Britain declares war on the Union in 1862....

[MrP]

Britain, goes to war inorder to protect a slave holding aristocracy against the worlds one true "democracy" and thanks to its military intervention tens of thousands of its young men die on foreign soil in battles of questionable importance.

*ahem*

Supporting a slave society is a dubious idea. The British plans are very careful about emphasising that this is not about helping the South. That is an incidental (if inevitable) matter to the planners. The key is defending British honour in the face of an insult.

Not to mention the consequences for the british economy on losing one of it's biggest trading partners and suppliers of food.

Ward, Burns and Burns give a figure of 400,000 British mill workers driven from their jobs.* By not intervening Britain permitted signal damage to her economy. Even though this did encourage later reliance on other locales for the cotton, at the time this was most deleterious.

To be honest, I'm not sure why America would provoke a war, refuse to back down, ruin her economy, incur the destruction of her fleet and the collapse of her blockade of the rebellious states, strip the armies facing the south to invade Canada, and only then go on the defensive and still not attempt to sue for peace. It's pure insanity! Even if the North was so foolish as to start the war by refusing to apologise and return the ineffectual commissioners, she could have backed down at practically any point after it started by so doing and making some limited form of restitution.

It isn't even a point of principle. Just remember how Seward phrased the OTL retreat from the original position, after all!

* P.108, The Civil War, An Illustrated History of the War Between the States

 

[Darkling]

Yes, because if you are defending yourself from an invasion, you let the invading power take whatever it wants.

The west coast is an island for all intents and purposes so the British can easily take that.

The Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming are essentially unsettled which means their fates are determined in Minnesota which Britain has better access to when they take control of the lakes.

The UK/Confederacy would almost certainly win this war, but it wouldn't be the cake walk you are describing.

That really depends how hard the Americans are willing to make things for themselves.

The US was already a great power albeit an unrecognized one after the mexican american war.

No, a local power but not a great one.

It had a large population, a diversified economy and it had an industrial output about as large as France's (yes I've seen those per capita industrialization figures, they are in "Rise and Fall of Great Powers" as well but I fail to see how they trump the stats on relative shares of global manufacturing)

They don't, however the relative shares is for a whole US, by taking the per capita and multiplying it by the population we get a more accurate figure, its simple mathematics.

In regards to the US lacking saltpeter for gun powder, it would probably be a serious problem at first but in time substitutes for it would be found and capitalized upon, look how the confederacy supplied itself with war materials when pre-war they had an almost non-existant weapon's industry.

The confederacy got some from nitre mines but most of it came in through the Blockade.

Finally, although you frequently mention how the north's population would soon become demoralized over the blockade and presumed northern defeats, why would the same exact thing happen on the otherside of the atlantic. Britain, goes to war inorder to protect a slave holding aristocracy against the worlds one true "democracy" and thanks to its military intervention tens of thousands of its young men die on foreign soil in battles of questionable importance.

Your failure to understand this is because you keep ignoring the fact that Britain wouldn't be fighting to free the South (and I doubt being a democracy carries a huge amount of weight with British public) but to protect Britain’s maritime supremacy and defend British honour.

Not to mention the consequences for the british economy on losing one of it's biggest trading partners and suppliers of food.

Yes but Britain won't have all here overseas trade shutdown like the US will, the British will continue to have access to the worlds financial centre (its conveniently located in London) and thus be able to raise loans meanwhile the US financial system is so ramshackle that nobody outside of the US will lend them money.

The UK will not be forced to hyper inflate its currency like the US and finally the breaking of the blockade gets the cotton mills running again.

 

[Darkling]

It isn't even a point of principle.

Whilst I agree in general that the US wouldn't fight to the death it would become a point of principle once eth US started a war over the issue.

 

[MrP]

Whilst I agree in general that the US wouldn't fight to the death it would become a point of principle once the US started a war over the issue.

