Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War

Can't wait to see the week days
Would the rebels try to hold the capital like the Germans in 1945 or abandon it to attempt a guerrilla resistance. I mean with how paranoid the planter class has gotten, I can see them attempting to hold on until the bitter end.
Is Jesse james going to be around afterwards
I wonder if there going be many outlaws after the war
I hope there one last epic battle to end it
 
I wonder if there going be many outlaws after the war
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Of course, that would be a fascinating timeline to read, too...
It would be indeed. Go up to around the late 1900s, and examine history as the south develop there national identity, how does the north react: More crackdown or deescalation? How do the Carpetbaggers and Freeman new class manage to get up from this point? It be a very interesting way to examine both nationhood, and how to move on from history.
Phil Sheridan would likely be passing out the party favors!
Funny thing about Phil, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, he actually went over to the Prussians as a advisor and rode around going "Yeah,lol, go shoot those franc-tierurs, you guys are great" and wrote home about how awesome Prussia was.
 
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It would be indeed. Go up to around the late 1900s, and examine history as the south develop there national identity, how does the north react: More crackdown or deescalation? How do the Carpetbaggers and Freeman new class manage to get up from this point? It be a very interesting way to examine both nationhood, and how to move on from history
Flood the area with carpetbaggers and make sure half the locals are part of a group with a vested interest in staying in the union? Inculcate a tradition of military service among the freedmen? Hawaii was an actual other country, but what are the odds of independence for them, really?
 
Flood the area with carpetbaggers and make sure half the locals are part of a group with a vested interest in staying in the union? Inculcate a tradition of military service among the freedmen? Hawaii was an actual other country, but what are the odds of independence for them, really?
The issue with Hawaii was that Hawaiians were a minority in Hawaii even before they were annexed to the United States. I don't think there's any reasonable way to make Southerners a minority in the South as a whole without genocide, although there were definitely some states where it might have been possible, and perhaps you could make a combination of freedmen and northern migrants a large enough minority that they make resistance impractical.
 
Funny thing about Phil, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, he actually went over to the Prussians as a advisor and rode around going "Yeah,lol, go shoot those franc-tierurs, you guys are great" and wrote home about how awesome Prussia was.
And imagine if Thomas Jordan, the Confederate general I mentioned earlier as having a chance to make France...less bad in that war, thus not losing Alsace and Lorraine, and Phil Sheridan wound up leading men against each other.
 
Funny thing about Phil, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, he actually went over to the Prussians as a advisor and rode around going "Yeah,lol, go shoot those franc-tierurs, you guys are great" and wrote home about how awesome Prussia was.

And imagine if Thomas Jordan, the Confederate general I mentioned earlier as having a chance to make France...less bad in that war, thus not losing Alsace and Lorraine, and Phil Sheridan wound up leading men against each other.
Who's to say that ex-Confederate and Union officers won't make their way over to Europe? You could end up with military attaches pitted against their former comrades or engaging against their adversaries again. It would also make for an odd diplomatic situation if a wanted Confederate general escaped capture by fleeing to Mexico and thereon to France to act as an advisor, only to later meet a Union officer sent over by the US to France as a gesture to improve relations.
 
Funny thing about Phil, when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, he actually went over to the Prussians as a advisor and rode around going "Yeah,lol, go shoot those franc-tierurs, you guys are great" and wrote home about how awesome Prussia was.

Phil Sheridan, always the "hard war" man!

But it's also fairly clear that the U.S. Army may not have gotten much return on its investment sending Sheridan as observer to the Franco-Prussian War. His conclusion: "Nowadays war is pretty much the same everywhere, and this one offered no marked exception to my previous experiences... Following the operations of the German armies from the battle of Gravelotte to the siege of Paris, I may, in conclusion, say that I saw no new military principles developed..." In terms of tactics, he probably had a point. But it's remarkable how he passes over in silence the work of the Prussian General Staff in preparing for the war and moving all the troops and supplies around so efficiently and quickly - yes, even better than anything Herman Haupt could manage.

