Cinco de Mayo

[KingSweden24]

John Sharp Williams (July 30, 1854 - August 13, 1913) was a Confederate politician and lawyer from Mississippi who served as the Speaker of the Confederate States House of Representatives from 1904 until his assassination less than a month prior to the outbreak of the Great American War. Williams was regarded as a talented orator and skilled parliamentary operator who helped facilitate the takeover of the ruling Democratic Party by insurgent, populist forces led by Benjamin Tillman in the early 1900s but still retain his moderate credentials; as such, he was an invaluable ally to Tillman as Speaker of the more restive House of Representatives, and they formed a mutually beneficial partnership. Williams' choice to stick with Tillman rather than President Thomas Jones in the 1907 political crisis that saw the Democrats break in two is seen as helping Tillman maintain his control over the party, but their political fortunes both declined in tandem shortly thereafter as younger, more aggressive Democrats began to grow in influence. Williams supported the nomination of Joseph F. Johnston to the Presidency and successfully whipped through his election by the House during the controversial contingent election that followed the inconclusive 1909 Confederate Presidential election.

During the Summer Crisis of 1913 after the expiration of the Treaty of Havana that ended all protections for US vessels in Confederate waters, Williams supported the administration through Johnston's death while urging a cautious approach, particularly after the highly controversial sinking of the grain barge Peoria, allegedly in American waters. After Johnston died suddenly of pneumonia at the height of the crisis, Williams stood to be one of the most influential figures in government as the new President, Ellison Smith, got his bearings with war looming on the horizon; however, after giving a speech declaring that he would hold a vote to declare war as a last resort reluctantly and only if diplomatic efforts by the Smith administration failed, he was assassinated by a bricklayer named Elias Mason on the steps of the Confederate Capitol, with his speech regarded by Mason as insufficiently belligerent and supportive of war. Due to the timing and circumstances of his death, Williams' assassination after the war spawned countless conspiracy theories, and remains a subject of great controversy to this day - his murder, along with the death of Johnston, are both regarded as badly destabilizing the Confederate government at a particularly tense hour and directly contributing to the decision by Ellison Smith to request a declaration of war from Congress on September 9th, 1913, which formally began the Great American War.

 

[KingSweden24]

German elections, 1913

397 seats in the German Reichstag; 199 seats needed for the majority​

Social Democrat (SPD): 106 (+32)
Centre (Z): 105 (-3)
National Liberal (NLP): 46 (-21)
German Conservative Party (DKP): 31 (-19)
German Progress Party (DFP): 31 (+9) (merged with DtVP)
Pan-German League (ADV): 27 (+7)
German Reich Party (DRP): 12 (-2)
German Agrarian League (BdL): 8 (+4)
Polish People's Party (PSL): 7 (-2)
Christian Social Party (CSP): 7 (+2)
German-Hanoverian Party (DHP): 5 (+1)
Independent Polish (/): 4 (-2)
German Social Party (DSP): 3 (-3)
Bavarian Peasants' League (BBB): 2 (-)
Independent Conservatives (/): 2 (+1)
Danish Party (DP): 1 (-)
German People's Party (DtVP): 0 (-4) (absorbed by DFP)

---

The 1913 German elections were held on 14 August 1913. Although the Social Democratic Party had won the most votes in every election since 1890, it had never won the most seats - this changed with the elections of 1913, where it emerged narrowly as the largest party in the Reichstag by one seat over the confessional Centre Party and once again won the most votes; it achieved this one day after the death of its longtime leader and central figure, August Bebel. With the election, parties ambivalent to the ruling elite of the German Empire - the Social Democrats, Centre and progressive left-liberal German Progress Party - had a clear majority of the Reichstag, but the Centre elected, led by its conservative leader Georg von Hertling, to continue its policy of supporting the Drehung or "rotation" of Reichstag Presidents organized by Chancellor Max Egon II, Prince of Furstenburg. However, with its numbers reduced, the Drehung was forced for the first time to count on the Agrarian League and the right-wing nationalist Pan-German League for support despite a lack of a formal arrangement, and German legislative activity would struggle as the Drehung system showed its flaws and cracks.

 

[KingSweden24]

"...while I enjoy this POD (that Cotton Ed Smith could have gotten splattered randomly in a head-on collision with a cow on the rural highway between Petersburg and Richmond on August 13th is morbidly hilarious) I'm not sure it changes that much. There's a reason Benjamin Tillman was nicknamed "Pitchfork Ben" - he was not, and never was, a reasonable, sober-minded guy. That he was among the few adults in the room when J.F. Johnston let Cotton Ed, Hoke Smith and the other inmates run the asylum at Heritage House is an indictment of the Johnston administration, not an endorsement of Tillman. This was, after all, the guy who put the CSA in this position in the first place by sinking the Bliss-Blackburn Treaty in order to complete a power play against President Thomas Jones in late 1908 and who injected a lot of the "politics of vitriol and violence," as Tom Martin was fond of saying, into the veins of the Confederate electorate. The idea that he was a closet dove is nonsense (the slain John Sharp Williams wasn't one either, by the way), he was just not a belligerent idiot in the way the ultra-hawks were.

The fact is this - the postwar rehabilitation of Tillman by many Confederates was a very deliberate project by Huey Long and his fellow travelers to launder Pitchfork Ben's reputation as a contrast to the conservative Redeemers running the show in Richmond before his election in 1933. From the Kingfish on down, Longism had a habit of indulging wild conspiracy theories, the more theatrical the better, to squeeze out any bit of political advantage against an opposition they saw not as political rivals but as traitors to Dixie. The idea that Tillman was a well-meaning man of the people, while true on some domestic matters, who was snookered into war by Hoke Smith and pseudo-Bourbons who snuck into Johnston's Cabinet and that there was a vast conspiracy to bring the Confederacy into war was pushed for a very specific reason. Long's great show of having Johnston's body exhumed so an autopsy performed is perhaps the most outlandish example of this but the theory that John Sharp Williams was assassinated at the behest of the Smiths, while common in the 1930s Confederacy, was pushed aggressively by Long and was taken by many of his supporters as fact to their graves. This context is absolutely critical to separating contemporary analyses of Tillman's views on the war before the declaration of war, which Longist ideology has successfully shaped in Confederate academia, from his actual worldview, which was that it was good and right for the Confederacy to go to war with the United States over the Mississippi River and a whole host of other matters (economic superiority in the Caribbean was as much, if not more, the driving factor in tensions), but that Richmond should choose the timing and cassus belli prudently.

I think you've done a good job here of capturing the absolute pandemonium that Smith dying a mere six days after Johnston at the same time that Williams is felled by an assassin's bullet and the chaos that that would cause in the Confederate government, but if anything I think that would make Tillman more inclined towards continuing on the path to war. How this unfolds is something that could be cool to explore; he was a convert to navalism, after all, but he was if anything even more overly deferential to General Scott and the ASO on strategic matters. Some small tweaks in the early weeks of the war could have big, big ramifications; dunce that he was, Smith's insistence on securing Baltimore Harbor as a conduit for logistics is famous for allowing the US Army to fully regroup beyond the Susquehanna, but Scott would have badly overextended his supply lines had he tried to race to the river as he initially planned and continue the "sickle sweep" and left his army's flank, if not its rear, badly exposed to the considerable contingent of the Pennsylvania National Guard near York that IOTL pulled back across the river in good order.

The thing is that the Confederacy was in a genuine, true bind - it had boxed itself into a maximalist position mostly due to vibes, and its entire political class, fearing being branded a coward and with zero incentive structure to even try to save face, let alone compromise, followed its dumbest, most bloodthirsty people down the rabbit hole. A Richmond so clouded in this mania was never going to accept the terms of the September Ultimatum - Williams was shot by some nut just for suggesting that the Confederacy may be reluctantly forced into a preemptive war by the actions of the United States - and had Myron Herrick not been a garbage-tier Secretary of War who Charles Evans Hughes pondered firing literally on the evacuation train from Washington in mid-September, they may have paid a severe price for their decision to roll the dice. So this POD, in my humble opinion, is way too late to butterfly the GAW entirely. A different GAW, however, could be very interesting to write..."

