Why do you like a Confederate victory?

[frlmerrin]

Hi, I've been a browser on this forum for several months now and in that time, I've noticed a large number of threads dealing with a confederate victory in the ACW. As I'm writing this there are three timelines on the front page dealing with that same thing. Obviously the civil war is a huge event in American history with many possible butterflies, but given the odds against a CSA victory, it seems to be very popular. So my question is, what do you find appealing about it? Is it just a underdog type of thing or just a large percentage of Americans on the forum.

I cannot answer for any other posters but for myself my interest in a Confederate victory in the ACW is three fold.

1) I do not agree with your implication that a CSA victory is unlikely, nor is a Confederate victory necessary for Confederate independence. There are in fact a great many Confederate independence scenarios some are very unlikely to the point they stretch the reader's credibility (e.g. some of the various steam punk offerings) other such as a Union conflict with Britain or a major Union reversal before the 1864 Union elections are far from improbable. A war over Trent for example was more likely than not right up until St Stephen's day 1862. So my first reason for liking the Confederate independence scenario is that there are so many different credible PODs to explore and they can lead to a wide variety of different time-lines.
2) My second reason for liking the Confederate independence scenario is that it is a major change in history compared with OTL. The USA can never be the superpower that it is in OTL 20th Century (unless of course it re-unites with the CSA in someway very quickly). In all probability it will break-up because it will have lost the major source of its prosperity (the south). The CSA on the other hand is likely to be very rich in many scenarios and dirt poor in a few. It also may break-up. In all cases there are now at least four powers in North America and possibly a great many more). The key thing is how these changes affect politics in Europe and to a lesser extent Asia.
3) My last reason is somewhat chilling. I find the idea that the CSA would abandon chattle slavery largely incredible. It is possible that the CSA might become a backwater reviled by nearly every other nation but this is unlikely because in most scenarios it will be very rich and everyone will want its goods. Thus it is more probable that the CSA will become a rapidly developing, rich, major nation that practices slavery. If that is the case then I can easily see 'scientific' slavery and the combination of the worse excesses of early 20th Century ultra-Capitalism and slavery leading to monsterous slave management programmes. The CSA may possibly roll back ideas about race and slavery to pre-Wilberforce values across large parts of the globe. An independent CSA can give rise to some truely horrific dystopias than are worth exploring for the light they shed on our current societies.

 

[frlmerrin]

Communist regimes killed an estimated 85 to 100 million people over the course of the last century. Even though Nazism had the edge when it comes to evil, the two are totally comparable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes

It is generally accepted that Capitalism and Capitalist states killed around four time your stated maximum figure for Communism. Would you care to comment?

 

[FleetMac]

It is generally accepted that Capitalism and Capitalist states killed around four time your stated maximum figure for Communism. Would you care to comment?

Generally accepted by whom? Sources would be nice, if we're painting so wide a brush (at least Fabius posted some sort of reference).

EDIT: Also, am I the only one that would support splitting the Communism-Capitalism death tally discussion to another thread?

 

[TFSmith121]

Thanks for the kind words...

I don't like Confederate victory threads, and I commend posters like tfsmith121 for crushing that nonsense with a torrent of logic, reason, and facts. Even if it's a literary exercise, the idea of a Confederate victory is repulsive.

Thanks for the kind words...

With all due respect to some who may not know, the idea that the war that ended in 1865 began in 1861 is more than myopic; it is straightforward denialism, racism, and advocacy of continued genocide.

Edward S. Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, despite revisionists and slavery apologists, makes it quite clear when the war that ended at Appomattox actually began...

As an individual who saw the conflict's causes quite clearly once said:

"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

See: http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

As always, there are those who so much enjoy the pathologies of the past, they like to pretend they had continued - sad enough from Americans, but even stranger from Europeans.

Who, one would think, would see the danger inherent in denying the humanity of entire groups of people based on psuedo-science.

But I digress.

Best,

 

[TFSmith121]

You know, there's a pretty classic Doonesbury that

Generally accepted by whom? Sources would be nice, if we're painting so wide a brush (at least Fabius posted some sort of reference).

EDIT: Also, am I the only one that would support splitting the Communism-Capitalism death tally discussion to another thread?

