How plausible/possible is New England seceding, and what happens afterward? I'd love to get some feedback.
The plausibility of New England seceding
once the War of 1812 broke out is actually very, very low.
This is partly because, as you note, even the suggestion that the Federalists were proposing secession at the Hartford Convention [1] was enough to destroy the party as a political force once the war was over.
But it went deeper than that. Various elements within the Federalists had been grumbling about New England secession for a decade or more by then, but it never amounted to much. The problem was that it was hard to find people who were willing to actually
do something about New England secession, as opposed to just grumbling about it.
Their fundamental concern was that New England's political weight was being diminished as the west opened up, and there was a fear that New England's special interests (trade-related, mostly) were being disregarded by other parts of the country. This led to discontent, but it still needed a more meaningful trigger to lead to even proposed secession.
There were only 3 triggers which lead even to meaningful discussion of secession:
i) the Louisiana Purchase (1804)
ii) the Embargo Act (1807-9)
iii) the Hartford Convention (1814-5)
The reaction to the Louisiana Purchase involved a lot of grumbling over the supposed unconstitutionality of the Purchase, but despite some powerful speeches and letters, it wasn't enough to bring about a call for secession, or even close to it.
The Hartford Convention wasn't a big enough trigger in itself. The stigma of treason was one reason among many that it didn't lead to secession. Whether it might have done so with a longer war, well, I rather doubt it, since it would still be seen as treason.
Even if it might have led to proposed NE secession, the problem was that Britain by this point wasn't interested in a longer war either. Having finished with Napoleon, they just wanted to revert to status quo ante bellum (more or less) in North America. US finances being rather poor by this point, they didn't really want to continue either. So the Hartford Convention turns out to be quite difficult as a trigger for NE secession.
The Embargo Act is the one with the most promise. Indeed, this is the one I ended up using in Decades of Darkness. Even then, though, it required a considerably prolonged embargo, substantial federal government bungling (something which Madison was fortunately quite capable of), and some luck to get to the point where NE declared secession. Even after secession was declared, I depicted a _lot_ of foot-dragging in New England (much like Unionism in the South in the ACW, only worse), and the secession was only successful first because New York went neutral for a while (preventing invasion) and because Britain intervened.
So having the Embargo Act lead to NE secession would be more plausible, but even then requires a dose of luck.
[1] Which they weren't, by the way, or at least not as a whole. A few individuals may have suggested it, but the delegates as a whole didn't want to push for secession.
This's actually the PoD for Jared's excellent
Decades of Darkness timeline, in which New England becomes independent in alliance with Britain, and the United States falls under the sway of the Slave Power. He sets the whole thing out with horrendous plausibility, though I think he makes the remaining US stronger than it would actually be. I'd love to hear a discussion of this - thoughts?
I disagree. While New York is certainly a loss, New England certainly isn't the backbone of America. DoD"s America still had key parts of where the Union's majors industries were. Also, as history has shown, the Latin American countries were/are proportionally weaker than the US, even when slightly fragmented. Remember, the US got frustrated with its inability to take down New England/Canada, thus it focused on its far weaker neighbors to the south and west. The US still got California and Texas, the economic engines of our TL. They also got all the resource rich parts of Northern Mexico to exploit. Parts of that the new Central America land suddenly gives America a year round growing season, and thus a huge food advantage over the rest of the world.
Heh, well, arguments about DoD's plausibility were a major reason that the timeline thread got to 187 pages.
Finding those arguments in such a long thread can be a bit intimidating, but I'd like to think that I've addressed most of them. Especially the perennial misconception that slavery was incompatible with industrialisation (er, what?) or that it was inextricably linked to agriculture.
That said, the key point is that the DoD USA indubitably had the
natural resources to become a superpower. Everything from Pennsylvania to Costa Rica (ignoring later conquests, for these purposes) - it's all there. Texas, California, Monterrey, *Birmingham (Alabama), the works.
