Southerners stay in Congress in 1860/1861?

If the south doesn't secede and their representatives stay in Washington, how much of the Republican platform in regards to race/slavery can Lincoln and the republicans carry out? The Republicans don't have a majority in the Senate as long as the Southerners stay put, so changes to blunt the Fugitive Slave Law (for example) go nowhere....
 
If the south doesn't secede and their representatives stay in Washington, how much of the Republican platform in regards to race/slavery can Lincoln and the republicans carry out? The Republicans don't have a majority in the Senate as long as the Southerners stay put, so changes to blunt the Fugitive Slave Law (for example) go nowhere....

Very little. They can admit Kansas as a free state. They can fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with an anti-slavery Justice, or at least a Free-Soil Northerner. That's tricky, because the vacant seat was left by Peter Daniel of Virginia. At the time there was a rule or custom that Justices would be named from each Federal Circuit (the area, not the Judges), and so Southerners would demand that Lincoln appoint someone from Virginia or perhaps Maryland, and would probably block anyone who was notably anti-slavery. A second vacancy occurred in April 1861, but it was left by John McLean of Ohio, who was anti-slavery and a Republican. (McLean aggressively dissented in Dred Scott, to raise his profile for the nomination in 1860; supposedly his dissent provoked Taney to expand his initial limited ruling into the expansive final decision.) Lincoln would have much less trouble with that seat.

After that...
 
The reality was that the House of Representatives was majority for the non-slave/northern states even with the 3/5 rule. This was only going to get more lopsided in the future as population growth and immigration was going overwhelmingly to the states of the Union. If you look at the states that would be admitted from 1861 until 1900 (excluding West Virginia which would not happen absent a Civil War) NONE of those states would be admitted as slave states even under popular sovereignty let alone the Missouri Compromise. The reasons those states would not be slave states are several. Most of the folks who filled those states up were yeoman farmers, prospectors/miners, ranchers etc. - these were not folks who would need or afford slaves, even were they so inclined. Most of the folks who moved to those states were either immigrants from Europe who had no tradition of slavery or from free states, the number of southerners who moved there was a distinct small minority. The geography and economies of these states were not, in the main, suitable for slave plantations. What this means is that the 10 states admitted during this time period will be represented in the Senate by anti-slavery Senators no matter what party. In 1861 there were 11 states that went to the CSA, and 4 states in the Union that still had slavery (although some like Delaware were minimal). There were 19 states that were non-slave. So by 1896 you have 29 free states and 11 states with slavery/committed to it. It is likely that Delaware and Maryland would have abolished slavery on there own, so 31 free states and 13 slave states. Prior to the Civil war the slave states were able to stop any legislation they did not like but their ability to do that in the House was fading rapidly by 1861, and the ability to clog things up in the Senate was going to follow.

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act wasn't going to happen very much with a Republican majority in the House even with the Southern strength in the Senate. The northern states simply weren't going to cooperate, and the southern states could not do much about it.
 
Very little. They can admit Kansas as a free state. They can fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with an anti-slavery Justice, or at least a Free-Soil Northerner. That's tricky, because the vacant seat was left by Peter Daniel of Virginia. At the time there was a rule or custom that Justices would be named from each Federal Circuit (the area, not the Judges), and so Southerners would demand that Lincoln appoint someone from Virginia or perhaps Maryland, and would probably block anyone who was notably anti-slavery. A second vacancy occurred in April 1861, but it was left by John McLean of Ohio, who was anti-slavery and a Republican. (McLean aggressively dissented in Dred Scott, to raise his profile for the nomination in 1860; supposedly his dissent provoked Taney to expand his initial limited ruling into the expansive final decision.) Lincoln would have much less trouble with that seat.

After that...


Yet Jeremiah S Black, whom Buchanan (unsuccessfully) nominated to fill Daniel's seat, was from Pennsylvania.
 
The reality was that the House of Representatives was majority for the non-slave/northern states even with the 3/5 rule. This was only going to get more lopsided in the future as population growth and immigration was going overwhelmingly to the states of the Union. If you look at the states that would be admitted from 1861 until 1900 (excluding West Virginia which would not happen absent a Civil War) NONE of those states would be admitted as slave states even under popular sovereignty let alone the Missouri Compromise. The reasons those states would not be slave states are several. Most of the folks who filled those states up were yeoman farmers, prospectors/miners, ranchers etc. - these were not folks who would need or afford slaves, even were they so inclined. Most of the folks who moved to those states were either immigrants from Europe who had no tradition of slavery or from free states, the number of southerners who moved there was a distinct small minority. The geography and economies of these states were not, in the main, suitable for slave plantations. What this means is that the 10 states admitted during this time period will be represented in the Senate by anti-slavery Senators no matter what party. In 1861 there were 11 states that went to the CSA, and 4 states in the Union that still had slavery (although some like Delaware were minimal). There were 19 states that were non-slave. So by 1896 you have 29 free states and 11 states with slavery/committed to it. It is likely that Delaware and Maryland would have abolished slavery on there own, so 31 free states and 13 slave states. Prior to the Civil war the slave states were able to stop any legislation they did not like but their ability to do that in the House was fading rapidly by 1861, and the ability to clog things up in the Senate was going to follow.