- "Destiny's Beef: Or, How the Confederacy Avoided Apocalypse"

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the right choice. Brazil's strategic debate essentially boiled down to whether the army should be mobilized and sent into Uruguay exclusively, or whether a preemptive attack on western Argentina should be the first move, as they were convinced the Fuerza would have little success in doing little more than delaying the better-equipped Blancos. Fonseca was a fierce partisan of the second option, but on this he was relatively alone; the Brazilian political establishment was mostly focused entirely on expelling Batlle from Uruguay and still, even in late August, was reluctant to cross entirely into Argentine territory. The naval lobby in particular was strongly opposed and argued instead for attacking the Argentine Navy in the River Plate, limiting its ability to reinforce the Fuerza and creating a strategic quandary for Buenos Aires which would ideally lead to a rapid and quick settlement - the withdrawal of Argentina from Uruguay entirely, the restoration of the Blancos, and otherwise a fully white peace.

Much as Fonseca hated this idea, geographic constraints did box his options in. Much of the northern Mesopotamia region of Argentina, particularly the provinces of Corrientes and Misiones, were covered in difficult wetlands that would prove a difficult obstacle for the Brazilians to pass through, forcing a circumvention along routes the Argentine general staff could reasonably predict. As a result, Brazilian forces, in order to credibly threaten Argentine territory, would have to pass through northern Uruguay regardless to cross into the province of Entre Rios - again, a route Argentina would and did anticipate. It was a matter of some debate amongst Brazilian war planners to what extent Argentina would fight for its land between the rivers; Fonseca was convinced that "that hot-blooded, proud people" (say what one will of Brazilian attitudes towards Argentina, they did not consider their enemy soft) would see retreat as cowardice and gamely but foolishly defend with the Parana to the their back. His peers were less persuaded, and once again the voice of caution was the Navy, which suggested that Argentina's likeliest move was to fortify river crossings east of the Parana as best they could for long sieges and then withdraw their forces across the river and sink or destroy any Brazilian attempt to cross at their leisure. With a small but respectable riverine fleet, it was a credible threat, and again led to Dom Agosto Leopoldo - the Emperor's cousin - insisting on the naval-first option, which Fonseca huffed was "predictable in proclaiming its own usefulness."

What forced Brazil's hand, in the end, was that some of this debate was had with Chile - whether to mobilize and strike first, a decision which Rio would not make without Santiago's consultation. One of these missives was, critically, intercepted by Buenos Aires (which had begun making an aggressive effort to code-break Chilean communications two months earlier) on August 24th and the hawks in Argentina had their proof - their neighbors were debating starting what could be a potentially existential war against them in order to maintain Uruguay in Brazil's camp and turn back what they saw as the tide of rampant Alemism across the Southern Cone. Two days later, Argentina gave orders to preemptively mobilize its entire Army and begin moving it to posts on the west bank of the Parana, with full mobilization expected to be complete by the 2nd of September, and also called all crews to its naval fleet off anchor in the River Plate.

This crisis of clear communications between Brazil and Chile had now captured Argentina's full attention, and the Bloc Sud was no longer conspiring in secret. Chile had a small but professional army regarded as highly capable; Brazil's was large but unwieldy, largely conscripts with poor training, and Argentina was somewhere in between. A two-front war was potentially disastrous for Argentina but the extent to which Chile was willing to march out of its Andean strongholds on the offensive was unclear. A strange, uncertain statis settled over the ABC Powers as August turned to September and Rio and Santiago responded. In Chile, the administration of Juan Luis Sanfuentes elected to issue its "red alert" to its Navy to immediately put to sea and prepare for war, but the strategic decision of where it was to steam from Santiago, where it had idled since its bizarre and provocative exercises a month earlier that had begun this crisis in the first place was left unmade; Admiral Luis Uribe wrote frantically to Rio de Janeiro asking to delay an attack on the River Plate until the Chilean Navy could steam around Cape Horn, but no strategic commitment was made on a date or time. Brazil, meanwhile, partially mobilized its southern army corps, at a speed too fast for the skeptical Emperor to slow down in order to negotiate with Argentina, but also at a speed too slow to give it the element of surprise or initiative depending on which direction it chose to attack..."

- Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...elided. It was true, then, that the Confederate and Mexican armies were, through their disciplined and advanced mobilization plans and pools of experienced reserves, numerically superior to that of the United States, and it was true that the United States had reduced its deficit in the past four years dramatically, even if it was not closed. It was true that the Confederate and Mexican armies had taken pride in being better equipped, and also true that the United States had improved its logistics remarkably in that same span of four years.

The one difference that would soon make itself apparent, though, was in the cadre of officer corps. For all their strength on paper, the Confederates had not fought a war of any kind in forty years, and the Cuban Expedition had not exactly gone well for them even when led by grizzled veterans of the War of Secession. Mexican generals were also fairly inexperienced, with the most senior officers last having fought their own countrymen in the 1882-85 Revolt of the Caudillos, but at least there were high-level commanders, particularly Chief of the Imperial General Staff Bernardo Reyes, who had distinguished themselves in that campaign and understood what they were doing.

The US Army, for all its considerable faults and flaws, did not have that problem. The core of its expanding officer corps had fought either in a nasty, six-year conflict in Utah against Mormon rebels, in the spectacularly violent Boxer War in China, or both. Its senior leadership had spent the last decade internalizing a number of those lessons and making improvements, eventually with Congressional support and largesse but initially without, to their combat readiness, training disciplines and structural organization. While the way the United States was caught on the its back foot in the opening month of the war did not surprise the Confederates, and indeed emboldened them, its ability to rapidly reorganize itself and counter-attack did, and that would not have been possible were it still the Army of 1893 or even 1903, rather than the reformed, improved force of 1913..."

- The Guns of September

 

[KingSweden24]

"...now known as the "Last Summer of the Old Confederacy;" despite a noticeably slowing economy [1] there remains among upper class Confederate citizens a nostalgia for the warm, peaceful months before the world changed forever on September 9th. As much as newspaper headlines suggested the beckoning calamity, life went on ordinarily for most. A golf craze had overtaken the South, and mere weeks before the war broke out one of the largest golf tournaments ever held in North America was conducted at the East Lake Golf Club on the outskirts of Atlanta, inviting participants from all over the world to the so-called Georgia Invitational. One would never have guessed that, as the world's finest golfers descended upon the decade-old links course with its red-roofed clubhouse and its enslaved caddies, many of the men playing would soon be dead on far-off battlefields.

If families thought that a war was around the corner, they did not show it; debutante balls were held with aplomb on plantations and in the ballrooms of Savannah, New Orleans and the other great cities of the South, weddings that ran long into the night under the light of lamps and fireflies to the music of violins and crickets, and colleges sponsored grand rugby tours throughout the summer to hype up support for their schools coming into the fall, schools that before long would be effectively empty as their students enlisted. The mood of the Confederacy in the summer of 1913, as politicians dealt with a severe diplomatic and soon military crisis, was not one of belligerence but calm. There was a strange sense in the air, a bittersweet one, a feeling of peace and joy and place that hung all across the Confederacy as a whole country took one final, relaxed breath together, and then let it out, never to breathe so easily again." [2][3]

- An Antebellum Elegy: Revisiting the Confederacy on the Eve of the Great American War

[1] It should be noted that between the Silver/Mexican Panic and the shutdown of Mississippi shipping, 1913 has been a year of severe supply shocks and financial crises, probably worse than any other since 1904. Certainly color in the decisions of the various parties to go to war
[2] And with that, we reach the end of our semi-Lost Cause apologia book. Don't worry, there'll be more badly biased content in the future!
[3] In my notes I'd told myself to go really deep with the Confederacy literally on the eve of war but I think we all just want to get to the fireworks, no?

 

[KingSweden24]

"...third grand diplomatic triumph, possibly the most important: the securing of the Anglo-Ottoman Concordat of September 1913. Haldane and Crewe received the bulk of the credit for it by their contemporaries and historians alike, but the work done on moving negotiations forward was driven largely by Foreign Office civil servants posted to the Middle East who had carefully cultivated relationships in the region for years, and it was not possible to find this deal until the ascent and securing of his power of the young, modernist and firmly Anglophilic Ottoman Grand Vizier, Prince Sabahattin.

