CSA industrialization

Unless they were eating an unusual amount of bread and cake in the ACW and suddenly stopped afterwards where the additional imported wheat went is rather vague. Of course if we assume that the US do not export to the global market at all, thus ensuring they do not displace other wheat into British granaries

What did the poor eat?


A typical poor family living in a town would have had about 12 shillings to spend on food each week. A loaf of bread cost about 3 d (pennies). Most of the week's money was spent on bread leaving little for other necessities. The weekly shop could also include milk, cheese and potatoes. Poor families could only afford meat once a week - this would have been saved for Sunday lunch.


and

As late as 1904 an official committee of inquiry was distressed to learn how few of the poor had sufficient utensils and appliances to cook at home. Primitive or non-existent cooking facilities, lack of cheap fuel, poverty, ignorance, and adulterated foods combined to produce a nation, not of John Bulls but, by today's standards, of pygmies, who were undernourished, anaemic, feeble and literally rickety.

. . . Esther Copley's Cottage Cookery (1849) suggests the poverty of the rural diet, for her recipes were for potato pie, stirabout, stewed ox-cheek, and mutton chitterlings. In Wiltshire, admittedly one of the poorer counties, the Poor Law Commission found that the standard fare consisted of bread, butter, potatoes, beer, and tea, with some bacon for those earning higher wages. . . .If the rural poor ate birds then the urban poor ate pairings of tripe, slink (prematurely born calves), or broxy (diseased sheep). Edgar Wallace recollects working-class families along the Old Kent Road shopping for 'tainted' pieces of meat and 'those odds and ends of meat, the by-products of the butchering business.' Sheep's heads at 3d each and American bacon at between 4d and 6d a pound (half the price of the native product) were too expensive for the irregularly-employed casual labourer to have frequently. In Macclesfield 23 per cent of the silk workers and in Coventry 17 per cent of the labourers had never tasted meat. Stocking weavers, shoe makers, needle women and silk weavers ate less than one pound of meat a week and less than eight ounces of fats. . . .

It was not until the last quarter of the century that the working man's diet improved significantly. Between 1877 and 1889 the cost of the average national weekly food basket of butter, bread, tea, milk and meat fell by some 30 per cent, and it was in this period that the first really appreciable nutritional improvement (aided by a greater variety of foods and new methods of retailing), occurre
d

I've seen roughly 24% of grains was imported to the UK in the 1860s

But hey, let the poors eat cake. I'm sure they won't mind food costs jumping
 
Clearly not American wheat flour as there was an extreme lack of famine when the level of imports was and more to the point the overall supply of wheat reduced in the years immediately post 1865.
As the years went on after 1865, the UK imported more and more grains thru WWI. UK farmers couldn't compete with cheaper US and Canadian grain.

Doesn't have to be full fledged famine with the Poors dying in the street, for higher food prices being a real political problem.
 
The USCT/Fenian thing is interesting. Something I hadn't really considered. Food for thought there indeed.

Thanks. Another thing that I haven't seen in Confederate independence TLs is the reaction of the slaves to that independence. In OTL, roughly 500,000 of the 3.5 million slaves from the Confederate states fled to the Union. That's a huge number, but most slaves were either too far from Union territory to have any chance of escape or they preferred waiting for liberation to the risks of fleeing to Union territory. Once those slaves realize that waiting will not bring freedom, I'd expect a large number to try to escape. Mississippi and South Carolina, where over half of the population are slaves, might even see mass uprisings. Any incidents will probably be magnified in the imaginations of the white Confederates, leading to brutal reprisals against real or imagined uprisings or attempts to escape.
 
Thanks. Another thing that I haven't seen in Confederate independence TLs is the reaction of the slaves to that independence. In OTL, roughly 500,000 of the 3.5 million slaves from the Confederate states fled to the Union. That's a huge number, but most slaves were either too far from Union territory to have any chance of escape or they preferred waiting for liberation to the risks of fleeing to Union territory. Once those slaves realize that waiting will not bring freedom, I'd expect a large number to try to escape. Mississippi and South Carolina, where over half of the population are slaves, might even see mass uprisings. Any incidents will probably be magnified in the imaginations of the white Confederates, leading to brutal reprisals against real or imagined uprisings or attempts to escape.

