Chapter One: The Fight For Liberty
The White House, the residency of the president of the United States, circa 1860.
Many could argue that the American Civil War(1) was inevitable. Ever since the United States of America had become independent it was divided into two cultural sections, the mercantile northern states and the agrarian southern states. The Industrial Revolution only deepened the division of the Union, as did the first American politics parties, formed immediately after the abolition of the humiliating Articles of Confederation.
Northerners initially aligned with the Federalist Party, which advocated for a strong federal government in order to avoid yet another failure as spectacular as the Articles of Confederation. In the south Americans supported the Democratic-Republican Party, an agrarian movement headed by Thomas Jefferson that feared the Union becoming yet another strong government that would hold the states on a tight leash. For wasn't that the very thing the Americans had fought against in their war of independence against the oppression of London?
Over time the Democratic-Republican Party and its successor, the Democratic Party forged by Andrew Jackson, completely retreated to the southern states where southerners believed that a weak federal government would be unable to end slavery if the northern states chose to end what they beginning to consider a morally incorrect practice. In the north the Federalist Party died a quiet death in the early 1800s and was replaced by the Whig Party, an organization formed to directly oppose Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party. The Whigs and Democrats remained in a strong opposition against each other for years, however, just like its predecessor the Whig Party ceased to exist in 1854 because of internal issues. Out of the flames of the Whigs emerged the radical Republican Party whose members had been outraged at the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and its replacement with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the expansion of slavery northwards.
Unlike their present-day counterparts(2) the Republican Party was seen as radical by the conservative Democratic Party in the south (yet another ironic twist of fate in history)(3) and in the late 1850s the two factions became bitter rivals. After the unpopular presidency of James Buchanan, who failed to stop the descent of the Union into chaos, the Republican Abraham Lincoln ran on on the basis of halting the expansion of slavery into American territories. While the south was outraged at what they saw as the start of a northern scheme to abolish slavery altogether they were powerless in stopping Lincoln and the southern states were divided between three candidates, none of which could amount to defeating Lincoln, who won the 1860 election.
President Abraham Lincoln of the United States of America.
Lincoln's victory was the last straw for the southern states and starting with South Carolina one by one slave-holding States in the Deep South seceded from the Union to form a new nation built upon the evil of slavery and frustration with the strong increasingly northern-dominated national government, the Confederate States of America.
Original flag of the Confederate States of America, called the Stars and Bars.
While President James Buchanan denounced the creation of the Confederacy and deemed it illegal he chose not to attack the new emerging nation and instead awkwardly awaited the transition of power to the Republican Party as the Union and Confederacy prepared to face off in an inevitable war. Instead, it was the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, who took an aggressive stance against the CSA by encouraging other southern states not yet integrated into the Confederacy to remain part of the Union.
Even after Lincoln was inaugurated war was temporarily avoided through attempts to reach a compromise, however, all negotiations broke down once the Confederates began to cease Union fortresses that they claimed were within rightful Confederate territory. War finally broke out on April 12th, 1861 with the Confederate attack on the Union-held Fort Sumter. A once united nation now found itself divided in the American Civil War as brother fought brother.
The fight for liberty had begun.
The Battle of Fort Sumter.
Immediately both the USA and the CSA mobilized large numbers of soldiers and conscripted plenty of soldiers (including children) to fight for their country. Immediately the American Civil War proved to be a bloodbath and is to this day the bloodiest conflict the Union has ever been involved in(4). New deadly weapons never before seen were introduced to the battlefield, such as the Gatling Gun, which gave a single man power previously only achieved by an entire regiment. Former peaceful farmland was quickly degraded to a hellish landscape by the weapons of warfare. Corpses from both sides of the newly-dug trenches scattered the dead American countryside.
A battlefield during the American Civil War.
On February 22nd, 1861 the former senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis, was selected by the young Confederate regime to become the nation’s president as Davis was deemed to be “a champion of a slave society and embodied the values of the planter class.” However, Jefferson Davis barely felt as though his new position was an honor and when he received the news of his selection through a telegram his wife said that, “Reading that telegram he looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family.”
President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America.
If things couldn’t get any worse foreign intervention was an ever-present ghost for the Union. The Confederate States had been reliant on the hope of aid from the United Kingdom and France in its attempt to become independent because it was anticipated that the two global powers (Great Britain was so powerful that much of the 19th Century is referred to as Pax Britannica because of global British domination) would come to the aid of the CSA, whose cotton they were highly reliant on.
