DiogenesLamp:
"This whole allegation about 'expansion' I now think was just a load of propaganda. " Well first of all, your map (reproduced below) is yet another crock of nonsense:
This map has nothing whatever to do with 1860 except possibly show where future slavery may have expanded, i.e., west Texas, Arizona and California.
A look at 1860 actual production is more like this:
DiogenesLamp: "Expanding it into the Caribbean (it was already there) or Mexico, would have been outside the prerogative of the US to control anyway, so is therefore irrelevant."
Such an odd thing to say since Southerners made numerous efforts, called "filibusters", to do just that, and even supported Federal government efforts to, for example, purchase Cuba.
Slave holders clearly had their eyes on any and all possibilities for expanding slavery beyond its 1850s limits.
Well first of all, your map (reproduced below) is yet another crock of nonsense:This map has nothing whatever to do with 1860 except possibly show where future slavery may have expanded, i.e., west Texas, Arizona and California.
Your response to it is the crock of nonsense. (There is that word again!) The map shows that it was clearly impossible to expand slavery to the "territories" because you could grow no cash crops in any of them. You point out west Texas, Arizona and California, and if you had bothered to read what I wrote, you would know it was impossible to grow cotton in any of those places in the 1860s because it required modern electric pumps and irrigation systems to even make it possible.
Effectively, Slavery could not expand to the territories, so the whole issue was phoney baloney astro-turf crap, and curiously enough, the party which was most responsible for spreading this nonsense was the "Free Soil Party", and coincidentally it was head quartered in New York.
So why would a New York headquartered entity be worried about "free men and free soil" in the territories a thousand miles away? Could it have something to do with representation in Congress, and therefore control of the power of Washington DC? They should have at least put this phone baloney organization in Chicago, where it would look a little more plausible having better proximity to the region in question.
Slave holders clearly had their eyes on any and all possibilities for expanding slavery beyond its 1850s limits.
So we have been constantly told, though the facts of modern cotton growing would indicate either those people in the 1860s who grew cotton for a living were either too stupid to know they couldn't grow cotton there, or this is just made up propaganda bullsh*t spread by people with other reasons for gaining those states representation in Congress.