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

[Rattigan]

That would have been a recipie for disaster. Can you imagine the sunset clause applying in the antebellum period?

True, but alternatively, can you imagine it applying in the Reconstruction, Progressive or New Deal eras?

 

[DTF955Baseballfan]

The problem is there might not have been a reconstruction or other eras if it had applied in the antebellum era.

The reconstruction era does give a very logical time to amend the Constitution, perhaps to put in such a clause, because there was a fairy drastic shift. Suddenly there was no more slavery, but also, one could argue that the counting of citizens itself needed to be reconsidered because there was no more need for a 3/5 compromise. Income accounting who was a citizen and who wasn't, how to determine what proper representation was, what impact the House of Representatives and also the electoral college which means that at least 2 of the branches of government would be affected.

By the way, this discussion is so good that I think I'm going to link it if anyone wants to come from Nina rymo, another non American citizen had a question for their work on understanding the basics of how the Supreme Court does something. While this hasn't totally been about the court, it is excellent in explaining the Constitution itself.

 

[Kylia]

True, but alternatively, can you imagine it applying in the Reconstruction, Progressive or New Deal eras?

I can imagine the backlash if it did happen in the New Deal era. Remember the backlash when FDR tried to pack the court?

 

[Rattigan]

I can imagine the backlash if it did happen in the New Deal era. Remember the backlash when FDR tried to pack the court?

Especially considering the time to re-do the constitution after that would have come during the Nixon-era backlash to liberalism... But, then again, I suppose that's politics for you

 

[Daztur]

Oh the poor butterflies, how many of them have fallen.
If the basic constitutional order of the US was fundamentally different you're not going to get exactly the same politics over a century or two later.

 

[tophatgaming]

One thing to consider is that Lincoln was very pro-labour for his time, to quote the man himself in his first annual message to congress

"It is not needed, nor fitting here (message to Congress in re the civil war) that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions; but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effect to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them, and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded thus far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights."

 

[Drunkrobot]

One thing to consider is that Lincoln was very pro-labour for his time, to quote the man himself in his first annual message to congress

The slide of the South into diehard advocacy and support of slavery pre-civil war tends to be focused on by those of us who aren't charme by the Lost Cause Myth, but it's worth remembering that the North had something of a radicalisation too in opposition to the growing extremism of the South. Lincoln's speech here effectively alludes to the Mudsill theory, a proposition by a Southern planter and US senator that a permanent fixture of any society in history is that there will always be a labouring class at the bottom to do the menial jobs that supports everyone else, and that while the South had found a race of people biologically suited for that role, the North and it's commitment to opposing slavery meant it had to use hired labour from white people, which would eventually lead to a revolution as white men are just too smart to be satisfied with a life as basically a beast of burden.

Now, you and I know that this theory is entirely bullshit, not only racist but also completely clueless to the process of mechanisation of manual labour which had already been going on for decades at that point and has by our time reached levels unfathomable to anybody in the 1850s. In the shorter term, it had the catastrophic (to the Southern planter perspective) backfire effect of helping spur a union between the Northern white working class and the anti-slavery cause. Northern working men felt insulted, these high-and-mighty would-be aristocrats down in Dixie speaking of them as if they were dark age peasants, and they were also worried that if slavery came to dominate the country then policies that helped workers would become impossible to implement. Lincoln was hardly a socialist, but his parties platform of tariffs to support industry and homestead to provide land to the working class (and helping keep wages high for those who stayed East) was considered by many Northerners to be much better than anything the other candidates were offering.

 

[tophatgaming]

The slide of the South into diehard advocacy and support of slavery pre-civil war tends to be focused on by those of us who aren't charme by the Lost Cause Myth, but it's worth remembering that the North had something of a radicalisation too in opposition to the growing extremism of the South. Lincoln's speech here effectively alludes to the Mudsill theory, a proposition by a Southern planter and US senator that a permanent fixture of any society in history is that there will always be a labouring class at the bottom to do the menial jobs that supports everyone else, and that while the South had found a race of people biologically suited for that role, the North and it's commitment to opposing slavery meant it had to use hired labour from white people, which would eventually lead to a revolution as white men are just too smart to be satisfied with a life as basically a beast of burden.