While neither the French or British ever dared to step far into the waters of American affairs during the Civil War a British entry seemed plausible for a brief moment in the November of 1861 during a burst of tension now referred to as the Trent Affair. On November 8th, 1861 the US Navy illegally captured two Confederate diplomats who were on board the British ship HMS Trent, however, no Britons were harmed (5). War seemed on the horizon between the United Kingdom and United States with both of their populations calling for war, however, any declaration of war was avoided when President Lincoln released an envoy to Great Britain that condemned the actions of Captain Wilkes, the commander of the Union forces that raided the HMS Trent. After a few tense weeks Anglo-Union relations, while damaged, mostly returned to normal and all European powers permanently stayed out of the American Civil War.
In the face of a war on their home fronts several slave states not wishing to abandon the Union declared neutrality, these being Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (a new state that was formed by the pro-Union populace of western Virginia), however, neutrality could not last forever. With the ever-looming threat of a Confederate invasion always present the neutral states eventually aligned with the Union and found themselves as the frontline of the American Civil War.
The American Civil War saw a rapid expansion of the Union navy in preparation for a potential war with Great Britain, the ruler of the waves. However, once the UK backed away from the American eagle the new navy was used to build a blockade(6) around the CSA called the Anaconda Plan, the brainchild of Winfield Scott. Unable to export cotton to the outside world the mighty Confederate cotton trade died and any hope of foreign intervention with it.
While the CSA may have faced some early victories against the USA in the early days of the American Civil War, most notably General Robert E Lee’s successes in the Eastern Theater, the Confederate advances in the east suddenly grinded to a halt with the Battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862. General Lee was defeated once more during the horrific Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted from July 1st to July 3rd, 1863. The battle is regarded as the American Civil War’s turning point and from there on the CSA continued to be crushed at the hands of the fully industrialized Union. On January 1st, 1863 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation(7), which officially ended the evil practice of slavery in the United States by liberating the few slaves left in the north. Several liberated slaves would join the Union Military soon afterwards, which fell under the leadership of the popular General Ulysses S Grant.
Once the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg fell in the July of 1863 the Union gained supremacy over the Mississippi River and, despite facing off against plenty of militias, successfully held onto the River. General Grant would deliver a deadly blow to the CSA through the invasion of Virginia and Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was captured by Grant in the early April of 1865. The rest of the American Civil War would be no less than the complete and total annihilation of the CSA and the conflict finally came to an end on April 9th, 1865 when General Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The war was over with a decisive Union victory, and a unified America was preserved.
General Grant accepting the surrender of Robert E Lee(8).
With America reunited slavery was abolished once and for all with the 13th Amendment and Americans hopefully looked ahead to a bright future and President Abraham Lincoln was immortalized as the saviour of the Union and the liberator of the slaves(9). Sadly, Lincoln would not live to see the reconstruction of the United States and was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer on April 15th, 1865. Lincoln, the hero of what would one day become a global superpower was succeeded by his incompetent vice president, Andrew Johnson, who would briefly oversee the Reconstruction Era.
(1): The War of Southern Independence will be referred to as the American Civil War because from the perspective of a victorious Union the conflict would just be a civil war. It also won't be called the Union Civil War considering without the CSA the Union will continue to be called America.
(2): Let’s just say that the Bushes (that conservative family that holds a lot of political power in Columbia) will like the present-day Republicans.
(3): A certain Pacifican prime minister will become a very prominent Democrat in the 21st Century (cough Obama cough).
(4): “What about the First and Second Weltkrieg?” you ask. Let's just say those conflicts will be quite different without the American Empire or the TSA as well as a longer lasting Monroe Doctrine. Also, yes, this is a timeline where the Union survives until the present day, that's the whole point.
(5): This is the main POD. Without the refusal of several of the HMS Trent’s crewmembers to accept the Union raid resulting in their deaths at the hands of Union soldiers British public opinion, while still extremely ticked off at the Union, never escalates out of control into the declaration of war from OTL.
(6): Without the Royal Navy around the waters are dominated by the Union. There was a major naval buildup in OTL so I don’t see why this could not happen.
(7): Lincoln’s OTL last-ditch attempt to gain the moral high ground and conscript a few extra soldiers will be regarded as a heroic act in this TL rather than a desperate man’s attempt to take advantage of an oppressed group to try and save a dying nation.
(8): Oh, the irony.
(9): Refer to number 8.