The Concordat was seen both in London and Constantinople as effectively settling for ever the disputes the countries had over the Persian Gulf and, at least in the Ottoman realms, began a clear shift towards the emphasis on the Sultan's symbolic influence and status as Caliph as his temporal authority over vast parts of Africa and the Near East dramatically waned. For decades, a major thorn in Anglo-Ottoman relations had been the status of Kuwait and other Gulf entities; with the Concordat, Crewe's negotiators secured an acceptance by the Ottomans that the fait accompli of the Persian Gulf being an area of British interest was formal. A firm border on Kuwait was finally secured, with Constantinople agreeing to its claims down to near the Qatari frontier [1] and disclaiming it as a tributary, while Britain evacuated the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan in the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab delta where the Tigris and Euphrates met the sea, by proxy effectively stepping back from their longstanding position of influence in cosmopolitan Basra. With that stroke of a pen, the Emirate of Kuwait was formally recognized by both parties as a British protectorate while the Ottomans retained Basra and their path to the Gulf, and decades of disagreement between the two were set aside. Most importantly to the Porte, however, was a British proclamation recognizing the Sultan as "Caliph of the Mohammedans" and a promise to consult with Constantinople on issues related to its Muslim subjects, particularly in India, with London hoping that this could be used to its advantage in the future..." [2]

- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924

[1] The opposite of OTL, where the British threw Kuwait's longstanding claims to basically the majority of Eastern Province under the bus to give it to Ibn Saud instead. So here we have Thicc Kuwait instead that owns the whole of the Persian Gulf coast between its OTL borders and Qatar, which as I'm sure any of you who've looked at a map of major oil and gas fields in the world will have major implications
[2] Muslims, however, don't put the Caliph in quite the same position of authority that Catholics do the Pope, so this is again more of a fluid and symbolic leadership role - Ottoman Sultans after all saw their role as Caliph as one where they were a "guardian" or "custodian" of Islam rather than its outright leader

 

[KingSweden24]

"...complex, pluralistic politics. Sabahaddin [1] was well aware that not everyone in the Ottoman Parliament shared his Anglophilic views and in early October of 1913, after the Concordat had done back to both countries to be ratified, gave a spirited defense of its terms to the whole body. Of course, with Ahrar holding a majority and with several smaller ethnic parties thought to be supportive, the audience was not the lower house but rather the considerably more conservative Senate and the Sultan himself. In his address, the young Grand Vizier outlined further his hopes for a moderately decentralized Empire that "assessed honestly its interests in every region to best formulate a system of government that serves its people while honoring our Sultan."

Still, the retreat from Kuwait and eastern Arabia was not universally popular; Britain claimed considerable land into the interior north of Aden and Oman as well, areas that the Ottomans had never exercised any kind of real authority over thanks to the Saudis and which Sabahaddin dismissed as "acreages of sand." Ahmet Riza, usually an ally despite chairing Ittihad, decried the Concordat's border revisions in Arabia and scoffed that, "Perhaps al-Makka shall be ceded to French Sudan next?" But the strategic implications of the deal were felt most firmly by the Rashidis, who having relied upon the Ottomans to drive the Saudis almost entirely out of Arabia now saw coastal land they had considered theirs handed away to Kuwait, landlocking them and making them ever-more dependent on Constantinople.

The truth of course was that Sabahaddin's choice was no accident. His grander cultural and governmental strategy was colored very much by his ardent Europhilia and it was his view that the Ottomans had stagnated economically and socially over the past fifteen years by turning towards matters of the Near East, rather than putting its full attention on Rumelia, as it had during the post-1878 economic miracle that lasted nearly to the end of the century. Conservatives of both the nationalist and Islamist stripe have, in the years since, made a number of claims that Sabahaddin's secularism made him an atheist, but this badly oversimplifies his views; rather, the Grand Vizier and most of his fellow travelers in Ahrar believed that the Ottoman Empire would collapse if it did not embrace democracy and its status as the only Muslim power in Europe, the "bridge between civilizations," which indeed was the name of Sabahaddin's half-finished political manifesto when he was assassinated in 1931. [2] The Empire could be a respected, albeit second-tier, power in Europe which would dominate the Balkans economically or a declining colonial punching bag in the Near East; it could not be both.

This was quite a bit for Sultan Abdul Hamid and most of his appointed Senate to take, however, even if the Concordat looked likely to pass thanks to the aggressive whipping of the respected Huseyin Hilmi in that body, and the last great crisis of his reign loomed as the rivalry between the Porte and the Ahraris escalated dramatically..."

- The Hamidian Era: The Ottoman Empire 1876-1914

[1] I'm pretty sure I'm writing this wrong but have seen it two ways - I know we have some readers (First and foremost @SultanArda) who are quite familiar with the Mideast. Should this be SabahaDDin or SabahaTTin?
[2] Flash forward!

 

[KingSweden24]

"...as an example of the insidious influence Britain held across the region, it effectively pried away not only Kuwait and much of the western Gulf coast from the Ottomans with the stroke of a pen, but also extended its influence deep into the Arabian Peninsula from Oman and Aden, too, to the point that the Ottomans redoubled their efforts to complete their Hejaz Railway not just to Mecca but down to Yemen in order to prevent that from falling into British hands as well. London had begun to view the Gulf as a crucial counterweight to India, a flanking position where client states would protect its Crown Jewel from foreign meddling while its Navy had key ports to deploy from at a moment's notice to close the Indian Ocean to traffic if need be - and, critically, where oil deposits were easily reachable by British businessmen as a result..."

- Mossadegh

 

[KingSweden24]

"...Monday, September 1st, 1913, came and went as any other day, most critically in that there had been no formal affirmative response to the American ultimatum that had set that day as a deadline. In the course of the past thirty days, grain and beef futures on the Chicago Commodities Exchange had sextupled in price and by early September the Federal Securities Commission had intervened to temporarily suspend commodities trading to prevent further speculative run-ups, the first time since its formation in late 1905 that the FSC had used this power. Washington appeared calm but the very real looming economic crisis that beckoned had put policymakers into a panic, and the silence from Richmond was deafening. Critically, however, there were few voices of import that suggested merely caving to Confederate demands - Congress was united behind a common front unseen in decades, which gave leaders both at the White House and on Capitol Hill room to maneuver.

On the morning of Tuesday, September 2nd, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair George Turner of Washington drafted the "Turner Note," a document meant to escalate the situation to recapture Confederate attention while being short of a declaration of war. Citing the refusal of the Confederacy to guarantee "safe, regulated and unmolested means of maritime commerce" on the Mississippi (and the Chesapeake, but with the Delaware Canal that was less of a pressing concern) the United States would immediately be suspending all trade relations with the Confederacy effective immediately. All Confederate goods would be turned away at ports of entry, and all American harbors would be closed to Confederate ships under threat of sinking or impoundment. With tariffs having been dramatically hiked on Southern imports late in the Hearst years, and never lowered, this was seen as the logical next step of the long-running trade war and the best way to truly get the Confederacy's attention. The note called for the Hughes administration to enforce this policy at once as a bill was marked up and passed by Congress. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the ranking Liberal on the Committee and the Turner Note's co-author, communicated this proposed policy to the White House, which gave it its tacit approval, and Elihu Root journeyed down to Capitol Hill on the 3rd to assess alongside Turner and Lodge the appetite amongst Congress for taking this stance as the note became widely circulated throughout Washington - and, crucially, leaked to the press.

Wednesday the 3rd had also been the day when Secretary of State Hoke Smith in Richmond had journeyed to the American embassy to deliver the Confederate response to the ultimatum, albeit two days late. The Confederacy, he informed Ambassador Beveridge, could not enjoin the collection of revenue in state ports, but was open to a deal in which revenue could not be collected on the open water of the Mississippi. Smith erred severely in letting Beveridge know that this was about as much of a concession as the Confederacy was willing to make, but that it would begin enforcing this policy immediately in order to head off the brewing crisis and buy both sides time, even with the ticking clock of October 31st now looming weeks ahead. Beveridge was affronted that Smith would set the maximum terms of debate having missed a deadline to respond and after escalating the crisis, but agreed he would transmit the response to Washington immediately.

Root, on Capitol Hill all day, did not hear of this response until evening, by which point news of the Turner Note arrived in Richmond. Outraged, President Smith informed Hoke Smith to immediately withdraw the offer, which his Secretary of State did the following morning - Thursday, September 4th. Hughes and Root were unimpressed by the response but had, in a late night Cabinet meeting, agreed to accept it provisionally, and so when the next morning they received word from Beveridge that the Confederacy's offer was withdrawn, it was enough to even send the typically even-keeled Hughes into apoplectics, and he immediately transmitted through Root a very public order to all customs houses in the United States to immediately suspend the importation of all Confederate goods and sent out an order activating Naval vessels in certain East Coast harbors to interdict Confederate flagged ships, while also adding to his command an order to apprehend the entry of all Confederate persons onto US soil at any and all crossings of the border, and to ban the running of trains across the border as well. Little did anybody suspect, even then, that just five days later they would be at war..."

- Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...profoundly different kind of crisis. Hughes called a Cabinet meeting late in the evening of September 4th to consult men he respected and admired; knowing how rarely the President came to others for advice rather than trying to study his way through a problem [1], the senior members of the administration were quiet and solemn for the entirety of it. Hughes next held a meeting solely with Root, Herrick, Ballinger, as well as calling in Army Chief of Staff William Wotherspoon and Admiral Bradley Fiske, the Navy's most senior flag officer whose role would be renamed Chief of Naval Operations the following year. Both meetings had the same purpose - to assess the readiness of the United States military to go to war imminently, possibly as soon as the following week.

The debacles of the fall of 1913 have often been placed on the shoulders of Myron Herrick, sometimes in an effort by politicians and military officials to find an easy scapegoat, and in fairness there was a reason he received the sack before the war was even six months old. Hughes, who was famously and often to his own detriment reluctant to fire anyone, acknowledged as much in his memoirs, admitting that "poor Myron was ill-suited to the task" and placed the blame for appointing him on himself. Herrick was not a bad man, merely a product of a party system at the time where Cabinet offices were handed out largely due to factional interests and regional concerns, and Herrick in that sense checked off two very important boxes - he was the only senior Cabinet officer from Ohio, and he was a close ally of that state's reformist Governor and key Hughes backer, James Garfield. The meeting on September 4th was illustrative as to his limitations. Herrick advised Hughes that while the National Guards of various states were already in various stages of alertness, a "full mobilization" of the standing Army as well as its reserves would not be possibly until at the very earliest the 15th. Wotherspoon concurred with this assessment and urged Hughes to order a full mobilization at once, which Root agreed with. Herrick interrupted here, according to all accounts of the meeting, and instead suggested a "partial mobilization" that would allow a fighting force of active duty divisions be ready by the 15th - again, the earliest date he could promise - and to hold off on declaring war until that date. Root was aghast, and Hughes declined to hold himself to Herrick's timetable on when to request such a declaration from Congress, but agreed with Wotherspoon to request the two-tiered mobilization in tandem with placing the navy on "war footing" and calling all soldiers to their barracks.

The question of when and how to declare war, in other words, had become operative in those two meetings on September 4th, and what was most critical about them was that there was no question at the highest echelons of the American government that war was inevitable and that the United States may indeed be declaring war first. Indeed, Hughes later called that supposition his greatest mistake; as he and everyone in his Cabinet, and as far as he was aware the entirety of Capitol Hill, viewed the United States as the aggrieved party that had been constantly and consistently harassed by belligerent Confederates going back to the last months of the Foraker administration [2], it seemed fitting to them that it would be Washington that would choose to go to war first after this final provocation. They had, after all, given no reason for the Confederacy to attack first.

This was of course not the approach being taken in Richmond at exactly the same time - because that very same night, a meeting was occurring at Heritage House that would alter the course of history, and where the logic of the United States picking and choosing the time and place to declare war was used by Confederate leadership to argue in favor of preemptively striking while they had the element of surprise..."

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

[1] This was a character trait I turned up relatively late in my research and I think these sort of bizarre personality quirks are what make historical figures so interesting. I'm not passing judgement on whether or not this is a good or bad thing, just the fact that Hughes had the mindset that if he just read enough about something and pondered it for long enough, he'd figure things out without needing to bounce ideas off somebody else is a special kind of weird nerd-hubris you wouldn't associate with most politicians
[2] Though let's be real, it started quite a time before that - this was just when the Amistad debacle happened way back in 1904

 

[KingSweden24]

"...simultaneously. It is of course true that the United States was engaging in its own mobilization on precisely the same day, but what may seem like an academic distinction was hardly one. The Confederate war plans - dubbed "HHH" by the Army Staff Office for well over a decade - necessitated a rapid mobilization and while the structure of the Confederate military and the realities of a war vote from Congress being a constitutional necessity were very similar to the circumstances north of the Ohio, this necessity had been built into various redundancies and preparations for years. "Preliminary" and "partial" may seem similar, but what the Confederate military was allowed to do was stage a "preliminary" mobilization of state militias with only the permission of the President and the requisite state governor, which Smith had granted as early as the 3rd. On the 4th, as Hughes and his Cabinet met in Washington only a hundred miles away, this meant that the Confederacy had already gathered key cadres of the Virginia State Militia at its deployment point in Harrisonburg and had routed necessary locomotives to Fredericksburg and Winchester to rapidly move those forces, as well as those of mobilized North Carolinians, northwards.

The key meeting, then, was on the afternoon of the 4th, after Smith had elected to withdraw his acceptance of the September Ultimatum. This move was understood on both sides of the Ohio to presage war; Smith, in a note to General Scott, said as much, informing him: "Now that we have chosen to reject the Yankee demands, we must steel our spines for the storm to come." Full phased mobilization orders were signed and countersigned, allowing the activation of the deep reserves available to various state militias rather than just active duty servicemen; what was needed now was a declaration of war, which would authorize HHH and allow the Confederate military to begin accepting enlistments, placing state militias under Army commanders and tapping its own reserves. As nearly every man in the Confederacy served in their state militia as a form of social duty, and the period in which they stood as an available reserve lasted for ten years after the end of their brief enlistment, this meant that effectively nearly every single white man in the Confederacy between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight, or thereabouts, was in state militia records and could be reached. This was a gargantuan manpower advantage that Richmond enjoyed, and they knew it.

At four in the afternoon, Smith greeted the two key Senators - Tillman of South Carolina, his mentor, and Martin of Virginia, his chief antagonist and rival - as well as the new Speaker, Heflin. There were no Cabinet officers present, for none were needed; knowledge that this meeting even occurred is largely only due to the Heritage House clerk, the testimony of two house slaves who heard much of the conversation, and Tillman's posthumous diaries, which shed tremendous light on the proceedings. Seated in the drawing room drinking mint juleps, Smith explained his decision to revoke the acceptance of terms, for which he received congratulations from Heflin. Tillman outlined the likely consequences of the action, not to condemn but rather to make sure everybody was in agreement on what exactly it meant; Martin concurred that the United States would have little choice but to mobilize and declare war, noting "even a Yankee will see this as an insult." Smith was angered at the clear implication from the Bourbon leader that his move was rash and ill-considered, but Tillman kept the peace. "Pitchfork Ben," having lost much of his fiery demagogy and hypnotic power of rhetoric in age and to two strokes, assured Smith that "the confrontation we have braced for has arrived, and history will congratulate you for having the bravery to end the dance and face it head-on and finally settle the matter." Smith was placated by this and then noted that Scott had begun mobilizations that would continue over the weekend, and that he figured that late Monday evening, the combined forces of the Virginia and North Carolina State Militias would be moved surreptitiously to within a fortifications network southeast of Martinsburg designed specifically for HHH's implementation. Heflin suggested declaring war the next day, Friday, and delivering the declaration to the American embassy on Saturday morning, not wanting to delay matters.

Tillman had a different suggestion. With the United States having a considerable naval advantage, it was better to secure Mexican acquiescence to war over the weekend, ready vessels in the Chesapeake for combat, and then align the war vote with when the preliminary mobilization was complete, late on Monday night. Smith was initially compelled to follow Heflin's suggestion - indeed, he had brought Congressional leaders to Heritage House specifically to ask them to declare war the next day - but elected to listen to his fellow South Carolinian and hear him out. Tillman's next suggestion is what is now known as the infamous "Heritage House Agreement," which was to time the delivery of the declaration of war to the US embassy at the immediate time a surprise attack from the Shenandoah Valley into Maryland and an attack on Baltimore Harbor by the Confederate Atlantic Squadron were executed. Smith, concerned that some Congressmen might get cold feet over the weekend, asked if Tillman was sure of that timing; the old Senator reportedly smiled and uttered his notorious words, "We can count noses in the Senate, Ed."