Any mass uprisings that lead to brutal reprisals will cause a political firestorm in Britain. After all, it’s directly their fault that these uprisings happened! I could see the current government being brought down over this and the next one distancing itself from the CSA, in all honesty.
 
As the years went on after 1865, the UK imported more and more grains thru WWI. UK farmers couldn't compete with cheaper US and Canadian grain.

Doesn't have to be full fledged famine with the Poors dying in the street, for higher food prices being a real political problem.

You know what, demonstrate to me that there were food riots in Britain in 1868 and then we can have a conversation

Because the total supply per head for the year 1866-1868 dipped to 4.8 bushels or less compared with averages of well over 5 bushels per head even topping 6 bushels at times during the ACW Link

So by your logic: political crisis...where is it?
 
Only correction I'd make here is that Montery and San Diego between them had a population of about 1,800, (1,100 and 730 respectively) not really worth the time to blockade, save for maybe detaching a sloop to annoy them from time to time. San Francisco was the biggest port and only American naval base on the Pacific, as well as being the logical place to gather men and material. If it was blockaded, the only posting of major consequence is cut off.

I agree that San Diego and Monterey were vastly smaller than San Francisco, but they are large enough for ships to dock and load or unload cargo, so they would need an on station blockading force, not just an occasional sloop sailing by. Looking at a period map of California, a full blockade would also need to cover Trinidad Bay, Humboldt Bay, Bodega Bay, and San Luis Obispo Bay. From Trinidad, California to San Diego is about 800 miles of coastline. They should also probably patrol Mexico's Bahia de Todos Santos, which is about 70 miles south of San Diego.
 
As the years went on after 1865, the UK imported more and more grains thru WWI. UK farmers couldn't compete with cheaper US and Canadian grain.

Doesn't have to be full fledged famine with the Poors dying in the street, for higher food prices being a real political problem.
Especially in the context of this being one of several prices the masses pay--including higher taxes, greater liability of being drafted, pressed or otherwise induced into risky and disruptive military service, all in the aid of a "classes" versus masses antilabor agenda in the form of actively aiding the CSA against the USA.

How this plays politically depends on how the Americans are perceived as being culpable or not in the war by the lower class politically active sectors. If the US is seen as having rashly and greedily attacked such British interests as say Canada, quite a lot of sacrifice might be endured. But if the USA is seen as finally moving against slavery only to have their own government jump in to protect the slavers, and violently attack the USA to do it, I think a US counterattack against Canada will be seen in quite a different light--and so will any and all of the privations workers must suffer for the sake of the war. If the US signals that its moves against BNA are defensive and return of lost territory is still possible, then the continuation of war against the USA in favor of the CSA becomes less politically tenable. If the Yankees also toss caution on the subject of abolition to the winds and declare emancipation, even in the hypocritically limited sense of Lincoln's OTL Proclamation, the anti-war cause gains even more legitimacy.

Of course at this date this is not a matter of the masses voting out the current government; most working people opposed to aiding the CSA have no vote for Parliament. But that too is an issue, and a reason that the USA is seen in a positive light by many of these working people. If the classes that do have the franchise will not listen to rumblings of the beast and move to placate them somehow, they might be facing a resurgence of militant Chartism or something worse.

Being conciliatory does not even require the elite interests to give up everything they did OTL; it involves negotiating with the Yanks and leaving the CSA to fend for itself--conceivably, having gone to war and then agreeing to stand down again, they can fancy-dance ongoing diplomatic recognition of the CSA past US effective protest, on the principle that the best thing about being hit on the head with a hammer is it feels good when it stops--mere formal reception of CSA envoys at the Court of St James might seem not such a big deal if Britain goes from actively allying with the Rebs to just sipping tea and nodding without doing anything helpful at these envoys.

They have alternatives to placating the masses; they can try to crack down. Certainly if the USA does anything against Canada to retaliate, no matter how restrained, some Britons will find that unforgivable, and in the middle of a war it is generally possible, at least initially, to impose quite a lot of reactionary repression. It is easy, early in a war, to get jingoism to drown out class interest politics. This is a major reason lots of stupid wars get started after all.

