Hello all, Nevermore here, since my thread the other day didn't do too hot, thought I'd try another one. While I was lurking before I was joining, it would seem that the general consensus of the forum looks down on Harry Turtledove's "Timeline-191" work post-How Few Remain (please, no Sam Carsten and zinc oxide jokes here

) and that Turtledove doesn't take into account any of the repercussions (i.e. the butterfly effect) a South seceding from the Union might truly have. So, as I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I don't want to bring back a dead topic, how could we make this different? I'm not sure how much I, personally, can contribute as I'm not very good at this, however, so I apologize for it if it doesn't seem in the future I don't help much.
The first order of business would be to address what exactly the PoD would be. Of course, the very title of the thread and novel series suggest it would be with the discovery of General Lee's Special Orders 191, but is it honestly feasible? I'm not too familiar with McClellan myself, but I hear that even when he found it in OTL, he barely did anything with them. So, if the Confederates had been able to somehow either recover it, or if the orders had stayed lost, would they have been able to keep that advantage? And, realistically, how many battles would have been fought before the Confederacy gained her independence from the Union? If we keep this around 1862, then I'm pretty sure the U.S. hasn't begun to blockade the South's Atlantic ports yet (though I could be wrong) so that won't be such an issue, I think.
Another question we should probably ask is: is it also feasible to think that the U.K. and France would either come to the aid of the Confederacy (at least to mediate peace between the two new nations), even if it was seceding on something both were morally opposed to? I personally found this question a bit hard to answer, as things like economics also have to be taken into the equation as well. Other things we'll have to discuss are post-War of Secession politics and economies. Like, when might the slaves in the Confederacy finally be manumitted? How will the wars against the Native Americans go here? Can the U.S. still buy Alaska from czarist Russia (as it did in OTL, rather than it not from the TL-191 books)? What other states might, realistically, the Confederacy have? But that's work for later...what about that PoD and the repercussions of that?