Certainly the south was better suited to the plantation style of slave ownership, but wasn't part of the threat that slavery might have become universal if not confined to the southern states the fact that slavery might have been adapted as factory workers as well as farm workers?

After all the reason that slavery existed in New York and New Jersey for so long was as dock workers. But it became cheaper to simply hire free people and pay them a non living wage and let those workers fend for themselves rather than the factory owner providing for their workers welfare.

But back to my original point. If it were not for the limits placed on the southern territories by the 1820 Missouri Compromise do you think that that might have forced some of those states to enter the Union as Slave States?

For example what would have happened had Florida wanted to enter the Union in 1845 as a free state?

I realize that the 1850 census shows that Florida was 50/50 white and slave population due to British high importation of slaves during their reign over Florida. But lets say that in 1845 the Florida legislature wish to eliminate that practise like New York and Pennsylvania had done and wanted to be admitted as a free state. Would it have been allowed to do so under the 1820 Compromise?

Another example closer to the point is Arkansas admitted as a slave state in 1836. Yet it only had a 20% slave population in the 1860 census, the smallest of any of the seceeding southern states. Had Arkansas decided to eliminate the slave practise prior to its admission or even as late as 1850, Would Arkansas have been allowed to become a "Free State" in the Union under the Compromise? Texas was another example in which "Technical Slavery" had only existed after it had won its independence from Mexico and after it had been admitted to the Union in 1845.

Then you have the admission of California in 1850 which caused a whole different compromise to handle that problem of how that state should be admitted as 0ne or two states, as one single free State, or as one half (the North) as a Free State and one half (the southern half) as a slave state.

So did the 1820 Compromise have the effect of taking the decision away from the individual states as to whether they would be Free or Slave based solely upon thier geographical location of being above or below a certain line drawn in the sand? The 1850 Compromise for California situation and the Kansas-Nebraska Act would seem to indicate that laws for the western territories were made up and changed as these different situation came up to suit a particular factions with their political agenda.

Whereas prior to 1850 southern slave state could not be admitted as "free states" even if their had a desire to abolish the practise it their states. And they could not be admiited as a "slave state" without the counterbalancing "free State" to offset any political advantage that either side might gain or lose due to that admission of certain states.