What it might have lacked is people to exploit those resources. You can make a case that having slavery would mean that the USA would be less productive per capita (although I'd dispute that it would be
much less), but the *USA still needs plenty of people.
One thing I will mention is that I came to the conclusion about halfway through the timeline that I'd overestimated the likely population growth rates for the *USA - I'd thought that the rate of natural increase would be higher than it most likely would. I also underestimated the percentage of people who would become citizens in the conquered Mexican and Central American territories (it should have been closer to 30% than 20% - there would be more scope for loyal people to pass the citizenship test). This may have made the *USA more powerful than it would plausibly have been.
This can be resolved, and I'd worked out a plausible (hopefully!) retcon which would manage it. And, indeed, seemed like it was something which seemed like it would actually be natural for it to happen, given the features of the *USA and its geopolitical context.
What I had in mind was the realisation that the *USA had two problems:
i) its northern inland frontiers were empty and vulnerable to interlopers from New England and Canada
ii) it doesn't have a codified way for immigrants to be assured of citizenship, which given some of the rumours about slavery, would be a barrier to immigration.
For i), this is actually the reverse of what happened to Canada in OTL - they were fearful of US immigrants flooding the Canadian prairies and trying to annex it to Canada. So they did their best to fill them up. This response was coordinated by an interesting character called Sir Clifford Sifton, who became the Canadian Minister of the Interior, and who set up immigration offices in Europe (especially Eastern Europe) to encourage immigrants. This program succeeded rather well.
For ii), the *USA did not plan to turn white immigrants into peons. (Well, not until Alvar O'Brien, and even then only in rare circumstances). Foreigners and rumour, however, won't buy that. And the *USA needs to tidy up its citizenship laws
anyway to clarify their view of peons.
In the DoD TL (original version) I'd had an analogue to Sifton arise in the *USA - the historical John Marshall Harlan set up a similar program in the 1880s and 1890s, which filled up much of the northern *USA (ie the empty bits which haven't been settled by farmers, since there isn't much call for plantations there).
Looking back, though, I think that *American paranoia over filling up the northern prairies would have started much earlier. (After about 1837, in fact). So I was planning to retcon in an equivalent to Harlan a couple of decades earlier, starting in around 1860 rather than 1880.
This would have been linked to the concern over citizenship, and also to an *Homestead Act. The Homestead Act in OTL was opposed by the South who feared that it would be used to create more free-soil states. That isn't the case in TTL - after 1837 it's a given that any new state will not be admitted unless it has an unalterable clause in its constitution protecting the rights of slavery and peonage.
So, ITTL the citizenship rules are rewritten sometime around 1850-1855, establishing a rule where white immigrants will be designated 'candidate' citizens who are automatically eligible for citizenship after a certain number of years (about 7, if I remember right). In 1860 or so, *Harlan gets going and links this to the *Homestead Act, encouraging white immigrants from Russia and some of the Habsburg Slavic lands to come to the *USA, with free land and accelerated citizenship if you live on it.
This land-hunger is a powerful pull for immigrants (as it was in OTL in Canada, and to a degree in the USA too), and you end up with a lot more immigrants to the *USA. All as white as the *USA could want. While a lot of them end up on the northern prairies, as happened in OTL, most immigrants stopped off in a US city first, and some of them decided to stay there.
This would solve the nagging problems of how the *USA had the population to sustain its imperial ambitions, and also explain how it found it easier to hold down the new conquests (30% citizens makes it a lot easier to hold a place down than 20%).
The big drawback was that working all of this into the published timeline would have been a major piece of work. I did start changing the names of some of the states to reflect the slower settlement of the interior (a bit of a continuity problem, if you read parts of the timeline) and I stopped publishing any more population data, since I figured that this would only make things worse.
I'd planned to get around to revising DoD to fix all of this up (and some other changes I'd had in mind), but rewriting a 700,000+ word timeline is not something which can be done overnight. What with other commitments, I've never gotten around to it. I will get to it if it comes to the point where DoD gets published (the timeline or the novels), but probably not before.