The White House, the residency of the president of the United States, circa 1860.
Many could argue that the American Civil War(1) was inevitable. Ever since the United States of America had become independent it was divided into two cultural sections, the mercantile northern states and the agrarian southern states. The Industrial Revolution only deepened the division of the Union, as did the first American politics parties, formed immediately after the abolition of the humiliating Articles of Confederation.
Northerners initially aligned with the Federalist Party, which advocated for a strong federal government in order to avoid yet another failure as spectacular as the Articles of Confederation. In the south Americans supported the Democratic-Republican Party, an agrarian movement headed by Thomas Jefferson that feared the Union becoming yet another strong government that would hold the states on a tight leash. For wasn't that the very thing the Americans had fought against in their war of independence against the oppression of London?
Over time the Democratic-Republican Party and its successor, the Democratic Party forged by Andrew Jackson, completely retreated to the southern states where southerners believed that a weak federal government would be unable to end slavery if the northern states chose to end what they beginning to consider a morally incorrect practice. In the north the Federalist Party died a quiet death in the early 1800s and was replaced by the Whig Party, an organization formed to directly oppose Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party. The Whigs and Democrats remained in a strong opposition against each other for years, however, just like its predecessor the Whig Party ceased to exist in 1854 because of internal issues. Out of the flames of the Whigs emerged the radical Republican Party whose members had been outraged at the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and its replacement with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the expansion of slavery northwards.
Unlike their present-day counterparts(2) the Republican Party was seen as radical by the conservative Democratic Party in the south (yet another ironic twist of fate in history)(3) and in the late 1850s the two factions became bitter rivals. After the unpopular presidency of James Buchanan, who failed to stop the descent of the Union into chaos, the Republican Abraham Lincoln ran on on the basis of halting the expansion of slavery into American territories. While the south was outraged at what they saw as the start of a northern scheme to abolish slavery altogether they were powerless in stopping Lincoln and the southern states were divided between three candidates, none of which could amount to defeating Lincoln, who won the 1860 election.
President Abraham Lincoln of the United States of America.
Lincoln's victory was the last straw for the southern states and starting with South Carolina one by one slave-holding States in the Deep South seceded from the Union to form a new nation built upon the evil of slavery and frustration with the strong increasingly northern-dominated national government, the Confederate States of America.
Original flag of the Confederate States of America, called the Stars and Bars.
While President James Buchanan denounced the creation of the Confederacy and deemed it illegal he chose not to attack the new emerging nation and instead awkwardly awaited the transition of power to the Republican Party as the Union and Confederacy prepared to face off in an inevitable war. Instead, it was the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln, who took an aggressive stance against the CSA by encouraging other southern states not yet integrated into the Confederacy to remain part of the Union.
Even after Lincoln was inaugurated war was temporarily avoided through attempts to reach a compromise, however, all negotiations broke down once the Confederates began to cease Union fortresses that they claimed were within rightful Confederate territory. War finally broke out on April 12th, 1861 with the Confederate attack on the Union-held Fort Sumter. A once united nation now found itself divided in the American Civil War as brother fought brother.
The fight for liberty had begun.
The Battle of Fort Sumter.
Immediately both the USA and the CSA mobilized large numbers of soldiers and conscripted plenty of soldiers (including children) to fight for their country. Immediately the American Civil War proved to be a bloodbath and is to this day the bloodiest conflict the Union has ever been involved in(4). New deadly weapons never before seen were introduced to the battlefield, such as the Gatling Gun, which gave a single man power previously only achieved by an entire regiment. Former peaceful farmland was quickly degraded to a hellish landscape by the weapons of warfare. Corpses from both sides of the newly-dug trenches scattered the dead American countryside.
A battlefield during the American Civil War.
On February 22nd, 1861 the former senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis, was selected by the young Confederate regime to become the nation’s president as Davis was deemed to be “a champion of a slave society and embodied the values of the planter class.” However, Jefferson Davis barely felt as though his new position was an honor and when he received the news of his selection through a telegram his wife said that, “Reading that telegram he looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family.”
President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America.
If things couldn’t get any worse foreign intervention was an ever-present ghost for the Union. The Confederate States had been reliant on the hope of aid from the United Kingdom and France in its attempt to become independent because it was anticipated that the two global powers (Great Britain was so powerful that much of the 19th Century is referred to as Pax Britannica because of global British domination) would come to the aid of the CSA, whose cotton they were highly reliant on.
