The Effects of a Larger America on the Issue of Slavery?

katchen

Banned
I think that the idea of a cotton gin (combs that comb the seeds out of cotton) is so elementary that it is a bit incredible that it would not be thought of. What COULD have destroyed King Cotton at any time from the 1790s on would have been the early spread of the boll weevil. It was not until the early 1900s that farmers figured out pesticides that could kill boll weevils and until then, all Southern planters could do was move their plantations further and further west into Texas and California. Which, if it happened a lot earlier would have a major effect on the distribution of slaves, wouldn't it?
Of course once land was infested with boll weevil, people would figure out that there was a lot of other things that could be planted on it. Tobacco could be grown further South, for instance. A lot of Tobacco is grown in Zimbabwe, as I recall, in the tropics. If not cotton, how about silk? Plant mulberry orchards, pick the leaves and feed them to silkworms. Very labor intensive, but if the slaves are there and silk prices high, easy enough to turn a profit on silk production. France and Italy produce silk, after all, and the South has a climate similar to Southern China. Or even opium and smokable marijuana. The only reason marijuana became illegal in the US was it's association with African-Americans and Latinos and it's competition with DuPont's nylon in the 1930s. In the 1830s as an economic savior of the South? Nothing wrong with it! Try to sell the British and the French on it! And hemp fiber for clothing of course. Still plenty of room for slaves, unfortunately.
 
Of course once land was infested with boll weevil, people would figure out that there was a lot of other things that could be planted on it. Tobacco could be grown further South, for instance. A lot of Tobacco is grown in Zimbabwe, as I recall, in the tropics. If not cotton, how about silk? Plant mulberry orchards, pick the leaves and feed them to silkworms. Very labor intensive, but if the slaves are there and silk prices high, easy enough to turn a profit on silk production. France and Italy produce silk, after all, and the South has a climate similar to Southern China. Or even opium and smokable marijuana. The only reason marijuana became illegal in the US was it's association with African-Americans and Latinos and it's competition with DuPont's nylon in the 1930s. In the 1830s as an economic savior of the South? Nothing wrong with it! Try to sell the British and the French on it! And hemp fiber for clothing of course. Still plenty of room for slaves, unfortunately.

Good points here, but unfortunately, at least as far as the Deep South is concerned, you don't need much competition from *DuPont analogues or Big Pharma to plausibly get smokable cannabis banned; all you would need is some Hearst-style racial fearmongering against Mexicans & blacks, and/or whoever introduced the stuff from whatever place(It was Mexican immigrants who largely introduced the stuff to a national audience IOTL, though it could also come from elsewhere ITTL, such as the Middle East, or even India or China!), and perhaps with plenty of support from at least tobacco companies(especially if they felt that marijuana was cutting into their profits, which very well could actually happen, particularly if people begin to realize the negative side effects of tobacco.), and you've pretty much got the perfect formula for at least a some county or state level, or even national-level bans.

On the other hand, non-hallocinogenic hemp, I'd wager, probably would be somewhat harder to push aside, or even ban, without as much of an influence of a *DuPont, or Big Timber, etc.(can't rule that out entirely, though); the stigma that might indeed come with marijuana would be tough to apply to hemp, and many small farmers, particularly those employing semi-skilled, free, labor for industrial purposes(yes, some skill was kind of a requirement for decent-quality hemp products, at least in most cases.), might be able to raise enough of a fuss to prevent even local bans of hemp-growing, particularly in regions where it might be significantly profitable for them(Ky. Tenn., and parts of Va. for one).....
 
Why? Most of them would probably wind up in the tobbacco states of NC, VA and the like.

The question is what happens to those inhabitants of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and (to a lesser degree) South Carolina when they move west. Would they end up pulled south to the cotton belt of Mississippi and Alabama (as OTL), or would they find it more attractive to go further north in Tennessee, Kentucky, or Indiana and Illinois?

The downstate regions of Indiana and (especially) Illinois were widely regarded - with good reason - as some of, if not the best farmland in the US of A. They were in many cases more attractive than farming in Kentucky (which in the 1790s in OTL was regarded as a lawyer's paradise due to competing claims). That's why a significant number of slaveholders moved there in OTL even though slavery was illegal.

If going deep south is less appealing (no cotton gin), downstate Illinois and Indiana start to look even more appealling.

Even if it became a slave state I doubt it would remain that long after Chicago is established. Situated where it is a large city is almost certain to be founded there and with all that industrialization and railroads I doubt it would remain a slave state long.

Perhaps. Though it's worth noting that once slavery did get established in a nineteenth-century U.S. state, it proved very difficult to remove. Maryland and (especially) Delaware show that rather well. Chicago started in the 1830s but its growth really kicked off in the 1840s. That leaves a couple of decades at least in the political consciousness.