You know, there's a pretty classic Doonesbury that features an argument between one of the main quartet of characters and his father exchanging shots over the history of the '60s and '70s that turns into them trying to figure out who was "right" about Cambodia... it goes something like this:

Mark Slackmeyer and his dad Phil square off over the Reagan Revolution:

Mark: “Look, dad, if you asked me to come home just so you could gloat, I think I’ll be on my--”
Phil: “Can’t take it, huh? The kid who gloated over Watergate for five years?”
Mark: “Yeah, well, who cackled with glee when Nixon beat McGovern?”
Phil: “Who became insufferable over Vietnamization?”
Mark: “That wasn’t as bad as your gloating over the Cambodian bloodbath!”
Phil: “Me? That was you!”
Mark: “It was?... You sure?”
Phil: Um... I think so. Whose fault did that turn out to be?”
​

Brutality is brutality.

Best,

 

[Herr Frage]

I think its all right there in the manuel. This is alternate history, and the Union won OTL.

And while the war itself was only affecting the united States majorly, the CSA becoming a long term nation would mean so many butterflies with how important the USA became.

What precedent would the victory of the slavers set abroad? How would international relations and trade be affected? Would the USA become hyper militant? Would it become more tolerant or less?

Would the CSA be like Tutrledove's were it holds to its founders principals or would we see earlier civil rights with the much larger percentage of african Americans? Perhaps without a view of equality being forced on them the White Confederates would not cherish the ideals of supremacy so? The Black and the Gray offers a look at the possibilities of a non evil evolution of the CSA. Not a utopia by any means but not dystopic either.

So its popular I think just because it is a good what if with many possibilities. Not saying there are nit crates of equally good ones that don't get so much attention. But it is a well known one and enough literature on the subject is out there it sort of builds on its own momentum.

 

[Darth_Kiryan]

snip

I wish i had your genius.,

 

[TFSmith121]

Kind of you to say.

I wish i had your genius.,

Kind of you to say.

My "genius" is pretty damn limited, however, given my obvious inability to post a quote just once.

Best,

 

[Rich Rostrom]

Thanks for the kind words...

With all due respect to some who may not know, the idea that the war that ended in 1865 began in 1861 is more than myopic...

Are you arguing that the practice of slavery is "war"?

Because that's an extension to the definition of war that I've never heard of before.

If "the war" ended in 1865, then it started in 1861.

If you are saying that violent, coercive racial oppression is "war", such that "the war" began before 1861, then "the war" didn't end in 1865. One could argue that it continued until the 1960s. There was certainly violence throughout that period.

 

[usertron2020]

A Confederate victory also has fans among non-American members of the forum, especially British and Canadian members, what with destroying the USA that will be in the 20th century.

Unfortunately, that generally follows with a "Disintegration of the USA", followed by at least one full additional century of the Pax Britannica. While furiously handwaving away all attempts to discuss how this would effect the continent of Europe to the present day and dismissing such discussion as American nationalism.

I rarely see a European poster who prefers the idea of American dissolution and yet also believes the resulting history of Europe in the 20th century would be for the worse.

Personally there's one Confederate Victory scenario that I'd like to see but haven't yet.

The Victory of the Confederacy proves to be short lived as the shortfalls of the Confederate Constitution come to light, namely that it's government is quite powerless, even when trying to deal with disagrements between the states. This leads to the breakup of the confederacy.

However the United States doesn't fare any better, as the terms of the peace means that every state has the right to secede, several choose to do so in the face of such a humiliating defeat. the New England States led the charge, California and the Mormon territories followed suit, by the early 1880's the United States was officially dissolved after the residences of D.C. drove out the remaining members of the Federal government and turned the city over to Virginia.

What would come after that?

New England was the most Federalist and Unionist region of the USA. I'll let it go at that.

As to the CSA it is facing total economic collapse due to its inability to control its currencies (including state currencies!) and bond issues. Win, lose, or draw, the CSA emerges as the worst basket case of any Western country. Strictly Third World material. After "victory", its time to pay the bills that the Confederate system can never hope to get a grasp on, and at that very moment Imperial France is occupying the CSA's neighbor in the name of unpaid debts. Uh oh.

I wouldn't say it's the ultimate dystopia at all... Just destroying American isn't necessarily bad at all especially considering all the things their government has done over the years.

Here we go...