But...over time people tend to sober up if the war seems to be drawn out and not so glorious. Trent War Anglo-wankers all seem to assume it will be quick and glorious for Britain, and perhaps it might be. But I think the USA will be more tenacious than OTL even, if Britain throws her weight around in America, and then it will not be so quick.

It is impossible to say definitively whether the outcome leads to such a gross erosion of ruling class legitimacy despite the most effective forms of repression the classes can muster that mass politics seizes control in a violent rupture, or if in fact the working classes can be kept in check handily and indeed OTL liberal progress is checked and reversed. It is worth noting one figure in favor of quick and easy recognition of the CSA, and quite possibly then liable to favor other escalations of worsening hostility with the USA, was Gladstone; if opposition to the war puts him on the side of reaction across the board, quite possibly this signals a general hardline attitude against all progress toward democracy in Britain, and the development of quite a different set of norms around the turn of the 19th into 20th century across Europe.

It seems bloody typical of the people who support the idea that Britain can easily enable CSA survival, that they disregard the importance of privation, even perhaps just moderate inconvenience, but still privation for no good reason from the mass point of view. They are just working people after all, how much can they even feel pain? It's not like they are real people who matter!

As I was writing the above passage and wondering if I was perhaps being too harsh or needlessly unkind, someone came along with yet another comment disregarding the intelligence of the common people in classic elitist fashion. This is the attitude one needs to be at all comfortable even contemplating the survival of CSA on just about any terms, so it should not be too surprising that elitism is the mindset.
Any mass uprisings that lead to brutal reprisals will cause a political firestorm in Britain. After all, it’s directly their fault that these uprisings happened! I could see the current government being brought down over this and the next one distancing itself from the CSA, in all honesty.
Of course this is only true if Britain actively twists the USA's arm--it can happen to a limited degree if HMG appears to have encouraged the CSA and discouraged the US to fight for reunification, but it only becomes a serious factor if in fact Britain is engaged in war with the USA, which is not a necessary condition for the CSA to be independent! If Britain does not come to open war with the USA there will also be no interruption of grain shipments either. Indeed I expect the "classes" of Britain to pay a political price if the CSA endures in any circumstances whatsoever, but if the US "simply" decides on its own not to try for reincorporation of the seceded states, much of the moral onus for any monstrous deeds in the South will fall on the northern government, for renouncing all options to aid the slaves to avoid a war; it will demoralize any republicans or democratic reformers in Britain, at least those relying on working class solidarity, along with discrediting the moral credentials of the elites who favor supporting the CSA for various expedient reasons.

CSA survival on any conditions at all tends to make the TL a crapsack 'verse. It was a scummy enterprise by scummy people, naturally these people prevailing is a bad thing with bad effects all around.
You know what, demonstrate to me that there were food riots in Britain in 1868 and then we can have a conversation

Because the total supply per head for the year 1866-1868 dipped to 4.8 bushels or less compared with averages of well over 5 bushels per head even topping 6 bushels at times during the ACW Link

So by your logic: political crisis...where is it?

You know what, demonstrate to anyone that these are equivalent circumstances! This argument in classic CSA apologist fashion shows a disregard for the agency of common people as political actors.

It is very very relevant whether a hardship emerges from the egregious misleadership of the powers that be, or not. For the elites of Britain to make a decision to go to war with the Union puts any consequences that reasonably can appear to emerge directly from that decision in a very different light than the same objective hardships appearing to emerge from circumstances not in anyone's direct control.

As noted, the drop in practical availability of foodstuffs would, in a Trent war scenario, be associated with other hardships at the same time due to the same obvious cause. Any statements about how people react need to integrate the whole situation, not treat people as mindless robots who respond to a given input with a fixed output without regard to general circumstances. Context is everything. Much worse privations might be endured by Britons who felt it was a necessary war, and much milder ones cause for major political upheavals if they step from a frivolous error.

This is why we can't have a generic vague "Trent war" scenario without specifying the details.

And why I prefer for this thread to focus on a simpler if arguably no more probable one in which the USA simply does not choose to incur the grave costs and risks of fighting the secession...and thereby accept incurring the consequences of that decision for inaction instead.
 
