As we know Nathen Bedford Forrest was elected in 1866. He then set the CSA on the path to total military dictatorship by ramming through a series of admendments to the CSA constitution that strengthened the presidency and removed the restriction of being able to serve only one term. He was reelected in 1872 and Wade Hampton assumed the presidency on his death in 1877. If he wasn't elected would the CSA been able to avoid the fate of winding up as a military dictatorship or was it pretty much doomed to become one at the start?
DBWI: No President Nathen Bedford Forrest
- Thread starter Johnrankins
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TBH, the C.S.A. was a slave-o-crat state thru and thru but it didn't have to be a dictatorship, necessarily. Though I do believe the problem was present from the very beginning, and I believe this was part of the reason why the Confederacy fell apart in 1892; there were no clauses prohibiting the use of emergency powers as Pres. Forrest had done.
Well, there was also the increasing British pressure after 1882 when parliment slapped heavy tarrifs on CSA cotton to try and get them to end slavery. Of course that it helped British cotton plantations in India and Eygpt didn't exactly hurt. They certainly were in the forefront although I think it was likely to happen anyways sooner or later.
Deleted member 16736
I think the biggest shame for the Confederacy was that they couldn't elect the most well-qualified man they had to the presidency because they couldn't hold his state in the war. John Breckinridge was forced to live out the rest of his career in the military because nobody was willing to give him a seat in the senate or a governorship. Such a waste. He was a shrewd politician who, through diplomacy (which Bedford and his cronies wouldn't know if it hit them with a stick), could have kept England from destroying the CSA's economy. I believe he could have started the path to at least nominal manumission, too.
He was such a great talent, it's a shame it was all wasted on being Commander of the Armies at a time of, relative, peace.
He was such a great talent, it's a shame it was all wasted on being Commander of the Armies at a time of, relative, peace.
The only way he COULD have kept England from destroying the CSA is to agree to some kind of manumission IMO. Whether he was able and willing to do so I don't know. But yes, Breckenridge is your best bet for a decent president of the CSA.
Very true. It also didn't help the CSA that the Mexicans had gotten pissed off about the occupation of Sonora & Chihuahua in 1877 and were comtemplating a treaty with the U.S. so they could liberate both of these states.....although they ended up just going to the U.S. after the anti-Obregonista revolt in 1889, along with the northern 60% of Coahuila(admitted in 1892, just after the C.S.A.'s collapse. What remained in Mexico, btw, renamed as Juarez in honor of that nation's most revered leader, with Saltillo as its capital.).
The CSA was a train wreck in slow motion from the day it seceded to the day the Treaty of Washington was signed. The planter class that ruled the nation either overtly or as puppet masters somehow managed to eventually piss EVERYONE off... The US, Europe, Mexico, S. America, and everyone in the CSA who wasn't them as well. There's a reason why the US intervention in the 'Revolution of '91' was considered a mercy killing of a state whose internal chaos and death wouldn't be rivaled until Leopold II's little house of horrors in the Congo Free State came to light. They are still finding mass graves from Austin to Franklin.
Frankly its amazing the CSA lasted as long as it did, run by the slaveholding fools in their mansions and/or the increasingly bloodthirsty and unhinged 'Presidents' who always found a new crisis to distract the low classes with until they couldn't.
Snake Featherston
Banned
The problem the CSA had is that it had a very fragile sense of civil infrastructure. The original class system pre-Junta had no unifying force, meaning it created more divisions than unifying factors, the planters were not adapting well, initially speaking, to the challenges of self-governance, and of course there was the problem of paying the army. In a sense Forrest could be seen as analoguous to the US Newburgh Conspiracy that actually resulted in an army taking over the state. Bashing the CS government is easy, it's worth, however, taking an honest look at the difficulty most New World states in general experienced with large armies.
The chief difference, too, between the CSA and the USA was that the USA had a time to build an established tradition of separate political and military leadership and civilian control of the military. The internal contradictions of the CSA foredoomed it not to have that time, while to forestall it requires perhaps either Breckenridge or maybe Toombs having a chance to develop CS civil government.
Even then a civil government in the CSA will have plenty of authoritarian asshattery of its own, the military junta did not introduce massive wholesale censorship of everything in the CSA, the antebellum civil governments pre-Secession War did.
The chief difference, too, between the CSA and the USA was that the USA had a time to build an established tradition of separate political and military leadership and civilian control of the military. The internal contradictions of the CSA foredoomed it not to have that time, while to forestall it requires perhaps either Breckenridge or maybe Toombs having a chance to develop CS civil government.
Even then a civil government in the CSA will have plenty of authoritarian asshattery of its own, the military junta did not introduce massive wholesale censorship of everything in the CSA, the antebellum civil governments pre-Secession War did.
True, even the ante-bellum South was censoring everything that was anti-slavery. This grew and grew during the war and afterwords until everything had to be cleared by government censors.
