Confederate Independence: How powerful is the US?

As petroleum emerged in Pennsylvania in the Civil War era, this resource would be well recognized in the North. But by the end of the 19th century, Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma [territory] would see the petroleum boom. No doubt USA businessmen would secure mineral rights in the South before the CSA realized their value.
Also, this doesnt change the fact that California still exists and is still going to be a major oil producer.
 
Issue is, the oil in Texas was discovered by a stubborn Ohioan who kept sniffing around areas other folks kept telling him had no oil. Odds are Texan oil might not be discovered at all. Meanwhile Oklahoma is American here.

That isn't exactly how it went down. At worst you get a five to ten year discovery delay. But most of the early oil exploitation was pretty home grown and local.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_oil_boom#Post-Civil_War_Texas

https://texasalmanac.com/topics/business/history-oil-discoveries-texas
 
I presume he means an import tariff on Confederate cotton. What he doesn't realise is that that kind of tariff will make cotton more expensive to Union manufacturers, but no more expensive to anybody else in the world. The same goes for the Union banning it: all that means is that there's more Confederate cotton for other countries to use.

Britain is still developing other sources of cotton, and slavery will ultimately make the CSA an international pariah. I could easily see Britain joining up to levy big tariffs on the CS as well. Both to punish the last slaveholding state, and to promote their own cotton sales.

Grant won't be president if the war is lost.

I disagree. Grant was the most successful general on the Union side, and as such would be an excellent choice to run for president afterward. His supporters could easily point to his successes and say something along the lines of "if he'd been in charge we'd have whupped the slavers."
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
Britain is still developing other sources of cotton, and slavery will ultimately make the CSA an international pariah. I could easily see Britain joining up to levy big tariffs on the CS as well. Both to punish the last slaveholding state, and to promote their own cotton sales.
Netherlands and Brazil had slavery up to '80s and were not pariahs of any sort. It is only after 1890 that I'd expect any significant international pressure on the CSA to appear.
 
Ban? The Europeans (Britain in particular) abhorred slavery
You mean the same Britain which up until 1860 happily imported vast quantities of slave-grown cotton from the USA (including proto-Confederate states)?

The British public may have abhorred slavery, but British industrialists were also very good at holding their noses and buying slave-grown cotton. So were the British public prepared to buy textiles made from slave-grown cotton.

and following the Civil War there was a boom in Egyptian and Indian Grown Cotton.
Erm, the short answer to this is "No, utterly wrong."

The longer answer is that it took the sky-high cotton prices to make Egyptian cotton cultivation possible at all. The prices were high enough that they could turn agricultural land over to cotton and import food. Once the ACW ended and cotton prices returned to normal, Egyptian cotton production collapsed. Significant cotton production in Egypt did not return until the 1890s, and it did not become a serious competitor to Southern cotton until the twentieth century.

Indian cotton was of inferior quality to Southern cotton, and had to be sold at a discount. Even then, as Southern cotton exports resumed after the ACW, they continued to gradually displace cotton imports to Britain from India (and elsewhere).

Europe could pretty easily get Cotton from other supporters.
Not in the quality or quantity needed. Egypt's out, India's out, the remnant USA doesn't produce enough supply.

The US still has Tennessee, Missouri, and Northern Arkansas here and could conceivably grow its own (free labor) cotton and I'm sure those producers would lobby hard in favor of tariffs on the CSA's Cotton.
Would this be the same Britain which viewed tariffs as immoral, and which was so committed to free trade that it avoided imposing tariffs even in response to its own colonies putting tariffs on British imports? (As several Australian colonies did, and Britain still refused to put tariffs in retaliation.)

This is not the kind of country which is going to be swayed by American lobbying to impose tariffs on the CSA.
 
IMG_0434.jpg

So the Confederacy would look something like this.

Since Richmond is now like 10 miles from the border I'm thinking the capital will be moved to either.

1) New Orleans
2) Montgomery
3)Atlanta
 
Probably weak. Escaped slaves will go to the north. When it comes time to vote, the e-slave descendants will push the USA towards trying to free CSA slaves. USA either wins a costly reconquest war or they will do stuff like embargos or whatever to put pressure and this drains USA resources that could be spent doing something more important for the North's economy. Heck, even a tax break would have the money better spent than trying to put pressure on the south from the perspective of "get power now" although the latter might be arguably better use for the sake of morality if it results in freed slaves or at least "nicer" treatment (if pressure on the CSA does neither, then that money is pretty much down the tubes being wasted from a geopolitical perspective and not relieving suffering whatsoever)