What it may lead to (by allowing others to take its place as the dominant power) may of course be very bad.

A bigger more reckless British Empire, a German Empire that wins World War One, a French Empire that...oh wait.

Eg if the Nazis had somehow won that would be far far worse: not just slavery but genocide would become the 'norm'.

I wouldn't worry about the Nazis, there won't be any (Good Thing!), what with the Imperial Germans and their Central Powers allies (no US loans to the British and French remember!) curbstomping most of Europe, while the British Empire scoops up more goodies for itself from Africa, Asia, and now I assume Latin America in a TL with the Monroe Doctrine dead.

It may be the ultimate dystopia for Americans who fear the loss of their present global dominance, whether consciously or not, but for the rest of the world and considering how bad things could have turned out, it's hardly the worst thing that could have happened. [1]

1] Ask the peoples of the Third World (at least those knowledgeable of history before 1945). Ask the peoples of Eastern Europe. Google "Cold War" & "USSR". Ask the people on the losing side of the two world wars.

Make whatever arguments you wish over American behavior post-1991, and especially post-2001. But I'd say the presence of a powerful United republican nation in North America over the last 150 years has been a very strong plus compared to the negatives out there in the same time period.

A Confederacy Victory means that they get to set the terms, and one of them would be to guarantee the right of every state to break away if they so wished.

Any Confederate victory TL SO overwhelming that they would be able to "dictate terms" up to and including what is and is not in the US Constitution would be so ASB that you'd see Confederate armies "Marching to Lake Erie".

 

[usertron2020]

Not really. The US would still have the industrial power house of the North, the vast agricultural lands of the Midwest-Great Plains region to attract immigrants, and the huge mineral wealth the far west to feed the factories and financial sectors in the east. They'd also have vast potential for a large military that, while demoralized by the loss in the ACW, would be itching to prove themselves in a fight if anyone else got any uppity ideas of secession. One of the things Turtledove got right in TL-191, in my opinion. [1]

Economically the South always needed the North more than the North needed the South. [2]


It's also my opinion that in a situation similar to TL-191, where Britain and France ally with the Confederacy, the US would try to find a partner in the far-east, like maybe Japan or China, to secure the Pacific. [3] They'd also try to find a friend in one or more great power in Europe, perhaps Germany or Russia, or both(a reapproachment between the two isn't impossible; I've seen it in other TLs). [4]

1] If for purposes of discussion the CSA gets Kentucky and keeps Louisiana, the north is crippled in terms of trade. Sherman was right about that. Along with the Great Lakes the Missouri-Ohio-Mississippi River system controls North America. The USA cannot survive without controlling the outlets of those rivers to the sea...

2] Well, they HAD little industry of their own. But the vital need for those rivers dictated Round Two [5] coming a lot sooner than later.

3] China is chaos, and Japan is only one generation from opening their doors. They have a long way to go before they can help anyone.

4] Problem: The Royal Navy's supremacy on the high seas at the time was so preposterously extreme (even more than the US Navy's today!) that the combined fleets of the world couldn't help the USA.

5] A fact generally handwaved for purposes of discussion I admit.

Here's an alt civil war scenario that I like, the British help the CSA for whatever reason you can come up with including manpower and weapons, BUT...

This serves to infuriate the Northern populace due to, among other things possibly, the prolongation of the war and much more casualties. Eventually the US wins having just as large an army as they do IRL after beating the CSA. In retaliation they take enough of Canada with that huge army that the British eventually give up the rest.

The USA cannot win against the British Empire AND the Confederacy. Its just that simple. The Royal Navy breaks the US blockade and establishes their own on the US Eastern Seaboard. Canada's defenses are strong enough to hold off whatever forces can be spared from the Confederate Front until re-inforcements arrive from all over. Assuming this is a Trent Affair war (even Palmerston couldn't get intervention just for shits & giggles), the British have sufficient political heft at home to allow for a longer war, and sit back and wait for the USA to sue for peace when their economy collapses.

Meanwhile during all of the Civil war fighting, some Canadians resent fighting at all

No they won't, not at all. Canadians love to abominate nationalism. Until, that is, somebody actually disses their country [6]. Or invades it.

6] See the Gomer Pyle screwing up the presentation of the Canadian Flag during Game 2 of the 1992 World Series. Our friends to the North went nuts.

