Heart of Dixie: A Timeline

After writing too-long posts for maps on the Map Thread, I decided to create a proper timeline for my scenario, titled Heart of Dixie. With this timeline, I will attempt to create a timeline with a world of butterflies set free in which the CSA does not turn into Nazi-analogues, literally Satan, or any other sort of dark cliches.

The timeline will be quite long, and full of information that you may not need to know, but will expand the world of the timeline. Expect lots of images as well, so you've been warned. Questions, comments, and concerns are welcomed and encouraged. Enjoy.

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Pealing Thunder: Road to Independence 1856-1861

Winged: Bleeding Kansas 1856-1857

The origins of the great conflict, coined the “Civil War,” that took place from 1857 until the winter of 1859 can be traced to a balmy June morning of the year 1856, in Baldwin City, located in the northwestern corner of the then-territory of Kansas.

There, the renowned Henry C. Pate, whose anti-abolitionist actions in the town of Lawrence in the past May had given him considerable fame among the pro-slavery advocates, stood with thirty or so fighting men and two prisoners they had captured earlier. The prisoners, the two sons of abolitionist John Brown, had been captured in retaliation for the deaths of five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie Creek. The men had been hacked apart with broadswords, in a savage display of anger by Brown and his comrade, Captain Shore.

Pate, despite his anger at Brown, had ordered the two boys to remain unharmed during their stay at Baldwin City. However, that afternoon several of the pro-slavery men had decided, against the wishes of their commander, to get very drunk. The drunker the men became, the more angry they got at Brown and his broadsword massacre. By the time Brown had arrived at the outskirts of the town with a posse of 29 abolitionists, anger began to boil over.

Before Henry Pate could stop them, three of his men dragged the boys out into the town square on their knees. There, in front of a small crowd that included advance scouts from Brown’s posse, the two frightened boys received a bullet to the head each. The reaction from the pro-slavery men was a mixed expression of surprise and anger at the slaying of the youths, but there was little they could do by then.

The reaction from John Brown, though, was more severe. The posse descended upon the town with righteous judgement and furious anger, and forced the pro-slavery men into a five hour-long battle, later coined The Battle of Black Jack. Brown and his 29 men eventually turned the hard-fought battle in their favor, and captured Henry Pate and 22 of his men.

Despite the insistence of Henry C. Pate that his men had acted on his own, John Brown could not bear the anger and grief in his heart at the death of his sons. With a cold determination, Brown ordered all captured men executed, and he killed Pate himself with a shot through the eye.

News of the Black Jack Massacre quickly spread through the Kansas territory, and from there through the United States. From the new territory capitol of Lecompton, John Brown received messages of support and praise from abolitionist groups throughout the north. The south, on the other hand, was aghast at the brutality Brown had displayed. The fact that he was acting in revenge for the deaths of his children was downplayed, in favor of outrage toward the death of 23 pro-slavery men.

Like an a cork shot out of a Champagne bottle, the massacre heralded the pouring of thousands of men from both sides of the Mason-Dixie line into the territory. Violence erupted throughout Kansas, and by September of 1856, Lecompton was under siege from pro-slavery forces.

With a split Congress and an increasingly-rebellious populace, President Franklin Pierce eventually ordered several thousand soldiers of the United States Army into the territory to force a truce. The job of commanding the troops fell to John Pope, a military officer in charge of surveying routes for a transcontinental railroad. Pierce hoped that Pope, familiar with the peoples and politics out west, would help defuse the situation.

John Pope proved to be a timid commander, and was reluctant to commit his soldiers into any fight with civilians, but rather desired to retain control over the territory capitol in Lecompton and enforce martial law where he could. Pope’s policies in the Kansas Territory proved unpopular throughout the territory and the rest of the nation, and Pierce’s appointment of the general killed any chances the standing President had at re-election in 1856.

The Democratic Party, instead, chose James Buchanan as their candidate, hoping that his pro-South attitudes would help defuse the situation in Kansas, and in the United States at large. Running against him was John C. Frémont, the first presidential candidate of the Republican Party, and Millard Fillmore of the American Party, though few took him as a serious candidate.

