What if the slave/free state divide was more balanced?

What throughout the 19th century, the US is able to keep the number of Slave and free equal? Would we see no civil war at the costs of heightened tension? Or would it just delay the civil war?
 
What throughout the 19th century, the US is able to keep the number of Slave and free equal? Would we see no civil war at the costs of heightened tension? Or would it just delay the civil war?

The slave/free state even split was pushed beyond its logical limit. It seems difficult to imagine that it would have worked out for any longer than it did, and very possible it would have worked out less.
 
The slave/free state even split was pushed beyond its logical limit. It seems difficult to imagine that it would have worked out for any longer than it did, and very possible it would have worked out less.

Oh I agree, eventually something needed to break, I'm just asking what the effects of a more equal balance would be. As in, an equal number of slave states versus free states
 
By 1850 even that wouldn't work, though. It would have made perfect sense to admit Kansas as a slave state to keep the balance, but that wasn't in the cards.
 
Actually the timeline I was imagining would have less free states; War of 11812 loses Michigan, Wisconsin are Canadian while Minnesota never forms.

You're basically describing the Decades of Darkness USA, then. If the country's center of gravity is further south, whether by more southern conquests or territorial losses to the north, slavery might last longer. The writing is still on the wall from 1808 on, though. Brazil only held out until 1888, and they didn't have a huge industrial free soil area agitating for abolition.
 
You're basically describing the Decades of Darkness USA, then. If the country's center of gravity is further south, whether by more southern conquests or territorial losses to the north, slavery might last longer. The writing is still on the wall from 1808 on, though. Brazil only held out until 1888, and they didn't have a huge industrial free soil area agitating for abolition.

So what might we expect to happen in the US, Also forgive me but I have yet to read Decades of Darkness
 
What possible additional slave states would there be?


Well, there's the usual POD of dividing up Texas.

Other possibilities:

(1) Partitioning California. This was proposed in 1850, and even after California was admitted as a free state, there was a movement in the southern counties to secede from the state and form a "Territory of Colorado" (which under the Dred Scott decision would be open to slavery).

(2) Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution. True, a slave state with few slaves--though more than is commonly realized--see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/2fMP4R-4fAE/RPjl9Aq4jcUJ on this--but with the pro-slavery party (fraudulently) in power. (And remember that eastern Kansas was not all that different in climate and soil from some Missouri counties that had considerable slavery.)

(3) Governor Robert Walker of Kansas, who argued that climate ("isothermal lines") would exclude slavery there, suggested that southerners instead work to form a slave state in the Indian territory to the south. "Upon the south, Kansas is bounded by the great southwestern Indian territory. This is one of the most salubrious and fertile portions of this continent. It is a great cotton-growing region, admirably adapted by soil and climate for the products of the south, embracing the valleys of the Arkansas and Red rivers, adjoining Texas on the south and west, and Arkansas on the east, and it ought speedily to become a state of the American Union. The Indian treaties will constitute no obstacle any more than precisely similar treaties did in Kansas; for their lands, valueless to them, now for sale, but which, sold with their consent and for their benefit, like the Indian land of Kansas, would make them a most wealthy and prosperous people; and their consent, on these terms, would be most cheerfully given. This territory contains double the area of the state of Indiana, and, if necessary, an adequate portion of the western and more elevated part could be set apart exclusively for these tribes, and the eastern and larger portion be formed into a state, and its lands sold for the benefit of these tribes, (like the Indian lands of Kansas,) thus greatly promoting all their interests."
https://books.google.com/books?id=8ZdFAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA336&

(4) New Mexico adopted a slave code in 1859 and if admitted to the Union would have been at least nominally a slave state (though one with almost no slaves).
 
You're basically describing the Decades of Darkness USA, then. If the country's center of gravity is further south, whether by more southern conquests or territorial losses to the north, slavery might last longer. The writing is still on the wall from 1808 on, though. Brazil only held out until 1888, and they didn't have a huge industrial free soil area agitating for abolition.

What exactly gives you this impression?
 
What exactly gives you this impression?

I'm not saying it was 100% inevitable, but the price of slaves was causing strain on the social system by the 1850's. Not that super-expensive slaves are bad for slaveowners, but a lot of things like ditch-digging were having to be done by free white man, often Irish immigrants. The immigrants tended to mix fairly freely with blacks, which greatly upset Southern whites, and if a free white man's labor is valued much less than that of a slave, there's going to be a certain amount of class resentment. That and the issue of being an international pariah state.
 
I'm not saying it was 100% inevitable, but the price of slaves was causing strain on the social system by the 1850's. Not that super-expensive slaves are bad for slaveowners, but a lot of things like ditch-digging were having to be done by free white man, often Irish immigrants. The immigrants tended to mix fairly freely with blacks, which greatly upset Southern whites, and if a free white man's labor is valued much less than that of a slave, there's going to be a certain amount of class resentment. That and the issue of being an international pariah state.

I think you're conflating views and treatment of Irish, who weren't even universally viewed as White at the time, with that of Native Southerners. GDP per capita wasn't that different from Northerners and inequality was about the same, while the need to retain the loyalty of the Free Whites led the Slave holding class to forge a symbiotic relationship with them; for one example, service in slave patrols in exchange for getting to use machinery owned by the Planters.
 
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I think you're conflating views and treatment of Irish, who weren't even universally viewed as White at the time, with that of Native Southerners. GDP per capita wasn't that different from Northerners and inequality was about the same, while the need to retain of the Free Whites led the Slave holding class to forge a symbiotic relationship with them; for one example, service in slave patrols in exchange for getting to use machinery owned by the Planters.

I didn't conflate the Irish and poor whites, I just phrased my post poorly. Irish immigrants mixing freely with blacks was commented on negatively by a lot of people in larger Southern cities in the late 1850's. Free laborers resenting slaves and slave owners was still largely regional at the time of the civil war, but it was also a growing source of tension.
 
Well, you didn't specify a starting date, by going to a pre-convention POD, we can make a dystopian USA with more slave-owner power by embedding racism into America. You seem to only be aiming for a 19th century balance of the powers
 
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