Now, you and I know that this theory is entirely bullshit, not only racist but also completely clueless to the process of mechanisation of manual labour which had already been going on for decades at that point and has by our time reached levels unfathomable to anybody in the 1850s. In the shorter term, it had the catastrophic (to the Southern planter perspective) backfire effect of helping spur a union between the Northern white working class and the anti-slavery cause. Northern working men felt insulted, these high-and-mighty would-be aristocrats down in Dixie speaking of them as if they were dark age peasants, and they were also worried that if slavery came to dominate the country then policies that helped workers would become impossible to implement. Lincoln was hardly a socialist, but his parties platform of tariffs to support industry and homestead to provide land to the working class (and helping keep wages high for those who stayed East) was considered by many Northerners to be much better than anything the other candidates were offering.

I agree with most of that, however, it is possible with the corruption of the post-war years, Lincoln may very well become a socialist, he's already radicalised ittl

 

[Drunkrobot]

I agree with most of that, however, it is possible with the corruption of the post-war years, Lincoln may very well become a socialist, he's already radicalised ittl

I still think that's unlikely, but I do think the enormous popular figure of Lincoln could direct the Republican Party towards a more pro-labour path without him explicitly adopting socialist doctrine. Yankees at this time have a reputation abroad for having a particularly well-educated, flexible, and innovative industrial working class, working men's associations and unions and so forth aligned with the Republicans might promote the spread of public education or co-determinate business structures, particularly into the South in the continued power-vacuum of a planter class shut out from reasserting their authority.

 

[Drunkrobot]

On a maybe funner note, what are the odds of the Union adopting an official national anthem? The Battle Cry of Freedom was immensely popular during the civil war, so popular even the Rebs made their own bootleg version, there was some talk IOTL of making it the anthem, and it's hardly any more bloodthirsty than La Marseillaise. Perhaps it was some of its slightly more overt abolitionism that doomed it from acceptance as an anthem:

We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true and brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
And although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitors, up with the stars;
While we rally round the flag, boys, we rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

 

[kaijudirector]

On a maybe funner note, what are the odds of the Union adopting an official national anthem? The Battle Cry of Freedom was immensely popular during the civil war, so popular even the Rebs made their own bootleg version, there was some talk IOTL of making it the anthem, and it's hardly any more bloodthirsty than La Marseillaise. Perhaps it was some of its slightly more overt abolitionism that doomed it from acceptance as an anthem:

Maybe change the lyrics, but keep the tune? It was a cover of John Brown's Body after all.

 

[VaultJumper]

On a maybe funner note, what are the odds of the Union adopting an official national anthem? The Battle Cry of Freedom was immensely popular during the civil war, so popular even the Rebs made their own bootleg version, there was some talk IOTL of making it the anthem, and it's hardly any more bloodthirsty than La Marseillaise. Perhaps it was some of its slightly more overt abolitionism that doomed it from acceptance as an anthem:

Battle Hym of the Republic would be better

 

[The Ghost of Danton]

We need a compromise song to bind the nation back together so the national anthem should be "Dixie" but the Union version.

 

[Meshakhad]

We need a compromise song to bind the nation back together so the national anthem should be "Dixie" but the Union version.

Perfection.

 

[Onedotman]

We need a compromise song to bind the nation back together so the national anthem should be "Dixie" but the Union version.

Jokes aside, roasting Johnny Reb every time the national anthem is sung would be the best thing ever.

 

[Drunkrobot]

Battle Hym of the Republic would be better

The main stumbling block to that is that, as defenders of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (albeit reinterpreted in a more explicitly egalitarian light), Lincoln and most Republicans are also dedicated to the principle of secular government. If "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" had smacked too much of the pulpit to survive the drafting of the Declaration, then I can't see a song alluding to the coming of Christ gaining official recognition.

 

[Red_Galiray]

That would be Sean Bean. Nick did intend to steal it, but to protect it from Sean, who wouldn't be as careful with it in his search of the treasure.

Oh, I tend to turn off my brain when watching that movie so I didn't remember.

PERSONAL OPINION: I think that a lot of Americans, both in the past and those living today, have internalised a belief that even supposing the Constitution isn't perfect, it is at least better than anything that could be made today. That the Founders are now so dead and remote is part of their virtue; Can we be so certain that the people picked today to make the US a new constitution would be so educated, so intellectually curious, so ready to argue and fight and eventually compromise as the OG were?

