Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

I have really liked it so far! I'm a fan of surviving Second Mexican Empire timelines and yours is great. Your short updates provide clear and detailed overview of the situations across different countries and are a quick, enjoying read. Keep them coming!

Thank you! Glad you’re enjoying it.

 

[KingSweden24]

Part II: Redrawing the Map​

​

“...if the 1848 revolutions was the mortal wound to the Concert of Europe, then the Unification Wars were the death and burial...”

- Belle Époque: The Golden Age of Western Europe

“...the position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power... Prussia must concentrate it’s strength and hold it for the favorable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided - that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849 - but by iron and blood.”

- Chancellor of Prussia Otto von Bismarck

 

[KingSweden24]

“...lost on no-one that Davis was an ineffectual a peacetime President as he was a wartime one. He had no foundational vision for the new nation other than slave power; where slave power demanded inaction by the central government in Richmond, it was inactive, and where slave power demanded action, it was active. Davis oscillated between aggressive stances towards state governors - there was nobody he despised more than rival Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, who was sincere in his belief in individual and state’s rights - and shrugging off concerns that faced his indebted nation. There would be no Monroe Doctrine under Davis, for they owed the Confederacy to the Three Friends of France, Mexico and Britain; a farming country, there were few to none thoughts of a tariff, making revenue hard to come by, especially with substantial war debt. The efforts of nation building were haphazard and interested Davis’s grandiosity little. A Calhounian at heart, he blew off the concerns of his reformed Whig Vice President Stephens and left the running of the government entirely to his Cabinet secretaries. In the hands of a capable Postmaster such as John H Reagan, that was of no concern; elsewhere in Richmond, the Congress found itself adrift and ossified, and the departments myopic as the guns of war were silenced...”

- The Cleavage of America (Heidelberg University 2011)

 

[Nivek]

“...lost on no-one that Davis was an ineffectual a peacetime President as he was a wartime one. He had no foundational vision for the new nation other than slave power; where slave power demanded inaction by the central government in Richmond, it was inactive, and where slave power demanded action, it was active. Davis oscillated between aggressive stances towards state governors - there was nobody he despised more than rival Zebulon Vance of North Carolina, who was sincere in his belief in individual and state’s rights - and shrugging off concerns that faced his indebted nation. There would be no Monroe Doctrine under Davis, for they owed the Confederacy to the Three Friends of France, Mexico and Britain; a farming country, there were few to none thoughts of a tariff, making revenue hard to come by, especially with substantial war debt. The efforts of nation building were haphazard and interested Davis’s grandiosity little. A Calhounian at heart, he blew off the concerns of his reformed Whig Vice President Stephens and left the running of the government entirely to his Cabinet secretaries. In the hands of a capable Postmaster such as John H Reagan, that was of no concern; elsewhere in Richmond, the Congress found itself adrift and ossified, and the departments myopic as the guns of war were silenced...”

- The Cleavage of America (Heidelberg University 2011)

A real confederation, run in complete autopilot

 

[Not Henry G.]

Well that's a fine way to run a country. I don't see anything bad happening to them

 

[KingSweden24]

“...Maximilian did everything he could to reinvent Mexico in the shape of a European state. This both troubled and encouraged his conservative supporters, but the dawn of the Habsburg era was one of new public works, of an enlarged legislature, and of immigration from Europe; though Porfirio Diaz and his diehards remained in the remote Sierra Madres, the fervor for the Liberals shrank in the face of Maximilian coopting some of their agenda...”

- Maximilian of Mexico

 

[Nivek]

“...Maximilian did everything he could to reinvent Mexico in the shape of a European state. This both troubled and encouraged his conservative supporters, but the dawn of the Habsburg era was one of new public works, of an enlarged legislature, and of immigration from Europe; though Porfirio Diaz and his diehards remained in the remote Sierra Madres, the fervor for the Liberals shrank in the face of Maximilian coopting some of their agenda...”

- Maximilian of Mexico

Hope that end well for him...

 

[KingSweden24]

“...in later years - including in this very book - Lincoln’s legacy has been re-evaluated. The Man Who Lost the South, as he was known for decades after declining to be re-nominated for the Presidency, was to many a budding tyrant done in only by his haplessness; but Lincoln, historians who rehabilitated him have argued, was dealt a poor hand and played it as best he could. And though it pained him to watch David Wilmot go down in defeat to Horatio Seymour in 1864, Lincoln always seemed at peace with his Presidency...”

- Lincoln: A Portrait of the 16th President

 

[Not Henry G.]

