1) "Beast Butler" not having any problems with working so closely with Deep South Democrats? Not being sarcastic at all, but did anything like this happened IRL?
Butler was pretty much of a Doughface. Butler voted 57 times for the nomination of Davis, and supported Breckinridge in the election. In early 1862, a Southern leader wrote that his presence in command (of the Army forces) meant the expedition against New Orleans was feigned - there was no way Republicans would ever give anyone like Butler such a chance at glory.
Stephen Douglas is dying, BTW...he didn't drop dead in mid-stride, he suffered a slow lingering death.
Douglas died of typhoid fever. He was perfectly healthy a month earlier.
"Back to Africa" movements were never more than a means to ship out Black Leaders out of the USA to Liberia.
So you're saying that Henry Clay, Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington, Daniel Webster, and James Monroe were all lying about their motives? The Colonization Society primarily concerned itself with free blacks, and there was a sense (expressed most frankly by John Randolph) that
free blacks were trouble. But there were others who saw in colonization a long-term solution to slavery. Also, many of the leaders (Clay in particular) saw interracial prejudice as deeply ingrained, and instinctive, that blacks would never get a fair deal in the U.S.
Not for nothing did they oppose teaching Blacks their three R's. You have an education, and you have upward mobility, which Southern Whites would not tolerate.
Under the Jim Crow system, there were schools for black children. Poorly funded, grossly inferior to schools for white children, but still tax-supported schools for black children. In South Carolina in the 1890s, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman presided over revisions to the state constitution which allowed the final suppression of black voting. But it was also under Tillman that South Carolina established its first teachers' college for blacks.
Problem: The Fire-Eaters are very much in charge in the South, and they represent 80% of Southern Whites... This is the first time I have ever heard the use of this word Cooperationists. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but it doesn't seem to have survived. These people really were powerless in their own states. They were outnumbered 4:1 by the Fire-Eaters.
This is a gross exaggeration, even in the Deep South. Recent research has shown that in voting for delegates to the Georgia secession convention, just over 50% of the actual votes went to (conditional) Unionist delegates. (The secessionist majority was achieved by gerrymandering districts and cooking the returns.) In the November election, of 393,000 votes in the Deep South, only 220,000 (56%) went to Breckinridge - the other 44% to Bell and Douglas, whom the Fire-Eaters rejected.
It was certainly not true in the Upper South, which strongly rejected the Fire-Eaters' program of immediate secession.
Tennessee voted against having a secession convention. Maryland's legislature voted 53-13 against a convention,
after Fort Sumter and the Baltimore riots. Missouri's convention rejected secession. Kentucky had no convention, was famously declared neutral by its governor, and ended by going with the Union.
2/3 of the delegates to the Virginia convention were conditional or strict Unionists. Only 66 of 191 voted for secession on April 4. The final vote was 136 for secession, 52 against (after 12 nays changed to yeas once the resolution had carried).
The Fire-Eaters had the whip hand, and stampeded the Deep South into secession, but their control was not so firm as claimed. One reason they pushed for immediate secession is because they expected their influence to ebb once Lincoln took office and there were no slave insurrections or abolitionist agents appointed U.S. Marshal.