I am sure that this is probably ASB, as even if the Confederacy were to "win" by somehow holding back the Union advances I doubt they'd be able to claim that much territory. However, what if they were able to somehow win and they were given the Arizona territory how would such a place be developed? Unless you just have slave cattle hands working on ranches, slavery wouldn't seem to be profitable in such a region. Also, how would the CSA deal with the local Indians in Arizona? I feel as if the disorganized CSA might have more trouble, but maybe they somehow are able to have some of the army patrolling the area. Any other ideas?
How would Confederate Arizona be developed if the Confederacy won the Civil War?
- Thread starter brunohusker
- Start date
It really depends on whether this CSA manages to get a Pacific port or not. If it doesn't, then I agree it would be the same as OTL. If it does, then this Confederate Arizona would be way more important and "powerful" that our Arizona/New Mexico.
Slave cattle hands. You mean black slaves handed guns and horses? Wow. I could see no possible way that could go wrong in entertaining ways.
Arizona's value to a nation boasting a sophisticated armaments industry and desire for Pacific access via the Mexican coast is without question.
Lead, zinc, copper, silver, gold, etc. Everything Richmond could ever want, and required desperately IOTL, are in those arid hills. If they have to subjugate the Apache and exterminate some bandits to secure control over such resources, so be it.
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I'm not sure that a Confederate war department would be a thing. The trouble is that you're looking at the Confederacy like they're some kind of modern organized, centralized state.
During the Civil War, the Confederate war effort was a ramshackle hodgepodge of state based armies, with some states explicitly challenging Richmond and refusing troops outside their borders. Jefferson Davis had to constantly battle his own states for the war effort, and it was never a battle decisively won. After the Civil War, it's not likely that Davis or whoever came next would be allocated the resources for an extraterritorial military adventure. I think the political obstacle is massive and more or less impossible to resolve.
There's also the massive question as to what degree the Confederacy is able to mount the necessary logistics for a venture like this. There's no sign that they ever mastered logistics,, or were ever going to master logistics. The military culture of the Confederacy, which celebrated Napoleonic valour and elan, without ever understanding that, vitiated against it.
The notion that the Confederacy would be able to take and hold Arizona seems... farfetched. As is the notion that the Union would simply hand it over.
dcharles
Banned
In fact, it was a thing.
It was organized on the same lines as the US Army.
Why? Jacksonian Democrats were typically expansionist. Confederate leadership was explicitly so.
No sign? I'm not even sure what that's supposed to mean. Are you saying that Confederate leadership did not know that people need to eat and guns need bullets?[/Quote]
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I think you may be overstating the case here. The Confederate States demonstrated a degree of disunity and administrative confusion during the war, but it certainly was an organized modern state with relatively advanced methods of wartime mobilization and control. It looks weak in comparison to the United States, but it certainly had a stronger and more modern state bureaucracy that many contemporary nations.
The Confederacy did have a War Department starting from 1861 and it was the largest branch of the CSA’s civil service. Considering the threat a surviving Confederacy would remain under after independence, I see no reason why the Confederate elite would decide to dissolve this institution.
While governors like Joseph E. Brown were extreme instances of uncooperative states rights diehards, the vast majority of states in the Confederacy submitted themselves to the central government without much issue. Even to such authoritarian measures as press gangs for the draft and army patrols empowered with requisitioning both cotton crop and slaves for the war effort. IIRC, the Confederate government was even able to mandate a certain portion of cotton from every harvest being put towards the cause. If the Confederacy could mandate some degree control over cotton production from the planter class and get away with the dragooning of slaves for military labor, I’d say that’s a clear demonstration of authority given that cotton and slaves were the fundamental basis of civilization there. Planters grumbled, but they acquiesced because it was in their ultimate interest. I’d imagine a post war centralization would look like that too..
The process of the war itself had a hardening effect on the 1861 Confederate state: for most of the war there was no single military hierarchy but by the last year this was junked and Lee was officially made the General in Chief of all Confederate Armies. I don’t know what the timeline is here for Confederate victory, but the process of learning through war I think would ensure some degree of post-secession centralization in order to survive.
As has also been pointed out, the antebellum planter class was obsessed with the idea that a geographically fixed slavery was a moribund slavery (look what happened to Virginia and Maryland, the logic went). Expansion was necessary to the survival of the peculiar institution. American expansionism and support for filibusteros before the war emanated mostly from the South. I would have a very hard time believing that extra-territorial military operations would be off the table post-war because of some eternal squabble between the states.
It’s also probably worth mentioning that for every states rights doctrinaire of the old style like Brown, there were planters who envisioned a new south with the birth of the Confederacy. A south not just mired in hyper-Jeffersonianism, but a more centralized and rigidly autocratic one in which the social orders were tightly controlled and the last vestiges of the aberration of democracy were done away with. George Fitzhugh is perhaps the best representative of it, but the wartime emergency measures and the failure of uncoordinated military action could easily make this more palatable. Especially in a post-war world where slavery is dying and must be defended from an increasingly hostile world. There will be currents pulling in many different directions post-independence, and it could go a few ways, but I disagree with the idea that most Confederate leaders and politicians were so dedicated to the idea of states rights that they’d cannibalize their bureaucracy and turn inward and isolationist.
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Quite. States rights was, and always had been, a fig leaf adapted to defend slavery. The minute it ceases to need that niche filled the slavers will discard it in favor of some other ideology dedicated to slavery.
There were a lot of factions in the South. If the war is very short the state centric people are likely to be in the drivers seat. The longer the war the more the centralizers will gain power and influence.