The race was a close one, with Kansas on the mind, but Buchanan emerged as the victor after carrying all of the southern states and a number of crucial areas in the north. Frémont carried the rest of the north, but completely lacked support in the south due to his anti-slavery policies and the hard line he took toward “Bloody Kansas.”


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Inauguration of President Buchanan.​

A Road of Good Intentions: Prewar 1857

Many in the south hoped that, with James Buchanan in office, the troubles in Kansas would come to an end. Indeed, Buchanan had promised an end to the conflicts in Kansas and restoration of peace, but would have a more difficult time actually keeping his promise.

In the wake of Buchanan’s election and ascendance to the office of the President, violence erupted anew within the Kansas Territory. Skirmishes raged across the state, and finally came to a head at the Battle of Topeka on March 20, 1857. The city, a bastion of free-state abolitionists, came under siege by pro-slavery soldiers who were intent on securing the town from the abolitionist men.

The abolitionists met the pro-slavery soldiers on open ground outside the town on the following morning, and a pitched battle began between the two groups. In total, close to twenty men were killed and close to eighty injured in the fighting. The battle was, ultimately, inconclusive as the pro-slavery men remained encamped around the city while the abolitionists retained control of the town proper.

By far the largest battle in Kansas yet, the fighting drew the attention of the newly-elected Buchanan. Forced to make a choice, Buchanan decided to order General Pope to Topeka in order to stop the fighting. He hoped to end the violence once and for all with federal pressuring, though specifically ordered Pope to refrain from violence against both parties.

Pope reached Topeka with five hundred men on March 29, and enacted martial law on the town, with orders to leaders from both parties to assemble at Pope’s camp for peace talks. While the free-state soldiers begrudgingly sent a representative, the pro-slavery men refused. Pope, angry at the insubordination, sent a platoon of men to find a leader and force him back to the Army encampment.

When the platoon had not returned by evening, Pope set out with half of his men to the pro-slavery camp, intent on retrieving his soldiers and imprisoning any who opposed him. What General Pope found was that the pro-slavery men had captured the men of the platoon and held them hostage within their camp.

Enraged, Pope demanded their immediate return, but the southern men argued that they wanted to bargain for a fair peace between the pro-slavery and pro-free sides. The general vehemently refused, and instead ordered his soldiers to enter the camp and take the prisoners back, by force if necessary. Despite his orders from the president, Pope allowed his soldiers to enter the camp armed, and had no right to be surprised when one side fired on the other shortly after the army men entered the camp.

A pitched firefight ensued, but was over quickly. The disciplined and organized soldiers all but slaughtered the pro-slavery men, killing more than fifty and injuring another fifty, leaving few unscathed from the fighting. Pope ordered his soldiers to round up wounded and unwounded alike and imprison them all within the army encampment.

The news of not only yet more violence in Kansas, but violence of the United States Army against southern civilians had the south in an uproar never yet seen in American history. Secretly, southern states began drawing up plans for secession and talks of rebellion abounded throughout the south. Their position only grew more popular with the people of the southern states when President Buchanan, stunned by the turn of events, attempted to justify Pope’s actions as “necessary force” against the pro-slavery men.

In one last attempt to preserve the United States as a whole union, a group of southern politicians including Henry A. Wise, Governor of Virginia, and Congressman Preston Brooks, back from a short bout of sickness in the past January, met with United States Army General Robert E. Lee in at his house in Arlington, Virginia. Lee had returned to Arlington after the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis to help divide up the will.

The delegation met with Lee to discuss an audacious plan: Lee was to gather up a large force of pro-South soldiers and march on Washington to support a move by Congress to impeach President Buchanan over the justification of murdering United States citizens.They asked for martial force in their support, as they were afraid that Buchanan would turn to Pope again if he was in danger of losing the Presidency. Lee was initially hesitant to accept the plan, but loyalty to both his home state of Virginia and the people of the United States led him to agree to the plan.