There's a slightly Hobbesian streak in American public thought that while the Constitution enables people to live up to republican virtues of civility, reason, and compromise, being without the Constitution would let out all the worst demons of humanity's nature. Most Americans, particularly older ones, see the beginnings of their national history in the Puritan Pilgrims, and I think it says something that the generally recollected memory of the Puritans is that they landed from the Mayflower, had Thanksgiving with the Indians, and then sometime later had a bout of mass hysteria about witches that got loads of people killed. In the national imagination, "Killing people for being witches" is the second or third ever thing that Americans did in their history. Superstition, terror, murderous hatred, these are bubbling in the souls of all human beings, and there has to be something that everybody can treat as a legal absolute if we're to make certain they won't boil over.

At least, that's what lots of people in America might think. Certainly in the 1860s, the attitude exists on both sides in this civil war, where both think the other has abandoned sacrosanct republican principles for more base instincts.

That's a fascinating point of view. Coming from Latin America the point of view is the opposite: we're naturally virtuous but bad governments and laws stiffle us and turn us towards evil.

I think another factor is the fact that the United States has never had a wholesale revision of the constitutional order, the way that France did for example. If your first republican government fails so catastrophically as France's, then naturally you're driven, to the extent that you still value the ideals it used to justify itself, to emphasize the ideals, and not any given constitution (particularly if later constitutions continue to fail, again like France experienced). But if the constitution more or less functions in defense of those ideals from the start, then there's no real need to draw a line between the ideals and the constitution.

I thin the most likely time for a wholesale revision of the constitution, given more or less OTL history, was probably the 1860s and Reconstruction. The Civil War is a major crisis point in the constitutional history of the United States because it showed that the constitutional order of the past wasn't functioning, but IOTL that was resolved with comparatively minor revisions largely turning on changed interpretations of the original document (another factor, I suppose...the brevity of the constitution means that interpretation is very important for actually applying it, and so you can change the constitutional order without changing the constitution itself). I suspect that a different (more Radical) President than Lincoln who survived into the post-war era might very well attempt to and perhaps even succeed in replacing the constitution with an entirely new document, particularly if the South was more successful and the war even more drawn out and bloody than it already was IOTL. Other possibilities might be an earlier civil war, particularly if the South won (as it might in a war fought in 1850 or 1820).

I've thought about the possibilities of a second constitutional convention, for the second part of the TL. I don't think it could happen during the Civil War itself, when defending the Constitution and the legacy of the Founders became a big part of the rhetoric of the Union cause. But after the war I could see a Convention being called to propose reforms and, like the first, it ends up just rewriting the whole thing. I do believe certain changes are needed for the short-term success of reconstruction and long-term success of the nation. Among those I was thinking of was direct election of the President and Senators by a top-two run-off, changes in how the Supreme Courts works (term limits, different ways to appoint them, clarifying their powers), a line item veto for the President, term limits for the President, a clearer succession line, etc.

In a lot of ways it's probably because we have weirdly powerful courts. Judicial Review in the United States is far reaching and expansive and I believe goes further than most other democracies, even those with lively legal traditions. You can construct arguments for why gun control is bad or about executive overreach, or you can support legal doctrines which say they're unconstitutional. You can fight for legislation supporting access to abortion or gay marriage, and yet the quickest path to success remains crafting judicial arguments that they should be enshrined as constitutional rights. I suppose on that front another factor may be our particular form of federalism has often made it so the courts are the only branch of government capable of instituting national standards. The recent gay marriage bill the Senate passed for instance was very aware of Congresses' limited authority; they can force states to recognize gay marriages issued in other states, but they can't force clerks in any state to issue gay marriage licenses.

If the courts, with the acceptance of the body politic, are going to be the arbiter of everything from minimum wage laws to civil rights to healthcare to whether or not the EPA can regulate carbon emissions, then of course everything will just be condensed down to whether something is constitutional or not. Because constitutionality actually just is the most important thing.

ITTL that has already changed since with the radical 13th amendment a future Congress can just declare gay marriage a right of the American people, and given that the amendment says quite clearly that the rights recognized in the laws of Congress cannot be denied, the power to force each and every State to recognize and perform gay marriages is there. So we already have a very important change in the history of American constitutionalism.

Not especially relevant given the issue ultimately is that the courts have been allowed to carve for themselves a huge amount of power, rather than how ethically they use said power.