Attempts to nationalize the industries of states like Davis trying to grab GA’s trains for the war effort often went badly with state and federal officials pointing guns at each other.
Davis himself moved in more of a nationalist direction as the war went on, but his Vice President didn’t and that had them at loggerheads.
Attempts to nationalize the industries of states like Davis trying to grab GA’s trains for the war effort often went badly with state and federal officials pointing guns at each other.
Davis himself moved in more of a nationalist direction as the war went on, but his Vice President didn’t and that had them at loggerheads.
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There is your catch 22. The Confederacy of 1864 was fairly centralized. The Confederacy of 1864 was broken and on its last legs, near bankrupt with its manpower depleted. That's not a good negotiating position to ask for Arizona, and a worse position to conquer it from.
On the other hand, the Confederacy of 1861 may have had the collective resources and willpower to go after Arizona, or in the case of a victory, to claim it at the negotiating table. But this was also the most decentralized and incapable of adventurism.
I completely agree that a successful Confederacy would want to be expansionist, they made no bones about it. There was that whole Knights of a Golden Circle, with designs all over the Caribbean and Central America and even into Colombia and Venezuela. But wanting something is not the same as being able to take it. Historically, the only successful Filibuster was Texas. Other attempts to hive off Mexican promises failed disastrously. The Celebrated William Walker lasted barely three years and only managed to unite all the rest of Central America against him. There was a certain racism at work premised on the notion that a handful of white adventurers could take a country away from the native residents. In Latin America, that didn't always work out.
Expanding into Mexico is probably a non-starter. Expanding into the Caribbean brings the Confederacy up against the British Empire, and the French Empire, and the Spanish Empire, and the Dutch Empire for that matter. Two of those would swat the Confederacy without breaking a sweat. The third, the Spanish, remained a formidable naval power weill into the 1880s, and the liberation movements in Cuba were all abolitionist - it's hard to see the Confederacy succeeding against Spain either on the sea or in Cuba.
And of course the US would likely invest a lot of time, treasure and energy in frustrating Confederate ambitions.
It's hard to imagine the Confederacy successfully conquering or negotiating for Arizona. As you've said, a lot depends on when and how. But there's a paradox, the more able they are to take it, the less likely they'll have the will to do anything with it, the more organized and centralized they are in order to develop it, the less able they are to take it.
I suppose the first step is to figure out the pathway wherein the Confederacy ends up in Arizona.
When wondering about the plausibility of a Confederate Arizona for my own TL, I looked at the track record for the Confederate campaign in Arizona. It was pretty much all bad. With the exception of turning the Battle of Valverde into an unlikely Confederate victory which is followed by a semi successful pursuit to the Union base at Fort Craig, where the demoralized Union troops retreat north.
In the aftermath of even that type of victory in 1862, it would have been perfectly possible for Union forces to them rearrange themselves to turn around, march south, and kick the Confederates out in 1863. However, my TL sees the US wrapped up in a concurrent war with Britain, so it doesn't happen and then no one puts it back on the high priority list leading to the Confederates having it at the peace table.
How it would develop is, well, as Elfwine said, not too different from OTL. The Confederates would encourage settlers and unfree labor and people looking for gold would flood into the region in the hopes of striking it rich when strikes were reported. The Confederacy would spend decades fighting the Apache to control the place, and in general it would be a frontier of blood, copper, gold and misery,
In the aftermath of even that type of victory in 1862, it would have been perfectly possible for Union forces to them rearrange themselves to turn around, march south, and kick the Confederates out in 1863. However, my TL sees the US wrapped up in a concurrent war with Britain, so it doesn't happen and then no one puts it back on the high priority list leading to the Confederates having it at the peace table.
How it would develop is, well, as Elfwine said, not too different from OTL. The Confederates would encourage settlers and unfree labor and people looking for gold would flood into the region in the hopes of striking it rich when strikes were reported. The Confederacy would spend decades fighting the Apache to control the place, and in general it would be a frontier of blood, copper, gold and misery,
Yes, that too. That’s why I felt it would not work though I didn’t think of this fully but yes. Basically there’d be no point for slaves in such a place except for farms close to water sources.
Yes. I have a feeling it won’t be fun except for the well off as even poor whites who venture here wouldn’t have much. Plus unless we go really and I’m guessing the CSA only gets the southern part of modern AZ and NM and most Hispanics would go North or much more likely, back to Mexico.
It might be a bit better if they can get a port as maybe they try to get Southern California and have ports in LA and San Diego but even then it’s still just desert and mining claims. LA and SD might do okay and there would probably be citrus plantations created and as it might include otl Bakersfield you’d have some of the San Joaquin Valley but not enough to make a dent.
If such a nation lasts which is asb from an already asb premise, you see the region west of about Dallas in the CSA become a place that hates slaveholder power and sees them as stuffy and controlling the CSA and holding it back. They’d ally with poor whites who’d argue that slavery just enables rich whites. I’ve always felt this would happen and I think a future CSA has a populist movement looking at ending slavery, but to allow for white workers and farmers to have more opportunity. I always see this as a thing in the future CSA.
Anyways even if the CSA lasts and ends slavery by 1900, you still have a planter class, a farmer labor class and a middle class who are all divided and are brink once you find oil in Texas and California, you see them call for more autonomy. Eventually these regions gain more independence and in the end you might even see a greater California movement that includes SoCal, confederate Arizona and maybe parts of Texas (though they’ll want independence too) and they’ll see their brother as stuck in the past and backwards and reliant on inferior labor.