Thus, on April 15, 1857, General Robert E. Lee marched on Washington, D.C. with 20,000 pro-South soldiers. The small army crossed Arlington and approached the federal capitol from the south, while at the same time southern congressman enacted their plan to impeach President Buchanan. However, Buchanan had been alerted to the threat and fled the city on the night of April 14, a fact unknown to Lee and his comrades until late in the afternoon the next day.

Buchanan, enraged by the attempt of a military coup, ordered Lee and all men allied to him be executed for treason, as well as the congressman and senators who had supported him. He then ordered Pope to remain in Kansas against further incursions by pro-slavery men, and ordered a telegram be sent to the retired General George B. McClellan, residing as vice president of the Illinois Central Railroad, begging him return to command in support of the President of the United States.

McClellan was reluctant to return to command so soon after his resignation in January, but relented and agreed to the commission. He boarded a train bound for Baltimore, the de facto capitol with Lee and his men essentially in control of D.C.


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Map of the United States in 1858, with slave states in red, free in blue, and border states in yellow.​

Done Talking: Confederate Independence 1857-1859

The South, meanwhile, erupted in anger and rebellion after the ordering of the execution of Lee, his men, and the politicians who had opposed the president. Fifteen states held debates over the topic of secession, though only thirteen decided to secede. Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas all declared independence between April 24 and May 8, 1857. Maryland and Delaware, under partial martial law and afraid of reprisal, abstained from independence.

The thirteen states, with the Indian Territory nominally in support, drew together and declared themselves the “Confederate States of America” on May 10. Richmond was declared the capitol of the new nation, despite nominal Confederate control over the national capitol in Washington, D.C. The decision was made after Lee and his army helped evacuate pro-South politicians from the city before engaging in battle with Union forces throughout the city.

Preston Brooks, on May 13, took de facto control of the CSA, though was later officially elected in July. Brooks called for an army of one hundred thousand men to rush north and support Lee, who still held on to Washington, D.C., despite heavy Union pressure on his position.

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Confederate President Preston Brooks.​

In Virginia, cavalry officer J.E.B. Stuart raised a cavalry army of his own and rushed north to support Lee’s Army of the Potomac. Meanwhile, pro-South men from all over the Confederacy and the territories rushed to recruitment stations to enlist in the Confederate Army.

Back in the north, however, support for a war was mixed. President Buchanan had all but taken direct control over the nation after many of the nation’s politicians were trapped and held prisoner within the capitol, and desperately tried to defuse the situation. Despite recalling General McClellan, he did not order the gathering Army of Maryland to attack, but rather defend Maryland’s border on the Potomac against Confederate incursions.

Buchanan continued attempt to instigate peace talks with the new Confederacy, with the goal of hammering the Union back together and end the war before it started. His arguments fell on deaf ears, however, after his many speeches in support of General Pope in Kansas and the absolute control he now held over the United States.

The only man who decided to try to do something about the Confederacy ended up being John C. Frémont, who, in an audacious move, recommissioned himself into the United States Army and gathered together close to 80,000 volunteers across Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania into the unofficial Army of Ohio.

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General John C. Frémont, Commander of the Army of Ohio.​

Without Buchanan’s support, Frémont marched his army from its staging area outside Cumberland, Ohio, over the Ohio River and into Cold Spring, Kentucky, where he did battle with local militia. Frémont hoped that Kentucky’s shaky allegiance would allow his army to quickly march to Louisville and Frankfort, gaining nominal control of the state.

The incursion of an army into the state, and its subsequent win at the Battle of Cold Spring, however, only furthered Kentucky’s cause as a Confederate state. To deal with the possibility of Frémont not only breaking through Louisville and Frankfort but farther south into Tennessee, President Brooks commissioned General Thomas Jackson, recently married and returned from Europe, to lead an army of 70,000 men into Kentucky to deal with Frémont.

While Jackson was dispatched and 90,000 men reinforced General Lee’s depleted army of 15,000 men in Washington, J.E.B. Stuart and his cavalry were finally given the go-ahead to drive into Union territory after the Yankees had shed first blood.

Stuart and his cavalry, numbering 20,000 with 40,000 supporting infantry, drove through Cumberland, Maryland, all but unopposed and drove north toward Pennsylvania. The army was met by General Ulysses S. Grant, recalled from Illinois to the east, and a hastily-gathered force of 50,000 men near the Pennsylvania.

