Status
Not open for further replies.
Frederick and Victoria: Consorts of Germany
"...despite her alienation from her deceased son even before his sudden death, Victoria was shattered by the affair and retreated from public life over the next few years, which neither Friedrich, out of concern for her treatment by the press, or Bismarck, who detested the sway she held with her husband, particularly minded. With the new Kronprinz Heinrich settling into a happy and content life as a young naval officer and rarely at home, her attentions fell upon Waldemar, always her favorite, whom she doted upon even more. Unlike his elder brothers, taught rigorously by Hinzpeter and sent off to schools, Victoria demanded Waldemar be kept close to home, to be tutored either in Potsdam where she spent the vast majority of her time or at a gymnasium of her choosing, a policy she implemented with his sisters as well. Prince Heinrich expressed concern to his father after a visit from his naval duties in late 1881, remarking, "She'll smother the poor boy one day if she doesn't relent." But there was no breaking Victoria's will - after the death of Sigismund at two and Wilhelm's drowning, she was determined to defend and protect those children not expected to carry Prussia on their shoulders.

Victoria's receding influence due to her attentiveness to her children released Fritz, in a sense, and for the first time left him a sovereign unshackled, for Bismarck's sun was beginning to set as well. The elections of 1881 had empowered the two parties with whom he privately sympathized - the National Liberals first and foremost, and the Progressives to a lesser extent - and gave the Kaiser a foothold in the Reichstag for the first time. Bismarck retreated from German affairs to a point - his Kartell was still ever-powerful in the Prussian Landtag - as he pondered his next maneuvers, even begrudgingly accepting Friedrich's invitation for Rudolf von Bennigsen, leader of the National Liberals in the parliament, to serve as Vice Chancellor [1], a position previously intended for Interior Minister Karl von Boetticher. Bennigsen immediately emerged as a rival of Bismarck, in no small part due to his insistence on the Reichstag's increased say in the affairs of the state.

Bismarck did not entirely mind Bennigsen's rise, however, insofar as it headed off further confrontation between the growing nuisance of Adolf Stoecker and his virulently anti-Semitic Christian Social Party, which campaigned aggressively against both the Chancellor and the Kaiser from the right, opposing Judaism, liberalism, democracy and even the paternalistic state socialistic laws Bismarck had begun to endorse and would pass before his tenure's end. Friedrich and Victoria attended a synagogue in Wiesbaden later in 1881 to make clear where they stood, and after that, any notion that Jews would have their citizenship stripped - already a fringe position - died with it. The blunt involvement of the Kaiser in the matter, however, did not endear him to a young and increasingly radical cadre of officers who regarded Friedrich as soft, with an infamous name in German history chief among them: Alfred von Waldersee, second in command to von Moltke himself..."

- Frederick and Victoria: Consorts of Germany


[1] This was apparently suggested IOTL but never went through, as Bennigsen's demands to join Cabinet were never met. And after a point, Bismarck stopped needing the National Liberals - here, that's not quite the case
 
Chessboard: The Splendid Isolation and British Foreign Policy
"...though Madagascar had survived for this long by playing Britain and France off one another, French demands to establish a protectorate and to restore the Lambert Charter had grown so loud that the island kingdom now sought the best deal - and was given it by Britain. The Royal Navy had already seized the uninhabited islands of Juan de Nova, Bassas da India and Ile Europa in 1880 in the Mozambique Channel, seeking to prevent France from establishing any further footholds in proximity to the Cape Route. The easterly Cape Route, to the east of Madagascar, was similarly threatened by Reunion and barely guarded by Mauritius, so the British plan - endorsed by Granville - would be to secure the route by establishing a protectorate in Madagascar, by force in necessary. The Commons vote on the Madagascar Resolution was raucous - it was the first time that Lord Hartington had needed to rely on Tory MPs to sustain a measure, for much of his anti-imperialist wing among the Liberals rebelled. A key supporter for Hartington was Chamberlain, who endorsed the measure as "a means to prevent a second Suez to the South."