...in what they see as none of their affair while some others resent being on the side of the slave-holding CSA and refuse to fight in a war they oppose. This, on top of no or little British support due to them being stretched to the limit due to all of the global demands on their manpower, creates less military opposition when the US does eventually invade.

No. The Canadians see it as a matter of survival and their duty to the Queen. Besides, membership in the Empire and meeting its duties was always part-and-parcel to the understanding that the whole of the Empire would be mobilized to save Canada from Yankee imperialism.

And that support would be coming. Saving Canada would be for Britain an "All hands on deck" moment for the Empire. No new wars against the Zulus, Afghans, Persians, or anyone else while this was going on. Any British prime minister who attempted to short-shrift the Canadians would be expelled in a Vote of No Confidence, if his Cabinet didn't collapse first. And remember, between the Canadians and British Army, they would only have to hold the line while the Royal Navy won the war.

Post civil war this creates a huge gap between the British and the US. I wonder on what side the US would fall when WWI and II happens in this scenario.

Assuming the alliance of the French, British, and CSA leads to a quick American defeat, and the reasons for European Intervention were not Trent-related but more imperialist in nature, with the CSA going as OTL until Intervention occurs? Assuming no USA dissolution, and if the USA completely abolishes Slavery and war breaks out in a ACW 2 the 1870s? No second foreign intervention by a Third Republic France and post-Great Reform Act of 1867.

Leaving the situation that of a re-united USA with a Reconstruction period possibly lasting into the 1890s. And the US seeing France and Britain as their bitter enemies going into World War One. Uh oh...

As a possible POD, maybe the US does at least a little better in the war of 1812, not winning any territory in the end, but prolonging the war and forcing the British to commit resources they desperately need elsewhere. This causes the the Brits to lose one or more battles they should have won. This pisses off the British quite badly for quite awhile afterward, because many of them blame the US for their losses.

Impossible. The US Navy was too tiny to win many "victories", sinking frigates. If the British hadn't played the expectations game so badly (fir-built frigates), they wouldn't have been embarrassed. And once the Napoleonic Wars ended, the British were in the position of exacting major payback.

In between the war of 1812 and the Civil war the tensions mount between both sides because of the British impressing US citizens and ship/sailors as well as raiding of a US port/settlement or shipping convoy under False or Pirate colors with the US finding out anyway. Then along comes the Civil war and viola.

I know it's full of holes but, whatever I'm tired and don't care.

Acting this way in the Age of Steam would be setting a dangerous precedent for Britain's usual enemies on the Continent. It was THEY who were by this time pushing for the freedom of the seas more than anyone, and only individual sea captains who were going off the rails.

Another scenario, the Brits help the CSA win the war. There is strong revanchist feeling in the US as a result. Military spending is considerably higher in this TL than OTL and it allies itself to Russia just after the war and Prussia\Germany in the 1870-1880s. It takes the US until the 1900s to be where it was in the 1880s OTL. WWI breaks out where it is the US/Germany/Russia/AH Empire vs. GB/France/Italy/Turkey/CSA. The US takes all of the CSA and all of GBs and France's American colonies and maybe a few islands in the Pacific. Russia takes GB and France's colonies in Asia and Constantinople. Germany takes parts of France and Italy plus some African colonies while AH takes parts of Italy and Africa.

I think the Entente would sue for peace long before this scenario ended. Also, I repeat: Round Two doesn't wait this long for the CSA/USA. I rarely see a serious explanation for why not?

 

[usertron2020]

I'm sketching out a timeline where the traitors do manage to, in part, break off from the United States--but this makes things worse for the south, as the industrialized North is thoroughly pissed off. President McClellan ends up a one-term president, and someone is elected in '68 on a promise of never again letting the USA stay weak. The continued attempts to keep up with the USA in military build-up leads to the South ending up in economic trouble...and then the last civil war begins...

Yay! Round Two Talk at last!

I find it fascinating due to the fact it would place two totally different nations (in philosophy and governance) across from each other on the North American continent. It's also fascinating to think of the repercussions this would have for the idea of liberal republics world wide. The only stable and prosperous republic is torn asunder in a civil war over slavery with the only others in the world in Latin American constantly shifted by military juntas. Couple that with the crushing of the liberal revolts of 1848 and you have a recipe for a very different world. Reform might settle more around the ideas of a parliamentary monarchy with the monarch being seen as a sign of national stability against 'anarchic republicanism' which envelopes the Western Hemisphere.