To say nothing of whether Illinois as a slave state discourages immigration (as happened in OTL) and the fact that slavery was hardly incompatible with railroads or industrialisation.
 
The question is what happens to those inhabitants of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and (to a lesser degree) South Carolina when they move west. Would they end up pulled south to the cotton belt of Mississippi and Alabama (as OTL), or would they find it more attractive to go further north in Tennessee, Kentucky, or Indiana and Illinois?

The downstate regions of Indiana and (especially) Illinois were widely regarded - with good reason - as some of, if not the best farmland in the US of A. They were in many cases more attractive than farming in Kentucky (which in the 1790s in OTL was regarded as a lawyer's paradise due to competing claims). That's why a significant number of slaveholders moved there in OTL even though slavery was illegal.

If going deep south is less appealing (no cotton gin), downstate Illinois and Indiana start to look even more appealling.



Perhaps. Though it's worth noting that once slavery did get established in a nineteenth-century U.S. state, it proved very difficult to remove. Maryland and (especially) Delaware show that rather well. Chicago started in the 1830s but its growth really kicked off in the 1840s. That leaves a couple of decades at least in the political consciousness.

To say nothing of whether Illinois as a slave state discourages immigration (as happened in OTL) and the fact that slavery was hardly incompatible with railroads or industrialisation.


Northerners moved to the cotton belt too and not all were pro-slavery. Many were merchants who sold things to the planters. Not even all Southerners were pro-slavery either. A 14 point gap is NOT easy to make up. It is not impossible but not as easy as all that. Also if more Southerners move to Ill more Northerners probably will to as it will get more attention in the papers.

Getting rid of slavery in a state was not easy but reintroducing it was even harder. Not a single Free State reintroduced it after banning it OTL.

Industrialization was incompatible to slavery at the time.White workers didn't want to compete with slaves and only a small minority of slaves were used in industry OTL. There were some experiments along this line OTL, some successful some not, but that happened later.
 
Northerners moved to the cotton belt too and not all were pro-slavery. Many were merchants who sold things to the planters. Not even all Southerners were pro-slavery either. A 14 point gap is NOT easy to make up. It is not impossible but not as easy as all that.

You keep focusing on the 14 points, but the percentage of votes in OTL really is irrelevant. The question is how many more migrants would be needed to change the results of the OTL constitutional convention.

If you were talking about the percentage of Southerners who moved west in OTL, and how many of those would need to move to Illinois instead, that might be more relevant, but I haven't seen any numbers for that cited yet.

Also if more Southerners move to Ill more Northerners probably will to as it will get more attention in the papers.

Sorry, but this is just grasping at straws. In the 1810s and 1820s, people weren't moving to places based on making or keeping something as a slave state/free state. That's anachronistic by a couple of decades at least. Mid-1840s it started, and really gained traction in the 1850s. Popular sovereignty, in the make-or-keep territories slave/free states, was a post-Mexican-American war phenomenon.

Getting rid of slavery in a state was not easy but reintroducing it was even harder. Not a single Free State reintroduced it after banning it OTL.

True as a general rule, but ignores the significant exceptions of Illinois, Indiana (and to a lesser degree Ohio), which had proslavery majorities at the time of statehood, and only did not become slave states because Congress made it clear that it would not admit them as slave states.

And the attempts to make Indiana and Illinois into slave states after admission are as per OTL. Yes, they failed in OTL, but they were close enough to show that there was potential for things to go the other way, for a time at least.

Industrialization was incompatible to slavery at the time.

Simply untrue. Slaves had been used for industrial purposes as far back as the first Southern textile mill of the 1790s.

White workers didn't want to compete with slaves and only a small minority of slaves were used in industry OTL.

The example of OTL shows that while white workers raised a fuss about working alongside slaves, they usually got over it too. (Or were made to get over it.) Not always - there were occasional times when workers successfully lobbied against slaves - but most of the time, the slave-using bosses got their way.

And the small minority of slaves used in industry was a reflection of cotton prices being so high, which kept them out of other uses, both agricultural and industrial. (When cotton prices did drop in OTL, more slaves moved into industry.) In a delayed cotton gin scenario, the number of slaves used in industry will be higher, not lower.

There were some experiments along this line OTL, some successful some not, but that happened later.

Again, slaves had been used in industry since industrialisation started in the South.