For this timeline I'm genuinely unsure how much we're bound to fall into the same trap. This period from what I understand featured quite a lot of condemnation of "judicial despotism" and Lincoln himself wrote often about the court's overreach and ability to do wrong, especially as it related to Dred Scott which here was even more nakedly partisan. Yet it isn't as if there was much appetite to totally rewrite the constitution or overturn Marbury v Madison, even efforts like the supercharged 13th amendment are mostly about updating the document. Some of the changes, especially the 13th amendment including a passage about 'individual persons,' hopefully preclude the later constitutional rollback which defanged the ability of Congress to enforce civil rights for a century, and yet our history is littered with examples of the courts basically just ignoring plain reading and going "because we said so." The Privileges and Immunities Clause is still dormant to this day by judicial fiat.

It likely comes down to how much this and subsequent Congresses are willing to just go "actually we do have this authority" and, if need be, further amendments reinforcing their power.

I think the biggest change is that Congress will be more willing to assert itself and its authority, especially with a friendly President. Though we now have a "Reconstructed Court" with a majority of Lincoln appointees, I can easily see Republicans arguing that they don't have to obey Supreme Court decisions regarding the constitutionality of its laws because then the SC is merely creating legislation - and only the sovereign will of the people represented in Congress may do that. The result may be a much weaker Supreme Court, at least for a few decades. Indeed, ITTL they may be remembered as merely pawns of Lincoln and Congress, because they are unlikely to try to oppose the President and Congress may just strip their jurisdiction if they step out of line.

Oh the poor butterflies, how many of them have fallen.
If the basic constitutional order of the US was fundamentally different you're not going to get exactly the same politics over a century or two later.

Haha I was thinking the same. What do you all mean Roosevelt's New Deal? A sunset clause would be massive, and, probably, result in Civil War way earlier.

The slide of the South into diehard advocacy and support of slavery pre-civil war tends to be focused on by those of us who aren't charme by the Lost Cause Myth, but it's worth remembering that the North had something of a radicalisation too in opposition to the growing extremism of the South. Lincoln's speech here effectively alludes to the Mudsill theory, a proposition by a Southern planter and US senator that a permanent fixture of any society in history is that there will always be a labouring class at the bottom to do the menial jobs that supports everyone else, and that while the South had found a race of people biologically suited for that role, the North and it's commitment to opposing slavery meant it had to use hired labour from white people, which would eventually lead to a revolution as white men are just too smart to be satisfied with a life as basically a beast of burden.

Now, you and I know that this theory is entirely bullshit, not only racist but also completely clueless to the process of mechanisation of manual labour which had already been going on for decades at that point and has by our time reached levels unfathomable to anybody in the 1850s. In the shorter term, it had the catastrophic (to the Southern planter perspective) backfire effect of helping spur a union between the Northern white working class and the anti-slavery cause. Northern working men felt insulted, these high-and-mighty would-be aristocrats down in Dixie speaking of them as if they were dark age peasants, and they were also worried that if slavery came to dominate the country then policies that helped workers would become impossible to implement. Lincoln was hardly a socialist, but his parties platform of tariffs to support industry and homestead to provide land to the working class (and helping keep wages high for those who stayed East) was considered by many Northerners to be much better than anything the other candidates were offering.

A form of class conscience that I hope to exploit more in the upcoming chapters is that often Northern soldiers took pride in being actual working men and denigrated planters as being inherently bad as a class. There are countless accounts of them being gleeful at the miseries of the slavocracy or boasting of the radical changes the war brought - a soldier for example wrote with joy of a slaveholder that tried to reenslave a person, only for them, "Northern mudsills" to throw him up in the air. Joined with the resentment of the Confederate poor this could become a crusade that seeks to destroy planters as a class before the South can be remade in the image of the free labor North. It could also lead to greater racial solidarity, as these White workers feel identified with Black workers as fellow victims of the aristocrats.

I still think that's unlikely, but I do think the enormous popular figure of Lincoln could direct the Republican Party towards a more pro-labour path without him explicitly adopting socialist doctrine. Yankees at this time have a reputation abroad for having a particularly well-educated, flexible, and innovative industrial working class, working men's associations and unions and so forth aligned with the Republicans might promote the spread of public education or co-determinate business structures, particularly into the South in the continued power-vacuum of a planter class shut out from reasserting their authority.

There was, it's been already mentioned, a wing of the Republican Party that was boldly expressing pro-labor, even socialist, ideas. This included men like Benjamin Butler and Ben Wade. I believe that after the war, with its land redistribution and class war, they could become much stronger. The cry that a Third Revolution, that would emancipate all workers and redistribute the property of the rich, is necessary may become a part of a much stronger American socialism.

