The Confederacy doesn't even have a Pacific port. Their chances of holding North Borneo after this war are pretty much zero. Presumably, the Spanish Pacific squadron took it in the first week of the war. R.I.P. Confederate colonial empire, we hardly knew you...
Dixieland: The Country of Tomorrow, Everyday (yet another Confederate TL)
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The Confederacy doesn't even have a Pacific port. Their chances of holding North Borneo after this war are pretty much zero. Presumably, the Spanish Pacific squadron took it in the first week of the war. R.I.P. Confederate colonial empire, we hardly knew you...
I'd honestly be surprised if there was any actual fighting.
But North Borneo is not exactly the CSA's biggest worry right now.
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Wow. So in the course of about a year, the CSA has lost a war to a Second-Rate (which is being generous) European power, gone through two coups and a Civil War, had one of its national heroes turn against it (granted he was barmy, but still), bent the knee to the damnyankees, and now Mexico's getting one over on them?
One can only imagine what kind of affect this Humiliation Conga is going to have on the national psyche going forward.
One can only imagine what kind of affect this Humiliation Conga is going to have on the national psyche going forward.
I wonder if there won't be a call for a constitutional convention to hammer out a lot of the systemstic issues which have been causing so much chaos
Bookmark1995
Banned
Well, when nations undergo these types of crisis, there are three options: one, they other make a serious attempt at reform. Two, they make window-dressings while keeping the rotten system in place. Or three, they double down on their insanely backward beliefs.
My idea of this comes from another nation that OTL was defined by a strictly reactionary leadership: tsarist Russia. Alexander the Second tried reform, Alexander the Third doubled down, and Nicholas the Second did window dressing.
If the Confederacy survives this latest crisis, a potential reform could come to power, only to be subverted by a hyper-nationalist reactionary who blames the problem on the usual "subversives." Damnyankees and Black Americans.
By this time, OTL Spain was a shadow of what it once was. Its empire was reduced to a few scattered islands and barren lands in Africa. TTL, one should expect a North American nation to defeat a shadow power and expel it from its American holdings.
It is a humiliation comparable to the Russo-Japanese War. Russians were mocked for being beaten by an Asian power, and Confederates will be mocked for not being able to beat the Spanish in their OWN backyard.
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Chapter 52 - Sherman Marches Through Georgia
Sherman Marches Through Georgia
The divisions between the CSIPers, the Constitutional Democrats, and the True Whigs were quite simple. Simply put, the non-commissioned military officers, upscale immigrants, US-linked businessmen, and non-slave-holding yeoman farmers were the backbones of the CSIP. The True Whigs were largely powered by small yeomen farmers and planters outside of Appalachia, men who typically owned only a few slaves, or owned no slaves, but rented a slave from a large planter and aspired to be large planters one day. The Constitutional Democrats were of course, overwhelmingly dominated by the wealthy large and mid-sized planters of the Confederacy. This class division ultimately heavily favored the Constitutional Democrats and as soon as the CSIP administration collapsed in the wake of various corruption scandals and the Alabama War, the Constitutional Democrats were able to seize control of politics quite easily, as the CSIP never had a mass base of support and the True Whigs had many of their supporters co-opted by the Constitutional Democrat's aggressive foreign policy.
Broadly speaking, 1% of whites were elite planters (owning over 40 slaves), 5% larger-sized (10-40), 5% being mid-sized (5-10), and 7% being small, owning 1-4, and 7% not owning any, but renting out a slave from a large planter. Of the other 75% of the country, the urban middle-class was around 5% of the population (and disproportionately immigrant). Then 15% were non-slave-holding yeoman farmers (disproportionately in Appalachia and Texas), 20% modest landless farmers, and 35% from the excluded class, which would be instrumental to the end of the First Confederate Civil War.
That extremely deprived class of whites were not engaged by the CSIP and later totally disenfranchised by the Constitutional Democrats. This class of poor whites generally owned no property, slaves included. No land, no slaves, and often no savings. Another roughly 20% of white Confederates also owned no slaves and no land, though they had some modicum of savings. Before the Civil War, they were effectively disenfranchised in most of the slave states, were banned from reading abolitionist literature, and could be executed for engaging in anti-slavery speech. They formed a class of labour that was neither free nor unfree - they were not slaves like blacks, but they were often arrested (poor whites filled most Confederate jails) and rented out as convict labor. They often became indentured servants. Andrew Johnson's hatred of the Confederacy was driven by his unhappy childhood growing up as a poor white in the South, when he was sold by his widowed mother as an indentured servant.