I think the one thing that really prevented slavery from reviving(which might have saved C.S.A. industry, and therefore, perhaps the country itself.) was the fact that mass-industrialization of the 'Peculiar Institution' never really did take off, mainly because many North American industrialists were in the Union states and most of them greatly feared losing much of their business if they tried to establish ties with the Confederacy[1].
OOC:
[1]In DoD, this wasn't nearly as much of a problem, thanks to New England's leaving the Union. Therefore, industrialization of slavery was far less difficult, thanks to a largely indifferent public in most areas of the remainder of the *U.S., and other factors as well.
Well, slavery did survive to the end. The main cause of the swift decline of the prices on slaves seems to be the British economic sanctions against the CSA. That caused a big cotton glut in the CSA which pushed down cotton prices. Industrialization never occured in the CSA for many reasons but the biggest are economic. It takes money to do and the CSA was flat broke its entire existance. After it paid the army and its back debt the CSA government had no money left and had to print large sums of money to pay its bills. Not many people want to invest where the inflation rate is 10-15% a month, the interest rate on loans is 17-22% a month and the government is shaky.
There were certainly some decent politicians in the CSA. But none of them could have lifted that nation out of the disaster it was drifting into since the system was collapsing even as it formed.
Maybe if Jefferson Davis and the original secessionists had been 'decent' rather than 'honorable' they could have built a working state, instead they built the state by the 'gentlemen' for the 'gentlemen' and rigged the system so that even the last Presidents who openly despised the CSA's plantation class couldn't take any major action against said 'gentlemen' because all those 'gentlemen' ever did was increase their own power.
What little statistics the CSA bothered to keep paints quite the shocking picture by the end of 1890, on the eve of the revolution 80%+ of of the population, black AND white, were living in either slavery or under the 'indenture' statutes (aka slavery), and 90% of all land in the CSA was owned by the top .01% of the population. Heck the difference between the top .01% and the 'bottom of the top 1%' was something on the order of 1,000 times the income and relative wealth or something mind boggling.
But as terrible as they were, what happened to all but a handful of them in 91-92 made them more objects of pity than anything else.
Well, maybe if you keep in mind how aptly a comparison between the CSA elite and the Belgian tyrant-leeches of the Congo was made in an earlier post, and, the laundry list of atrocities that merely started with smothering the rights that secessionists pretended to pay respect to, pity on them is like sugar sprinkled on rocks, wasted.
Yea, comrade, for they sowed, and, they reaped.
Yep, they were in the same league as the tyrants of the Free Congo State. I don't waste pity on them either. The revolution in 1891 and their reunion with the US in 1892 wiped out all but a few planters but they did ask for it.
I agree completely they reaped what they sowed, but the images from that 'revolution' are sickening and something I wouldn't wish on any living thing. The CSA during those those two years of anarchy and then until the US Army really started cracking down in late 1894 and putting together the segregation camps (and that more for the safety of the refugees than any 'control') is just... well...
It's quite the testament to the madness and rage that swallowed up between 6-8 million of the CSA's estimated 16 million inhabitants in the decade between 1890 and 1900 that one could truly say the plantation owners truly 'got what Karma they gave.'
I guess the true escape artist was Thomas Jackson Jr., the last 'true' President of the CSA, dead by his own hand before the fires burned Richmond to the ground and his security detail was overrun. He never paid for his 'solutions' and his cordoning off areas and then 'pacifying' them.
I doubt Leopold would have received justice for his crimes against the Congolese if not for Jackson, though.
I agree completely they reaped what they sowed, but the images from that 'revolution' are sickening and something I wouldn't wish on any living thing. The CSA during those those two years of anarchy and then until the US Army really started cracking down in late 1894 and putting together the segregation camps (and that more for the safety of the refugees than any 'control') is just... well...
It's quite the testament to the madness and rage that swallowed up between 6-8 million of the CSA's estimated 16 million inhabitants in the decade between 1890 and 1900 that one could truly say the plantation owners truly 'got what Karma they gave.'
I guess the true escape artist was Thomas Jackson Jr., the last 'true' President of the CSA, dead by his own hand before the fires burned Richmond to the ground and his security detail was overrun. He never paid for his 'solutions' and his cordoning off areas and then 'pacifying' them.
I doubt Leopold would have received justice for his crimes against the Congolese if not for Jackson, though.
You added a zero there, it was between 600,000- 800,000. OOC:That would still be damn bloody. 6-8 million is simply insane I don't know if the bloodiest war in history killed off half its population.
OOC: I'm talking more in a 'when things are said and done.' This wasn't a war so much as a complete and total internal collapse of society Rwanda style followed by a terrible famine 'Irish potato famine' bad followed by a massive cholera epidemic. The 'direct' killings amounted to 6-800k, but this CSA is a failed state on North Korea levels in the end and the US knew it was bad, but had no idea it would be as bad as it was and simply couldn't gain control over an area the size of W. Europe quickly enough to stop a lot of the worst of the tragedy.