I have to ask, why are you so vehemently against even the possibility that Illinois and Indiana becoming slave states may have happened? You keep raising an assorted grab-bag of reasons as to why something just could not happen. And those reasons are, to be blunt, fairly insubstantial and in many cases simply wrong.
 

katchen

Banned
Jared is right about Southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois for a very important reason. Those parts of those states were settled by Scots-Irish settlers, just as Kentucky was, while areas further North in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were settled from New York and New England and Germany. That's why IOTL, Ohio is a swing state and Illinois has so many Republican downstate congressional districts and Indiana is conservative Republican and 90 years ago was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. Given that it only takes the approval of a majority of each house of the state legislature and a majority of each House of Congress, according to the Constitution, for a state to split, the possibility of one, two or all three of those states splitting into free and slave states cannot not be discounted ATL either.
And Southern congressional delegations can take into account the potential for more free soil by pushing for the admission of more smaller slave states to the Union to balance things out, at least in the Senate.
 
Northerners moved to the cotton belt too and not all were pro-slavery. Many were merchants who sold things to the planters. Not even all Southerners were pro-slavery either. A 14 point gap is NOT easy to make up. It is not impossible but not as easy as all that. Also if more Southerners move to Ill more Northerners probably will to as it will get more attention in the papers.

Getting rid of slavery in a state was not easy but reintroducing it was even harder. Not a single Free State reintroduced it after banning it OTL.

Industrialization was incompatible to slavery at the time.White workers didn't want to compete with slaves and only a small minority of slaves were used in industry OTL. There were some experiments along this line OTL, some successful some not, but that happened later.

All very true, by the way. Sure, this whole concern about slave states and free states didn't really start until later on IOTL, Jared IS (mostly) correct there(it actually started before 1840 but didn't become a major issue until that decade started, and really took off with Texas and the Mexican War), but it wouldn't take a lot of effort to plausibly to get some vagabond Northerners moving westward to balance out the pro-slavery people, particularly if land prices aren't too expensive and you can get a good PR movement going. It certainly can be done.

As for white workers not wanting to work with slaves, for whatever reason, it is indeed true that many workers either got over it, or were made to shut up, but a very important thing to remember is this was the era before labor really began to take off in the United States; of course, the planters and the industrialists could always call upon strikebreakers, perhaps even using more loyal indenturees, to suppress protests thru various means(including that age-old strategy of divide-and-conquer) as their *Northern counterparts did.
However, though, what is for sure is that once some white workers realize that they could be getting along much better financially without the free labor, then you've got a recipe for discontentment and unrest....and maybe more.

However, though, Katchen does also have a point; the states of Illinois and Indiana very well could have split based on support of the slavery system and/or other factors, associated or not. Additionally, TBH, this could have even happened to Texas or California: Try to imagine, for example, a West Texas without slavery or a South California(at least San Diego and everything south of there) with it.

And to @Jared, I don't believe that John is vehemently against anything........how did you come to this conclusion? :confused:
 
On the other hand, non-hallocinogenic hemp, I'd wager, probably would be somewhat harder to push aside, or even ban, without as much of an influence of a *DuPont, or Big Timber, etc.(can't rule that out entirely, though);

The trouble with the "DuPont/Big Timber got hemp banned" conspiracy theories is that the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 did not make industrial hemp illegal.

The definition of marijuana (marihuana) from that Act is:

"(A)ll parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any such plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds, or resin; but shall not include the mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any other compound, manufacture salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination."

I've bolded the relevant portion.

At a federal level, industrial hemp remained legal for several decades after 1937. Some individual states did not bother to make the distinction, and banned all of it. Industrial hemp cultivation was encouraged during the Second World War (Hemp for Victory). Industrial hemp was still being cultivated into the 1950s in places like Wisconsin, but was largely abandoned because it was uncompetitive with other fibres (synthetics and imported tropical fibres).

I can't recall offhand whether the Controlled Substances Act (1970) prohibited industrial hemp too, but it was a moot point by then: meaningful production had ceased. Certainly it could not be considered a viable competitor to timber/nylon by 1970.

Edit: I checked, and the 1970 Act did not make any distinction.
 
You keep focusing on the 14 points, but the percentage of votes in OTL really is irrelevant. The question is how many more migrants would be needed to change the results of the OTL constitutional convention.

If you were talking about the percentage of Southerners who moved west in OTL, and how many of those would need to move to Illinois instead, that might be more relevant, but I haven't seen any numbers for that cited yet.



Sorry, but this is just grasping at straws. In the 1810s and 1820s, people weren't moving to places based on making or keeping something as a slave state/free state. That's anachronistic by a couple of decades at least. Mid-1840s it started, and really gained traction in the 1850s. Popular sovereignty, in the make-or-keep territories slave/free states, was a post-Mexican-American war phenomenon.



True as a general rule, but ignores the significant exceptions of Illinois, Indiana (and to a lesser degree Ohio), which had proslavery majorities at the time of statehood, and only did not become slave states because Congress made it clear that it would not admit them as slave states.

And the attempts to make Indiana and Illinois into slave states after admission are as per OTL. Yes, they failed in OTL, but they were close enough to show that there was potential for things to go the other way, for a time at least.



