The historical and economic analyses of slavery which I have consulted indicate otherwise.
Which sources would those be?
For one good one, try: "The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861" by David M. Potter. I can dig up others if you need them.
Without launching into a detailed analysis, I would simply state the obvious: if slave escapes were such a minor problem that affected so few Southern slaveowners, and the problem of escapism was so easily controlled, one might wonder why would enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act have become such a vital issue for the South?
Because they were paranoid on the issue, basically. Most Northern politicians argued for the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, after all, barring a few extreme abolitionists. Lincoln argued for the enforcement of it. So did Seward.
The individual slaveowners who lost slaves certainly complained loudly about it, but the percentage of runaways was never anywhere near high enough to threaten the viability of slavery as an institution.
It was this issue, along with the issue of the right to take slaves into the territories, which almost every Southern State which made such declarations cited in their declarations of the reasons for secession in 1861. Obviously it was more of a problem than you are making out here.
It's true enough that the South was worried about it, but they were worried over plenty of other things which turned out not to be the case. Lincoln had said repeatedly that he had no power to abolish slavery in any existing state, but the South found the prospect of a president who had some reservations over slavery so disturbing that they seceded even before Lincoln was sworn in.
The declarations of secessions cite plenty of other concerns besides the two you list. Firstly and most importantly, the slaveowners wanted respect. They complained about fugitive slaves, certainly, but in the context of a broader dislike of the north being antislavery. From the South Carolina causes of secession:
"We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection."
Fugitive slaves are in there, but there's much more than that: the denunciation of slavery as being seen as sinful, and also concern over slave insurrection. (Slave rebellion being another example of something which the South was paranoid about much more than it was actually a realistic prospect.)
And while your analysis of the slaves who escaped (young, unattached males within 200 kilometres of the border) may or may not be true...there were a number of highly publicized cases of slave women and their children escaping to the North (highly publicized, quite often, because they were caught in the North and returned under the Fugitive Slave Act)...
There were certainly a few cases who weren't young and unattached males, but the large majority were as I said.
it doesn't really answer the question of why the vast majority, even within that 200 kilometer area, did not even try.
Because they thought that they'd be caught, basically.
There is evidence (such as statements in the interviews with former slaves known as THE SLAVE NARRATIVES, for example) that a prime reason for this was that they knew that, even if they made it into the "free" states, they could be, and most likely would be, returned to slavery. This won't be the case in the ATL.
Slaves who made it into Canada couldn't be returned even in OTL. A maximum of 6000 slaves went that far between 1850 and 1860. So knowing that they wouldn't be returned wasn't the only reason the slaves didn't leave.
As I said in the timeline, this is a process which will occur gradually over a period of over 50 years. There won't be an instant flood of runaways across the border. But as time goes on, and as the slaves in the border States begin to realize that runaways aren't being returned, the floodgates will gradually open, and the population of slaves will begin to be affected.
And the USA is unable to stop them? I rather doubt that...
That's true...but that was, in large part, not due to the "economic and social context," but simply because most of the region had not been adequately explored and it's potential was not yet realized.
Just because cotton can be grown there in a mid to late twentieth century context has very little bearing on whether it would be profitable in a nineteenth century slave economic system. And more particularly whether it would be profitable in comparison to other uses for the slaves, and other cotton areas. The prime area for expansion of cotton plantation (apart from the Delta) is around southern Coahuila and northern Durango.
The fact is that there was quite a lot of internal improvements being made and funded in the South prior to the war. There was not much opposition in the South to internal improvements as such.
No... just opposition to being taxed to pay for it. And since any government improvements would have to come from taxes (not enough people in Arizona to pay for it themselves) it amounts to the same thing when asking whether there'd be irrigation projects in Arizona.
One factor which might mitigate against there being as much opposition to federal funding of improvements in the ATL is that they will be going into the Territories...which is land held in common by all of the States. It would likely be easier for the representatives of the various States to rally around that than there would be for support of internal improvements within an existing State.
Or they'd chose to block funding for it more or less entirely, as they ended up doing in the CS constitution.
It is not really valid to use the Confederate experience as a guide in this case. The C.S.A., when it's Constitution was written, also didn't have any western territories in need of development. All of its undeveloped land was within STATES, which were seen as responsible for their own internal improvements.
The CSA expected to acquire New Mexico territory, at least.
The United States in the ATL after the conquest of Mexico finds itself with a huge amount of undeveloped western territory, and the way it proceeds will also likely be different.