Aye, granted - the very public view feared at that Christmas cabinet meeting. I ought to have phrased that better, oughn't I? Mm, what I meant was that before it all starts there's no point of principle to hold the men, and that once a war had, only stubborn foolish would keep them locked up - and I do admit that stubborn foolishness could prove seriously damaging to hopes for peace.

 

[King Gorilla]

*ahem*





Ward, Burns and Burns give a figure of 400,000 British mill workers driven from their jobs.* By not intervening Britain permitted signal damage to her economy. Even though this did encourage later reliance on other locales for the cotton, at the time this was most deleterious.

To be honest, I'm not sure why America would provoke a war, refuse to back down, ruin her economy, incur the destruction of her fleet and the collapse of her blockade of the rebellious states, strip the armies facing the south to invade Canada, and only then go on the defensive and still not attempt to sue for peace. It's pure insanity! Even if the North was so foolish as to start the war by refusing to apologise and return the ineffectual commissioners, she could have backed down at practically any point after it started by so doing and making some limited form of restitution.

It isn't even a point of principle. Just remember how Seward phrased the OTL retreat from the original position, after all!

* P.108, The Civil War, An Illustrated History of the War Between the States

exactly, it would be insane for the north to declare war on the UK while in the midst of the civil war, but this scenario deals with Britain recognizing the confederacy and declaring war on the north. Hence the Union finds itself on the defensive almost as soon as the war begins thanks to the hostile actions of the British empire rather severly changing the dynamics of war. I would agree with you though in the case of American agression though, which is the typical scenario on this board.

 

[MrP]

exactly, it would be insane for the north to declare war on the UK while in the midst of the civil war, but this scenario deals with Britain recognizing the confederacy and declaring war on the north. Hence the Union finds itself on the defensive almost as soon as the war begins thanks to the hostile actions of the British empire rather severly changing the dynamics of war. I would agree with you though in the case of American agression though, which is the typical scenario on this board.

Oh, dear me! So it does. What a peculiar idea. I can't see that happening without widespread British public support.

I really must read all preceding posts before starting these things - or at least the very fons et origo of the thread!

 

[King Gorilla]

Darkling, misunderstood your figures, I thought you were talking about the total numbers rather than those of a fractured union although the percapita industrialization figures would be higher if the north lacked the relatively un-industrialized south. I still disagree with you though on the British cakewalk as sizable armies would have to be raised and supplied inorder to invade the US which proved to be incredably apt at wartime mobalization. Also I question the US not being a greatpower, It may have not been amongst the top three(Britain, Russia, France) but it certainly was more powerful than Prussia, Italy, Turkey and Austro-Hungary.

 

[King Gorilla]

Oh, dear me! So it does. What a peculiar idea. I can't see that happening without widespread British public support.

I really must read all preceding posts before starting these things - or at least the very fons et origo of the thread!

yeah no problem, I made the same mistake on a similer thread (ie practically identical) and am sure I drove you crazy with my seemingly inane stubborness

 

[Darkling]

Oh, dear me! So it does. What a peculiar idea. I can't see that happening without widespread British public support.

I really must read all preceding posts before starting these things - or at least the very fons et origo of the thread!

No need to worry, by the fifth post the thread had already been changed to a Trent POD ((by the thread opener).

 

[67th Tigers]

Re: Nitre

There are no substitutes. Smokeless powder can be manufactured, but the nitric acid used is made from nitre itself....

Some can be mined, but total production was tiny. The whole CSA was tiny, and they had the nitre sources (well, there's one mine in WV).

The real manufacturing industry is ancient, and had been used in Europe for centuries. It involves extraction from Manure and takes a year to do. This is the same Manure needed for fertiliser.

 

[Darkling]

Darkling, misunderstood your figures, I thought you were talking about the total numbers rather than those of a fractured union although the percapita industrialization figures would be higher if the north lacked the
relatively un-industrialized south.