Simply untrue. Slaves had been used for industrial purposes as far back as the first Southern textile mill of the 1790s.



The example of OTL shows that while white workers raised a fuss about working alongside slaves, they usually got over it too. (Or were made to get over it.) Not always - there were occasional times when workers successfully lobbied against slaves - but most of the time, the slave-using bosses got their way.

And the small minority of slaves used in industry was a reflection of cotton prices being so high, which kept them out of other uses, both agricultural and industrial. (When cotton prices did drop in OTL, more slaves moved into industry.) In a delayed cotton gin scenario, the number of slaves used in industry will be higher, not lower.



Again, slaves had been used in industry since industrialisation started in the South.

I have to ask, why are you so vehemently against even the possibility that Illinois and Indiana becoming slave states may have happened? You keep raising an assorted grab-bag of reasons as to why something just could not happen. And those reasons are, to be blunt, fairly insubstantial and in many cases simply wrong.

1) Quite a few. You are assuming only pro-slavery Southerners woud move in if there wasn't competition from the Cotton South. I highly doubt that.

2) Not because of the slavery question but the fact that people like to jump on the bandwagon or at the very least like to hear about a place before they move there. If there are more people moving to Ill more attention will be paid to it in the newspapers. The attention it gets will cause more people to move there and not only Southerners. There were more Northerners than Southerners and if Ill is suddenly getting a large increase in population attention will be made of it in the papers. Some of them will move to Ill countering a lot of the Southern vote.

3) They weren't close. 14 points isn't close. All you proved is Ill had a small population at the time. You arbitrarily add 20,000 anti-slavery voters from Mass into Ark in 1820 and it is suddenly a Free State!

It is not impossible just harder than you make it look.
 
1) Quite a few. You are assuming only pro-slavery Southerners woud move in if there wasn't competition from the Cotton South. I highly doubt that.

No, I'm working from the context that what has changed is the (lesser) attractiveness of cotton-growing in the South. Which means that people who decided to move west in OTL (as a lot did) now have different destinations to consider.

Some will still move west and grow tobacco. A few may stay home. But some of those who pursued the cotton fields in OTL may well decide to try their hand elsewhere at farming some of the best lands in the Union.

2) Not because of the slavery question but the fact that people like to jump on the bandwagon or at the very least like to hear about a place before they move there. If there are more people moving to Ill more attention will be paid to it in the newspapers. The attention it gets will cause more people to move there and not only Southerners. There were more Northerners than Southerners and if Ill is suddenly getting a large increase in population attention will be made of it in the papers. Some of them will move to Ill countering a lot of the Southern vote.

I hate to repeat myself, but you are really, really grasping at straws.

The attractiveness of the Illinois farming regions to Northerners is unchanged from OTL. Those Northerners who were planning to move there have already done so. What has changed is that Illinois is now (relatively) more attractive to Southerners who were going to move anyway. The question is what destination they pick once they've decided to move.

And frankly, a couple of thousand extra people in downstate Illinois isn't going to raise much of a fuss in the U.S. newspapers.

3) They weren't close. 14 points isn't close. All you proved is Ill had a small population at the time. You arbitrarily add 20,000 anti-slavery voters from Mass into Ark in 1820 and it is suddenly a Free State!

I remain mystified by your obsession with 14 percentage points. That would be relevant if you were asking "what would it take to make the existing Illinois voters change their mind on the slavery question".

But that's not the question. The question is what happens if a couple of thousand more Southerners (who are largely pro-slavery) move into the teritory with their slaves - as plenty did OTL, remember - and then want to make their ownership of those slaves legal.

As to your nonsense of arbitrarily moving 20,000 anti-slavery voters into Arkansas, well, come up with a scenario why those voters would want to move there, and we can discuss it. Otherwise, it's just a red herring.
 
1) Quite a few. You are assuming only pro-slavery Southerners woud move in if there wasn't competition from the Cotton South. I highly doubt that.

2) Not because of the slavery question but the fact that people like to jump on the bandwagon or at the very least like to hear about a place before they move there. If there are more people moving to Ill more attention will be paid to it in the newspapers. The attention it gets will cause more people to move there and not only Southerners. There were more Northerners than Southerners and if Ill is suddenly getting a large increase in population attention will be made of it in the papers. Some of them will move to Ill countering a lot of the Southern vote.

3) They weren't close. 14 points isn't close. All you proved is Ill had a small population at the time. You arbitrarily add 20,000 anti-slavery voters from Mass into Ark in 1820 and it is suddenly a Free State!

1.)True. Yes, some pro-slavery Southerners might move there, but what about Southerners who didn't own slaves and/or had no desire to own them?(that would include a whole bunch of my maternal ancestors, btw)

2.)Very true, although this might lead to the state of Illinois being split in two along some line(this played a small role in Hamilton's admission as a state in my flagship TL, Stars & Stripes, in which a limited amount of slavery was allowed down there).

