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Oh, yeah, here's another one to watch out for - seniority. It seems to always catch people out, and you end up with generals in the wrong order (especially as Jefferson Davis was a stickler for seniority) Lee, for example, was senior to everyone except AS Johnston (and the staff officer Samuel...

I was going to put together a long post about how it's important to make sure we get a proper historical picture so that we don't simplify the matter too much - while still being aware the whole thing was pretty universally bad - but I think instead I'll just put together a very simple...

This hypothesis has a problem with it, which is that slavery continued to exist. I don't mean that slaves wanted slavery, of course, I mean that most slaves considered their "lot" in life to not be worth the risk in rising up against it. Otherwise either there'd be no slaves left or no slavery...

They are genuine ways to get a decisive Confederate defeat of the Army of the Potomac, though. It's harder later on because the Union was much more mobilized.

That was definitely done. But equally, it is certain that not all slaves were treated this way because slavery was a complicated institution - for example, a slave who had been whipped in the past had a much lower value, and since the value of a healthy adult male slave was upwards of a thousand...

...why? A slave was worth a lot of money and worth being careful over. It is important to avoid painting slavery as all of a piece - there are degrees of horrible. Certainly slaves used in towns or factories were differently handled than the ones on plantations because the environment was...

Well, yeah, but what you didn't have at this time was available, trained manpower. Even OTL McClellan's field force at Antietam included something like 20% totally raw recruits from the training camps, including multiple regiments who never even fired their weapons (such as the Corn Exchange...

I'm... honestly pretty sure it wouldn't be, because slaves were expensive. Depends on the nature of the disaster. For example... So the Confederacy wins Bull Run in the way described and Pope's Army of Virginia is functionally unable to take further part in the campaign or any future ones in...

The entire RN in the 1890s (construction, maintenance, crew pay etc) cost about £13M a year, which would be about $65M at the time. Obviously this is a bit much, but the value of the cotton crop for the US in 1913 (exports only) was on the order of $500M, and a lot of it was spent inland. If we...

By the time of the Civil War in America, half of Europe was using rifled breechloading artillery. The US seemingly didn't even try even by the end of the war. In the case of the Prussians it's because they adopted the breechloading rifle very early, in the case of the French because they kept...

Something that's worth thinking about is that a fairly large fraction of the French successes in the first decade of the 19th century (i.e. the archetypical Napoleonic campaigns) are because of the very highly trained troops of the Army of England (as they'd been training for several years...

That's rather hard to do as the British had breechloading artillery with percussion shells before they had breechloading long arms. Of course, if the breechloading artillery gun with percussion shells isn't accurate enough to hit the target (and US ACW guns were very poor on this) then you get...

I suspect that might have been because of a lack of black people, at least in part! Of course. And my point in turn is that it's still possible for there to be (as the saying goes) "fair for its day" and indeed for a group to become less tolerant over time. I would probably agree that Natal was...

The railway issue is probably because of informal segregation - that is, without actual legislation behind it. Deplorable certainly, but there's a difference between de facto and de jure when it comes to the history of a legal system (Apartheid). I'm certainly not aware of any such legislation...

Well, yes, but as I posted there's degrees of that. In Natal a black person could sit next to a white person on a train, not so in the OFS or Transvaal. This suggests that, purely in a comparative sense, Natal was still "better" along that axis (even if still rather bad). Was that one...

Nevertheless, though, you have a situation where the British-controlled areas of South Africa (before confederation) tended much more liberal and the Boer-controlled areas were much more - well, reactionary? Conservative? Hard to find the right word. My point is that the Boer republics legally...

I think there was a general belief in the US that there was no need to have a strong standing army because MILITIA MYTH, but in reality of course that tends to lead to bad things. Heck, the British Army at the Somme suffered such large casualties in part because they'd not been trained...

I don't think it's "patently false" because they obviously were nicer to black people at the time - in the Cape there were coloured people who could vote - and a lot of the legislation that was passed in Natal (and subsequently in South Africa as a whole) had as the explicit motive the desire to...

Too bad, that's OTL. The first US Army breechloading artillery was the M1885, they built only a hundred of them (and the last regular army muzzle loader left service in 1892), and the NY National Guard (which, remember, was supposed to mobilize to being a proper army unit on short notice) was...

Not really. If we assume historical purchasing patterns then an 1883 Civil War would see the Union using a mixture of smoothbore and rifled muzzle loading artillery not much more accurate than smoothbores, while the Confederacy would be purchasing some highly accurate Union pieces to augment a...