The problem (or, depending on your perspective, the virtue) with the previous post is that we’s have to do this... negotiation... every generation. It should be obvious why- creating a system in which there are no losers, so to speak, is a nice goal but probably infeasible without the revolution you’re talking about (even then I suspect all that would happen is that the liabilities would shift).
American southern states don’t make ‘clunk’ move of Civil War?
- Thread starter GeographyDude
- Start date
The real 'clunk' was not secession but initiating hostilities by firing on Ft. Sumter. Given the geographic and political realities of 1860 secession for the 7 cotton states made sense. Plantation Slavery was geographically stymied and over time the increasing political dominance of the North would have forced the deep south's hand. What that 7 state Confederacy needed was a neutral buffer, as provided by the still Unionist upper South. Given the level of 'let the erring sisters go' sentiment among many Northern Democrats and some Republicans, they also needed to not 'waken the sleeping tiger'. Once they attacked the Union by firing on FT Sumter the impact was essentially the same as Pearl Harbor. That was the spark to bring together almost all Northerners in a crusade to same the Union and also broke the buffer by driving the southern tier of border states out. In the OTL Civil War the South had only a slight chance of success, despite their own delusions of martial superiority. Given enough delay and temporizing, the independence of the original Confederacy may have become a true fact. Was the 7 state Confederacy viable, well in the mid-19th century there were a number of unviable states, especially in Latin America.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
I think professors will be the first to claim, hey, we don’t have that much power. In part because they do tricks like not giving clear instructions about the requirements of papers and so on and so forth!
Interestingly, the two theories of ethics most talked about by philosophy departments — Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Principle of Utility’ and Immanuel Kant’s ‘Categorical Imperative’ — both provide definite, and dare I say it, objective goals? And both have a lot of overlap in the real world, although not in hypothetical examples.
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marktaha
Banned
No secession, no civil War,slavery lasts longer and gradually abolished-but what of others? What would various political careers have been like? Or culturally-I assume John Wilkes Booth would have continued as an actor, various soldiers would have remained obscure or unknown. What would Little Women have been like?
Ummm, confused how that exactly has to do with what I'm saying. I was refuting someone's very Marxist and highly inaccurate understanding of the South and of economics in general.
Well, my response to that person who I suspect is a Marxist was about the major flaws and misunderstandings of his analysis.
Only for Hebrew slaves (and this is similar to many "barbarian" slave codes of say Europe, or those of the ancient Middle East). Whereas non-Hebrew slaves were chattels and handed over as inherited property. It's all right there in the scripture, beyond all argument. Based on race, as you put it, and without limit. And most interpretations say that the provision to not return an escaped slave to a slave owner was only for slaves coming into Israel from non-Hebrew lands, not for escaping slaves of Hebrew slavers.
So no, not terribly different if you really honestly look at it.
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In Western Siberia, the Russians signed them up for government service and paid them salaries, just like Russian service class people. They also kept the tax levels at the same levels as they were when collected by the Taibughins/Shaybanids, or lower. They primarily fought those of the Dzungars, Kazakhs and Nogays who weren't allies, and were frequently on the defensive until the late 18th c. The steppe peoples came up into Siberia to extract their own yasak (and kidnap the kyshtym yasak-paying serfs) and most importantly to simply take slaves, because these were all slave-owning societies. The Russians of the time certainly never rounded up whole nations, if only because they had no capacity to do so.
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Methods of conquest can vary from place to place, and time to time. So you think paying native people as a State Labor Force, and taxing them is better then paying tribes to live on marginal land? Maybe, or maybe it's 6 of 1, and half a dozen of another. Ether way you lose your independence, and way of life.
Well yes, all conquest is conquest, that seems to simple a point to even dispute. But I'm just saying that the Russians already came into a system where most of what I described already existed, and where the Siberian peoples were already in yasak-paying arrangements with outsiders. The Russians simply displaced those outsiders in that role permanently and eventually integrated everyone as subjects, whether through personal contracts or treaties with the nobles or the whole nation. It's not exactly how it went in America. If you want real examples of where the Russians came in with completely foreign ideas and fucked things up, Yakutia would be a good one, because the Yakuts were themselves the extractors of yasak and never subjects, so they fared poorly; and in the Aleutian islands, where formalized hostage-taking, yasak, and state service were completely unknown concepts.
Ok so here is my two cents. The dumbest the south did in the antebellum was the compromise of 1850 aka popular sovereignty. The Missouri Compromise had set good borders for the guaranteed expansion of slavery to the west coast. Without the compromise of 50 they get a state of Southern California. Not to mention the fact that President Fillmore exhausted all of his political capital to get the compromise of 1850 pushed through.
So let the south see the long game for a minute in the summer of 1850. They drop support for the Compromise of 1850. This keeps the Missouri Compromise line as the law of the land. It also gives President Fillmore the political capital to presue the Annexation of Cuba when it pops up later in the 1850s. If the south can pull this off then the Civil war is butterflies away. This also means that the end if slavery is pushed back till the bo weevil decimates the cotton industry in the 1890s.
So let the south see the long game for a minute in the summer of 1850. They drop support for the Compromise of 1850. This keeps the Missouri Compromise line as the law of the land. It also gives President Fillmore the political capital to presue the Annexation of Cuba when it pops up later in the 1850s. If the south can pull this off then the Civil war is butterflies away. This also means that the end if slavery is pushed back till the bo weevil decimates the cotton industry in the 1890s.
GeographyDude
Gone Fishin'
And just for the record, I’d love to see timelines in which the early American colonies engage in neither slavery nor massacre of American Indians.
And if this makes for boring fiction of utopia, that’s fine. We can just keep it shorter.
PS Such a timeline would need to get lucky wth the more minor form of smallpox being introduced first. I don’t think there’s any other way on this one.
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Sorry, I did actually mean the Yakuts. It had been a while since I read about them. By Western Siberia I was trying to exclude stuff like Vladivostok where the Russians operated differently.