Following the agreement, Tillman asked Heflin to imply to some of his more loose-lipped colleagues that a war vote might be held as soon as tomorrow, hoping that that news would reach Washington, as Smith met with Scott and other military officers to inform them of the new plan. HHH was to be executed at 5:30 AM sharp on Tuesday, September 9th. Meanwhile, the rumor of a war vote on Friday did in fact reach Washington, and Ambassador Beveridge made plans to leave Richmond on Sunday evening; when Friday came and went without such a vote, the assumption in Washington became that the Confederacy may have been reconsidering, and its original timetables remained unchanged, but Beveridge nonetheless bizarrely elected to stick to his and return to Washington for consultations [1], thus not being in Richmond on Monday evening when Congress gathered there after an uncomfortably quiet, tense and eerie weekend when everyone could feel the world was about to change.

Ironically, Beveridge's train broke down near Fredericksburg; had it moved ahead a few extra miles when it stopped working, the Ambassador may have seen the artillery pieces and soldiers' camps around the city that would the next night be rapidly moved up to the Arlington Heights. As it were, Beveridge and his fellow passengers sat for three hours next to a horse farm south of the Rappahannock in the dead of the night, and by the time he was at the White House the next day to discuss the situation with President Hughes, the Confederate Congress had met to make their fateful vote..."

- Before the Storm: The Crises of 1913

[1] That he didn't dip out on 9/1 is probably unrealistic, to be honest, considering diplomatic protocols of the time

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the votes were held simultaneously, on both ends of the Capitol. In two hours of floor debate in the House, a few Congressmen argued in favor of letting Hoke Smith attempt to negotiate one last settlement, but were largely drowned out by their colleagues' jeers; in the end, only two voted no, while six abstained. In the Senate, meanwhile, the vote was entirely unanimous, with only the most minute debate on the matter, and a number of Senators giving self-indulgent speeches on their reasoning for their vote. By eleven o' clock at night, both votes were done; Tillman spoke last on the floor of the Senate, stating: "This shall be the vote that is recalled when it is asked in the future what was done to preserve the white race and its civilization; that at the hour, our generation answered the call, and rescued Anglo-Saxonism from itself." When he cast his final vote, a fait accompli, to make it 24-0, the whole Senate chamber broke out into applause; they had already heard the raucous reaction from across the building when the House completed their proceedings. The clerks of both chambers brought the instruments of declaration down the street to Heritage House, where they were countersigned five minutes to midnight by President Smith, who held up the documents proudly and handed the pen to General Hugh Scott as a souvenir. Reporters from the galleries rushed to their printing presses to get morning editions out, with the headlines already written: WAR!

By the time Confederate citizens awoke to the jubilant announcements throughout their country that Congress had declared war on the United States, the Atlantic Squadron's infamous attack on Baltimore Harbor would have already begun, and the 1st Army would be fanning out in four "scythes" into Maryland and Pennsylvania from Martinsburg and Harpers Ferry. Cheers, fireworks and street festivals erupted spontaneously; hundreds of thousands of men swarmed state militia bureaus to report for duty as reservists, and even many who had not served sought out recruitment offices. The chance to punch the damned Yankee in the mouth was an exhilarating feeling, and some were joking about having Christmas dinner in New York, so fast would American lines melt before them. The day to celebrate was now; the day to mourn would come, sooner than they thought...

...on the evening of September 8th, the Confederate Congress had declared very simply: "Resolved: the Confederate States of America declares a state of war upon the United States of America." The road to the hour in which those sixteen words were written out and voted upon with barely an utter of protest was long and winding, beginning approximately twenty years prior. It had wound a curious path, through the jungles of Central America, the warm blue Caribbean Sea, and along the mighty Mississippi. It had led here, to the most destructive war in North American history and one of the 20th century's great conflicts; but it had not been an inevitable way, a road foreordained. It was paved with poor choices, made of simple mistakes, marked by wounded pride and displays of misplaced honor. Yes, the road to this conflict had been long, but it had passed many a crossroads those traveling upon it had chosen not to take. It was a road made by men, in all their flaws. And traveling that road from its beginning along all its circuitous turns suggests that just perhaps, the republics and empires of the Americas were not at all bound for bloodshed - they had instead chosen it."

- Bound for Bloodshed: The Road to the Great American War

(And with that we say goodbye to the textbook I've enjoyed writing entries from the most, my own little Sleepwalkers homage. This last graph was meant to evoke Clark's closing line "for they were the sleepwalkers, not knowing the hell they had just unleashed." I hope you've all enjoyed Bound for Bloodshed, which kicked off at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, as much as I've enjoyed writing excerpts from it).

 

[KingSweden24]

"...sophisticated, developing and modernizing societies; nonetheless, it was the Confederacy that was at the lynchpin of the alliance. Without it as a shield, Brazil would have never dared act unilaterally on her ambitions in her periphery; without it as the tip of the spear, Mexico would have been unlikely to make its substantial economic disagreements with the United States a cause for war.

Postwar, the Confederacy's military prowess was retroactively downplayed, but it was a serious emerging power even if it was not an exact peer to the United States. By the autumn of 1913, it had six battleships, four of them dreadnoughts with a fifth to be delivered late the following year, as well as thirteen cruisers - a total naval tonnage that would have been respectable for a second-tier European power. Each of its states could mobilize a state militia of between fifteen to twenty-five thousand men on quick demand and by late November it would have put an army of over half a million men into the field and it had a robust armaments sector particularly well-developed in the manufacture of artillery shells. It had an industrial density similar to that of Italy and despite its considerable societal inequalities a rapidly rising per capita income on par with that of Austria or Belgium. After two deep, long-lasting agricultural depressions in the 1870s and 1890s that had caused mass dislocation but also substantial economic reforms and innovations, it was one of the fastest growing economies in the Western Hemisphere and had finally begun to seriously attract levels of immigrants comparable to Canada or Mexico, though still not at the mass pace of its northern cousin or the countries of the Southern Cone. Its white population had an above-average literacy rate, particularly women, and was urbanizing rapidly. It was mostly in comparison to the trio of great European powers - Britain, France and Germany - and the United States that it can be considered anything other than a rising, ambitious state.

Its membership in the Bloc Sud was what made all that followed possible; it is also, not coincidentally, what gave the Confederate States leadership, from the civilian officialdom starting with President Ellison "Cotton Ed" Smith as well as the military hierarchy embodied in the cool and collected General Hugh Scott, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Staff Office, such confidence in the opening salvos of the war. One can also see in contemporary military planning documents as well as reactive responses to the conflict just how seriously the United States took its opponent, a begrudging respect for its capabilities that speaks to the remarkably harsh postwar settlement imposed upon Richmond, particularly on its military capabilities.

What the Confederacy showed off on September 9th was an impressive display of strategic creativity and operational art that would be studied by war gamers and staff colleges for decades to come; as the German General Edwin von Rommel would once comment in his book on the war (Rommel served as a military observer in the Eastern Theater embedded with the United States), "The Confederate tactical prowess was combined with a well-practiced, disciplined plan executed across a vast front line within a half hour, timed with clockwork precision to confuse and overwhelm their opponent with infantry, artillery, aerial scouting and naval assets simultaneously." In modern terms the operation would be termed as combined arms warfare, but there was no such language for it then. What language existed to describe the Confederate attack on the morning of September 9th was merely one of awe.

At 5:00 AM, the order to move to attack positions was received by Confederate soldiers both near its staging ground outside of Martinsburg as well as the division south of Alexandria City and the II Atlantic Squadron that had left Norfolk on Sunday evening and was now anchored in the Pocomoke Sound, just south of the international border on the Delmarva Peninsula. At 5:30, a second telegraphed coded message was broadcast out to all soldiers - "HHH. HHH. HHH." For close to ten years, it had been the most feared and anticipated signal in the Confederate military: the codeword to commence an attack on the United States.

In later years, it became vogue in the United States to criticize if not condemn the behavior of the Maryland National Guard during the second week of September, and indeed its seeming habit of melting before the enemy at the slightest contact did it no favors in the eyes of the public or policymakers. Nonetheless, it had a major disadvantage of being a force of barely twenty thousand men, many whom had been Guardsmen for close to twenty years, defending a small, still oft-agricultural state across a variety of theaters. The largest barracks of the Maryland Guard was in Hagerstown, directly across the Potomac from the Confederate line of attack and behind aging but stout defenses designed to prevent another crossing such as that of 1862. The main thrust of the Confederate attack was aimed here, firing two divisions up the Monocacy Valley to cut the east-west rail, telegraph and canal infrastructure to Washington. [1] The riverfront defenses were undermanned and were quickly overwhelmed under artillery fire and the attack occurring effectively at dawn; by nine in the morning, Confederate forces had secured their bridgeheads and were marching to meet Maryland forces at Hagerstown.