3.)That could happen. In fact, that gets me thinking: what would a more Yankee-influenced Arkansas look like, culturally speaking? :D
 
I'm at a loss how anyone could think that a later cotton gin means that Maryland and Delaware go abolitionist. What's the reason? The border states (including Kentucky and Missouri, later) didn't produce cotton in any meaningful way. Even in Virginia, meaningful crops of cotton were only produced in a small area along the south-eastern coast.

Slaves in the border states and the rest of Virginia produced tobacco and wheat (together with other small grains), and a smaller amount of hemp.

Indeed, as I've pointed out before, the paradoxical effect of a later cotton gin is that it may increase the geographical spread of slavery, because slaves aren't being sucked south. The southern regions of Indiana and Illinois had slavery in OTL (even though illegal), growing the same crops that were grown in Kentucky across the Ohio River, and those slaveowners made very good profits. Their bids to have slavery legalised in Indiana and Illinois failed, but if the cotton gin hadn't sucked more Southern migrants and their slaves further south to the cotton areas, those bids may well have succeeded.

If Indiana and Illinois became slave states in the 1810s or 1820s, turning them abolitionist would be very difficult, even if there's only a few slaveowners in the state. The OTL example of Delaware shows that very well. By 1860, there were only a relative handful of slaves in the state - 90% of them had been freed - but the state still stubbornly resisted all efforts at compensated emanicipation and freeing the slaves, even when the ACW showed that slavery was on the way out. Delaware even refused to rafity the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, and would not ratify until 1901. Indiana and Illinois would probably prove to be similarly resistant if they have slave-using regions in the south of their states.

Alternatively, since the cotton gin isn't around in the first place, before statehood, the two territories may be redivided along an east-west axis, with the southern portions of Indiana and Illinois converted to one slaveholding territory and the northern portions converted to one free-soil territory, and the two admitted together.

The the division longitudinally had more to do with the distance of the far western settlements from the Terr. capital at Vicennes. It was too long or too distant for them to travel there ( or both)..thats still likely to be the case.


But you could have a movement for separation at some point among the northern Free soil counties. W. Virginia type but probably earlier. It would be difficult and probably resisted. As it would reapportion the electoral votes of those states. but since its likely only to create 1 free state out of the northern half to a third of those states. The southern portions would still remain as states. It might might happen with some backroom politicing. At some point the movement will eventually be strong enough even without a Civil War to separate those counties.
 
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oshron said:
Maine
California
Not sure if Maine is even created, with *Canadian states. And I'd expect California to be pretty different, probably a slave South & free North. Also, AIUI, there was slave sympathy in OTL Oregon, so that might come back slave TTL.
oshron said:
first one being British Columbia as the state of Cascadia. Though now that I think about it, that may well require some changes of its own
At a minimum, you'd have to divide the province in about 4 to keep it in line with U.S. state sizes.
oshron said:
last one being Nunavut in 1999. Before anyone says that Nunavut doesn’t have the population for that, a basic idea I had with that state is that it basically becomes the new Indian Territory prior to ratification
Completely unnecessary. There's plenty of space in OTL Southern Saskatchewan & Alberta that could serve as Reservation land, since it's worthless for agriculture, in the Palliser Triangle. (OTL, it was explored in a rainy period that made it look much better than it was, kind of like the "rain follows the plow" nonsense...:rolleyes:).

IDK what the U.S. standard for statehood is, but I'd imagine most of the Prairies never achieves the pop density for it:eek:--or, at a minimum, doesn't for a very long time. (I'm not sure it would even now.:eek:)
oshron said:
British Columbia confederated with Canada in 1871, and that’s when I decided to mark down their admission to the Union
With the changes to HBC & NWC, I'd imagine *BC joining shortly after annexation, along with northern *Oregon (roughly the area between 48-52 North & the Pacific & about 110 W). There was already a lot of encroachment by Americans, & a bit of conflict.
katchen said:
until then, all Southern planters could do was move their plantations further and further west into Texas and California. Which, if it happened a lot earlier would have a major effect on the distribution of slaves, wouldn't it?
This kind of move, which IIRC happened OTL as population migrated, was actually the first thing that occured to me. It also means IMO *Texas will be admitted as 4-5 states, to balance Northern free ones.

Also, with the demographic changes in play, nothing like the OTL state borders is likely to happen.


Something else you need to bear in mind: with more northern U.S. territory, the National Railway is going to be located somewhere else, probably further north. Run out of Chicago, through OTL North Dakota, & terminus in Seattle or Vancouver? This is bound to provoke Chinese immigration, & lead to race relations trouble...

