US Civil War: Northern Secession?

I've seen a lot of northern-secession timelines, but a lot of them are close to ASB (severe Republican party fracture in early 1860 causing it to become six different parties) or don't involve much of the North seceding, as well as the secession being for a non-anti-slavery reason (I'm sure you all know which TL I'm referencing here). So, can anybody think of an actually plausible way that the North or a good portion of it (by this I mean more than three-quarters) might secede from the Union to combat slavery?
 
The Rivers of War series was going that way before it was ended. A large free black population in the way of slavery's expansion and new slave states might do it by forcing the issue of slavery years before our history. Southern states use their power to force new pro-slavery laws through at the Federal level. At that point the South was the politically ascendant region so it would be the North who pushed back against Federal law.
 
Britain wins 1812 and winds up with Michigan, Wisconsin and northern Indiana/Illinois (and some other non-western territory stuff). The war gets dragged out an extra two months and the Federalist Manifesto from Hartford has time to percolate in Washington and cause a lot of tooth gnashing between the Federalists and Republicans. The presidents elected from non consecutive states rule has broad traction so Crawford goes for it and wins the 1816 election, Monroe stays on as Sec of State any arranges the Florida deal with Spain and presses America's claim that the Louisiana purchase extends to the Rio Grande. Spain agrees (for a price). Crawford retires and Calhoun takes the presidency, he's a disaster. The Northwest Ordinance is overturned in the state of Indiana/Illinois (now merged because they're smaller) and flips to a slave state and East Texas is admitted as a state after the southern land boom. Calhoun angers almost everyone during his tenure and loses the nomination to somebody.

I'm on vacation right now and doing this on my phone. But if Calhoun can poison the well of the presidency while the north keeps harping about the 3/5s clause from Hartford (even after the Federalists are no more) and you get an acrimonious 1832 election you could set up a potential 1836 northern secession with slavery and economic ruin ( from the whopper of a recession that took place that year) as a backdrop. I like to think van Buren makes a play for it and fails so callously decides to split the country to become a northern president as opposed to an American one. The war won't be over the right to secede because most the remaining states don't care, but what happens with states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who are anti-slavery but also pro-Union. Indiana-Illinois devolves into a literal civil war, Britain doesn't intervene because of problems in Canada.

There is my napkin logic for a civil war. Feel free to critique, but keep in mind I'm away from anything that resembles a source.
 
I've seen a lot of northern-secession timelines, but a lot of them are close to ASB (severe Republican party fracture in early 1860 causing it to become six different parties) or don't involve much of the North seceding, as well as the secession being for a non-anti-slavery reason (I'm sure you all know which TL I'm referencing here). So, can anybody think of an actually plausible way that the North or a good portion of it (by this I mean more than three-quarters) might secede from the Union to combat slavery?

Possible but very unlikely. OTL the South seceded because they (accurately) feared that the North was getting more and more power and would eventually push through the legislation no matter what the Southerners did.

The problem, also, is that the North seceding does absolutely nothing to end slavery. It creates a new country with no slavery...in territory that already didn't have any slaves. And the westward expansion was already showing the limits of the slave economy, which needed an appropriate climate for large scale plantation growth of cash crops and cheap transportation. OTL's CSA is about as far as you can get up the various tributaries of the Mississippi and still grow cotton (or whatever). I guess they could try sugar beet...

Anyway, I also don't think that there are enough Northern leaders that feel as strongly about abolition as the Southern leaders did about slavery; economic concerns are more consistently powerful than ideological ones.
 
What about if the Supreme Court effectively declares that there are no free states or something along those lines?
 
I do not think that that northern disunionism should be totally written off. It was not merely a Garrisonian eccentricity; a considerable number of antislavery northerners did at least toy with it from time to time. Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire once said: "If this Union, with all its advantages, has no other cement than the blood of human slavery, let it perish." (Quoted in David Potter, *The Impending Crisis 1848-1861*, p. 45) Senator Wade of Ohio stated in 1854 that "I go for the death of slavery whether the Union survives it or not." (Quoted in Brian Holden Reid, *The Origins of the American Civil War* [London and New York: Longman 1996], p. 147) Also, at various times in the 1860-61 crisis, Charles Sumner, Joshua Giddings, Gerrit Smith and other abolitionists advocated the peaceful dissolution of "this blood-stained Union." (Quoted in Kenneth Stampp, *And the War Came* (Phoenix books edition, pp. 247-8)

Still, all this was mostly rhetorical--it was people saying "I would rather have disunion than another cowardly compromise with the Slave Power." Most of the people who said this (a) were much more radical on slavery than most northerners (including a majority of Republicans), and (b) except for the Garrisonians, didn't really believe it *was* necessary to choose between Union and antislavery. It is true that after Buchanan's election in 1856, some northern antislavery radicals concluded that the struggle aginst slavery was hopeless within the Union, and tried to make common cause with the Garrisonians in a "disunion convention" in Worcester, MA in 1857. They sent out invitations to several prominent Republicans--who all turned them down. Even a Radical like Henry Wilson advised the Convention to "leave all the impotent and puerile threats against the Union to the Southern slave propagandists." https://books.google.com/books?id=Wl38uYb85DgC&pg=PA141

The questions are: (a) what would get antislavery northerners to believe that the cause of antislavery within the Union was doomed, and (b) make them a majority in the North--or at least in enough northern states to make a serious movement for secession possible?

The only thing I can think of is a Breckinridge victory in 1860--having the "slave power" win yet another victory will by itself be tremendously embittering--followed by a war in Latin America which northerners would see as a war for slavery, and also by the "second Dred Scott" decision Lincoln had warned about. (Yet a "second Dred Scott" decision *immediately* establishing slavery in the North was unlikely. What was more likely and more insidious was the possibility that the court would establish slavery in the North *gradually* by first recognizing slaveholders' rights briefly to pass through northern states with their human "property" and then step by step expanding that right to one of staying there with the slaves indefinitely--and perhaps even buying and selling them. What worried Lincoln was that the gradualness of the process--combined with Douglas' public moral indifference to slavery and view that a Supreme Court decision was a "Thus saith the Lord" that cannot be questioned--would mute northern outrage.)

More likely, even in the event that Breckinridge won in the House in 1860 (or there was a deadlock in the House so that Breckinridge's "doughface" running mate Lane would be chosen as acting president by the Senate) most Republicans would still hope for a victory in 1864, and favor remaining in the Union. Or at least enough of them would do so, that combined with Demcorats, they could block northern secession.

In short, a fair number of antislavery northerners did toy, at least rhetorically, with disunionism--but "toyed" and "rhetorically" are the key words here.
 
It is very difficult to pull off , the North was more populous and getting more and more so vs the South. It was only a matter of time before the North so outnumbered the South that the latter's opinion on slavery wouldn't matter any more. Both sides understood that which is why the South eventually rebelled. They knew they would have to leave soon as rebellion would be more and more hopeless over time.
 
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