Thanks. Another thing that I haven't seen in Confederate independence TLs is the reaction of the slaves to that independence. In OTL, roughly 500,000 of the 3.5 million slaves from the Confederate states fled to the Union. That's a huge number, but most slaves were either too far from Union territory to have any chance of escape or they preferred waiting for liberation to the risks of fleeing to Union territory. Once those slaves realize that waiting will not bring freedom, I'd expect a large number to try to escape. Mississippi and South Carolina, where over half of the population are slaves, might even see mass uprisings. Any incidents will probably be magnified in the imaginations of the white Confederates, leading to brutal reprisals against real or imagined uprisings or attempts to escape.

That's an example of something that has very different consequences depending on just how and why the CSA maintains effective independence.

In my preferred model, this is the major downside that burdens the US government and the political factions supporting it in a decision not to risk war to break the secessionist movement. The direct result of that is a US government, and implicitly the whole nation under the Constitution, washing its hands of what happens to the AA people in a fashion this religiously oriented age will not fail to see is exactly like Pontus Pilate giving in to the people calling for Jesus's crucifixion. Because the USA holds back, people inspired by American democratic republicanism overseas will be demoralized to some degree, which means the general moral tone of the later 19th century Atlantic centered world drops lower in balance--for the side that actively supports the CSA can hardly completely avoid being held complicit either. The ground zero of evil here is of course the secessionist white supremacist leaders of the CSA themselves, but they drag everyone down pretty evenly, assuming the North arrives at "no war."

In the Trent war alternative others seem to find more plausible to the point of disregarding a more peaceful path to CSA survival, it is or anyway, depending on how reasonable the US leadership is, can be much different. If the USA decides as OTL more or less to fight secession and attempt to rope the seceded states back in, but then Britain comes in to tromp on these efforts, the culpability of the pro-secession faction back in Britain is much much worse, whereas the USA can easily be seen as having made a good faith effort to do right only to be massively wronged again. US acceptance of the reality they have no control over Southern slavery can then be seen as submission to superior force rather than a decision to throw the slaves under the bus. The more dire the circumstances for the Union are when the USA comes to terms, the more credible this narrative is (and vice versa of course; surrendering at the first notice the British are mobilizing to start a blockade will leave the optics for US leadership little better than if they just gave up from the beginning--in some ways worse, looking like blustering fools).

Meanwhile back down South, the slavers have to balance their need for submissive order against the fact that every slave they execute or kill in fighting is, the way they figure the books, a huge capital loss. They'd take pretty big paper losses of this kind (bearing in mind that in their accounting this paper loss is very real with real fiscal consequences, not to mention that in the world of material reality they have lost quite a lot of labor power however they propose to manage it) before letting slaves be acknowledged as fellow humans of course, let alone equals, and since an escaped slave is at least as much of a loss on the books as a dead one, and worse since their example inspires rather than deters further slave unrest (not to mention the aid and comfort the self-liberated former slave brings whoever hosts them as refugees, such refuges being likely enemies of the CSA), they are likely to err on the side of brutality despite the red ink.

So yes, this needs to be factored into CSA industrial capacity! If the slaves are 3/4 or less their pre-secession numbers when the dust finally settles and keeping the lid on them remains a costly drain indefinitely, that definitely should be a liability in any ledgers purporting to justify a future CSA claiming a given rank among developed nations.

And for any Trent Warriors, the possibility that mass risings in the South might be effectively used by Unionists to offset advantages to the slaver side Britain's alliance bring should be taken seriously and not disregarded. That's a little different in that I agree with you, the slaves will not rise if they think the Union forces will come in eventually to liberate them--but will be responsive to these calls from the USA if made in context of an effective Union force near enough to credibly be in a position to reinforce their rising. Alas given the short time frame assumed, the Union cannot have coastal naval supremacy and thus cannot come to the aid of the majorities in South Carolina, Louisiana or Mississippi--conceivably the Union can do well on the Mississippi front and fight their way down to linking up with the black belt in MS, which brings LA perhaps in reach as well, though New Orleans itself seems likely to be pretty strongly held. Another Black Belt little noted is in Virginia itself; between western Virginia that was dominated by mountaineers sick of tidewater centric rule and the large slave populations of much of the tidewater, it seems possible that even in a scenario where the Union ultimately must concede defeat that Virginia is effectively destroyed first, turned into two new Unionist states, one western and white, one eastern and black-dominated. I would think if such an avalanche can get started, it might roll on to nearly annihilate the Confederacy so I have not contemplated this much in the context of this TL or any other stipulating long term CSA survival.