Indeed, as the British sailed to Diego-Suarez on the north coast of Madagascar [1], it was the culmination of the Indian Ocean Policy established under Granville and the Admiralty Board a year earlier. Alarmed at the rapidity with which France could deploy warships through the Suez from Marseille or Le Havre and reach India, and the possibility that they could similarly close the nominally neutral canal to British warships in a time of war despite the canal being controlled by a public company, Granville had resolved that France would need to be denied any colonial assets or allies that could serve as a "diving board above India." [2] Part and parcel of this had been projects in the Bab el Mandeb, such as the previous establishment of a substantial coaling station at Perim and the beginning of efforts to establish a naval base to rival Gibraltar at Ras Menheli only 3 miles away, both under the purview of the Resident of Aden [3]. Though the Madagascar Expedition would precede it, the formation of French Somaliland across from Perim in 1883 only caused further alarm in London and there was considerable relief that Italy was establishing territories of influence both in Eritrea and on the Horn of Africa to prevent French control of the entire Red Sea.

As for the Malagasy, though they bristled at Britain's occupation of Diego-Suarez in early 1882 and gunboat diplomacy, they were already well-tied into the British Empire through their reforms and of all the protectorates Britain would establish, this had the lightest touch - fighting in 1882 between locals and British Marines was overshadowed by tropical diseases, and beyond the use of Diego-Suarez as a Royal Navy station and coaling base, Britain did not even demand particular control over Malagasy foreign or trade policy and merely guaranteed it against occupation by any other European power, such as France or even Spain or Germany. In this endeavor, it was the first time that a native kingdom had had something the British wanted or needed, and where London had effectively acquiesced, so desperate was it to not be outfoxed by a rival power..."

- Chessboard: The Splendid Isolation and British Foreign Policy


[1] So essentially we have Britain preempting the Franco-Hova War of 1883 by a year or so
[2] The strategic realignment Britain has to undergo sans Suez is one of the more fun things to extrapolate in this timeline. Anyone is more than welcome to chip in with any thoughts on what else they can do to make sure they have routes to India and Australia only they and their proxies (like Chile ITTL) have strategic control over
[3] Britain didn't really need to do much with these two rocks IOTL due to its command of Suez - here, it absolutely needs to, in order to not make the Red Sea a true French lake in the way they've done with the Med.
 
The Grand Consensus: The Longstreet Machine, Reconciliation and the Dawn of the 20th Century in Dixie
"...of utmost concern to Longstreet, and a focal point of his whirlwind campaign to call constitutional conventions in a sufficient number of Democratic controlled states, was the condition of the Confederate Navy. Having had most of its power projection ships sunk in 1872 during the Cuban Expedition, it had only secured one screw-steamer and two ironclads in the intervening decade and most of its river vessels were hopelessly outdated. Longstreet, through friends and spies in the Union, had learned that the delays and cuts in the visionary Naval Act of 1869 had left the Union focused primarily on countering European powers in the North Atlantic and preventing and sustaining future blockades. As he argued on his grand tour of Dixie, the Confederacy's ability to defend its vast coastline and many rivers depended on the government having substantial revenue. He was rewarded in 1881 with the elections of friendly state legislatures in most of the Deep South and even in Texas, a quirky state that tended to empower forces arrayed against whomever was in power in Richmond. To that end, in early 1882 seven states - half of the Confederacy and more than the three necessary - called constitutional conventions to end the prohibition on internal improvements. With an even friendlier Congress and Senate, Longstreet also secured his five cent export tax on all agricultural goods, specifically for funding a new Navy. The focus of his Naval Secretary Seaborn Reese [1] was less to create a blue water navy but rather a riverine one, to establish low-displacement ironclads or "patrol gunboats" that could rapidly deploy along Dixie's numerous rivers and effectively block any efforts of a potentially hostile Union from seizing crossings or river forts. The other prong of the naval strategy would be to build armored coastal defense cruisers that could quickly move along both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts as needed to prevent future raids like those suffered by Spain or break blockades such as . Anything "out of view" - out of the view of the Confederate coast, in other words - would belong to other navies out of necessity until such a time that a defensive orientation was achieved.