At bottom, I also wonder why the cotton gin doesn't happen.:confused:
 
1.)True. Yes, some pro-slavery Southerners might move there, but what about Southerners who didn't own slaves and/or had no desire to own them?(that would include a whole bunch of my maternal ancestors, btw)

2.)Very true, although this might lead to the state of Illinois being split in two along some line(this played a small role in Hamilton's admission as a state in my flagship TL, Stars & Stripes, in which a limited amount of slavery was allowed down there).

3.)That could happen. In fact, that gets me thinking: what would a more Yankee-influenced Arkansas look like, culturally speaking? :D

Another thing to remember is all the "Western" states like Ill, Ark, KY and TN had small population. A shift of 2,000 people at that time was not trivial. They were moving in at thousands per state per year not hundreds of thousands per state per year.Why should they all move to Illl why not KY and TN instead? Tobacco in Ill can't compete with TN in growing tobacco and tobacco is big bucks even today. Nor were all the people who moved to Alabama and Mississippi die hard pro-slavery fanatics. Some were Northern Merchants who planned to sell goods to the new planters and some anti-slavery Southerners (And there were anti-slavery Southerners incl out and out abolitionists even in 1850 not talking 1820) moved there.
 
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 explicitly prohibited slavery in the area where Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin became states. It does not matter when the cotton gin gets invented and if any part of Canada enters the union. Even the southern states voted for it because they did not want additional competition in the tobacco crop which was so labor intensive that only slaves made it profitable.

No states from that area will be allowed to legalize slavery as Congress wouldn't approve their applications for statehood if slavery was included. By the time the territories of the Northwest Ordinance were populated enough for statehood, slavery had become a sectional issue and Congress would not allow the balance between free and slave states to end.

Now, it's always possible that after statehood was approved that the citizens might attempt to legalize slavery, which as earlier mentioned was what happened. Now it's entirely possible that the politics of 1822 could end up differently so that slavery became legal in Illinois, but a later invention of the cotton gin does not lead to this.
 
Another thing to remember is all the "Western" states like Ill, Ark, KY and TN had small population. A shift of 2,000 people at that time was not trivial. They were moving in at thousands per state per year not hundreds of thousands per state per year.Why should they all move to Illl why not KY and TN instead? Tobacco in Ill can't compete with TN in growing tobacco and tobacco is big bucks even today. Nor were all the people who moved to Alabama and Mississippi die hard pro-slavery fanatics. Some were Northern Merchants who planned to sell goods to the new planters and some anti-slavery Southerners (And there were anti-slavery Southerners incl out and out abolitionists even in 1850 not talking 1820) moved there.

That's another thing, too.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 explicitly prohibited slavery in the area where Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin became states. It does not matter when the cotton gin gets invented and if any part of Canada enters the union. Even the southern states voted for it because they did not want additional competition in the tobacco crop which was so labor intensive that only slaves made it profitable.

No states from that area will be allowed to legalize slavery as Congress wouldn't approve their applications for statehood if slavery was included. By the time the territories of the Northwest Ordinance were populated enough for statehood, slavery had become a sectional issue and Congress would not allow the balance between free and slave states to end.

Now, it's always possible that after statehood was approved that the citizens might attempt to legalize slavery, which as earlier mentioned was what happened. Now it's entirely possible that the politics of 1822 could end up differently so that slavery became legal in Illinois, but a later invention of the cotton gin does not lead to this.

I like your thinking here. :D
 
I’m sorry it took me so long to reply on all this.
That isn't that close a vote in percentage terms that is a 57%-43% victory for the anti-slavery position. That is hardly razor-thin. A presidential election with that margin is considered a blowout. You have to change the vote by 1,689 votes. If it is by new voters you need 14.5% of the population more as pro slavery voters without a single free voter coming into the state. If you double the voter base with the same split in reverse you get 6,144 new pro-slavery voters with 4,985 new anti-slavery voters you wind up with 11,096 pro-slavery voters and 11,625 anti-slavery voters and you still lose. Done with the same voter size you have to have shift about 1 in 8 anti-slavery vote which is a big shift.
tbph, I wouldn’t see it as too out-there-implausible for pro-slavery factions to try and fix the election by sending as many people to Illinois as possible to legalize slavery there (they tried it in Kansas IOTL, after all), especially considering that the slavers seem pretty willing to do ANYTHING to keep themselves in power, though I’m honestly not sure if (at that point in history) they were as willing to do so as they were in the late 1850s and 1860s (there’s a laundry list of Southern subversions of the rights of free states for OTL precedent).
This scenario is what the potential consequences if there's a change in Southern (i.e. pro-slavery) migration patterns due to no cotton gin.

Under the scenario, there's negligible difference to the number of free soil settlers moving into Illinois, so no, that number won't really change. The numbers who move there are as OTL. Cotton gin or no cotton gin doesn't change that.