The battle was joined in a forest surrounding Lake Habeeb on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. Grant, despite showing considerable martial prowess, simply lacked the manpower to oppose Stuart’s cavalry and infantry that engaged him in a pitched and bloody battle inside the forest. Worse, many of Grant’s soldiers were hastily-conscripted with little military training before being thrown into battle.

With close to 4,000 casualties, Grant withdrew from battle and was forced to flee north, all the way to Bedford, Pennsylvania, while Stuart officially entered the state. President Brooks and the rest of the Confederacy was joyous of their victories, and confident in an ultimate victory over the United States.

In the north, the feelings toward the war were mixed between anger at the south and anger at Buchanan for his incompetency. The growing United States Army was forced to redeploy and march north to New York and Boston to put down riots over Buchanan’s dictatorship and the draft enacted in July 1857.

Still, the Army grew in size into a fighting force throughout the summer of 1857, despite repeated defeats at the hands of Confederates. General Ulysses Grant was forced to withdraw Bedford after another costly defeat and move east, under orders of President Buchanan, to Chambersburg. Meanwhile, much of the United States Navy still in Union control was withdrawn up Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore to help defend the city.

General Lee was anxious to move, but reluctantly followed orders to wait until late July to move out of Washington and across the Potomac. When he did, his Army of the Potomac met General McClellan’s Army of Maryland in Bethesda, Maryland. The two armies engaged in battle that saw massed infantry charges, heavy cannon fire, and the dying wails of thousands of young boys.

The battle was turned in Lee’s favor early due to a fall out between McClellan and his junior, William Tecumseh Sherman outside the Bethesda headquarters of the Army of the Maryland. Sherman’s forces attempted to bring the battle to Lee’s thin right flank and drive him toward the Potomac, but McClellan resisted the move and instead ordered his junior General to reinforce his own position.

With the Union army warring with itself, Lee’s forces were able to smash into the Yankee center, and eventually break McClellan’s forces and push them into full retreat. General Sherman covered the retreat and managed to inflict a number of casualties on overconfident Confederates, despite the loss.

President Buchanan began to grow more and more nervous, and began to order almost all available soldiers to the Maryland front to protect himself and Baltimore from the fighting. Despite his efforts, however, Lee and a continuous stream of volunteers from the Confederacy advanced up through Maryland and laid siege to Baltimore in early September.

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Union forces fighting in Pennsylvania.

From the retreat up Maryland, the only major victory came from General Sherman in Columbia, when his infantry destroyed a Confederate flanking force, and burned the town once his forces were forced to withdraw, denying the city to the approaching southern army.

In the West, Jackson and Frémont continued to do battle with each other across Kentucky. Jackson was the superior commander in sheer tactical genius, but General Frémont was sly and devious in his command, and managed to keep the southern general from finding an effective victory through the summer of 1857.

To further strain the Confederate supply lines and keep southerners from cutting off the eastern United States from the west by driving up into Ohio, Frémont led Jackson across Kentucky toward Missouri, and its valuable port on the Mississippi River, St. Louis.

Missouri, despite voting to join the Confederacy, had been a battleground between pro-North and pro-South forces since May, and had made the conflicts in Kansas seem like child’s play in comparison. Frémont hoped that, with his army entering St. Louis, he would be able to secure a hotspot for pro-North forces in the state and help drive the Confederates out.

Reinforcements in Illinois bolstered Frémont’s army as he crossed out of Kentucky in late September 1857, leaving behind towns devastated by war, but a populace firmly in the Confederate bloc. Jackson, rather than continue to blindly follow the Union army, entered Missouri from Kentucky and linked up with Confederate forces in the southern areas of the state.

Jackson had hoped to advance up Missouri and enter St. Louis from the west before Frémont crossed in the east, but General Jackson and his Army of Kentucky were caught in a fierce battle outside Perryville, Missouri, between pro-Union forces and pro-Confederate forces in Missouri. Jackson’s prowess as a general proved instrumental in the Confederate victory, though it delayed him enough that Frémont was able to cross the Mississippi unopposed from Illinois and capture St. Louis for the north.