It came to be then that 1882 was the start of a very successful run for Longstreet - his new naval building program was financed, the constitutional conventions to at last end the self-defeating improvements clause were underway, and Justices Stephens and Benjamin, two titans of the War of Independence era, left the Supreme Court, allowing him to appoint more forward-minded Justices sympathetic to his more robustly federalist vision to the bench..."

- The Grand Consensus: The Longstreet Machine, Reconciliation and the Dawn of the 20th Century in Dixie


[1] This is just some random Georgia Representative form the 48th Congress I found but with a name like Seaborn Reese how can you not be Navy Secretary
 

Ficboy

Banned
"...of utmost concern to Longstreet, and a focal point of his whirlwind campaign to call constitutional conventions in a sufficient number of Democratic controlled states, was the condition of the Confederate Navy. Having had most of its power projection ships sunk in 1872 during the Cuban Expedition, it had only secured one screw-steamer and two ironclads in the intervening decade and most of its river vessels were hopelessly outdated. Longstreet, through friends and spies in the Union, had learned that the delays and cuts in the visionary Naval Act of 1869 had left the Union focused primarily on countering European powers in the North Atlantic and preventing and sustaining future blockades. As he argued on his grand tour of Dixie, the Confederacy's ability to defend its vast coastline and many rivers depended on the government having substantial revenue. He was rewarded in 1881 with the elections of friendly state legislatures in most of the Deep South and even in Texas, a quirky state that tended to empower forces arrayed against whomever was in power in Richmond. To that end, in early 1882 seven states - half of the Confederacy and more than the three necessary - called constitutional conventions to end the prohibition on internal improvements. With an even friendlier Congress and Senate, Longstreet also secured his five cent export tax on all agricultural goods, specifically for funding a new Navy. The focus of his Naval Secretary Seaborn Reese [1] was less to create a blue water navy but rather a riverine one, to establish low-displacement ironclads or "patrol gunboats" that could rapidly deploy along Dixie's numerous rivers and effectively block any efforts of a potentially hostile Union from seizing crossings or river forts. The other prong of the naval strategy would be to build armored coastal defense cruisers that could quickly move along both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts as needed to prevent future raids like those suffered by Spain or break blockades such as . Anything "out of view" - out of the view of the Confederate coast, in other words - would belong to other navies out of necessity until such a time that a defensive orientation was achieved.

It came to be then that 1882 was the start of a very successful run for Longstreet - his new naval building program was financed, the constitutional conventions to at last end the self-defeating improvements clause were underway, and Justices Stephens and Benjamin, two titans of the War of Independence era, left the Supreme Court, allowing him to appoint more forward-minded Justices sympathetic to his more robustly federalist vision to the bench..."

- The Grand Consensus: The Longstreet Machine, Reconciliation and the Dawn of the 20th Century in Dixie


[1] This is just some random Georgia Representative form the 48th Congress I found but with a name like Seaborn Reese how can you not be Navy Secretary
So the Grand Consensus is basically Reconstruction but with the independent Confederate States and the United States reconciling with each other. Longstreet is the Confederacy's savior so far.
 
In all fairness, the actual Longstreet was one of the few former Confederate generals that enforced Reconstruction after the Civil War.
 
The Cornerstone: John Hay and the Foundation of American Global Prestige
"...the First Pan-American Conference in the spring of 1882 was touted in friendly papers - most prominently the New-York Tribune of Whitelaw Reid - as a resounding success for American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. In less friendly Democratic quarters, such as the Herald and many Midwestern papers, it was considered a bizarre circus, and questions were asked - as they often would be over the next six or seven years - about James Blaine's investments and ties in foreign countries, most prominently Peru's guano industry. Nevertheless, for Hay it was an exciting opportunity to meet the foreign ministers of a whole host of nations. He broke bread several times with Lucius Lamar, the affable Secretary of State from south of the Ohio and a man widely regarded as Longstreet's likeliest successor, both of whom acknowledged their respective Presidents' support for reconciliation. In the delegates of Mexico and Brazil Hay sized up potential competitors to the United States, countries with nascent industrial bases and their own goals on a geostrategic level. The hostility between Chilean and Peruvian delegates was tangible, and Hay wrote in his diary: "We must watch the Chileans even closer than we watch the Mexicans or Dixiemen - for as few souls as they have in that country, that fleet of theirs is and will be a problem for all free nations."