As with keeping West Virginia, the secessionists' best bet is to hope the Yankees don't fire a shot in the first place.
 
You know what, demonstrate to anyone that these are equivalent circumstances! This argument in classic CSA apologist fashion shows a disregard for the agency of common people as political actors.

I think this one paragraph shows you know that your argument simply does not hold up to neutral scrutiny. Not merely the accusation of being some kind of rebel stooge but your refusal to engage with the existing evidence being discussed.

Britain is not coming in to help the rebellious states. The Union would have to do something egregiously stupid to provoke Britain into war, something like I would posit, go and mess with a Royal Mail packet ship. I pointed this out in response to your claim the US would be occupying Upper Canada were Briton to raise a hand against it.

So we have situation where it is claimed the British would go hungry if they opposed the Union no matter what its actions. This despite evidence to the contrary, that at worst the British would be reduced to their period normal supply of wheat. It is further interesting you single out what you refer to as "Trent warriors" which I take to mean those folks who have the temerity to point that the Trent Affair was a separate and specific potential casus belli to the ACW. Related to it only by the Union's misapprehension of the desire of the powers of Britain and France to get involved. Mason and Slidell achieved nothing by their own efforts, they only came close because Lincoln dithered in accepting the inevitable and sending them on their way. Whereupon following their arrival in Europe they went back to non-entity status.

Now I would love to say that there were not people in Britain who did not misapprehend the Confederate cause and feel the British Empire should support it. The line of thinking there seems to be that the southern rebels were somehow just like the Greeks. That the British government was initially loathe to get involved on behalf of the Greeks suggests a certain pattern of behaviour and not some great moral impulse, sadly, to Britain's decision to recognise the Union blockade for example. That said there were people in Britain who did have a significant moral impulse in supporting the Union against the rebellion. However many of the more intellectual of these were not exactly convinced by the Union's anti-slavery credentials to this point. Indeed within the Union support for the unity of the United States did not meaningfully imply support for abolition. Many officers and soldiers went to war to preserve the United States alone, some of those were slave owners.

Abolition was primarily a tool aimed at international not national sentiment. This is not to say the morality of the international community was exactly stellar. Among those nations most impressed by the Proclamation were those who had been happy to profit by and even assist in Briton's war to push drugs on China. There is plenty of moral muck in this era to go around.

An independent Confederate States would be a calamity. That Lincoln made the correct decision in backing down from Wilke's action did play a part in averting that calamity. Your argument seems to be he cost the USA Canada, which may not be what you set out to achieve but since you have accused me of being some kind Confederate sympathiser I really ought not to extend you the benefit of the doubt now should I?

So the long and short of it that no Lincoln made the correct call. Violence with the British Empire would have been extremely detrimental to the Union cause, which as President was his first concern. It would likely have been detrimental to the cause of the abolition of slavery, which would have been a cost to world. It would have been the cause of loss of life and misdirected spending in Britain which would have been a loss to Britain. It would also have likely used up capital that went to helping countries such as Germany and the US and South America and others all progress, again a loss to the world.

After Trent a number of things occurred. The US moved to strengthen itself against potential foreign interference both diplomatically, the Emancipation Proclamation and physically in terms of laying in stocks of war materials such as gunpowder and in terms of influence, it moved to improve communications with European governments including the British and win them round to its way of thinking on the matter of rebellion. That it was mostly pushing an open door on the last helped as the first was slightly more sceptically greeted at the time than is recalled in the popular imagination now that Lincoln's intent is proven.

After Trent the likelihood of British involvement, note that word as opposed to intervention Britain was not keen on the idea of intervention as others have demonstrated in this thread, goes down dramatically because Lincoln and others understood the importance of not courting conflict. To examine why Trent as a singular moment in history could have been a disaster is not to endorse the Confederacy.
 
Thanks. Another thing that I haven't seen in Confederate independence TLs is the reaction of the slaves to that independence. In OTL, roughly 500,000 of the 3.5 million slaves from the Confederate states fled to the Union. That's a huge number, but most slaves were either too far from Union territory to have any chance of escape or they preferred waiting for liberation to the risks of fleeing to Union territory. Once those slaves realize that waiting will not bring freedom, I'd expect a large number to try to escape. Mississippi and South Carolina, where over half of the population are slaves, might even see mass uprisings. Any incidents will probably be magnified in the imaginations of the white Confederates, leading to brutal reprisals against real or imagined uprisings or attempts to escape.