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act wasn't going to happen very much with a Republican majority in the House even with the Southern strength in the Senate. The northern states simply weren't going to cooperate, and the southern states could not do much about it.

I was focusing a little more short term (During Lincoln's time as president). I realize by 1900 the Slave states that remain are going to get swamped. The only thread of a chance to keep equality of states includes both rapid conquest and admission as states of the remaining slave holding Spanish Caribbean (Cuba emancipated in 1867 and Puerto Rico 1873ish) and I believe the admission of Northern Brazil as states.

I very much agree on Delaware, there were at least two times prior to 1861 where a small nudge would have led to eventual emancipation in Delaware. For Maryland, as long as the state senate was (functionally) by county rather than population (which was true in the 1851 constitutions as well as OTL 1864 and 1867 until the Supreme Court decision in the 1960s), I tend to doubt it would be that quick. And the balance may somewhat different with either all of OTL Oklahoma or one of the two territories becoming slave states and of course the entire question of one or two Dakotas. So I think best case scenario (without the Caribbean) for the slave states is *about* 30-15 (-Delaware +Oklahoma)
 
Another thing about if Southerners stayed in Congress, especially Senators such as Judah Benjamin and John Slidell of Louisiana, is that Buchanan's nomination of Jeremiah Black (despite his home state of Pennsylvania being in a different circuit from Virginia, the deceased Peter Daniel's home state) would've had a considerably greater chance of getting confirmed by the Senate (maybe by a vote of 32-26).
 
In the 37th Congress, the Republicans would not have had a majority even in the House, let alone the Senate, had there been no secession. (See the tables at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/37th_United_States_Congress and note how the Republican majorities depended on the large number of vacant seats.) There were enough "free state" Democrats sympathetic to the South (Jesse Bright of Indiana is an extreme example) that no legislation hostile to the South could have been passed. Even on the tariff, an issue where some otherwise pro-Southern Democrats from states like Pennsylvania sided with the Republicans, the Morrill Tariff would not have had the votes to pass the Senate had all the southern states stayed in the Union. (This by itself is enough to make nonsense of the notion that the South seceded because of the tariff, even leaving aside the heavy emphasis on slavery in the secession debates and declarations of secession. But there is no use trying to reason with neo-Confederates on this point.)

Why didn't this fact impress the secessionists? Mainly because they were not worried about what *Congress* (at least in the short run) might do. They were worried about what *Lincoln* might do. These fears ranged from the absurd belief that Lincoln was going to deliberately encourage new John Brown raids to the more plausible concerns that Lincoln might use federal patronage to build up an anti-slavery party in the South and that he would have the post office allow the circulation of abolitionist literature in the South. (There was also the fear that the very fact of Lincoln's election could encourage slave revolts, whether Lincoln wanted them or not. John Slidell said in his farewell adsress to the Senate that Lincoln's inauguration would be viewed by the slaves as "the day of their emancipation." John Bell, hardly a fire-eater, wrote a public letter in which he said the "simple announcement to the public that a great party at the North, opposed to slavery, has succeeded in electing its candidate to the Presidency, disguise it as we may, is well calculated to raise expectations among slaves, and might lead to servile insurrection in the Southern States." http://www.nytimes.com/1860/12/12/n...rpose-tendency-republican.html?pagewanted=all)

And of course with the Republicans controlling the executive branch, it was irrelevant that Congress did not have the votes to impose a Wilmot Proviso on the territories; as Kansas had demonstrated, no new slave state could be formed out of the territories without active executive encouragement. In fact, during the "secession winter" Republicans readily agreed to the organization of new territories without any restrictions on slavery precisely because they knew such restrictions were now superfluous.

All in all, attempts to portray Lincoln's election as an *immediate* threat to slavery were unconvincing and even paranoid. OTOH, that a Republican victory was a long-term threat to slavery was more plausible. If the South failed to secede, the Republican party would become a permanent factor in national politics--after all, the big argument against it, namely that its victory would lead to disunion, would have been proven untrue. Even Democrats in free states would compete with Republicans in anti-southern sentiment; already, there was a Douglasite "semi-free-soil" wing of the Democratic Party which *in practice* was as opposed to slavery expansion as the Republicans. No more slave states would be admitted to the Union, while one free state after another would be. I don't think that secessionists were wrong to think that in the long run this would be fatal to slavery, even if they were vague in saying exactly *how.* The point is, that if the slave South was now faced with inevitable decline of its influence in the Union, it had to either accept the eventual end of slavery or get out of the Union *now.* Lincoln's election represented a turning point which made secession plausible in a way it would never be in the future. The future victories of antislavery might be so gradual, and the South might be so demoralized, that it would never resist them.
 
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David T has an excellent analysis that I haven't seen before. Since the South threatened breaking up the Union if someone like Lincoln was elected, once someone like Lincoln was elected that had to make good on the threat.
 
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