True but the US having a smaller tariff protected market (then can't prevent southerners from buying British here), the lack of the lucrative cotton (and to a lesser extent Tobacco etc) exports monies provided by the South and the need for higher taxes because of the loss of the South (and even higher taxes on top of that if they wish to expand their army) all point towards this North having less industry than the north in a whole Union.

So it just seems easier to peg it at about the same instead of trying to guess whether the US will be higher or lower, certainly when just doing a rough back of the envelope calculation.

I still disagree with you though on the British cakewalk as sizable armies would have to be raised and supplied inorder to invade the US which proved to be incredably apt at wartime mobalization.

The US army had its hands full with the CSA, Britain will need to recruit forces to be sure but it won't be a huge mobilisation, as I pointed out the British don't need to engage in huge land battles to gain what they (may) want, they just overwhelm Minnesota and land troops in poorly defended and isolated wets coats areas.

The only big battles the UK could get involved in are in defence of Canada or attacking Maine (should the US choose to put a lot into defending it).

Also I question the US not being a greatpower, It may have not been amongst the top three(Britain, Russia, France) but it certainly was more powerful than Prussia, Italy, Turkey and Austro-Hungary.

Well Italy wasn't around when the American Mexico war finished, I wouldn't really consider the Ottomans a great power by this point (they had already been forced to be subservient to the Russians but had broken that hold and were about to entire domination by Britain/France).

Prussia and Austria get by on their large military forces and the fact they are in Europe, if you gave Prussia a land border with the US in 1850 I would bet on Prussia to win and the same probably goes for Austro-Hungary.

 

[Darkling]

Re: Nitre

There are no substitutes. Smokeless powder can be manufactured, but the nitric acid used is made from nitre itself....

Some can be mined, but total production was tiny. The whole CSA was tiny, and they had the nitre sources (well, there's one mine in WV).

The real manufacturing industry is ancient, and had been used in Europe for centuries. It involves extraction from Manure and takes a year to do. This is the same Manure needed for fertiliser.

So the question is, can the US survive a year with what it had in 1862 at the OTL operations tempo or will they have to reduce it?

 

[King Gorilla]

Re: Nitre

There are no substitutes. Smokeless powder can be manufactured, but the nitric acid used is made from nitre itself....

Some can be mined, but total production was tiny. The whole CSA was tiny, and they had the nitre sources (well, there's one mine in WV).

The real manufacturing industry is ancient, and had been used in Europe for centuries. It involves extraction from Manure and takes a year to do. This is the same Manure needed for fertiliser.

Good point, but if the need is there it will be done and human waste would probably become a very important source of it. Otherwise Union blockade runners will do the same things the confederates did for needed war materials.

 

[Darkling]

Good point, but if the need is there it will be done and human waste would probably become a very important source of it. Otherwise Union blockade runners will do the same things the confederates did for needed war materials.

Two problems with that, first the Northern coast is smaller than the CSA coast and second the Royal Navy is better than the Union Navy.

 

[Ghost 88]

True but the US having a smaller tariff protected market (then can't prevent southerners from buying British here), the lack of the lucrative cotton (and to a lesser extent Tobacco etc) exports monies provided by the South and the need for higher taxes because of the loss of the South (and even higher taxes on top of that if they wish to expand their army) all point towards this North having less industry than the north in a whole Union.

So it just seems easier to peg it at about the same instead of trying to guess whether the US will be higher or lower, certainly when just doing a rough back of the envelope calculation.



The US army had its hands full with the CSA, Britain will need to recruit forces to be sure but it won't be a huge mobilisation, as I pointed out the British don't need to engage in huge land battles to gain what they (may) want, they just overwhelm Minnesota and land troops in poorly defended and isolated wets coats areas.

The only big battles the UK could get involved in are in defence of Canada or attacking Maine (should the US choose to put a lot into defending it).



