Yeah, a strong union movement would have given the slaves better working conditions, higher wages, and the grievance process to resolve workplace injustice. But those were unnecessary in the antebellum agricultural paradise of Lost Cause Land, ain’t that so DT?

FOAF: work or starve may not be truly be “against their will” but it’s a strong incentive to put up with a lot to keep working. history of the tenements of the 1860s makes interesting reading

Flag. OK. I’d always heard KY was the 13th and central star on the ANV battle flag. Yes, MO was also included. My bad.
Would have made some interesting history had MD seceded.

The confederate flag, both the stars and bars and the more well-known confederate battle flag, had 13 stars though only 11 stated seceded. I believe the other “extra” star was for Missouri, though Maryland and Delaware were also northern slave states.

However one could not argue that northern factory workers were forced to stay in their jobs against their will.

No, it was all about slavery.

Much as the United States did in the Declaration of Independence when it seceded from Britain, South Carolina issued a Declaration when it seceded from the United States in 1860. Contrary to what Confederate apologists tell everyone today, it made no mention of taxes, tariffs, or any other issue. It was all about slavery.

Called the ”Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union” it laid out the primary reason behind South Carolina’s decision to secede from the US as “the increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery.”

It went on to state “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”

Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas issued similar documents. Support for the Confederacy was and is support for slavery.

As for an attempt to deal with secession with methods short of war, all of that went out the window when South Carolina fired on the federal troops at Fort Sumter.

The war was more about the global cotton market than slavery. Slavery became a “feel-good” issue later in the war. One could argue that northern factory workers were often treated as and worse than southern slaves but the victors write the history.

PS – The South fought the Civil War to preserve slavery. Perhaps not all the soldiers but certainly all the leaders.

— FOAF

Without the slavery issue, I think there would still have been an internal crisis of some sort about that time, but probably not a mass civil/secession war. The question of whether the USA was a single nation-state or a tight alliance of sovereign polities (a federation or a confederation, in modern parlance) was in dispute from 1789 to the 1860s, and I think it would have come to a head about then even without slavery.

(Even the Founders disagreed with each other on this point. If you look at the original texts from those days, it used to be common to refer to the United States in the plural, ‘the United States are’, it changed to ‘the United States is’ after the Civil War.)

But I think the crisis would probably have been resolved (however it was) peacefully at scale without slavery. I say ‘at scale’ because I think there might still have been local violence.

There were larger trends in play as well. I don’t believe it was a coincidence that Bismarck united Germany at roughly the same time, or that other parts of Western Christendom were centralizing and and unifying at larger scales, too.