On a maybe funner note, what are the odds of the Union adopting an official national anthem? The Battle Cry of Freedom was immensely popular during the civil war, so popular even the Rebs made their own bootleg version, there was some talk IOTL of making it the anthem, and it's hardly any more bloodthirsty than La Marseillaise. Perhaps it was some of its slightly more overt abolitionism that doomed it from acceptance as an anthem:

I like that idea, as the American Marseillaise. For that I actually found modified lyrics from a 1904 performance that I think fit better as a national anthem. Maybe, similarly to how the Philippines has a war flag and a peace flag, the US could have a war anthem and a peace anthem.

Yes we'll rally round - the flag, boys, we'll rally once again.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom
We'll rally from the hillside, we'll gather, from the plain
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Chorus.
The Union forever, hurrah boys, hurrah.
Bright in its glory shines ev'ry star.
While we rally round the flag boys, rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

We are springing to the call of our brothers gone before
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
And we'll fill the vacant ranks with a million patriots more.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Chorus.

Oh, then rally round the flag boys wherever it may wave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom;
From the Northland,, tried and true, from the Southland ever brave,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Chorus.

So we're springing to the call from the East and from the West,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.
And if need be we will die for the land we love best.
Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Hmm, the "boys" part may also require a change to be more inclusive.

We need a compromise song to bind the nation back together so the national anthem should be "Dixie" but the Union version.

It is, after all a lawful prize captured during the war.

Battle Hym of the Republic would be better

The main stumbling block to that is that, as defenders of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (albeit reinterpreted in a more explicitly egalitarian light), Lincoln and most Republicans are also dedicated to the principle of secular government. If "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" had smacked too much of the pulpit to survive the drafting of the Declaration, then I can't see a song alluding to the coming of Christ gaining official recognition.

I don't feel comfortable with something so explicitly Christian either. The pledge of allegiance already seems a little too much. The National Anthem too? It could work as something of a second anthem - the way England has God Bless the King but also Rule Britannia, or even France with La Marseillaise and Le Chant du Depart.

 

[DTF955Baseballfan]

This talk of Labor Republicans is why I think you should consider the idea that it could be conservatives that split off from the Republican Party instead while supporting the spoil system. A much more labor friendly Republican is elected in 1868, conservatives push Grant in 1872 who supports the spoil system but still fights to integrate the South, and then the more liberal ones go back to Garfield.

I like that modified Battle Cry of Freedom. "Boys" could easily become "all." Perhaps with some politician making the sarcastic comment that "We'll throw those Southerners a bone. We'll turn that into y'all."

 

[VaultJumper]

with

It is, after all a lawful prize captured during the war.



I don't feel comfortable with something so explicitly Christian either. The pledge of allegiance already seems a little too much. The National Anthem too? It could work as something of a second anthem - the way England has God Bless the King but also Rule Britannia, or even France with La Marseillaise and Le Chant du Depart.

Dixie has such good tune it has to be emancipated from supporting slavery

National Anthem should probably be Battle cry of Freedom and the Under God in pledge of Allegiance was only added in the 20th century same with in god we trust (fucking red scares). Battle Hym of the Republic feeds into my up bringing of growing up in America and Christianity and being taught that were good and I should love them, my up bringing succeeded in that, but it left horribly disillusioned once I actually learned reality about what both actually do and are. So Battle Hym of the Republic allows a tiny escapism for me.

This talk of Labor Republicans is why I think you should consider the idea that it could be conservatives that split off from the Republican Party instead while supporting the spoil system. A much more labor friendly Republican is elected in 1868, conservatives push Grant in 1872 who supports the spoil system but still fights to integrate the South, and then the more liberal ones go back to Garfield.

I like that modified Battle Cry of Freedom. "Boys" could easily become "all." Perhaps with some politician making the sarcastic comment that "We'll throw those Southerners a bone. We'll turn that into y'all."

yes y'all is the most inclusive hahahahaha

 

[5000 Cows]

This talk of Labor Republicans is why I think you should consider the idea that it could be conservatives that split off from the Republican Party instead while supporting the spoil system. A much more labor friendly Republican is elected in 1868, conservatives push Grant in 1872 who supports the spoil system but still fights to integrate the South, and then the more liberal ones go back to Garfield.

I like that modified Battle Cry of Freedom. "Boys" could easily become "all." Perhaps with some politician making the sarcastic comment that "We'll throw those Southerners a bone. We'll turn that into y'all."

I have actually thought about this before reading this TL; it's not especially likely but that would be really kind of amusing to see the Republicans adopt that mantle.