Nevertheless, disputes over Hay's Presidency of the meeting and Blaine's support for compulsory arbitration soon made more substantive matters run aground. That all countries there were equals in the eye of international law was more or less agreed upon, but notions that military victories should carry no territorial concessions was laughed out of the room, embarrassing Hay. Peru's delegates angrily shouted him down and pointed out that Chile had just "stolen" theirs and Bolivia's land south of the Cabarones; Mexican delegates huffed that the United States had taken nearly half their country's territory in 1848 and that the Confederacy had brazenly attempted to seize Cuba by force in an undeclared war a decade earlier, a declaration that caused Lamar and his fellow Dixiemen to walk out for the next two days and would spend their nights in Alexandria rather than accommodations in Washington for the rest of the conference. Suspicions of a Zollverein-like customs union made the subject a plain nonstarter for many South American nations, particularly Britain's trading partners in the Southern Cone, with only the Confederacy moderately in favor of "reconciling" with the vast American market again and ending tariffs levied against them.

Though compulsory arbitration and the customs union collapsed, progress was made on agreements to settle disputes diplomatically before wars occurred; in this regard, Spain volunteered to use Havana as a permanent seat for disputes as a neutral ground, being a European power rather than an American one. Hay and Blaine bristled at this suggestion, recalling Havana as the site of the treaty that "stole the South at gunpoint," but acquiesced to the suggestion. If nothing else, the First Pan-American Conference allowed many diplomats and men of stature to meet in person and confer for the first time, establishing personal trust, and perhaps more importantly, growing mutual respect among the various powers and an agreement that nobody wanted to see the New World descend into the kinds of feuds and bickering of Europe..."

- The Cornerstone: John Hay and the Foundation of American Global Prestige


(No footnotes; I'll just note that this basically goes how the real First Inter-American Conference in 1890, also James Blaine's brainchild, went, only with the wrinkles of an intact Brazilian and Mexican empire, CSA, and it being so soon after the Saltpeter War that tempers have yet to cool)
 
So the Grand Consensus is basically Reconstruction but with the independent Confederate States and the United States reconciling with each other. Longstreet is the Confederacy's savior so far.

Sort of. Grand Consensus is a domestic reference to the post-1880 dominance of the Democratic Party in essentially every state, as devised by Longstreet, and an end to paramilitary violence as a method of governance for about twenty years, in contract to the Forrest-Harris era with the alt-Klan. Reconciliation is more or less just the diplomatic and economic thawing of relations across the Ohio; I enjoy the irony for TL-191 fans of Longstreet and Blaine being the Presidents who (temporarily) bring the US and CS into alignment after twenty years of tensions. That isn't to say everything is hunky dory - the naval rebuilding plans of Longstreet pretty clearly have an eye on defending against a potential future conflict with the Union.

In all fairness, the actual Longstreet was one of the few former Confederate generals that enforced Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Yup, to his immense credit he was a pragmatist and a realist. He was still very much a creature of the plantocracy before the war, though, so in a CSA victory scenario I'd see him still being very establishmentarian in that respect (which tbf Forrest didn't exactly rock the boat ITTL either beyond his fiery rhetoric. A certain Louisiana politician in the 1930s might handle things a tad differently, though...)
 

Ficboy

Banned
Sort of. Grand Consensus is a domestic reference to the post-1880 dominance of the Democratic Party in essentially every state, as devised by Longstreet, and an end to paramilitary violence as a method of governance for about twenty years, in contract to the Forrest-Harris era with the alt-Klan. Reconciliation is more or less just the diplomatic and economic thawing of relations across the Ohio; I enjoy the irony for TL-191 fans of Longstreet and Blaine being the Presidents who (temporarily) bring the US and CS into alignment after twenty years of tensions. That isn't to say everything is hunky dory - the naval rebuilding plans of Longstreet pretty clearly have an eye on defending against a potential future conflict with the Union.