Well Italy wasn't around when the American Mexico war finished, I wouldn't really consider the Ottomans a great power by this point (they had already been forced to be subservient to the Russians but had broken that hold and were about to entire domination by Britain/France).

Prussia and Austria get by on their large military forces and the fact they are in Europe, if you gave Prussia a land border with the US in 1850 I would bet on Prussia to win and the same probably goes for Austro-Hungary.

I believe you need to go and visit Manitoba,Western Ontario and Minnesota before you talk about a walk over.These areas are not good areas for large scale operations,40 below zero F in the winter and a wet cold.90 F + in summer with boggy terrain. The Lakes will not supply a force in Minn.if the US can hold Niagara which it can get a sizable force there. Aside from Canada and the US being friends there is no need to defend the border as it is" miles and miles of miles and miles" until the Canadian Pacific is built it takes months to get any place.And the land area around Minn is almost a swamp. No you need to find somewhere else to invade from.

 

[King Gorilla]

The US army had its hands full with the CSA, Britain will need to recruit forces to be sure but it won't be a huge mobilisation, as I pointed out the British don't need to engage in huge land battles to gain what they (may) want, they just overwhelm Minnesota and land troops in poorly defended and isolated wets coats areas.

The only big battles the UK could get involved in are in defence of Canada or attacking Maine (should the US choose to put a lot into defending it).

Once again, Navel invasions are hard to pull off sucessfully due to a limited number of optimal landing sites, the need to establish beachheads, and keep one's invading forces supplied from the said beach heads. This is even more difficult when the invasion force is in the tens to hundreds of thousands, they will need alot of supplies most of which will have to come from across the atlantic. A minnesota invasion would likely be dealt with reasonably quickly thanks to the presence of railroads and telegraphs. Regardless of who wins the battle(s) (although I'd give the union a slight edge due to a home turf advantage) the UK is going to take heavy casualties that won't be popular back home.

 

[MrP]

No need to worry, by the fifth post the thread had already been changed to a Trent POD ((by the thread opener).

Yet again my failure to read things throoughly is exposed. *chuckle* Oh, well, at least I'm back to where I was!

So the question is, can the US survive a year with what it had in 1862 at the OTL operations tempo or will they have to reduce it?

Mm, can't find anything definite numbers-wise.

FIREPOWER AND FERTILIZERS is the first thing I found.

The British firm of Antony Gibbs & Sons of London played a major role in the guano industry. Gibbs had been merchants in Lima since Spanish colonial days. They signed their first guano-trading contract with the Peruvian government in 1842, and their last in 1861, though there were periods where they lost the contract. At times Gibbs was the dominant company in the guano trade, primarily because from 1847 onward it held the monopoly of selling Peruvian guano (the best in the world) in Britain and North America. In the 1840s Gibbs was buying guano in Peru for $15 a ton, and selling it for an average of $50 a ton. In most years Britain was the major market for guano, generally importing about 100,000 tonnes a year, but 200,000 tonnes in 1850, and more than 300,000 tonnes in 1858. The peak for American imports was 176,000 tonnes in 1855.

There's some handy stuff here, too.

Gunpowder mills were already established in the Virginia during the Revolutionary War. Afterwards, entrepreneurs searched Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee for saltpeter sites, and production escalated during the War of 1812. One of the few advantages the South had over the North later in the Civil War was the great number of saltpeter caves south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Eleuthère Irénée du Pont earned a reputation for making quality gunpowder in the years following the revolution, and established water powered mills on the Brandy-wine River in Delaware. But the operations of the time did not have the capacity for large—scale production. Confederate blockade runners managed to slip several million pounds of European gunpowder through the Union naval blockade. How-ever, the enterprise was risky, the black market powder of dubious quality, and soon the rebels felt it was in their best interests to establish a means of manufacturing their own powder in the southern heartland.