Wealthy planters often feared this group. They overwhelmingly sided with the Union in the War of Independence, and when county secession conventions weren't properly rigged, they had a tendency of voting against secession, as seen by the state of West Virginia. The tone of the Confederacy was very much set in 1860, when Southern political elites prevented Abraham Lincoln from being on the ballot, out of fear that this class would vote for him! The only slave states where people were allowed to vote for Lincoln was Delaware, where he scored a respectable 24%, and Missouri, where he did less well at 10%, but partly because the two other Unionist candidates scored over 70% of the popular vote. Without even counting unfree blacks, had all whites been able to vote on whether to leave the United States, the result would have been a landslide for the Union. Although they were drafted into the Confederate Army, they were not particularly supportive at all of the Confederate project. However, they never organized in the years after the war, because they were overwhelmingly illiterate. Although it was legal to teach them to read (unlike slaves), in practice, the lack of any public education prevented any mass education. In addition, Southern crime was notoriously harsh even before the Civil War - the justice system overwhelmingly targeted these whites, not blacks (who were still enslaved).
The Christian Commonwealth of North Carolina was many of the fears of elite planters coming through. Although Jackson had the support of the Lumbee and many freed slaves, the bulk of his support were poor, landless, white peasants, who gladly abolished slavery, not because they wanted slavery abolished, but because they simply wanted to spite the social elites. However, Jackson kept them on a tight leash, and North Carolina was a relative bastion of stability. This was not to be true in the rest of the country.
The 6% of elite planters and larger planters actually split down the middle, largely between people who were truly ideologically committed to slavery and those who primarily cared about their bottom line. As did the slave-renters, who overwhelmingly aspired to slave-holding, but split down on the middle as to whether they cared enough to side with the Provos in the middle of a war against Spain. However, the mid-sized and small-sized planters overwhelmingly sided with the Provos. This gave the Provos a base in around 20% of the white population. In contrast, the non-slaving yeomen farmers (15%) sided with the Nationals, as they were probably the closest thing the South had to a group positively disposed towards abolitionism. The urban middle-class did as well, due to their obvious proximity to industry (5%). Finally, the minority of planters not covered above sided with the Nationals (around 5% of the population). Finally, the modest landless farmers (20%) sided with the Nationals, largely because they revered the Confederate Army as their primary path of social mobility. This gave the Nationals a solid base of around 45% of the white population.
In many ways, this would have simply been an easy, quick defeat of the Provos. However, the calculus got even worse for the Provos, when poor, deprived whites, included in neither major coalition, spontaneously exploded in rage across Georgia, North Florida, and parts of South Carolina at the excesses of several Provo mobs, who were attacking anyone associated with the Nationals. Combined with their deep economic suffering due to the massive explosion in food prices, a fire was lit. Attacking the Provos as "satanic traitors to the Confederacy, puppets of Mammon", poor whites across Provo territory, inspired by Jackson's fervor but not restrained by Jackson's charity, formed even larger mobs that overran both the Provo mobs, but also Provo arsenals, seizing weapons, and destroying, looting, and burning any center of wealth they could find. The Provos, unable to fight both an internal revolt within a revolt at the same time they tried to fight the CS-US Armies, quickly collapsed. The vast majority of slaves simply bolted to defend themselves, with the kinder masters sometimes finding out that their former slaves, while empathetically pointing out that they were finally free, would help them escape the mobs. The crueler masters were much less lucky. In some cases, former Provos too far from Spanish areas of control celebrated the arrival of General Sherman, who typically dispersed rebels and re-established social order as his army marched through Georgia. Those closer to Spain quickly fled into Spanish-protected areas, causing Spanish-occupied Savannah to expand in size.