Imagine the different world that would breed, it would have an effect on the power and legitimacy of the idea of a monarchy and breed a much different socialism. The world as we know it would be changed in ways we probably can't even totally conceive. We can imagine them though, and while some things would certainly be darker, it would have a very interesting effect on the world.

It's kinda what I'm trying to explore with my 'Great War' TL

Ah, Tsar Nicolai II still gets shot.

I don't.

As a biracial American with a deep belief in the importance of human dignity and rights, the success of a nation ideologically committed to human enslavement is the stuff of nightmares, similar in vein to a Hitler Wins WWII style of story.

I enjoy stories with the opposite line of effect; the Union wins earlier, easier, and builds a better nation with a better reconstruction and the quiet removal of the Wilsonian revival of racism.

The Confederacy is high octane nightmare fuel. I think a dark story that discusses the ramifications of SLAVERY TODAY, the effects of Modern Style-American Democracy collapsing under its own contradictions, and the world giving up on the idea of universal rights in favor of some kind of National Moralism that unites, as Hitler did, one's nation, one's ethnicity, and one's ethics.

Would be quite a scary world indeed.

PM me. About...anything.

I've been toying with such a scenario for the past few days, where the South wins the Civil War (either OTL's ACW, or an earlier, messier one under a President Fremont ala Heart of Dixie), and the Union, rather than going full Revanchist/TL-191, washes its hands of the matter and keeps chugging along, while the South limps along for a generation before imploding into various mini-confederacies/state governments, so you end up with an industrialized, federal North and a balkanized mess in the South.

And in the name of keeping marauders from raiding across the border, the US Army sends in some peace-keepers. Say, a million of them.

I don't like Confederate victory threads, and I commend posters like tfsmith121 for crushing that nonsense with a torrent of logic, reason, and facts. Even if it's a literary exercise, the idea of a Confederate victory is repulsive.

Totally agreed.

 

[usertron2020]

Confederates are far from Nazis. Confederates were part of the USA, which enshrined it in its constitution from Washington's election to 1865, and in my opinion the USA is as evil as the CSA in the slavery regard. The point is, while slavery in itself is wrong, it goes no where near the concentration camps and genocide of millions of people that the Nazis, and the Soviets did. While the CSA/USA were not the greatest nations on the earth, they are not the worst nations.

How is Slavery enshrined in the US Constitution (as opposed to the CSA Constitution) beyond how the Census was determined (3/5th of all other persons)?

Remember that in terms of the horrors of Slavery and its history in the New World, you can't really separate the institution as it was practiced in the CSA as it was in the USA before Fort Sumter (though it was abolished north of the Mason-Dixon Line and would have been in Delaware and Missouri had they been allowed to), as well as the fact that it was practiced in ever greater brutality the further you go back in Western Hemispheric history going back to Columbus.

I understand you were saying its a major point in history, but I needed to point that out as a lot of people consider nazis=condfederates.

I think its more along the lines of say a modern African-American seeing a Rebel Battle Flag and having the same visceral reaction as a Jew seeing a swastika, historical distinctions to be made notwithstanding.

No. Not even close. Closest thing we have to Nazis in America is the US government condoning the murder and genocide of millions of Native Americans so we could have there land for "living space", which the USA then sold off or had settled.

The only way the "US Government" was condoning the murders of millions of Native Americans is if you are defining the "US Government" as being every Imperial Power in the whole of the history of North and South America from 1492 to 1900, and blaming Washington for every death by starvation and disease to boot. Not to mention that the estimations you have for populations of "millions" seem to be highly suspect. Again, unless you are blaming Uncle Sam for the works of Cortez, Pizarro, and their ilk.

Not that said policy wasn't horrific, but it didn't happen over four years (four centuries!), and couldn't be blamed on any one nation or its policies.

Sounds like Nazis to me. The North didnt have to fight the South. They were standing on southern soil, or as the South Carolinians viewed it, and legally its mixed at best. And Im pretty sure it was over a million people. [1]

They were standing on American soil.

1] Source?

