Sofa King:
The Northern factory workers would have risen up, but the black slaves would have risen first. I can very easily see the revolution of the Abolitionists being carried out by resistance cells of escaped blacks and Northerners who won’t accept the war is over. The Puritan North might have ‘officially frowned upon’ such acts, but they wouldn’t have stopped the cells from coming North to regroup and recruit, or from going South to sabotage Southern plantations and liberate men, equipment, and food. Poor whites fighting freemen and Northerners in the Southern swamps and forests, underground cells of Freedom Fighters being rooted out by Southern authorities, public executions in the towns and cities of the ones that caught, and posters blaring the names and faces of the ones they didn’t. A Second Civil War seems plausible, with an incident of ‘Southern Brutality’, spread by Hearst-style yellow journalism, giving the hawks in DC all they need to spark it. A Fifth Column in the CSA would ruin the South’s chances of winning the second time.