Despite General Frémont’s capture of the crucial city, Jackson’s victory all but made up for the loss of St. Louis. His rout of pro-Union forces secured Missouri’s allegiance to the CSA, and nulled Frémont’s plan to bring the state back into the Union. General Jackson settled for camping his army in St. Charles, upriver from St. Louis, while sending a portion of his forces to Jefferson City to further complete the Confederacy’s control over Missouri.

By the onset of winter 1857, the Confederate States of America were clearly winning their war of independence. Confederate forces occupied southern Pennsylvania, portions of southern Ohio, much of Maryland, and, after a bloody siege lasting for two months, the temporary capitol of Baltimore by Christmas 1857.

President Buchanan fled north to the old capitol of Philadelphia, and McClellan’s army with him, re-christened the Army of the Union. Perhaps the worst part of the defeat was the stranding of much of the United States Navy in Chesapeake Bay outside Baltimore. Shipboard cannon had proved to be a hampering force to Confederate advances, but had ultimately been unable to stop the siege.

Worse, the fleet was now abandoned on all sides by Union armies, and were now surrounded by hostile Confederates with heavy artillery along the riverbanks. The fleet fled out toward the sea, but took heavy damage the entire, and lost a number of ships to the cold winter waters of the Chesapeake.

They then were forced to meet a large portion of the Confederate Navy outside the bay before reaching the ocean. The United States Navy was far better organized and disciplined over their Confederate counterparts, but the flight from Baltimore had taken a toll on them. Less than half of the ships that had left Baltimore made it past the Confederate blockade and north to pro-Union waters. The United States Navy, after their grave defeat, was unable to effectively blockade the Confederacy, only keep the southerners out of US territorial waters for the remainder of the war.

The war took on a decidedly blood bent for the long year of 1859, as the war continued to drag on. Despite hopeful Union victories by General Sherman and Frémont, the year was marked by the continual retreat from Baltimore, for McClellan, and Chambersburg, for Grant.

The battles along the long roads leading to Philadelphia were marked by bloody battles of attrition as both sides used trench warfare tactics and massed cannon to counter cavalry and infantry charges. Despite Union victories at the Battles of Shippensburg, Carlisle, and Wilmington, there were never enough men or horses to capitalize on these victories, and the Confederate Generals would only renew their drive with rested men and fresh horses and force the Union back.

Much of the reason for the failings of the Union forces and the success of the Confederacy lay at the feet of the commanders in chief. President Buchanan steadfastly refused to close negotiations with the CSA, and instead only picked up his attempts for peace as the war got worse. However, his refusal to step down as President kept the Confederacy to ever seriously consider his proposals.

Without a strong leader, the Union was unable to fully mobilize its significant populations and industrial prowess, whereas the Confederate States were more or less at total war with the United States, pressing almost all of southern industrial power to the war effort. With a Union blockade only a hopeful fantasy by Buchanan, cotton profits continued to pour in to New Orleans and up through the country to fund the war.

Despite the year of defeat and loss for the Union, one man was having success against the Confederates. General Frémont in St. Louis, after the spring thaw of 1858, used naval gunboats he had successfully gathered from up the Ohio River to support a drive against General Jackson’s army in St. Charles.

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Securing St. Louis for the Union.

General Jackson still managed to inflict more casualties on the northern soldiers than he received, but the gunboat support and superior numbers of Frémont forced him out of St. Louis. Instead of engage in a series of costly holding actions to secure a position near St. Louis, however, Jackson withdrew all the way to Jefferson City, to retain nominal control over the state. There, he dug in with local militia forces the soldiers he had sent there the past year to keep the Union out.

Frémont begged General Pope in Kansas to withdraw and come into battle with Jackson to the west of Jefferson City so General Frémont could launch an attack from the east, but the stubborn Pope refused. He reasoned that Kansas must remain in the Union, despite the cost. That cost would be little, though, as most of the pro-slavery men had gone back east to fight. That fact escaped Pope, who remained holed up in Topeka.