What has changed is the destination of Southern migrants, in the absence of a cotton gin. My point was that if there's no southward pull of cotton which happened in OTL, then more of the pro-slavery people who went south for cotton may well take move into Illinois and Indiana.

If that number of migration involves 2000 new voters - plus their families if they have them, though the majority of early migrants tended to be male - then you have enough voters to make Illinois a slave state.
Though I replied separately to the Johnrankins post above, I’m finding this here to not only be more plausible but also arguably more desirable. Relating to this, what I’m starting to envision is, perhaps, an attempted secessionist movement in southern Illinois and Indiana if and when civil war breaks out, perhaps to the effect of what happened in Maryland IOTL, along with a definite secession by Missouri (given southern diaspora and partly accounting for an adjusted Missouri Compromise line that I thought up which would designate more of Missouri as pro-slavery)
I think that the idea of a cotton gin (combs that comb the seeds out of cotton) is so elementary that it is a bit incredible that it would not be thought of. What COULD have destroyed King Cotton at any time from the 1790s on would have been the early spread of the boll weevil. It was not until the early 1900s that farmers figured out pesticides that could kill boll weevils and until then, all Southern planters could do was move their plantations further and further west into Texas and California. Which, if it happened a lot earlier would have a major effect on the distribution of slaves, wouldn't it?
Of course once land was infested with boll weevil, people would figure out that there was a lot of other things that could be planted on it. Tobacco could be grown further South, for instance. A lot of Tobacco is grown in Zimbabwe, as I recall, in the tropics. If not cotton, how about silk? Plant mulberry orchards, pick the leaves and feed them to silkworms. Very labor intensive, but if the slaves are there and silk prices high, easy enough to turn a profit on silk production. France and Italy produce silk, after all, and the South has a climate similar to Southern China. Or even opium and smokable marijuana. The only reason marijuana became illegal in the US was it's association with African-Americans and Latinos and it's competition with DuPont's nylon in the 1930s. In the 1830s as an economic savior of the South? Nothing wrong with it! Try to sell the British and the French on it! And hemp fiber for clothing of course. Still plenty of room for slaves, unfortunately.
An interesting supposition. I hadn’t thought of other cash crops coming up in place of cotton
True as a general rule, but ignores the significant exceptions of Illinois, Indiana (and to a lesser degree Ohio), which had proslavery majorities at the time of statehood, and only did not become slave states because Congress made it clear that it would not admit them as slave states.

And the attempts to make Indiana and Illinois into slave states after admission are as per OTL. Yes, they failed in OTL, but they were close enough to show that there was potential for things to go the other way, for a time at least.
Jared is right about Southern Ohio, Indiana and Illinois for a very important reason. Those parts of those states were settled by Scots-Irish settlers, just as Kentucky was, while areas further North in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois were settled from New York and New England and Germany. That's why IOTL, Ohio is a swing state and Illinois has so many Republican downstate congressional districts and Indiana is conservative Republican and 90 years ago was a Ku Klux Klan stronghold. Given that it only takes the approval of a majority of each house of the state legislature and a majority of each House of Congress, according to the Constitution, for a state to split, the possibility of one, two or all three of those states splitting into free and slave states cannot not be discounted ATL either.
And Southern congressional delegations can take into account the potential for more free soil by pushing for the admission of more smaller slave states to the Union to balance things out, at least in the Senate.
So do we think that Illinois ITTL could/would become a slave state? I just want to get a general consensus because of the separate talking points here.
Simply untrue. Slaves had been used for industrial purposes as far back as the first Southern textile mill of the 1790s.

The example of OTL shows that while white workers raised a fuss about working alongside slaves, they usually got over it too. (Or were made to get over it.) Not always - there were occasional times when workers successfully lobbied against slaves - but most of the time, the slave-using bosses got their way.

And the small minority of slaves used in industry was a reflection of cotton prices being so high, which kept them out of other uses, both agricultural and industrial. (When cotton prices did drop in OTL, more slaves moved into industry.) In a delayed cotton gin scenario, the number of slaves used in industry will be higher, not lower.

Again, slaves had been used in industry since industrialisation started in the South.
This could also have interesting repercussions on the later parts of the TL (remember the black socialist uprisings in the CSA in TL-191? Something like that is what’s coming to mind, at least to me)
All very true, by the way. Sure, this whole concern about slave states and free states didn't really start until later on IOTL, Jared IS (mostly) correct there(it actually started before 1840 but didn't become a major issue until that decade started, and really took off with Texas and the Mexican War), but it wouldn't take a lot of effort to plausibly to get some vagabond Northerners moving westward to balance out the pro-slavery people, particularly if land prices aren't too expensive and you can get a good PR movement going. It certainly can be done.