The U.S. Army would not establish a general staff until 1903.

And imagine if Thomas Jordan, the Confederate general I mentioned earlier as having a chance to make France...less bad in that war, thus not losing Alsace and Lorraine, and Phil Sheridan wound up leading men against each other.

I think it's hard to appreciate how difficult it was to convince French Army leadership of *anything* in the 1860's. Decades of parochial officer selection and vapors of fading Napoleonic glory had produced a staggering calcification in the French officer corps by the time of the Second Empire. As Dallas Irvine famously put it, the French promotion system "was almost completely effective in excluding the army's brain power from the staff and high command."

And this would apply doubly to the idea that they might have anything to learn from Americans.

Only the curbstomp they suffered in 1870 could produce the kind of shakeup needed to make the French Army into a competent instrument of war once again. (Competent, that is, for anything but colonial wars and meatgrinding second rate Austrian generals.)
 
Who's to say that ex-Confederate and Union officers won't make their way over to Europe? You could end up with military attaches pitted against their former comrades or engaging against their adversaries again. It would also make for an odd diplomatic situation if a wanted Confederate general escaped capture by fleeing to Mexico and thereon to France to act as an advisor, only to later meet a Union officer sent over by the US to France as a gesture to improve relations.
This sounds like the premise for a historical buddy comedy I'd pay money for, ngl.
 
This sounds like the premise for a historical buddy comedy I'd pay money for, ngl.
The climactic final scene showing the two men in a trench, staring down a rushing Prussian attack.
"Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a damnyankee."
"What about side by side with a friend?"
"Aye... I reckon I could do that."
 
South Carolina and Mississippi were African-American majority in 1860, so these seem at least possible to do something with.
I think Louisiana was as well, or close, and Florida was thinly populated enough that it might have been possible to just flood out the old inhabitants with new Yankees. It might have been possible to think of something for Kentucky and Tennessee as well, perhaps also Virginia if West Virginia wasn't a separate state. But yes, those states were precisely the ones I was thinking about...rather ironically, given their trajectories IOTL towards being unassailable fortresses of reactionary neo-Confederism.
 
Why would Union officers help France at all, even if France were willing to accept them? France was aiding their Mexican puppet empire, which was fighting the US-backed Republic.
 
Why would Union officers help France at all, even if France were willing to accept them? France was aiding their Mexican puppet empire, which was fighting the US-backed Republic.
Which they gave up on in 1865, once the Union had won...AFAICT, it was pretty quickly back to smiles and roses after that. France had an imposing (though not really deserved) reputation, and there was a traditional Francophilic attitude due to its intervention in the Revolutionary War that was only gradually starting to switch to general Anglophilia at this point (not that Anglophilia hadn't previously existed, but the general trend in high society was Francophilic instead).
 
Which they gave up on in 1865, once the Union had won...AFAICT, it was pretty quickly back to smiles and roses after that. France had an imposing (though not really deserved) reputation, and there was a traditional Francophilic attitude due to its intervention in the Revolutionary War that was only gradually starting to switch to general Anglophilia at this point (not that Anglophilia hadn't previously existed, but the general trend in high society was Francophilic instead).
Also, all the west pointers were taught about how awesome Napoleon was and the attitude was passed on fairly hard.
 
Ah yes, wasn't the curriculum quite based on Jomini at this point in time?

As far as strategy was concerned, Jomini didn't just dominate West Point study, it was all there was!

Sylvanus Thayer was determined to transform West Point into a kind of American École Polytechnique. Dennis Hart Mahan turned the Jomini dial up to eleven.
 
Is it pretty much accepted that the dominant Republican coalition after the war are going to be formed by the "good old boys" from the civil war (Northern WASPs, Southern Scalawags, Germans in places like Texas and Missouri, Scandanavians, and Old-Stock Freedmen), and the rest of the non-republicans are a scattered group of everyone else (Natives, anti-reconstruction Southerners, former Chestnuts, the Irish, Latin Americans, and immigrants from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, southeast asia, and later the Caribbean )?
 
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