And all wars cause casulties. Soldiers know what there risks for. You saying the South wanted all those men to die is like saying Washington wanted his troops to freeze to death at Valley Forge.

Few people ever go to war understanding the full perils of what they are getting into. As to Valley Forge, the British made a decision which they stuck to with a determination that was completely pathological to concentrate their war effort completely upon the blockade of North America to the exclusion of almost anything else. So while the French, Spanish, and Dutch were sweeping up Britain's colonies all over the world, Whitehall's foreign policy on the Continent had collapsed, Washington's armies to the North (Bennington, Oriskany, Saratoga) and South (Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse) were marching to victory, yes. Washington's poor men were freezing.

Not a good example. And even at Valley Forge Washington saw to it that his new inspector general, the Prussian von Steuben, trained the Continentals to be a professional force, so when they emerged at Monmouth, they had become the United States Army.

They attacked federal property they violently suppressed Unionists [2] in their states and slavery. And Americans didn't directly kill many natives it was mostly disease still terrible but no one understood that well back then [3].

2] They were massacring German-American immigrants in Texas for the "crime" of fleeing the state!

3] In fact, right at the very time of the ACW the Parisian medical community had forced out of the city a quack chemist who claimed he understood the true secrets of disease. Louis Pasteur.

See what happened in the border states, namely Maryland? The Union violently killed Confederate sympathizers and placed the region under martial law. The killing of symathisers for the enemy is not new, and has been going on for thousands of years.

Those "sympathizers" weren't exactly any shrinking violets themselves, as they had threatened to kill Lincoln if he tried to enter Washington (some did try, which is why he entered the city in disguise).

That aside, this is getting out of hand, but the reason I find the CSA victory interesting is the fact that I wonder how bad the USA could have gotten in the case where it has a chip on its shoulder and a large enemy on its border, possibly two depending on if the Brits aid the South.

They will, for the CSA to win. Even Jeff Davis didn't really think the CSA could win all on their own.

In those conditions they become like Germany, enemies on all sides, and a chip on there shoulder for revenge. That and socialism might be more acceptable in some ways, and a CSA-USA reunion peacefully after some time apart has always been an interest to me.

For this to be real, you'd need to butterfly an almost preordained ACW 2, which would require the British Empire upholding a long term military alliance with the Confederacy. Something that isn't going to happen until the CSA abolishes Slavery. Something that isn't going to happen in any kind of reasonable time frame. Like the next 50 years.

How do you see the solving of this political conundrum?

<snip>
The technical aspects of it are fascinating - the use of railways and telegraphs, the invention of steam age riverine and littoral warfare, the beginning of continuous engagement warfare...<snip>

The American Civil War was the world's first true Total War, though only for the USA. The inner workings for the CSA prevented them from doing so, except in terms of mobilizing available military aged manpower.

 

[usertron2020]

It is generally accepted that Capitalism and Capitalist states killed around four time your stated maximum figure for Communism. Would you care to comment?

I would. How far back in time are you going and what are your parameters for what constitutes a capitalist state? And by what means are these killings occurring?

 

[usertron2020]

I cannot answer for any other posters but for myself my interest in a Confederate victory in the ACW is three fold.

1) I do not agree with your implication that a CSA victory is unlikely, nor is a Confederate victory necessary for Confederate independence. There are in fact a great many Confederate independence scenarios some are very unlikely to the point they stretch the reader's credibility (e.g. some of the various steam punk offerings) other such as a Union conflict with Britain or a major Union reversal before the 1864 Union elections are far from improbable. A war over Trent for example was more likely than not right up until St Stephen's day 1862. So my first reason for liking the Confederate independence scenario is that there are so many different credible PODs to explore and they can lead to a wide variety of different time-lines.

There are few CSA Victorious TLs that do not involve European Intervention. Unless you are in ASB or total wank territory.

If President McClellan is sworn in and the front lines are even remotely like they were OTL, he would announce "peace measures TBA", while privately telling his generals: CHARGE!! There'd be nothing more in the Known Universe that Little Mac would want more that to grab the plum of Total Victory for himself, once it was ripe for the picking. Then waving said plum in Lincoln's face while he devoured it, all the while remarking on its succulence.

Probably results in torpedoing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments though.

Trent does seem to be the only reasonable war cause, with idiots in Washington and maniacs in London.