However, though, Katchen does also have a point; the states of Illinois and Indiana very well could have split based on support of the slavery system and/or other factors, associated or not. Additionally, TBH, this could have even happened to Texas or California: Try to imagine, for example, a West Texas without slavery or a South California(at least San Diego and everything south of there) with it.
I think I’ll now consider the Mexican-American War the turning point on the free/slave issue ITTL and maybe even redo a bit of the state ratification that I wrote up earlier in the thread.
Not sure if Maine is even created, with *Canadian states. And I'd expect California to be pretty different, probably a slave South & free North. Also, AIUI, there was slave sympathy in OTL Oregon, so that might come back slave TTL.

At a minimum, you'd have to divide the province in about 4 to keep it in line with U.S. state sizes.

Completely unnecessary. There's plenty of space in OTL Southern Saskatchewan & Alberta that could serve as Reservation land, since it's worthless for agriculture, in the Palliser Triangle. (OTL, it was explored in a rainy period that made it look much better than it was, kind of like the "rain follows the plow" nonsense...:rolleyes:[/IMG]).

IDK what the U.S. standard for statehood is, but I'd imagine most of the Prairies never achieves the pop density for it:eek:--or, at a minimum, doesn't for a very long time. (I'm not sure it would even now.:eek:
The required population for a state to be admitted is 60,000. Of all the states I have listed as having joined the Union ITTL (over its entire history) the only one I had to justify as having had a population boost is Nunavut (though admittedly I’m going by the current population count; OTL’s Northwest Territories and Yukon, together, have a population of over 70,000 so they are a single state, one of the geographically largest ITTL).

Maine is still separated from the main part of Massachusetts and isn’t adjacent to TTL’s Canadian states (remember, it’s Rupert’s Land that’s annexed, not all of Canada, though the North-Western Territory and British Columbia are later purchased/annexed as well). California actually includes Baja California as well which does eventually split, though part of the issue of slavery concerning California IOTL was that slavery had been illegal there for a long time under Mexican rule and there weren’t nearly as many pro-slavery settlers as there were in Texas. I’d say there could be some slavers in PARTS of California, but not enough to change anything (more like Illinois IOTL, though maybe not even proportionately)

And would British Columbia necessarily need to be split into a few different states? iirc, British Columbia’s size had been pre-determined by the time of confederation IOTL (annexation ITTL). In general, I’m also basically looking at some of the newly-acquired US territory being initially much larger (a separate idea is that California starts off much larger and is later split into it’s respective states, or that Indian Territory includes a lot more land and is also later split, but this kind of conflicts with a larger California). After all, we’re looking at a POD in the late 18th century, meaning that the butterfly effect could very well change the criteria for the geographic sizes of states. There’s also, generally, a larger global population ITTL because some OTL wars don’t occur due to the butterfly effect.
With the changes to HBC & NWC, I'd imagine *BC joining shortly after annexation, along with northern *Oregon (roughly the area between 48-52 North & the Pacific & about 110 W). There was already a lot of encroachment by Americans, & a bit of conflict.

This kind of move, which IIRC happened OTL as population migrated, was actually the first thing that occured to me. It also means IMO *Texas will be admitted as 4-5 states, to balance Northern free ones.

Also, with the demographic changes in play, nothing like the OTL state borders is likely to happen.

Something else you need to bear in mind: with more northern U.S. territory, the National Railway is going to be located somewhere else, probably further north. Run out of Chicago, through OTL North Dakota, & terminus in Seattle or Vancouver? This is bound to provoke Chinese immigration, & lead to race relations trouble...
At bottom, I also wonder why the cotton gin doesn't happen.:confused:
You raise a good point concerning Oregon. Maybe I’ll readjust that to British Columbia joining at the same time as the rest of Oregon Country

I had considered the additional northern territory when it comes to railroads, with the basic idea that the more populous southern half (OTL’s Lower 48) would get its railways first and then others are added going both north and south

As for the cotton gin: butterflies :p maybe Eli Whitney trips and breaks his neck or something and someone else comes up with the thing a couple decades later or something
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 explicitly prohibited slavery in the area where Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin became states. It does not matter when the cotton gin gets invented and if any part of Canada enters the union. Even the southern states voted for it because they did not want additional competition in the tobacco crop which was so labor intensive that only slaves made it profitable.

No states from that area will be allowed to legalize slavery as Congress wouldn't approve their applications for statehood if slavery was included. By the time the territories of the Northwest Ordinance were populated enough for statehood, slavery had become a sectional issue and Congress would not allow the balance between free and slave states to end.

Now, it's always possible that after statehood was approved that the citizens might attempt to legalize slavery, which as earlier mentioned was what happened. Now it's entirely possible that the politics of 1822 could end up differently so that slavery became legal in Illinois, but a later invention of the cotton gin does not lead to this.
You raise a good point
 
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