Ironically, the ideologues of the Confederacy had spent years asserting that the collapse of their rule would lead to widespread massacres, rapes, looting, and other atrocities. They were entirely correct, as every major city in Georgia except Savannah (under Spanish protection) was burnt down in an orgy of violence and looting. They were wrong in supposing that such atrocities would be committed by blacks. Savannah, Alexandria, Columbus, and Atlanta all burned down, with Spanish-occupied Savannah as the Confederacy's new largest city and port. The rebels were often merciless, lynching civilians associated with the Provos and even some Nationals (if they looked sufficiently rich) in the thousands. One oddly semi-educated rebel leader famously adopted as his group's slogan: "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." Latin for "Kill them all. God will recognize his own." The noose would from this point on forever be a symbol of revolutionary extremism in North America. The only reason the CS-US armies could defeat the rebellion was that the extremism of these minority of rebel bands quickly turned the majority of rebel bands against them and towards accommodation with the CSA. Some had espoused opposition to both the Nationals and Provos, but the most extreme bands convinced most of the rebel bands to support the Nationals, following the example of the late Stonewall Jackson.
Ironically, escaped slaves were typically not the source of the worst atrocities. Although there were many recorded incidents, most slave groups simply banded together and tried to hide out in the wilderness, sometimes helping out individual whites, sometimes not. Luckily, the most insane of the escaped slave bands had a tendency of fighting with the most insane white rebels, and the fact that the two groups tended to kill each other off through increasingly brutal methods tended to limit the atrocities inflicted on everyone else. Stories of escalating atrocities between these two groups, including flagellation and mass sodomizations, were luckily ended by the arrival of US/CS troops, which had a tendency of crushing both. As a result, although the USA remained relatively unpopular in the South, General Sherman became wildly beloved in the CSA for his March through Georgia, because he was completely apolitical in mercilessly and methodologically crushing any group in the rebelling states, whether pro-National, pro-Provo, white, or black, that was committing atrocities against any other group. This extended to General Sherman protecting any Provos from reprisals, either from the rebels or Nationals.
With all of Georgia in ruins, order only partially restored, and the Spanish Army more or less running a giant refugee camp in Savannah, it also became clear to both the Spanish and the Confederates that it really was the time to start negotiating peace.
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TBQF, pretty much every surviving plantation owes its survival either to Sherman or the Spanish, because the Nationals are fine watching them burn. Sherman wasn't.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Sherman as the savior of the Confederacy is such a historical irony, I bet you planned it from the very beginning.
I really didn't, but it's actually closer to his OTL personality. Sherman actually liked the South a lot. Many of his close friends were secessionists, he was probably a conservative Democrat, became close friends with many Confederate generals after the war, and he really hated it when people celebrated his March to the Sea. He thought it was necessary to end the war, but he still wasn't proud of it.
The Southern demonization of Sherman was only something that emerged decades after the war (when all the generals involved were dead) as part of the Lost Cause mythology.
Bookmark1995
Banned
In others, Sherman saw his burning of Atlanta the same way Truman saw his atomic bombings: a dirty deed that was done of out pragmatism.
Sherman wasn't a nutcase. Just a man who made a harsh, but necessary, decision.
I think the Confederacy were the most successful losers in history: sure they lost the war, but their racism and beliefs spread nationwide. To the point where an American President (Wilson) could get away with wilifying the people who held the Union together.
Honestly I'd expect it to be somewhat of the opposite. The fact that Spain couldn't defeat a backwards, decaying slavocracy that exploded into a multi-sided civil war/class war despite being a globe spanning empire and European regional power is likely the far greater humiliation as far as the rest of Europe would be concerned.
Bookmark1995
Banned
Well, they did defend their territory from Confederate incursion.
So...that earns a small pat on the back.
I mean, they creamed the Confederate navy then managed to occupy three major cities. One they lost when the single most zealous force in the CSA attacked them, while they only lost New Orleans when the industrialized northern steamroller marched on them. And even then much of the Yankee navy is at the bottom of the sea.
And remember that the CSA did try to surrender, until their Cuban forces refused to comply and utter political chaos broke out.
I think this should be "as every major city in Georgia except Augusta"
Basically at this point, from the standpoint of the United States, they have lost a good chunk of their navy and some army soldiers (both in the attack of New Orleans and Sherman's march). No actual damage to the US at home though. It will take a few years for the USA to rebuild their Navy, but the question is whether this is the right time to build a navy or whether it will become instantly obsolete at the time of the Dreadnoughts.
It is unclear to me what damage has been done to either Richmond or Norfolk if any at all, but the Confederacy overall will take at least a generation to rebuild at a time when the USA is growing fairly rapidly.
It is unclear to me what damage has been done to either Richmond or Norfolk if any at all, but the Confederacy overall will take at least a generation to rebuild at a time when the USA is growing fairly rapidly.