The second thrust of the attack was to seize more crossings of the Potomac, and these met even less opposition. Near the site of the 1862 Battle of Sharpsburg that ended inconclusively, a cavalry regiment forded the river at a shallow point and seized the railroad bridge nearby, allowing a brigade across; downriver at Harpers Ferry, a full division attacked across the river, splitting in half to secure a defensive perimeter five miles to the north in the highlands ridge of South Mountain while the other contingent marched along the river to secure bridgeheads on the east side of the highlands (two more divisions would be formed by the 11th in Leesburg to be brought across there) and seize the strategic railyards at Brunswick. The Maryland National Guard had a second, smaller barracks at Frederick and foolishly split these forces in half; they were twice repelled by Confederate defenders as they attempted to respond to reports of Confederates everywhere and move towards Washington, where federal forces were overwhelmed in artillery bombardment, and reinforce a small National Guard garrison in Baltimore as its harbor erupted in fire and explosions early that morning. By striking out in two prongs while using heavy fire against the two largest population centers in the region - including the critical capital - the Confederates were able to achieve all their day one objectives by early afternoon and regroup for the second wave of reinforcements to cross on the morning of the 10th as mobilization continued apace. The Battle of the Monocacy, as the engagements became known, were over within a day and were decisive Confederate victories, with hundreds of National Guardsmen captured and the majority of them fleeing in hurried retreat..."

- Alliance Against America: Inside the Bloc Sud

[1] The B&O railroad runs north of the Potomac until West Virginia, as I'm sure you can all imagine

 

[KingSweden24]

"...the II Atlantic Squadron was led by the dreadnought CSS Alabama as well as the CSS Texas, an old pre-dreadnought battleship nicknamed "Old Hoodoo" for its curious cases of strange, often poor luck, supported by three of the Confederacy's thirteen armored cruisers - Richmond, New Orleans, and Pensacola, the lead vessel of its newest class - the aging protected cruisers Knoxville and Macon, four destroyers and five surface torpedo boats. In addition, two experimental submarines were dispatched as part of the escort; the Confederacy had a rudimentary submarine warfare doctrine and only six of the vessels in total, but Baltimore Harbor was expected to be an outstanding proving ground for these vessels. Separate from the II Squadron, two old, unprotected cruisers from the 1890s long earmarked to be scrapped or mothballed were sent out ahead of the escort crew by their skeleton crews and followed by a small unarmed vessel to the east, bearing for the mouth of the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal. The operation they were meant for was carried out soon after the assault on Baltimore began - the two old cruisers were maneuvered into the mouth of the canal, turned so as to block its passage, and then scuttled. The crews were picked up by the unarmed surface ship and steamed back to Pocomoke Sound immediately.

The attack on Baltimore Harbor commenced at approximately 8:07 AM on September 9th, 1913. Baltimore was the sixth-largest city in the United States and was, after New York and Philadelphia, the East Coast's third-busiest port. Lying at the point where the Patapsco entered the Chesapeake and not far south of the mouth of the Susquehanna into the same bay, it was at the head of an outstanding natural harbor with an outer and inner segment delineated by various headlands. Even before tensions with the Confederacy had risen, its defenses had been a key concern for US military planners; Fort McHenry on Locust Point in the Inner Harbor adjacent to the main port had been made famous in the War of 1812, but it had been supplemented and rendered nearly obsolete by a network of defenses guarding the Outer Harbor. Furthest out sat Fort Howard on the north of the Patapsco and Fort Smallwood on the south; two miles further in was Fort Armistead on a promontory on the south, and the small pillbox fortification of Fort Carroll with its three barbette guns smack dab in the center of the river on an artificial island. Together, these four forts were designed to prevent a hostile attack on the harbor itself, and they were well-armed and properly staffed by the US Army Harbor Defense Command on the morning of the attack. In the port itself, at anchor, was the Third Division of the Atlantic Fleet under Admiral Frank Fletcher; the Third Division contained the dreadnought battleship Rhode Island (BB-13) as well as the pre-dreadnoughts Minnesota (BB-7) and Kansas (BB-10), and the armored cruisers Seattle (ACR-10, the lead ship of its class, the last separate armored cruiser class of the US Navy before it was combined with the "heavy cruiser" designation in 1914), Brooklyn (ACR-3), and the protected cruisers St. Louis (C-20) and Springfield (C-22), along with two destroyers and two torpedo boats.

The improvements meant to defend against dreadnought big guns had not yet been made to the coastal defenses of Baltimore Harbor, and the Alabama quickly pounded Fort Howard on the north bank into submission as the three armored cruisers passed behind it to open fire upon Fort Carroll. The Texas sustained two direct hits that nearly crippled the boat from Fort Armistead but was able to suppress its fire long enough for Fort Carroll's guns to be pounded into oblivion during the exchange of fire, opening up an avenue into the harbor. The key to the battle, of course, was the use of torpedo boats and submarines to pass behind the larger vessels into the Inner Harbor itself to wreak havoc, which they did with gusto; as the Third Division scrambled to deploy out of its docks (it had been put on alert but not been put to sea yet; Navy plans had called for dispatching it towards Norfolk on the 11th as Congress debated a declaration of war), torpedoes hummed through the water, striking vessels below the waterline. The Seattle's fuel quarters and magazine were struck dead-on, detonating the ship in a massive fireball at its quay and severely damaging other harbor facilities; two other magazines and coal depots were struck by strafing fire from the Alabama with its long range guns, causing a massive fire to break out in the port. The St. Louis was hit by two torpedoes to its port and it listed, forcing its abandonment; the Springfield was hit square-on by a shell that punctured its armor and it sank after pulling out of dock.

The three battleships had sufficient firepower to ward off the Confederate vessels and indeed sank two torpedo boats, but suffered critical damage nonetheless. The new Rhode Island took a critical strike to its propellers and rudder, rendering it inoperable; the Kansas had one of its big guns blasted clean off the deck and a hole punched through its armor just above the waterline. Only the Minnesota escaped relatively unscathed, fighting its way past the enemy and out of the harbor to relative safety, only to discover that its escape route to the Delaware River had been closed off. It was instead sailed into the mouth of the Susquehanna, where it would lie in wait as a floating artillery barge.

In all, the Battle of Baltimore Harbor lasted approximately four hours and was a staggering, decisive defeat for the United States. Three cruisers had been sunk and another captured; two battleships, including a prized dreadnought, had been rendered inoperable at dock. The port facilities at Baltimore were destroyed, massive amounts of damage had been done to the city itself, and three of its harbor fortifications had been devastated. Not only that, but news throughout the day suggested massive Confederate advances in western Maryland, and news of a similarly lethal bombardment of Washington reached the city as the Confederate squadron - which lost only one destroyer and two torpedo boats in the whole ordeal, though Texas was returned to Norfolk for repairs - rained hellfire upon a city of over half a million souls. Pandemonium broke out in the streets; in addition to the one thousand US sailors killed in the attack, nearly three hundred civilians lost their lives on September 9th, close to a third of them from the chaotic stampede to flee the southern part of the city that broke out..."

- Hell at Sea: The Naval Campaigns of the Great American War

 

[KingSweden24]

"...glad that Antoinette and the children were still on Shelter Island and that he had instructed them in no uncertain terms not to return to the capital. Still, the "last quiet weekend" as it became known was anything but inactive. After the Confederate Congress did not meet on Friday the 5th and no war vote was held, Hughes elected to hold a Cabinet meeting the following week and met with Congressional leaders to gauge when the soonest a war vote could be held in Washington. The House was, surprisingly, not the issue; Speaker Mann and Minority Leader Clark, who would have an excellent working relationship throughout the war as they switched jobs back and forth, surmised that debate could begin on Monday afternoon with a vote to be held on the morning of Tuesday, September 9th. Clark acknowledged to Hughes that there was a contingent of House Democrats from the Prairies who would be unlikely to preemptively declare war on the Confederacy, but that if the Confederacy declared war first, they would be "fully and entirely committed to the prosecution of such a conflict until our goals are met." [1] The Senate, however, was more of a problem; its rules were designed for wide-open and wide-ranging debate, Senate Majority Kern of Indiana was loathe to curtail the debate of his colleagues on such a "monumental question," and how quickly a war vote could be turned around in the body was a live question, though Kern - despite personally being a skeptic of a preemptive declaration, he had recognized that the mood for war was now the overwhelming majority view of both chambers - was confident it could be passed by Wednesday morning at the latest. Hughes elected simply to formally request Congress pass a declaration of war upon the Confederacy, and asked Mann to bring the matter up for debate in the House on Monday (coincidentally as the Confederate Congress was passing its war resolutions with lightning speed) and then hold a vote as soon as possible. It was a gamble, but he had grown increasingly uneasy over the weekend with a sense of creeping dread, and had elected not to defer to Herrick's mobilization estimates.