Four minor gunpowder mills existed in the South at the time of the rebellion. Efforts to increase saltpeter or nitre production were stymied by the Union occupation of mines in Kentucky. As a result the Confederate government pushed its field operatives to discover new sources. Fortunately for the impoverished South, limestone caves in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Arkansas contained what appeared to be almost limitless sources of gunpowder’s most precious raw material. A deposit in Texas yielded 2,000 pounds of refined saltpeter per day. Even privies and latrines were mined for their combustible contents, the take shipped to Nashville and New Orleans for processing.

Eventually Yankee occupation and explosions—a frequent byproduct of powder milling—resulted in the construction of a large and centrally located powder works in Augusta, Ga. The facility consisted of 12 mills powered by steam engines. The finished product was stored in a magazine capable of holding 100 tons of gun-powder.

Making gunpowder was dangerous work, and the plant found it difficult to retain skilled employees. Conscription carted workers away to battlefields no matter how necessary their jobs were to the overall war effort. And men were lost to explosions.

In August of 1864, 6,000 pounds of gunpowder went up in smoke, killing nine. The mishap was blamed on careless smoking habits. However, even with the explosion and a labor shortage, the August plant manufactured nearly 3 million pounds of powder from 1862 through 1865, enough to supply the Confederate army’s needs and still have 70,000 pounds left over when Lee surrendered.

This place looks rather handy for a consideration of the blockade - though I haven't read it thoroughly. It also has a table of blockade runner success rates.

The union navy's blockade during the American Civil War (1861–1865) possesses a blemished reputation, as it did not completely deprive the Confederacy of imports of food, arms, and munitions. Historian Stephen Wise provides a typical summation:

In terms of basic military necessities, the South imported at least 400,000 rifles, or more than 60 percent of the nation's modern arms. About 3 million pounds of lead came through the blockade, which by [Josiah] Gorgas's estimate amounted to one-third of the Army's requirements. Besides these items, over 2,250,000 pounds of saltpeter, or two-thirds of this vital ingredient for powder, came from overseas. Without blockade running the nation's military would have been without proper supplies of arms, bullets, and powder.1

 

[MrP]

This is even more difficult when the invasion force is in the tens to hundreds of thousands, they will need alot of supplies most of which will have to come from across the atlantic.

Hm, don't see why the British would launch a naval invasion without having first stockpiled sufficient materiel in theatre to support it.

O'course, should Union forces prove successful against British forces, then they could have adopted the OTL Southern practice of nabbing arms and everything else to keep themselves supplied!

 

[King Gorilla]

Two problems with that, first the Northern coast is smaller than the CSA coast and second the Royal Navy is better than the Union Navy.

Yes, but most blockade runners still got through, the thing that made it sucessful is the south couldn't repair the losses encured to its shipping which also diverted away wartime production.

 

[Darkling]

I believe you need to go and visit Manitoba,Western Ontario and Minnesota before you talk about a walk over.These areas are not good areas for large scale operations,40 below zero F in the winter and a wet cold.90 F + in summer with boggy terrain.

Which is exactly why the force with the shortest supply line has the advantage, the British just need to win a battle or two there to establish their claim on the region.

The Lakes will not supply a force in Minn.if the US can hold Niagara which it can get a sizable force there.

That sizeable force will have to see off all the forces Britain can assemble in Canada and the Canadian militia.

But let’s talk specifics, where is this sizeable force coming from?

And holding Niagara isn’t enough if there is enough shipping in British hands on Erie and Superior to supply a British force, all the British need then is Detroit.

Aside from Canada and the US being friends there is no need to defend the border as it is" miles and miles of miles and miles" until the Canadian Pacific is built it takes months to get any place.And the land area around Minn is almost a swamp. No you need to find somewhere else to invade from.

It isn't an invasion of the US in general it is an occupation force to establish a British force in Minnesota (if they want to claim Minnesota West), the British just need to mark their presence there so they can claim that and all points west to the Rockies to be under their control.