I'm skeptical of a 'reconquest', but could see the US taking back in breakaway portions of the Confederacy. Not everyone there voted for Secession & there were fair sized chunks of states like Florida that might be in Secession from the Secession. I've read a number of these Confederacy timelines and am pessimistic about the social and economic conditions of the Confederacy through to and into the 20th Century. Although Texas oil will help from the 1920s there are strong negative economic trends. Beyond that the entire motivation behind the Confederacies leaders was to preserve a social and economic condition that would inevitably be in flux, and was already under pressure for change from many directions. Like others in these discussions I'm thinking a economically stagnate & socially explosive collection of states, where immigration out is the dominating demographic. I expect there will be a pejorative word for white migrants from the Confederacy used by northerners to identify the low wage workers arriving from the South. Migration to Mexico and Latin America is liable to be larger as well.
 
The longer answer is that it took the sky-high cotton prices to make Egyptian cotton cultivation possible at all. The prices were high enough that they could turn agricultural land over to cotton and import food. Once the ACW ended and cotton prices returned to normal, Egyptian cotton production collapsed. Significant cotton production in Egypt did not return until the 1890s, and it did not become a serious competitor to Southern cotton until the twentieth century.

Indian cotton was of inferior quality to Southern cotton, and had to be sold at a discount. Even then, as Southern cotton exports resumed after the ACW, they continued to gradually displace cotton imports to Britain from India (and elsewhere).
Was it something regarding the soil/and or climate that made Egyptian and Indian cotton much more expensive and/or inferior? Because if it's not that, but lack of experience, lack of adaption to different circumstances, etc that could eventually be overcome.
Fracking also used to be unviable as an alternative to imported oil until the technology matured. If the British can make Egpt or India work within a decade or two after CSA indepencece, it might do to the CSA economy what fraking did to Venezuela et al.
 
Was it something regarding the soil/and or climate that made Egyptian and Indian cotton much more expensive and/or inferior? Because if it's not that, but lack of experience, lack of adaption to different circumstances, etc that could eventually be overcome.
Fracking also used to be unviable as an alternative to imported oil until the technology matured. If the British can make Egpt or India work within a decade or two after CSA indepencece, it might do to the CSA economy what fraking did to Venezuela et al.
With Egyptian cotton, it was just lack of experience, selective breeding of varieties to suit local conditions, gradual evolution of ancillary technologies and methods, etc. The first long-staple cotton was grown in Egypt in the 1840s/1850s (I forget which) and there was gradual development from there. Once the local knowledge and methods had developed far enough, then Egyptian cotton did become competitive with Southern cotton again. This isn't the case of just picking a country and throwing money at it, but gradual development of knowledge by lots of people over time.

Southern cotton went through a similar process of gradual evolution over time, by the way. Without any dramatic new technologies, between 1810 and 1860 Southern cotton farming became something like three times as productive per worker (I forget the exact increase, but it was high). Things such as improvements in bagging and related methods just led to more productive workers. In essence the South had started several decades earlier than Egypt and it would take time to catch up, time which can't be hurried very much.

The varieties of cotton grown in India were (mostly) of a shorter staple (ie shorter fibre length) than Southern cotton, and were thus less useful for British machinery and technologies which had been optimised for Southern cotton. Adapting wholesale to Indian cotton would have required slow, expensive retooling of all of the existing machinery and processes in Britain, removing their existing competitive advantage over other textile producers (especially New England), and may still have failed because there was no guarantee that India could supply cotton on the same scale as the South anyway.
 
Britain is still developing other sources of cotton,
Helped immeasurably by the drop in US cotton exports: if you compare 1856-61 and 1866-1869, the quantity of US cotton produced almost halved (from 1.7 billion pounds to 1 billion) without a commensurate change in the proportion consumed domestically (from 370 million pounds to 363 million). Without the substantial changes to the plantation system that we saw historically, it seems likely that Southern cotton will come back into the market in 1865-6 in a big way. Indeed, the proportion consumed in the Americas may be lower than before the war: even without a Union import tariff on Confederate cotton, Confederate sellers may prefer a lower price from European buyers. That could be for nationalistic reasons, but also because Union dollars don't buy as much in an independent Confederacy as they did in the defeated South.

To put this in perspective, in 1866 total cotton exports from India, Egypt and Brazil combined were just over a billion pounds: in 1860, they had been 424 million pounds.

and slavery will ultimately make the CSA an international pariah.
To the extent that slavery made the United States an international pariah, absolutely. However, it seemed that the United States could live with it, and it's probable that the Confederacy could as well.