On Sunday the 7th, Hughes attended church at St. John's across the street from the Executive Mansion and spent much of the day praying privately and reading missives from various state governors about the readiness of their National Guards, but in between he met again with General Wotherspoon and set out two key directives. The first was that if the Confederacy declared war, or attacked the United States, the Army should react as if Congress had declared war and initiate its war plans immediately. Hughes had consulted with Root on this question the night before, and Root had advised him that though conducting war without a Congressional declaration was what had threatened impeachment for James Blaine (Root had of course been a junior official in the Blaine administration), in a situation in which the soil of the United States was at risk rather than a dispute over Samoa, it was unlikely that much controversy would arise. Wotherspoon, for his part, agreed with the prudence of such a decision and conveyed as much to his staff, going further to elect to move himself and most of his staff to Wilmington, Delaware the next day out of an abundance of caution after giving the Washington Army Garrison orders to fortify positions behind Rock Creek to defend the core of the federal district should a Confederate attack occur. The second directive was to begin evacuating valuables from the Executive Mansion; Hughes quipped, "I shall not be Dolly Madison carrying portraits out of here, should it come to it." The work was swift; by Monday night, dozens of artifacts including most Presidential portraits had been moved out of the White House and to a train at Union Station, where it was transported to New York for safekeeping. A number of residents noticed this, creating a strange, tense atmosphere throughout the capital as rumors that the United States Congress was debating a declaration of war spread all day on Monday.

Those rumors were correct - Mann delivered the written request of the President to the House at three in the afternoon, and opened two hours of deliberation before a vote in the affirmative was passed, 310-103, and signed by Mann shortly thereafter. The results of the vote spread like wildfire through Washington, to both joy and shock. Despite a large number of abstentions and votes against - primarily from Congressmen in the Midwestern and Western states, a multi-partisan blend of dissenters including every Socialist and, quite famously, future Speaker of the House George Norris [2] - Kern scheduled a debate to proceed the next morning as soon as the Senate gathered. Hughes, at the last Cabinet meeting held at the White House, advised his senior administration that the Confederacy would likely move swiftly once word of the war vote sometime Tuesday reached them, unaware that such a vote was in fact occurring as they spoke in Richmond. Vice President Hadley and more than half the Cabinet departed on the last trains out of Washington that night; according to his extensive diary entry regarding the day to follow, Hughes went to bed ahead of a restless, sleepless night wondering if perhaps he should have advised Congress to evacuate and reconvene elsewhere, too.

Before departing for Delaware, Wotherspoon had estimated that the Confederacy could realistically deploy their partially mobilized forces within three days of a declaration of war, even if they had already begun preliminary preparations ahead of such a vote. He cautioned Hughes that this was potentially a conservative estimate, and advised that as soon as the Senate voted, that the government evacuate to Philadelphia. It was by this stroke of pure luck that preparations had already been made for the morning of September 9th; indeed, with their own declaration of war passed, many members of the House had already decamped on night trains. The estimates were, in the end, wrong; and the Senate's delay of a mere day would prove infamous.

Hughes typically woke up around six o' clock in the morning, and September 9th was no different. The Senate was due to convene two hours later and begin debate on the declaration. As he sat down for breakfast at approximately six thirty, a young lieutenant of the US Army, Robert Eichelberger, burst into the room to announce that the Confederate States had delivered a declaration of war passed at the stroke of midnight. Mere moments after informing the President of this, the first shell landed on the White House lawn..."

- American Charlemagne: The Trials and Triumphs of Charles Evans Hughes

[1] I recently saw on Twitter some excerpts from Clark's biography that were basically him just talking about how much he detested William Jennings Bryan and his acolytes and it made me like Champ Clark more than I already did.
[2] Norris voted against entering WW1 as well, and this number of votes against is slightly above the amount that voted against declaring war on Germany in 1917

 

[KingSweden24]

"...chance for one of the war's most famous commanders, Mason Mathews Patrick, a scion of one of Virginia's oldest and noblest families, second perhaps only to the Lees. Patrick's forces made two thrusts across the river immediately above the Fall Line, one from Leesburg and one from Forestville, right above the Great Falls of the Potomac, screened by light artillery cover; his entire corps was across the river by early afternoon.

The artillery fire upon Washington had commenced at six-thirty sharp in the morning and by midday had left much of the city aflame; during the city's occupation, Patrick would survey the grand obelisk monument to the great Virginian himself and regarded it as providential that it was surrounded by impact craters but had not been damaged itself. The shelling of the Yankee capital had suppressed a response from its garrison of approximately five thousand men; much of that force was focused on maintaining order in a panicked city as much of the government attempted to evacuate all at once, and the rest of the soldiers were hastily finding their way into a defensive position much as their comrades in the Maryland National Guard were doing to their northwest.

The Confederacy achieved all of its first-order goals on September 9th in rapid succession and General [Alexander} Dade, to Patrick's north, elected to press his advantage. The Maryland Guardsmen had chosen not to defend the large town and key rail junction of Frederick and instead withdraw behind the Monocacy River; Dade pushed forward south of Frederick with his corps, circumventing a city he would have been bogged down to occupy. It was profound luck that there were no further Maryland Guardsmen barracked there, for Dade would have left his rear undefended; as it were, the next engagement occurred on the Monocacy as the Virginia Militiamen under his command as well as the 2nd Cavalry Company probed various parts of the Monocacy, looking for an easy crossing. They found one at a place called Monocacy Junction, but were repelled twice before sundown; choosing not to collect high casualties before another division of reinforcements was due across the river the next day, Dade withdrew and regrouped to push the following morning.

Patrick's corps left behind two companies to guard its bridgeheads for the next wave of soldiers to cross late the next day according to the mobilization timetables and linked up about two miles south of Germantown, seizing yet another point on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad and securing telegraph lines to communicate with Dade's forces. Thanks to their crossing points they were east of the Monocacy and thus operating behind the Maryland Guardsmen (though well to their south), but Patrick's objective was to seize Washington and his men marched forward along Rock Creek until nightfall, stopping to rest having encountered barely any resistance and only a single casualty the entire morning.

The Battle of the Monocacy and the Battle of Washington occurred approximately simultaneously; the latter would last until late on the 11th, when the Confederate flag was raised over the Old Capitol of the United States, and the former would see the breakout of Dade's corps into central Maryland, threatening the Pennsylvania Railroad trunk line that connected Washington to Baltimore and Baltimore to points beyond. Both battles proved a preview of the campaigns to come; frenetic, bloody, and savage. At the Monocacy, Dade attempted to cross at the Junction again and the Maryland Guardsmen, now reinforced not only by US Army garrisons from Baltimore but also volunteers who grabbed rifles and pistols out of their own homes, held fast for much of the day until limited mobile artillery was moved into place and a bridgehead violently cleared; by the evening of the 10th, the Confederates had passed entirely over the river and the Guardsmen were scattered, many captured and others retreating back to Baltimore as the severity of the crisis at hand started to sink in. It was that evening that the state government of Maryland abandoned Annapolis by train, and confusion and miscommunication reigned throughout its overwhelmed National Guard. Dade marched steadily ahead and on the morning of the 11th began to turn northwards, hoping to march to the Patapsco's bank at Eldersburg by nightfall and then regroup.

Patrick encountered considerably more resistance as his men followed Rock Creek down into the District of Columbia proper. The shelling continued on the 10th and 11th at a lessened pace, with strict orders from General Scott in Richmond not to expend too many shells "on the first days." Yankee soldiers had positioned themselves capably throughout the vast Rock Creek Park which prevented an easy path north-south for Patrick's men into the city; Patrick elected to follow the water all the way to the Potomac and thrust into the capital through the township of Georgetown, where artillery cover would be most amenable to him and his men and established bridgeheads could allow more forces over. This was now an active thought for the 1st Army; two additional waves of troops had crossed into Maryland at the Great Falls and at Harpers Ferry during the course of September 10th, and a third was due on the 11th at the latter. Confederate forces now held Frederick and were going to thrust into a sickle shape northeastwards, towards the Pennsylvania state line, and the reinforcements that were not marching straight to Washington were going to back up Dade's men and attempt to cut Baltimore off from the north. Plan HHH was more or less working as designed.

