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...

[/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

--or, at a minimum, doesn't for a very long time. (I'm not sure it would even now.
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.
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

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