I'm hoping Lincoln has a happy ending. TL-191 sort of had one, so I hope the same happens here

 

[Nivek]

I'm hoping Lincoln has a happy ending. TL-191 sort of had one, so I hope the same happens here

He did funded/legitimated the socialist in 191 and later on might have got a rehabilitaltion like this one after all say and done, specially the awful hand he got in TL-191 and here.

 

[pathfinder]

Hoping to see more on Maximilian in the future. btw, what sources are you using for info on the Mexican Empire? I've read isolated snippets here and there, and recently read Maximilian and Carlota: Europe's Last Empire in Mexico, and what I've read makes it seem (at least to me) that Maximilian was more than a little resentful of having to rely on French arms to keep himself in power. Any plans on showing the friction between Max and the French in future posts?

 

[KingSweden24]

Hoping to see more on Maximilian in the future. btw, what sources are you using for info on the Mexican Empire? I've read isolated snippets here and there, and recently read Maximilian and Carlota: Europe's Last Empire in Mexico, and what I've read makes it seem (at least to me) that Maximilian was more than a little resentful of having to rely on French arms to keep himself in power. Any plans on showing the friction between Max and the French in future posts?

My source is mostly whatever I can find online; with Juarez’s death so early in the war, though, his reliance on French arms is diminished.

 

[KingSweden24]

“...the Schleswig War, even more so than the conflict in the Crimean, presaged the ending of the world built by the Congress of Vienna. With France’s victory in Mexico and now Prussia’s seizure of much of Denmark, the continent was barreling again to a confrontation...”

- Iron and Blood: The Wars of German Unification (1999)

 

[KingSweden24]

Hello all! I'm going to start this back up again - the last entry was literally posted three days before my now-ex wife asked for a divorce so I've been a bit busy this fall haha. Keep your eyes here for future updates!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Seymour's first and foremost desire was to defend the interests of his home state's prized textile industry and so he strongly opposed efforts to economically isolate the Confederacy. The Rapprochement Era, as the next two decades would become known as, were defined by efforts to heal the wounds between the two Americas. Families cloven in two reunited and in some cases buried their grudges; pragmatists on both sides of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers, the plainest frontiers between the nations, made efforts to rebuild frayed ties. Slaveholding interests in the North, suddenly highly isolated, in many cases fled South - and slaves from the South began to flee north in greater numbers, no longer fearing the Fugitive Slave Act which despite being the law of the land was enforced only against slaves who fled Maryland or Missouri. Nevertheless, as this new era dawned, not all was good in the Union - scapegoats for the loss began to appear, most prominently black freedmen, as well as the Irish who were said to have intentionally behaved in cowardice while at war. Through the end of the 1870s, lynchings became as common in the US as they did in the South..."

- The United States of America in the 19th Century (2003)

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Maximilian watched events unfolding in Europe carefully from Mexico, concerned every time he received letters detailing the rising hostilities between Vienna and Berlin and beginning to fear that the greater German question would be soon answered in Prussia's favor. More secure in 1866 than he had been in those wild days after the Battle of Puebla, Maximilian's Mexican Empire enjoyed less robust investment from Europe than he had hoped, but France's divisions had finally withdrawn, Mexico's open-arms immigration edicts had - as hoped - was beginning to attract entrepreneurial Europeans to her three largest cities and his modest political reforms had yet to severely anger either the conservatives or the liberal rebels still holed up near the Confederate Border. Events later in the year, though, both home and abroad, would come to challenge his rule most severely for the first time..."

- Maximilian of Mexico

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the Confederate Congress seated in February of 1866 was a different animal to the ones that had been elected in 1861 and 1863 in that it was populated largely by former Whigs hostile to the increasingly inept Davis administration and "soft" Democrats who formed a loose coalition with their erstwhile opponents. Opposition to Davis was particularly concentrated in the Carolinas and Georgia, states reliant on foreign trade still smarting from the lingering effects of the US blockade during the war and the painfully slow return of European investment. While trade with Britain had recovered to approximate antebellum levels, hoped-for economic ties to Mexico, France and Austria remained elusive. Complicating matters were Davis's general aloofness on matters of peace and diplomacy, the growing rift between him and his Vice President Stephens, and the popularity of war heroes such as Lee, Jackson and Bragg as compared to the political class who newspapers began to for the first time in early 1866 denounce as the "Do-Nothings." Caught between his firm belief in a small federal government and increasing fractiousness between individual states, Davis's approach was compared to sitting on his hands and waiting for someone else to solve his problems.