While neither the French or British ever dared to step far into the waters of American affairs during the Civil War a British entry seemed plausible for a brief moment in the November of 1861 during a burst of tension now referred to as the Trent Affair. On November 8th, 1861 the US Navy illegally captured two Confederate diplomats who were on board the British ship HMS Trent, however, no Britons were harmed (5). War seemed on the horizon between the United Kingdom and United States with both of their populations calling for war, however, any declaration of war was avoided when President Lincoln released an envoy to Great Britain that condemned the actions of Captain Wilkes, the commander of the Union forces that raided the HMS Trent. After a few tense weeks Anglo-Union relations, while damaged, mostly returned to normal and all European powers permanently stayed out of the American Civil War.
In the face of a war on their home fronts several slave states not wishing to abandon the Union declared neutrality, these being Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (a new state that was formed by the pro-Union populace of western Virginia), however, neutrality could not last forever. With the ever-looming threat of a Confederate invasion always present the neutral states eventually aligned with the Union and found themselves as the frontline of the American Civil War.
The American Civil War saw a rapid expansion of the Union navy in preparation for a potential war with Great Britain, the ruler of the waves. However, once the UK backed away from the American eagle the new navy was used to build a blockade(6) around the CSA called the Anaconda Plan, the brainchild of Winfield Scott. Unable to export cotton to the outside world the mighty Confederate cotton trade died and any hope of foreign intervention with it.
While the CSA may have faced some early victories against the USA in the early days of the American Civil War, most notably General Robert E Lee’s successes in the Eastern Theater, the Confederate advances in the east suddenly grinded to a halt with the Battle of Antietam on September 17th, 1862. General Lee was defeated once more during the horrific Battle of Gettysburg, which lasted from July 1st to July 3rd, 1863. The battle is regarded as the American Civil War’s turning point and from there on the CSA continued to be crushed at the hands of the fully industrialized Union. On January 1st, 1863 President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation(7), which officially ended the evil practice of slavery in the United States by liberating the few slaves left in the north. Several liberated slaves would join the Union Military soon afterwards, which fell under the leadership of the popular General Ulysses S Grant.
Once the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg fell in the July of 1863 the Union gained supremacy over the Mississippi River and, despite facing off against plenty of militias, successfully held onto the River. General Grant would deliver a deadly blow to the CSA through the invasion of Virginia and Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, was captured by Grant in the early April of 1865. The rest of the American Civil War would be no less than the complete and total annihilation of the CSA and the conflict finally came to an end on April 9th, 1865 when General Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The war was over with a decisive Union victory, and a unified America was preserved.
General Grant accepting the surrender of Robert E Lee(8).
With America reunited slavery was abolished once and for all with the 13th Amendment and Americans hopefully looked ahead to a bright future and President Abraham Lincoln was immortalized as the saviour of the Union and the liberator of the slaves(9). Sadly, Lincoln would not live to see the reconstruction of the United States and was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer on April 15th, 1865. Lincoln, the hero of what would one day become a global superpower was succeeded by his incompetent vice president, Andrew Johnson, who would briefly oversee the Reconstruction Era.
(1): The War of Southern Independence will be referred to as the American Civil War because from the perspective of a victorious Union the conflict would just be a civil war. It also won't be called the Union Civil War considering without the CSA the Union will continue to be called America.
(2): Let’s just say that the Bushes (that conservative family that holds a lot of political power in Columbia) will like the present-day Republicans.
(3): A certain Pacifican prime minister will become a very prominent Democrat in the 21st Century (cough Obama cough).
(4): “What about the First and Second Weltkrieg?” you ask. Let's just say those conflicts will be quite different without the American Empire or the TSA as well as a longer lasting Monroe Doctrine. Also, yes, this is a timeline where the Union survives until the present day, that's the whole point.
(5): This is the main POD. Without the refusal of several of the HMS Trent’s crewmembers to accept the Union raid resulting in their deaths at the hands of Union soldiers British public opinion, while still extremely ticked off at the Union, never escalates out of control into the declaration of war from OTL.
(6): Without the Royal Navy around the waters are dominated by the Union. There was a major naval buildup in OTL so I don’t see why this could not happen.
(7): Lincoln’s OTL last-ditch attempt to gain the moral high ground and conscript a few extra soldiers will be regarded as a heroic act in this TL rather than a desperate man’s attempt to take advantage of an oppressed group to try and save a dying nation.
(8): Oh, the irony.
(9): Refer to number 8.