It's something of a wild card. I can see the slaves near the lines attempting to flee, but in the Deep South untouched by the war or on the coasts they would stay put. Even when the Union army was on their doorstep, many were simply too afraid to flee the pervasive system of coercion and violence was so ingrained. Uprisings (I think) would follow in, say, 1866-67 when numbers of USCT managed to cross the border and disseminate themselves amongst the slave population. Sadly, I have a near certainty they would fail since the slave population would be so badly outnumbered and dispersed compared to the power of the CSA to react to rebellions. I have read one alternate history book which addressed it well.

Say what you will about the antebellum South, but they were depressingly good at oppressing their servile populace. Then again, most oppressive states are good at repression and little else.

I agree that San Diego and Monterey were vastly smaller than San Francisco, but they are large enough for ships to dock and load or unload cargo, so they would need an on station blockading force, not just an occasional sloop sailing by. Looking at a period map of California, a full blockade would also need to cover Trinidad Bay, Humboldt Bay, Bodega Bay, and San Luis Obispo Bay. From Trinidad, California to San Diego is about 800 miles of coastline. They should also probably patrol Mexico's Bahia de Todos Santos, which is about 70 miles south of San Diego.

The problem would be that they can't take the same number of ships as San Diego, nor could they resist a descent by the British navy. They are also 500 and 115 miles (respectively) away from San Francisco. There's no railroads connecting the state in this period, which means a long slow slog across land. Coupled with the small population and sheer distance, they aren't really capable of supporting the war effort. A blockade doesn't have to cover every port, just the important ones, and San Francisco is the only place of economic note.
 
Anyone counting on British intervention to win the secessionists' game for them should consider that even if the USA seems a bit culpable in entangling the British, it would tap into reserves of US patriotism left untapped OTL. A lot of people sat out the war OTL, not sure of the issues involved, who very likely would be moved by stung patriotism should the British appear to be opportunistically ganging up for their own invidious purposes. People strongly sympathetic with secession would not be so moved but there are plenty of others OTL who were skeptical of Lincoln's wisdom who might here join in.

This is a major reason I think invoking British intervention is a dubious trick, before we even get into the question of how committed British subjects would be to supporting such a war. I think that moral and morale factor gives us some grounds to assert British commitment must be limited or it would provoke dangerous levels of domestic reaction, and this alone would seem to rule out any rash ventures on the Pacific beyond the cheapest and simplest, which merely annoy but do not decide the war.

What I've read of EnglishCanuck's timeline Wrapped in Flames is good, but the field appears to be dominated by Trent Warriors who have Britain act more swiftly and unanimously than they did when national survival was at stake; commit to force levels not seen outside of the Napoleonic Wars or the Great War; and let Britain ignore friction, logistics, and the laws of physics; while the Union does little or nothing to prepare for or counter British actions.

I have heard that Harrison went the other way, with Monitors sailing to Britain and wreaking havoc, but then some of the same Trent Warriors who justly criticize Harrison have no problem with Britain producing a new ironclad design that would be even less seaworthy than the Monitor sailing to the US and wreaking havoc.
 
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The problem with a CS Navy is that of all the industrial things the CSA does not have, a shipbuilding industry capable of making steam powered wooden vessels let alone ironclads heads the list. The CSA did not have a single establishment capable of making marine steam engines suitable for riverboats let alone ocean going vessels. On top of that they did not have foundries capable of making the naval cannons to arm those ships. last, but not least, while there were some naval officers from the prewar who went south, overall the pool of southern sailors to actually serve in a navy was quite small. The reality is for quite some time the CSA would need to purchase their warships overseas (as they did OTL), at least 10-20 years before they could even begin to build modern warships. Those ships would need to be paid for with real money, and the CSA simply cannot afford to do this.

Remember that a very high percentage of the Southern capital was tied up in either slaves or land, neither of which was liquid.

Yep, and anything she buys will be countered by Union shipyards, if not two or three times over.
 
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