By late summer of 1858, all Union forces had withdrawn to Philadelphia to keep the city out of Confederate hands. General Stuart and Lee made a show of meeting outside the city, shaking hands in victory over the northerners. A siege was engaged around the city, one which would last from August 1858 until January 1859.

The single Siege of Philadelphia would incur almost as many casualties as the rest of the war up to that point combined. Costly battles on the fringe of the city saw little ground gained for hundreds or thousands of lives. Meanwhile, both President Buchanan and General McClellan remained stubborn to commit their forces to one single attack, rather preferring to “bleed the Rebs dry” in small-scale engagements.

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Confederate dead in Pennsylvania.​

This tactic might have worked, had the Confederates not been able to surround Philadelphia after a hard-fought victory against General Sherman in Northern Philadelphia. Cut off from supply, the Confederates began to starve the Union forces out.

Despite its hardships, the Union Army refused to surrender, and with spring approaching, the Confederacy knew it had to act. Against his own reservations, General Lee led an attack by his Army of the Potomac against Philadelphia from the south, while General Stuart attacked from the west.

Unlike the Union, the two Confederate generals concentrated their forces and defeated the more spread-out Army of the Union in one pitched battle after another. The streets ran red with the blood of dead Americans on both sides, and hastily-constructed hospitals were erected and quickly filled with the wounded and dying.

Lee himself is purported to have vomited upon seeing his wounded, and remarked, “It is well war is so terrible, lest we grow fond of it.” The remark would later be disputed by historians, but the legend only served to describe the carnage witnessed in the historic streets of Philadelphia.

After several days of hard fighting, General McClellan finally surrendered to General Lee outside the symbolic Independence Hall. President Buchanan, captured while attempting to flee the city like he had Baltimore and Washington, was in attendance of the surrender, and was promptly forced into a ceasefire between Union and Confederate forces across the continent.

The ceasefire was ratified on January 18, 1859, and by January 24 the war had finally come to a stop. A proper treaty began to be drawn up by the two sides in Washington, D.C., with help from British and French diplomats that had arrived at the request of both sides. President Buchanan had been pleading for help from Great Britain since the war’s beginning, but the British had refused to intervene on the grounds of Buchanan’s use of force against civilians and dictatorial control of the nation.

The Treaty of Washington was completed and signed by March 10, 1859, which would mark the final independence of the Confederate States of America. The treaty contained a number of conditions:

-The Confederate States of America would be recognized as a sovereign and independent nation by the United States of America.
-The Confederate States of America would withdraw all forces from foreign territory by April, 1859.
-Trade along the Mississippi River would continue unimpeded by either side, and raids upon shipping by either side would be considered an act of war.
-The United States of America could not declare war on the Confederate States of America for 25 years.
-The Indian Territory, after voting in 1859 to join the Confederacy, would remain a territory of the Confederate States of America.
-Due to damage being exclusively on territory of the United States of America, no war reparations would be made to the Confederate States, but rather the Confederate States of America would enjoy unrestricted trade on all American rivers and in all American ports.

Despite controlling Maryland and Delaware, the Confederacy did not press for them, as they did not press for a large sum of money in exchange for the war. Evan after all its losses, the Union had been massing forces from Maine, Massachusetts, and New York totaling almost 200,000 men all told, and had been heading south when the ceasefire had been signed.

General Lee, terrified of having to face the new army with his depleted force, pressed for President Brooks to sign the favorable peace treaty and take what he could get. Brooks, acting on judgement from the best the Confederacy had, agreed and signed the treaty alongside President Buchanan.

And Goodwill Toward Men: Peace 1860-1861

Throughout the newly-sovereign Confederate States of America, parades and parties were held to celebrate the new independence. The United States of America, meanwhile, duly watched the Confederate armies leave their territories and the government return to Washington, D.C.

President Buchanan was forced to step down shortly after returning to the capitol, and his Vice President, John Breckinridge, took up the office for the remainder of Buchanan’s term. The unremarkable Breckinridge simply focused on rebuilding Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the rest of the the areas that had been destroyed in the fighting.