Such problems would not be solved anytime soon. Two crises erupted in the spring of 1866 - first, the largest slave rebellion since Nat Turner's uprising began in northern Mississippi, and the band led by the slave Jedediah Ford soon threatened Memphis. As Tennessee's Nathan Forrest rode out to put down the rebellion with a host of veterans of the western theater, anger over high taxation and a poor crop in North Carolina erupted into what would become known as the Tar Heel Rebellion. Zebulon Vance, North Carolina's nakedly anti-Davis governor and a longtime foe of the Richmond government, ordered his state militia not to fire upon the unruly mob and instead addressed them and their concerns from the steps of the state house in Raleigh, now known as the "State House Speech." Davis was stunned - and immediately ordered another veteran of the War of Independence, James Longstreet, to ride south immediately..."

- The Rapprochement Era in the Confederacy, 1863-1881 (Harvard University, 1967)

 

[KingSweden24]

Jedediah Ford​

Jedediah Ford (? - April 27, 1866) was a Confederate slave who led a slave rebellion in the spring of 1866 in northern Mississippi and southern Tennessee. Ford's Uprising, as it became known, was the largest slave rebellion in history, with nearly 500 slaves part of his militia. Much of the weaponry that fell into his slave band's hands were leftover from the Union evacuation of Tennessee during the War of Independence. The slave band at one point threatened Memphis, advancing as close as 20 miles from the city, where they were met at Colliersville by the Tennessee State Militia and the Confederate Cavalry, led by Tennessean Nathan Bedford Forrest. Ford's Uprising ended in the Battle of Colliersville, later known as the Memphis Massacre, where Ford and an estimated 480 of his compatriots were killed by firing squad, hanging, or stabbing over the course of two days. The Memphis Massacre is widely considered the largest mass-lynching in Confederate history.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...critical to Seymour's ability to navigate the postwar world was the fact that he was acceptable to Republicans as he had supported the war initially, and had only criticized Lincoln's conduct thereof, and the same applied to his relationship with War Democrats. Deeper into his second year in office Seymour became more comfortable in the role, and despite his critique of many of Lincoln's wartime and peacetime policies as unconstitutional, did not significantly change the federal government's encouragement of public works projects and continued homesteading. However, foreign policy came to dominate the Seymour Cabinet's attention, pursuing not just its doctrine of Rapprochement with the Confederacy but also repairing ties with European states that had recognized the rebel nation at Havana and afterwards. It fell to Secretary of State George B. McClellan to aggressively pursue diplomacy with France and Mexico with the eyes of a suspicious public on him, as well as continuing to build a deeper friendship with Russia, then the Union's strongest European contact. It was in early May of 1866 that Seymour accomplished what would be viewed as his Presidency's most substantive achievement, when McClellan secured the purchase of Russian America, soon to be known as Alaska, for the sum of $6.8 million dollars. Though dismissed by some hostile Republican newspapers as "Seymour's Folly" or "Walrussia," the purchase was generally popular and expanded American territory dramatically just three years after having lost the Confederacy."

- Seymour: Portrait of a Forgotten President

 

[KingSweden24]

"...it is hard to overstate the impact that both the Jed Ford Uprising as well as the Tar Heel Rebellion would have on the Confederacy. The Southern newspapers were generally much more subdued when it came to criticism of the political class, for a variety of reasons, but conspiratorial musings about "Negro barbarism" and the Yankee Menace sold copies. Newspapers sympathetic to the Davis administration gleefully reveled in reports of Forrest's debauchery at the Memphis Massacre and egged on "Richmond Regulars" as they besieged Raleigh to the shock and horror of state officials from the Arizona Territory to Florida. The animosity between Jefferson Davis, with less than two years left in his single six-year term, and Zeb Vance became a blood feud after two dozen of the Tar Heelers were left dead in Raleigh as Longstreet swept through the city to clear out the ragtag but peaceful rebels. Despite political alliances being largely informal and based on antebellum connections, the two violent events in the spring of 1866 would define Confederate culture for the next half century, all the way up to and through the Great War. Elections in the CSA would from then on be politics of personality and, in many cases, violence; Nathan Forrest went overnight from being a respected but largely unknown cavalry officer to a swaggering, blood-soaked hero who had done near Memphis what his idol Andrew Jackson had done in the Seminole Wars. Similarly, Vance's ideological misgivings about the ineptitude of Davis's centralized, hostile government run essentially in absentia by slaveholders far from Richmond only hardened and memories of bodies spread across Raleigh's streets, gunned down in many cases by men who had served alongside the dead in the War of Independence, were long and not particularly forgiving..."

The Rapprochement Era in the Confederacy, 1863-1881 (Harvard University, 1967)