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Are you one of those alternative history buffs?

No.

Because you sure are creating a new one.

No, I'm not.

The Great Migration didn't take place until 50 years--half a century--after the end of the Civil War.

I didn't mention any "Great Migration." You did.

In 1900, approximately 90 percent of all blacks still lived in the former slave-holding states.

Kind of destroys the argument that the slave economy was so horrible, doesn't it? After all, why stay down on the plantation when the streets Up No'th are paved with gold?

Detroit's black population in 1910 was all of 6,000, just 1% of the total population.

I used Detroit as a metaphor for ALL the Northern industrial centers. And I never said that only Blacks were serfs in the industrialized North. In fact, I argued just the opposite.

freed slaves who stayed in the south continued to be disenfranchised, once Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow laws were enacted.

Discrimination -- whether codified in the form of Jim Crow laws or exercised de facto as a cultural artifact -- existed, and continues to exist in all parts of the country. To suggest that it is limited to the South is simplistic.

You said:
And that's the reason Detroit is in such great shape today ... because all those freed slaves immediately found Eden in the loving arms of Andrew Carnegie and JP Morgan.

I pointed out that the Great Migration occurred a half century after the end of the Civil War because in no actual history of the U.S. did "all those freed slaves immediately" go anywhere near Detroit, Andrew Carnegie, or J.P. Morgan.

You said: Kind of destroys the argument that the slave economy was so horrible, doesn't it? After all, why stay down on the plantation when the streets Up No'th are paved with gold?

Here's where you really get ridiculous. You see, prior to the Civil War, slaves escaped to the north. After the Civil War, when slavery was abolished, they didn't need to escape to the north since they were no longer the property of those genteel southerners. Slave economies are generally pretty good for the slave owners, not so much for the slaves. Point out some poor northern serfs who willingly sold themselves into slavery in the south and you might just have an argument that conditions for workers in both parts of the country were equivalent.