have decried as an attack on their culture. They can shut up already - they lost that war 150 years ago!
Very funny, I liked it. BUT realistically Grant (someone who lived his adult life in Missouri, a slave border state even though he was born in Ohio and died in Upstate NY near Albany) and Lincoln (Kentuckian/southern-central Illinois) would both in an ATL where only the most extreme Northern states secede probably be ambivalent/neutral in such a war, especially if it's just New England seceding. Sherman was not anti-slavery (and definitely not pro-Black rights, he was downright racist), though another Ohio born person, he lived in Louisiana and Missouri, Sherman's stance on the Civil War and staying with the Union was about the fact that leaving the Union was being a traitor; he more than Lincoln or Grant would definitely be staying with the pro-slavery Union. Only Sheridan, an Upstate NYer (even though not by birth as he claimed) can I see being a name to mention, though I am sure there would be more from New England and Mid-Atlantic; it's just this time period for "pro-Union" in OTL is dominated by the dominating demographics of NY and Ohio, and it is the last hoorah for Virginia big men in history; so picking names for the North to revere in an ATL is hard to find to compare to people in OTL like Lee and Jackson.
 
If slavery is abolished later (and it probably would have to be,) the person who said that the secessionists would be viewed with a “complicated” legacy would be dead-on. In fact, how they are viewed would be extremely divisive to this day, moreso than OTL with the South.

It would also depend on how slavery was actually abolished. If it just disappeared due to impracticability and slavery was still technically legal, a lot of people may not see what was wrong with it. People may see no difference morally from having any other outdated technology that no longer makes sense to have. Furthermore, it wouldn’t completely go away, and you can wager that it would exist in some form (case in point, private prisons, which would probably be a way for slaveowners to make a profit off slaves.)

However, if it’s abolished by statute in every state, the statutes would vary. Given that the private prison loophole exists in OTL’s abolition (and shit, there’s no constitutional reason a criminal couldn’t be sentenced to slavery OTL) one can guess that some state state would have people exploiting the slavery loophole while others wouldn’t have such a loophole as well (the secessionist states probably would have laws that say “no slavery, no loopholes, no way no how” while the way OTL did it would likely be the majority view.) So Maryland May allow private prisons while Massachusetts puts a stop to them.

You can also forget about birthright citizenship. That was born of post-Civil War handwringing over “what the hell do we do with all these freed slaves?” So in addition to the 13th Amendment being non-existent, the same will be true of the 14th and 15th Amendments. So blacks may be freed later, but they won’t be equals in any sense of the word, and they sure as shit won’t be voting en masse, at least not right away. They may have to piggyback off the women’s movement, which, through sheer force, gets ratified same as OTL.

You may also see a stronger push for an ERA during the Civil Rights era, one that includes race as well as sex. So blacks will finally be equal before the law, even if it takes to the 1960s or so to happen at all - and when it does, expect it to hit like a ton of bricks, since all the Civil Rights legislation would happen with a series off amendments that essentially serve the same function as the postwar amendments of OTL as well as ERA. A possible wrinkle - abortion rights enshrined into the Constitution. It’s a long shot, but some defeats at SCOTUS along the way may lead the push.

Of course, the backlash from all this will make the next few decades very interesting, to say the least. Forget Reagan - the right will want a hardline authoritarian leader, and the KKK or similar groups will be huge. We’ll be seeing a massively divided nation - picture OTL’s current divide times a thousand. And all this may lead to a second Civil War or a hell of a lot of unrest, and the secessionist flags will be flying.
 
Obligatory mention that this scenario is pretty unlikely, in that I find it doubtful the Slave states would attempt to hold onto the Free States via conflict. As for the matter of practicality of this, it's extremely possible to expand slavery further into the Union, particularly into the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic. Given that, I'd imagine this Northern Secession would be limited to New England, which would be rather easy to beat against the rest of the United States.

With regards to the view of it, they'd be viewed pretty horribly. For one, a United States dominated by Planter interests is one that has an extremely different political and cultural outlook; OTL the Liberal urban mercantile interests of the North won out against the rural conservative interests the South represented. In regards to this changed environment, the negative outlook on slavery we have IOTL will likely be non-existent. Further, given that OP specifies Slavery still ultimately fades away, the Secessionists will be more harshly viewed given they attempted to sunder the Union and engendered grievous losses for essentially no point in the long run.
 
“The multi cultural South prevented the treasonous North, and its racist freesoil movement aimed at preventing our black brethren from even entering their country, and had plans to murderously deport them with their colonization society, were heroically stopped by the South, creating a more perfect union.”

“The North betrayed the ideals of the Revolution with their never ending support for high taxes, and left as traitors in hopes of creating a non viable state.”
 
This is highly unlikely. The south seceded because they felt that their way of life, slavery, was threatened. The way of life of the North is not threatened, why would they secede? And why wouldn't the South let them, if they did?
 
If the Quakers don't become anti-slavery (or the anti-slavery bloc doesn't become dominant), then slavery may be kept on in Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, even if not anywhere nearly as prevalent as in the south.

As a result, much of the Northwest would have also have slavery be legal, as @DominusNovus mentioned. There would be a "tobacco belt", of the Upper South, Mid Atlantic, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and a "cotton belt" of the Deep South.

If the Louisiana Purchase still happens, Congress may allow new states to hold a referendum on whether to keep slavery legal, whilst the individual territories could de facto have slavery, simply because it wasn't illegal, or at least poorly enforced outside of the areas settled by anti-slavery types.

However, much of Upper Louisiana isn't really suitable for large-scale plantation slavery. Maybe they use poorly-treated "contract workers", which is slavery in all but name, and are hired as needed from agencies.

Slavery would be practiced/not-practiced for economic reasons rather than being legal/illegal for a long time.

Basically, a toned-down version of the US from DoD.

This is highly unlikely. The south seceded because they felt that their way of life, slavery, was threatened. The way of life of the North is not threatened, why would they secede?

Maybe the North is tired of the South forcing them to return runaway slaves despite the fact that slavery is not legal within their jurisdiction?

Maybe a variation of the Virginia plan is enacted, lessening the influence of the northern states? Maybe the North is afraid that, as a result, the South (which de facto includes the Mid-Atlantic states in their minds, in this scenario) will have a permanent lock on the government, which means that they are effectively irrelevant.

The South was more interested in their states' rights than in states' rights generally.

And why wouldn't the South let them, if they did?

Dunno? Maybe it's a case of "how dare they leave the perfect country, the traitors. We should stop them from seceding, despite the fact that this is completely in keeping with the whole 'states' rights' stuff we keep harping on about"?

On the other hand, the South may just allow them to leave, just so they stop complaining.
 
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