I could easily see Britain joining up to levy big tariffs on the CS as well. Both to punish the last slaveholding state, and to promote their own cotton sales.
Except that Britain had the opportunity to levy big tariffs on Brazil to punish a slaveholding state and promote sales of their own free-labour West Indian sugar. They didn't take it.

Overall, this response doesn't do anything to disprove the fundamental points I made earlier: that Britain would continue to buy cotton from a slave-owning South, just as they had done before Confederate independence, and that a Union import tariff increases the price to the American manufacturer but does nothing to the rest of global cotton consumption.

Was it something regarding the soil/and or climate that made Egyptian and Indian cotton much more expensive and/or inferior?
With Egyptian cotton, it was just lack of experience, selective breeding of varieties to suit local conditions, gradual evolution of ancillary technologies and methods, etc...
The varieties of cotton grown in India were (mostly) of a shorter staple (ie shorter fibre length) than Southern cotton
If anybody is really, really interested in how the cotton-growing world responded to the American Civil War, then the 500-page doctoral thesis Seeds of destruction: the globalization of cotton as a result of the American Civil War will be right up your street. I was going to suggest that those who struggle with insomnia will also find it helpful, but on reflection that'd be unfair to the author.
 
I disagree. Grant was the most successful general on the Union side, and as such would be an excellent choice to run for president afterward. His supporters could easily point to his successes and say something along the lines of "if he'd been in charge we'd have whupped the slavers."
The defeated United States are not going to propel into the presidency a general whose efforts weren't enough to win the war. It would not necessarily be fair to hang the loss around his neck, but given that he'd only ever wanted to be mayor of Galena, and Lincoln has not been assassinated, there's no reason why Grant would run, let alone be elected.
 
Tax, as in tariffs. It'd be an import tax.

Ban? The Europeans (Britain in particular) abhorred slavery and following the Civil War there was a boom in Egyptian and Indian Grown Cotton. Europe could pretty easily get Cotton from other supporters. The US still has Tennessee, Missouri, and Northern Arkansas here and could conceivably grow its own (free labor) cotton and I'm sure those producers would lobby hard in favor of tariffs on the CSA's Cotton.

The boom in Egyptian and Indian cotton was insufficient to replace Southern Cotton, and was well known to have a lower quality as well. Those aforementioned states could also never sufficiently out-compete the Deep South.

Force open... yes. The US would even within a decade be far stronger than the CSA which would have A LOT of internal issues and even without direct conflict the North has plenty of means for pressuring the south (Unionist southerners tended to live in the geographic area most suited for guerilla conflict, the north could support slave revolts, etc). The disparity between the north and south in terms of industrial strength and wealth would only continue to grow over time and TTL it'd be even greater than OTL.

Not really, as relative industrial differential was about the same in 1860 as between Germany and the US in 1936; that the ETO took four years should be indicative of how hard a renewed fight against the Confederacy would be as it won't be a pushover. Furthermore, you have to assume Confederate Industrialization will be significant, as it was primarily in the closing days of the war that their industry was destroyed, meaning that here they'd have a solid base to grow upon.

As for Unionist areas, the only one that has an actual basis is East Tennessee, which according to OP is already in the United States.

As long as the US isn't trying to completely reconquer the south, it really wouldn't take much effort on the part of the US to quickly occupy the bulk of the CSA's major ports (Norfolk, Wilmington NC, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston... done) and the Sea Islands and just sit there until it gets what it wants. It's not like gunboat diplomacy always involved total occupation of a country. Plus between the bluffs of Memphis, Red River, Ouachitas, Red River, and Appalachians the US can secure its own border on land fairly easily.

It took four years of total warfare to accomplish that which you speak off and at great cost, so to act like the U.S. could just boss around the Confederacy by using Gunboat diplomacy is rather lacking in historical basis, to say the least.
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
I've seen it pointed out that stand alone CSA would be the world's 4th most industrialised country.
I'm going by faulty memory here, so dont get too attached to that number :)
The point is that the CSA was poorly industrialised when compared with the highly industrialised USA.
 
I've seen it pointed out that stand alone CSA would be the world's 4th most industrialised country.
I'm going by faulty memory here, so dont get too attached to that number :)
The point is that the CSA was poorly industrialised when compared with the highly industrialised USA.
That quote referred to all 15 slaveholding states, and compared to the rest of the USA, and per capita (not absolute).

It also depended on what measure of industrialisation was being used. In terms of railway miles per capita, the South was something like second or third, while in textiles or iron it was more like sixth or eighth.

The overall point is still a good one, though - the CSA was far behind the North or UK, but broadly in line with mainland Europe.
 
Top