Mason dixie line continued

I read somewhere that one politician had planed to just keep the mason dixie line going in the Mexican cession south would be slave north free, it went down in flames but what if it hadn't, what if everything below the mason dixie line would be slave states, everything north would be free and how would they decide califronia?
 
Not sure how plausible this is. There's a reason it died OTL. When was this proposed and by whom?

But assuming it somehow happens...

This puts southern OH, IN and IL in Slave turf along with Kansas (now not a violation of the Missouri Comp), Colorado, Utah, and Nevada...and Cali, though that was within the "slave" zone OTL and fought hard to become a Free state anyway.

Now, without advanced plows or windmills Kan. and Col. are ill-suited to plantation ag., and Utah & Nevada totally ill-suited without serious irrigation efforts, so Slavery is never going to become as major as the SE and may be slave in name only. The Mormons will resist slavery in Utah as well.

The BIG deal now is OH/IN/IL and that rich Ohio R. valley. No Cotton or Tobacco with the climate, though.

It might just mean earlier conflict Bleeding Kansas style, but ironically if the Midwest Freesoilers prevail as OTL (likely IMO with the NWO still in effect) this makes less difference than you might think since I'd assume Utah and Cali stay free anyway and the rest is ill-suited to plantations and may be unlikely to secede even if slave states.
 
While it would be possible to continue the Mason-Dixon Line much further west it would not have changed anything other than the shape of the states. Settlement patterns north of the Ohio River and along the Allegheny Mts. completely favored free soil settlers. These settlers came out of PA, NY and New England and were not open to allowing slavery in those regions. Even if the territories were declared to be slave territories, the federal government had almost no power to prevent the local settlers from declaring their territory free of slavery when they ratified a state constitution.

If they had tried, all of these border territories would have gone the way of Bleeding Kansas. This in turn may have sparked an earlier conflict as the territorial civil wars spread to the states and federal government. Either way it would have been messy. But the most likely outcome would see each territory north of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers vote to be free territories and the South would complain each time. Eventually the balance in the Senate would end and free states would elect an anti-slavery President. And we all know where that ends.

Benjamin
 
The Mason-Dixon Line was never a formal dividing line between free and slave states. It was the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The real dividing line between terrirories which would be free and those in which slavery would be allowed was the Missouri Compromise line of 1820 (no slavery in terrirories north of the southern border of Missouri). This line was overturned , first by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which established the concept of "popular sovreignty" to decide the issue of slavery in all territories and then by the Dred Scott decision which held that Congress had no authority to ban slavery in the territories, thus holding that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional.
 
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