2) My second reason for liking the Confederate independence scenario is that it is a major change in history compared with OTL. The USA can never be the superpower that it is in OTL 20th Century (unless of course it re-unites with the CSA in someway very quickly). In all probability it will break-up because it will have lost the major source of its prosperity (the south). The CSA on the other hand is likely to be very rich in many scenarios and dirt poor in a few. It also may break-up. In all cases there are now at least four powers in North America and possibly a great many more). The key thing is how these changes affect politics in Europe and to a lesser extent Asia.

Learn to speak German, unless you live in Britain. Learn to speak Japanese if you live in the Pacific Basin. But the good thing is no nazis, since the Germans will already have won the Great War.

3) My last reason is somewhat chilling. I find the idea that the CSA would abandon chattle slavery largely incredible. It is possible that the CSA might become a backwater reviled by nearly every other nation but this is unlikely because in most scenarios it will be very rich and everyone will want its goods. Thus it is more probable that the CSA will become a rapidly developing, rich, major nation that practices slavery.[/ If that is the case then I can easily see 'scientific' slavery and the combination of the worse excesses of early 20th Century ultra-Capitalism and slavery leading to monsterous slave management programmes. The CSA may possibly roll back ideas about race and slavery to pre-Wilberforce values across large parts of the globe. An independent CSA can give rise to some truely horrific dystopias than are worth exploring for the light they shed on our current societies.

I agree about your incredulity in regards to the idea that the South would ever willingly abandon Chattel Slavery. Even with agricultural mechanization of farms and the arrival of the Boll Weevil, the cultural parts of Slavery are too ingrained. BTW, just imagine the South trying to industrialize with an illiterate workforce of poor Whites and Black Slaves. Manufactured products of the 19th century may be easy to make by our 2014 standards, but just imagine what happens when slaves are unleashed on a calibrated and QC'ed modern mass assembly line! Work is the enemy of the Slave, so why should he be killing himself trying to learn intricate job skills performed at a madcap pace requiring you to work at all times?

The result would be a CSA with an appalling reputation for unreliable manufactured goods.

I totally disagree about the CSA enjoying postwar economic vitality. They would have had to default with all the bills they had coming due with no way under a Confederate constitution to pay for them.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

I'd note that, while we can agree that a victorious CSA would be a bad, it doesn't follow that an earlier Union would be good -- in particular, if McClelland's Peninsula Campaign had succeeded, the Union might have been "restored" without even really touching upon the issue of slavery, delaying emancipation for who knows how long. Of course, that's not to say there aren't some intriguing a potentially hopeful PoDs out there. For example, I read (for this) about the Battle of the Crater...

I totally disagree about the CSA enjoying postwar economic vitality. They would have had to default with all the bills they had coming due with no way under a Confederate constitution to pay for them.

Well, who says the Confederate Constitution is likely to be survive? I see the CSA as a state which has been willing to not only abandon any pretense of small government, but drift toward dictatorship (both long, long before they are willing to abandon the slavery). Likely in time, the police state (necessary to slavery) undermines even the pretense of republican democracy, and the CSA ends up ruled by something like a military junta.

I fully understand the appeal of dystopian fiction - I'll even acknowledge it as useful in helping us understand that we should be thankful for some fortunate turns of history. But I think it should always be countered with utopian fiction. I love the question, "How could we do better?" and it is this question that drives my interest in alternate history and future history.

Speaking for myself, I have two favorite PoDs of the American Civil War period: second place goes to the Maryland Campaign being a success, which I believe was the best chance the CSA had of achieving independence, and all the dystopian potential that entails; but first place -- in fact, it was the first TL I attempted on this board* -- well, that goes to averting the Lincoln assassination, and all the great potential of a successful Reconstruction.

*well, solo attempt

 

[dropbearabroad]

"Sure - if treated well. But all too often fanboyism cuts in. Same thing happens with the Axis Victory TLs - they often seem to involve NOTNAZIs who don't mistreat any happy smiling Jews, or the like."

True, which is a problem with a lot of those TLs. But that doesn't mean the concept itself is morally wrong.

 

[Saphroneth]

"Sure - if treated well. But all too often fanboyism cuts in. Same thing happens with the Axis Victory TLs - they often seem to involve NOTNAZIs who don't mistreat any happy smiling Jews, or the like."