The Battle for Washington began in earnest shortly after noon on September 10th as Patrick's forces entered Georgetown and encountered savage fighting from soldiers rapidly routed down to it and from armed civilians, meeting particularly stiff resistance from the township's primarily Negro inhabitants. Some battles were house-to-house, with artillery shells hurtling overhead; at one point, forty Confederate soldiers were mowed down as they attempted to push towards Rock Creek by a well-placed Maxim gun nest. The fighting did not break for the night, and on September 11th Patrick's men engaged in a pitched battle on the National Mall, in the shadow of the Washington Monument and Old Capitol. The city, spare a few buildings, was mostly rubble; the Executive Mansion had been blasted to just a scorched husk by three days of shelling, and much of the Mall was littered with corpses and craters. The Old Capitol was damaged but intact, as was the opulent Library of Congress building behind it; both took hours to properly clear of snipers and other figures within. Seventeen members of Congress had been unable to flee the city by the afternoon of the 11th, including two Senators, and Patrick quickly found accommodations for his valuable prisoners; late in the evening of the 11th, with most of the garrison defeated, the men of his corps lowered the American flag from the Old Capitol and raised their own. The two-day battle for Washington had cost the Confederates three hundred and nineteen dead and four times that wounded, but the capital was, save some pockets of resistance beyond the Anacostia, mostly theirs, and it was yet only the third day of the war..."

- Mississippi Rubicon: How the Confederacy Went to War in 1913

 

[KingSweden24]

"...though of course, as the Federal District was governed directly by Congress, the Black community of Washington did not enjoy voting rights. Nonetheless, it was the most affluent and politically connected Black area of the United States save perhaps Philadelphia, Cincinnati or Indianapolis; Georgetown was overwhelmingly Black and home to an entrepreneurial, thriving populace until September 9th, 1913, when the Confederacy attacked the United States and began shelling Washington from across the Potomac.

Those who could fled; as their fellow Black citizens of Baltimore discovered shortly thereafter, though, their ability to find room on the trains scrambling to get people out was highly limited, and hundreds if not thousands of Black families were left standing on train platforms across Maryland as conductors turned them away, even if ticketed, in favor of their white neighbors. The majority who remained or were stranded, however, understood the stakes clearly. A disproportionate number of the District's Black residents were first-generation descendants of slaves, and a good number of them had fled north themselves and settled down upon crossing the Potomac. Many had served in the Army (the Maryland National Guard was the last in the Union to segregate its forces), and were good with pistols and rifles, particularly those pilfered from the abandoned homes of neighbors. A small militia had formed in Georgetown by the early morning of the 10th, ready to scrap with the Confederate Army as it marched into Washington from the west; many white residents of Washington joined them to defend their home, residents who would have turned them away from their own barbershops and general stores and agitated to deny them jobs at the Navy Yard just a week before.

The Sack of Washington by the 1st Army's II Corps under General Mason Mathews Patrick is regarded as one of the chief atrocities of the Great American War and also its first. Confederate soldiers, upon meeting a surprising amount of urban resistance, set houses on fire, often with people hiding inside; few if any prisoners were taken in Georgetown as the fighting went from street-to-street to room-to-room, and after the Washington Garrison of the US Army was driven from the exposed National Mall, bodies were displayed on its trees as macabre warnings. Officers looted the Smithsonian Institution's galleries and collections; their men went unpunished for torturing and murdering men they encountered and raping women with abandon, including girls as young as twelve. By the 12th, the Confederacy had secured most of the city and driven defenders south of the Anacostia River to the more sparsely settled, hilly townships beyond where a defense was easier, though they remained under the line of fire of the guns in Arlington; they would not be dislodged for another five days, when the defenders in Anacostia surrendered and were kept in a makeshift prison south of the mall, in the swampy grounds adjacent to the Tidal Basin where two hundred of them grew sick and died of neglect, particularly during the harsh winter of 1913.

It was Georgetown that was the worst hit, though, and not just due to the initial fighting punching through the beating heart of Black Washington - its mere existence was an ideological insult to the worldview of the Confederacy. Much of the adult male population was killed, often summarily, and the neighborhood was razed to the ground both with accidental and intentional fires to "blaze a path" for marching soldiers into Washington from the bridgeheads further west along the Potomac. Black families that were captured were, beginning on the 14th, catalogued and then moved across the Potomac into Virginia to be sold into slavery further south, most of them in the Confederate War Department's needs. The fate of Georgetown, rather than striking fear into Blacks north of the Ohio, galvanized them, and as enlistment opened up across the United States to "strike back," Black Americans volunteered at a rate far disproportionate to their share of the population..."

- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War [1]

[1] This is gonna be a dark one to include updates from

 

[KingSweden24]

"...rightly, the debacle in Maryland that allowed the Confederacy to seize Washington within three days and rapidly advance on Baltimore. However, the chaotic state of affairs in the east disguised that, in the wild opening days of the war, the United States actually accomplished a fair number of its immediate objectives in what would eventually come to be known as the Midlands Theater, particularly the securing of rail links across the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois and more importantly at Cincinnati, preventing their detonation by Confederate soldiers and agents and securing their first bridgeheads on Kentucky soil as a result. This swift reaction on September 9th and 10th was not enough to prevent the successful implosion and destruction of the rail bridge across the Ohio at Louisville, an act that proved largely irrelevant to the war in the long run considering that the Falls of the Ohio adjacent to the city already split the river into two effective theaters.

This was not to say that the first week of the war in the Ohio Valley was not without some color. By the end of the day on the 9th, the Kentucky State Militia had maneuvered artillery pieces into the highlands south of Covington and begun shelling Cincinnati in an indiscriminate manner reminiscent of what was happening in Washington that same day. The Ohio National Guard, however, had prepared for this eventuality and returned fire, beginning a weekslong artillery duel across the river as soldiers sniped at one another from their respective sides. By the end of September, Covington would have largely been suppressed and it was realistic to start pondering an expansion of the bridgehead there; not so in Louisville, where the Indiana National Guard and gunboats from downstream continued to shell the city into submission for weeks thereafter to keep the city's considerable industrial base from being repaired and usable for Confederate forces, flattening much of the central city and eventually forcing the evacuation of much of the intact factories southwards..."

- The Guns of September

 

[KingSweden24]

"...major counterattack north of Peking meant to be timed with President Li's visit to the Forbidden City and his address to the garrison and populace there, an excursion that came with not one but two near-successful assassination attempts, including a bomb thrown at his DeDion-Bouton touring automobile. The defeat of this Manchurian attack near Tangshan exhausted both sides and forced the retreat of enemy forces back to Shanhaiguan and Li, afterwards, noted to General Wang that an offensive to the Great Wall may be in order while the enemy had been defeated in a particularly bloody engagement but both shared a mutual skepticism about what exactly could be achieved after that.

The reality was that China was exhausted, and there were still the western provinces to pacify. Back in Nanking, there was an emerging consensus within Li's ruling Jinbudang that now, with the symbolic victory of securing Peking and driving the Qing behind the Great Wall, it was time to focus on building up the Chinese economy and securing their position as its rulers, especially with the Guomindang organizing aggressively after the narrow win in the March elections. In a parallel to the Guomindang's 1940s-era "Inward-Looking Policy" that was developed for largely similar reasons (consolidating the economic and political life of China), many of Li's inner circle - particularly eminence grise Liang Qichao - pushed for a curtailment of the war effort now that the threat to the Yangtze Valley was ended and the Qing back in Manchuria, where they belonged. The Northeast would have to be redeemed at a later time.

Fortunately for Li and his compatriots, a similar attitude had emerged amongst the Russian leadership, who were beginning to come to terms with the reality that they would not have a client state controlling the whole of China north of the Huai He but they could quite easily have Manchuria as a vassal nonetheless. A quiet push had begun in Mukden, chiefly by General Kornilov, for the Russian Foreign Ministry to begin reaching out to Nanking about finding an arrangement they could both live with, one that would include a permanent Qing presence in Manchuria in return for an end to the war..."

- An Unfinished Revolution: The Second Chinese Republic, 1912-1924