They'll have to persuade a bunch of people to pay for taxes for (as they see it) no benefit to themselves. A transcontinental railroad is one thing; government sponsorship of irrigation projects quite another.
Your arguments, if we analyze them, are somewhat contradictory.
1) You argue that cotton is so profitable that all slave labor was being sucked into cotton production, which would prevent any other slave-based agriculture from developing in Mexico.
2) You argue that the supply of slave labor is so limited that slave-based agriculture couldn't develop in Mexico, and that they would use Mexican peon labor instead.
Available slave labour, i.e. that which can be bid on and moved.
Yet, elsewhere, you argue that...
If slaves were in such short supply in the cotton states, it does not seem likely that in the Upper South where there the cotton boom was not dominant, the slave population would be actually increasing. This would indicate that there was in fact a surplus supply of slave labor available to supply the slaves, at least initially, needed by development in Mexico. It can't be both ways at once. Either there was a surplus, or there wasn't.
No contradiction involved, just a matter of
how many slaves were being sold. In Virginia, Maryland and Delaware up to 1840 or so, it was enough that it outpaced the rate of natural increase of slaves in those states. Post 1840 (well, between the 1840 and 1850 censuses, anyway), the rate of migration of slaves out of Virginia was less than the rate of natural increase of slaves in that state, hence the number of slaves started to rise again.
This does nothing to change the fact that whenever slaves
were sold, cotton planters won most of the bids. Cotton sucked slave labour out of urban industry quite handily (check out the history of the Tredegar Iron Works, for instance), and it sucked out a lot of the growth in tobacco too.
As for your arguments that cotton was so profitable that it would prevent the development of industries like coffee, sugar, rice, or cacao in Mexico,
It wouldn't prevent the development of those industries; it would prevent the development of slave agriculture using them, when local peasant labour was available and cheap enough to get started with. (Until cotton prices crashed, as I also said upthread.)
and that the Mississippi Delta region was undeveloped and was some of the best cotton land around, I would respond by pointing out that planters in the Mississippi Delta region primarily grew sugar cane and rice. If the land was so suitable for cotton,
The parts of the Delta which grew cotton and those which grew sugar and rice weren't quite the same. The parts which were more suitable for cotton were somewhat drier, and needed the construction of levees before they could be farmed. (Which started in the 1850s in OTL, but really got going after the ACW.)
and if cotton was so much more profitable than these other crops, that begs the question as to why the Delta planters were still growing rice and sugar instead of cotton.
Because with the land and microclimate they had available, they couldn't grow cotton in those areas at that time.
It also demonstrates that if a different crop can be more profitable than cotton in a different region, then Southern entrepreneurs of this period would likely grow it using slave labor.
I wouldn't dispute for a moment that planters would switch between crops if another turned out to be more profitable. The cotton boom itself was a prime example of that. (Cotton being a minor crop at the time of the American Revolutionary Wars, with tobacco, indigo and rice major ones. Indigo was just about gone by the ACW, and rice was in severe decline.)
But when people are getting into bidding contests for slave labour, it's the crop which generates the highest overall rate of return which will get most of the slaves. And during the period in question, that crop was cotton, cotton and more cotton. Pretty much anyone who could grow cotton did. (Sugar and rice were grown when the land was either too wet or too hot, and tobacco when the land was too cool or too dry, or both.)
You ignore the other factor which I mentioned...the extreme prejudice which Southerners of the time are going to have against Mexican peon labor.
I don't ignore it, it's just that it's a minor matter when compared to the problem of actually getting slaves. As I said, there are some areas of Mexico which will see a huge boom with slave cotton agriculture - Durango, Coahuila and Neuvo Leon, basically. For the rest... It's use peasants or have no workers, basically.
Will some of them use it? Yes. Will that prevent slave labor from being preferred, and prevent the supply of slaves in the cotton states from being impacted, by the movement of slaves to Mexico? No.
As I said, it's not that Southerners wouldn't prefer slave labour given a choice, it's just that they won't be able to get enough slaves. The Southerners who were mining in New Mexico wouldn't have minded a few slaves either, and it was legal, but that's not where the slaves ended up.
There are ways around that. Raise taxes to the point where landowners will sell cheaply to avoid losing everything at the tax auction. It happened quite a lot in the post-Civil War South, and similar policies could well be applied in Mexico.
These are people for whom property rights are damn near sacred. That was why they got so worked up over slavery in the first place. Those sort of screwy manouevres aren't going to cut it. Especially since the big landowners are going to be the people the downsized-USA is going to have to keep onside if it's going to hold down Mexico.