True, which is a problem with a lot of those TLs. But that doesn't mean the concept itself is morally wrong.

And as such, I feel that there's nothing inherently wrong with a CSA victory. It's just that, well... I don't like the average CSA victory timeline for those reasons.
Those which don't gloss it over are instead just really depressing (which I don't necessarily want to read, depending on my mood).

 

[TFSmith121]

One could ask the victims, of course...

Are you arguing that the practice of slavery is "war"?

Because that's an extension to the definition of war that I've never heard of before.

If "the war" ended in 1865, then it started in 1861.

If you are saying that violent, coercive racial oppression is "war", such that "the war" began before 1861, then "the war" didn't end in 1865. One could argue that it continued until the 1960s. There was certainly violence throughout that period.

One could ask the victims, of course... many of them saw it that way:

To suppose that slavery, the accursed thing, could be abolished peacefully and laid aside innocently, after having plundered cradles, separated husbands and wives, parents and children; and after having starved to death, worked to death, whipped to death, run to death, burned to death, lied to death, kicked and cuffed to death, and grieved to death; and, worst of all, after having made prostitutes of a majority of the best women of a whole nation of people...would be the greatest ignorance under the sun.​

- Private Thomas Strother of the USCT, writing in the Christian Recorder, the 19th century paper published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church


But there is certainly an interpretation of the 1861-65 conflict that it was the final act in a war that began in the 1600s.

As a better writer than myself once put it:

"The celebrated Civil War historian Bruce Catton best sums up this sense when he refers to the war as “a consuming tragedy so costly that generations would pass before people could begin to say whether what it had bought was worth the price.”

All of those “people” are white.

For African Americans, war commenced not in 1861, but in 1661, when the Virginia Colony began passing America’s first black codes, the charter documents of a slave society that rendered blacks a permanent servile class and whites a mass aristocracy. They were also a declaration of war.

Over the next two centuries, the vast majority of the country’s blacks were robbed of their labor and subjected to constant and capricious violence. They were raped and whipped at the pleasure of their owners. Their families lived under the threat of existential violence—in just the four decades before the Civil War, more than 2 million African American slaves were bought and sold. Slavery did not mean merely coerced labor, sexual assault, and torture, but the constant threat of having a portion, or the whole, of your family consigned to oblivion. In all regards, slavery was war on the black family.

African Americans understood they were at war, and reacted accordingly: run&shy;ning away, rebelling violently, fleeing to the British, murdering slave-catchers, and—less spectacularly, though more significantly—refusing to work, breaking tools, bending a Christian God to their own interpretation, stealing back the fruits of their labor, and, in covert corners of their world, committing themselves to the illegal act of learning to read.

Southern whites also understood they were in a state of war, and subsequently turned the ante&shy;bellum South into a police state. In 1860, the majority of people living in South Carolina and Mississippi, and a significant minority of those living in the entire South, needed passes to travel the roads, and regularly endured the hounding of slave patrols."

See: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/02/why-do-so-few-blacks-study-the-civil-war/308831/

At any rate, the realities of that war, the short one from 1861-65 and the long one from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth are plain to anyone who bothers to look; those who revel in the grognardish details, much less those who think of the conflict as some sort of intellectual Disneyland, but without recognizing the realities that the rebellion was, at center, over the "right" to kidnap men, women, and children and sell them as livestock, make clear their beliefs.

As I said earlier, it is tragic enough that any Americans think of the realities of the antebellum era and the war as some sort of moonlight and magnolias entertainment at best and something else entirely at worst; that some Europeans do as well is particularly illuminating, given the continent's recent history.

"Coercive racial oppression" is horrible; it is not, however, slavery. As has been said, in 1861, children and adults could be legally sold in much of the United States; in 1865, they could not.

That reality seems worth considering in the balance of the 1861-65 conflict, and of the previous centuries' worth of violent resistance.

Without invoking Godwin, there is certainly a parallel with 1939, and 1945, which one would think might come to mind - especially to Europeans and Americans.

But it appears to be overlooked by those who so relish the concept of a rebel victory...as it does for those who equally relish that of an Axis one.

Best,

 

[TFSmith121]

Thank you for the kind words

Totally agreed.

Thank you for the kind words.

Best,