When the elections of 1860 rolled around, the Democrats didn’t even bother to run a candidate. Republicans had already poured into Congress and the Senate, the American Party had dissolved during the war.

After some deliberation, General John C. Frémont was chosen as the Republican candidate, and he ran unopposed for the office. Frémont, the only major military figure to have surplus of victories under his belt, promised to restore the United States of America to greatness, an idea that would come to be known, in the future, as “American Supremacy.”

For his Vice President, Frémont chose the venerable Abraham Lincoln of Illinois to better balance the California-based candidate’s bid for the Presidency. Lincoln would spend his time in the Vice Presidency being influenced both by Frémont’s policies, and those that trickled into the damaged United States from Europe.

Meanwhile, in the Confederate States of America, a constitution was drawn up and ratified in 1860. President Brooks would be allowed to run again in the first official election in the same year, an eerie parallel to the northern equivalent. Like Frémont, Brooks would run unopposed on the Democratic Party ticket, with Jefferson Davis as his Vice President. Brooks would begin his single six year term on March 10, 1861.

The world in 1861 had changed. A new nation had emerged on the American continent, and European nations looked to it as a sign that new powers were beginning to emerge from the old. For the budding powers of Prussia and Italy, they would take this lesson to heart in the coming years of the 19th century.


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Contemporary map of the Confederate States of America.
 
Last edited:

Dialga

Banned
Preston Brooks POTCS? Giving General Fremont a pair?

I like where this TL is heading, and it's only just begun.
 
How'd the CSA get Missouri and Kentucky so quickly?
As mentioned in the timeline, both Missouri and Kentucky narrowly voted to join the Confederacy after President Buchanan's incompetency, and their loyalty remained shaky for some time. Kentucky only really started to be loyal when General Frémont ran through with his army, burning and shooting up half the state in the name of the Union.

Missouri was openly fighting within itself over joining the Confederacy, and was only firmly in Confederate hands when General Jackson swept through with his army and fought off the pro-Union men in the state. Though Frémont owned St. Louis for the rest of the war, Jackson owned the rest of Missouri and held on to it until the end of the war.
 
Interesting start if nothing else, though I'd argue giving the CSA Missouri would border on ASB - certainly giving the whole state, I'd see it far more likely they divide it in half between the USA and CSA. Other then that, interesting start.
 
Will the Confederacy abolish slavery?

Will you mentions sports ITTL?

Good start. Interested to see where this goes.
 
Will the Confederacy abolish slavery?

Will you mentions sports ITTL?

Good start. Interested to see where this goes.

To advance as an industrial nation, the Confederacy will abolish slavery, though how and when will be my secret for now. ;)

I hadn't quite thought about it, but as a big fan of expanding the culture and an avid follower of baseball, I'll probably squeeze in sports as much as possible.
 
To advance as an industrial nation, the Confederacy will abolish slavery, though how and when will be my secret for now. ;)

I hadn't quite thought about it, but as a big fan of expanding the culture and an avid follower of baseball, I'll probably squeeze in sports as much as possible.

Make sure you include Basketball as well :). I like the direction you're taking this. I'll be following.
 
To advance as an industrial nation, the Confederacy will abolish slavery, though how and when will be my secret for now. ;)

I hadn't quite thought about it, but as a big fan of expanding the culture and an avid follower of baseball, I'll probably squeeze in sports as much as possible.

Industry should improve after the Boll weevil arrives. You will need a larger work force and more immigration.
Slavery might die out if share cropping takes off and proves to be more profitable.
Would be intresting to see the CSA develop their own sports like Ireland did with the GAA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_Athletic_Association
 
Interesting read.

How will the Confederacy react to the French/Spanish/British intervention in MExico (if that is coming in yout TL)?

Watching out for butterflies ;)
 
Now that the CSA won their independence from the USA in the War of Northern Aggression, will they eventually -once they abolish slavery themselves- inherit the status as suzerain of Liberia from the USA? I could easily see the CSA pursuing a policy of repatriation instead of naturalisation regarding the freed slaves, with this stronger remigration resulting in a stronger, more industrialised Liberia.
 
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