Yup, to his immense credit he was a pragmatist and a realist. He was still very much a creature of the plantocracy before the war, though, so in a CSA victory scenario I'd see him still being very establishmentarian in that respect (which tbf Forrest didn't exactly rock the boat ITTL either beyond his fiery rhetoric. A certain Louisiana politician in the 1930s might handle things a tad differently, though...)
Huey Long.
 
The UK's playing great power politics in the Western Hemisphere caused problems with the US even in OTL. Will there be greater tension now that the US has been weakened specifically by British interference (CSA independence)?
 
The UK's playing great power politics in the Western Hemisphere caused problems with the US even in OTL. Will there be greater tension now that the US has been weakened specifically by British interference (CSA independence)?

Great question, and absolutely. The UK's deployment of the Halifax Squadron was a big factor in Horatio Seymour's 1868 defeat and the passage of the Naval Act the following year, even if the alt-USN by 1882 is nowhere near what was intended when the act was passed (I'd say its still ahead of OTL's USN at this juncture, though). Add to that Britain's substantial investments in Canada (early CPR completion), Hawaii (complicating US access to Asia and forcing them to use Midway and Wake as their main coaling stations), the Confederacy (France is a big player here too, granted) and Mexico (the Tehuantepec Railway in particular, while France sort of ignores its Panama Railroad comparatively), and it pouring money and ships into Chile (coming down pretty firmly on their side in the Saltpeter War and border dispute with Argentina) to use it as a proxy for controlling the Three Capes, and it definitely is setting itself up for some rivalries with the United States long term.

I imagine that the Royal Navy's presence in the Falklands would grow a lot here and it would probably cozy up to Brazil, too, to make sure that her Atlantic sea lanes have absolutely zero threats, though none of that is canon in any updates I have written.
 
Continuing the theme of CSA-as-banana-republic, it would be interesting to see the Kingfish as a Cardenas or Vargas equivalent.
 

Ficboy

Banned
Continuing the theme of CSA-as-banana-republic, it would be interesting to see the Kingfish as a Cardenas or Vargas equivalent.
Well more accurately a caudillo republic similar to Brazil and Mexico. It's also slightly more well off than the banana republics of Central and Latin America because of its ethnic composition and ties to Britain and France.
 
Well more accurately a caudillo republic similar to Brazil and Mexico. It's also slightly more well off than the banana republics of Central and Latin America because of its ethnic composition and ties to Britain and France.
Yeah, I mixed up the terminology. I meant something more like a caudillo rule, which is why mentioned the two big Latin American populists of the 30's, Cardenas of Mexico and Vargas of Brazil.
 

Ficboy

Banned
Yeah, I mixed up the terminology. I meant something more like a caudillo rule, which is why mentioned the two big Latin American populists of the 30's, Cardenas of Mexico and Vargas of Brazil.
Both nations were well off to an extent at least by the standards of Latin America. The same went for Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.
 
Were Brazil and Mexico as wealthy as the Southern Cone? I was always under the impression they were slightly poorer, and that the plantation-heavy CSA would be more similar to those two states.
 

Ficboy

Banned
Were Brazil and Mexico as wealthy as the Southern Cone? I was always under the impression they were slightly poorer, and that the plantation-heavy CSA would be more similar to those two states.
Brazil had massive levels of European immigration much like Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. It still suffered its fair share of instability and chaos as well as dictatorships. Mexico to an extent had this.
 
Were Brazil and Mexico as wealthy as the Southern Cone? I was always under the impression they were slightly poorer, and that the plantation-heavy CSA would be more similar to those two states.

As of 1882 the big migrant waves to the Southern Cone and Brazil hadnt begun yet, so they were all on pretty even footing at this point I’d think. If anything Mexico ITTL might be ahead of the others with the light industry it’s formed and it’s healthy immigration waves
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top