The CSA won the civil war (meaning: no loss of territory + indy) due to European intervention in 1862, but the Union with Abraham Lincoln at its helm emancipated their slaves and revoked any Fugitive Slave laws, so that any slave managing to go over the Union border was a free man. The same applied if one managed to get to neutral Kentucky. No Jim-Crow-like laws were instituted either as Radical Republicans - rid of most of the Democrats in Congress and the remaining ones being abolitionists - pushed through truely rights-giving amendments and laws.
But as the Boll Weevil crossed the Rio Grande in 1866, two years after the election of George Washington Julian, the CSA collapsed. Jefferson Davis was POTCS, but due to the States' Rights thingy and a neutral Kentucky, Texas and Virginia - the state with the capital of Richmond - seceded instead of calling the Army up. Floridian and Georgian responses were also lukewarm, and the Union thought it legal to support secessionist states against the CSA as they - and rightfully so - saw them as independent states and not as part of the CSA where they were not allowed to intervene. The CSA saw it differently, naturally, and Birmingham declared war on the USA. Together with the War of the Three Germanies (Switzerland wanted to bite a piece off and intervened on the German side) with a French intervention pro-Austria and later a Russian Civil War about reactionatries wanting to introduce serfdom, the Spanish, French and Brits intervening on the side of the Confederacy, Portugal, though, intervening on the US side and Britain later blatantly changing sides to the US-Prussian side, this should become World War I. However, nobody called it that as the Europeans mainly thought of it as a War of the Three Germanies, sometimes even seen as combined with Wars of the Bavarian and Piemontese Succession.
After eleven years of warfare in Europe Portugal got Galicia, the Germanies were united unter Prussian leadership with Prussia controlling territory from Esbjerg to Trieste and from Freiburg (Switzerland) to Königsberg, the British Empire got even mightier and the Portuguese getting Galicia. Russia broke up and left several puppet states of Germany (or, if you want to be generous, Germano-Hungarian or Germano-Finnish ones) in place, somewhat like Brest-Litovsk, and had another civil war. In America, however, the war went on. The Confederates put up a hard guerilla fight and there were a lot of secessions and counter-secessions on both sides. As the war in Europe wound down, the one in America wound up and after seven years, it was a real war between powers more than a civil war. Kentuckians varyingly fought for the Union or Confederate Armies, this also applied to Virginians and Texans, and all three proved extremely valiant fighters. Further to the West, Mormons - still practising polygamy and the USA finding them even more unacceptable than blacks - seceded and founded the Holy Kingdom of Deseret, taking the Navajo and Hopi nations with them. Several Indian tribes also allied with the Confederate side and thus, a supply route could be established from Arkansas into Utah, naturally only with the help of Franco-Spano-British veterans. And they now came in droves.
Elections were still held every four years as ever in the USA, however, this increasingly became a show as George Washington Julian won the next three elections handily on a fig-leaf "Keep the Union!" campaign (1868, 1872, 1876, 1880). On top of it all, with a
VEI 7 of Mt. Rinjani, there is a Second Year Without a Summer and so, harvests were severely diminished and completely failed in 1883 in Europe.
In the winter of 1882/1883, with millions over millions of men having perished on both sides, the people of the Union - against the united powers of Europe (with Germany having chosen neutrality and
Platz an der Sonne in as of yet 'available' Africa for now!), the Union Army was more or less stalemated - had enough of continuous warfare on their territory and nobody being able or wanting to stop it and rose up. But it was not communism that reared its head (although some strands of rebels
were communist), but what took power was an extreme Christian Fundamentalist - but pacifist - streak of the Moralist movement, i.e. radically Christian pseudo-socialists (Charity, but only if you are up to the high Moral Standards!).
The CSA was the one to profit, but also several secessionist states. As the European Powers did not really believe in either some "states' rights" thingy nor in the peculiar institution, they recognised both the CSA (Tennesse, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi) and several independent nations (Texas, Florida, Virginia, Deseret) and withdrew hastily due to red revolutions occuring in Europe. France and Spain could no longer be salvaged and the Reds proclaimed
An XCI de la Revolution. Germany was content with snatching Alsace-Lorraine and Portugal thought it needed Extremadura, but otherwise, full-scale invasion of a Franco-Spanish Rational Workers' State (FSRWS) was deemed impractical. On top of that, by 1887, Extremadura proved too Spanish to handle for Portugal (constant pro-FSRWS unrest mainly out of nationalism) and the latter fell to supported communists.
Out of the Moral Movement - now, the USA was frequently called Moral States or Christian States of America even though those names were never official - a state was formed, a theocracy where God was to be beseeched when harvests failed and where every American
had to live a good life. What that meant depended on "the Word of God" uttered through the President, but it always included:
- life, being fruitful and multiply as much as possible
- prohibition of alcohol, tobacco (the latter less enforced), "lewdness" (mostly pornography, homsexual acts and of course polygamy), divorces ----> forced lifelong marriage, often from youth
- keeping to the Ten Commandments and, depending on POTUS, many other verses of the Bible
- work, get as rich as possible
- be charitable, give to the poor,
- serve in the military forces or police, fulfil several other civil duties (from serving at the altar to several forced "experiences", e.g. prison on both sides or a (mostly mock) criminal trial - that shall deter you from committing sins=crimes)
Only such a life was considered any good, and a life that could not become good (e.g. because the parents had committed homosexual acts, were polygamous, the child was concieved due to rape or the mother had a previous abortion, or many other circumstances) was prone to be ended prematurely being considered "not good enough to be lived out" or "lived in irredeemable sin". Meanwhile, Europeans were busy establishing red forms of government and/or killing each other for nationalist causes in the East (Hungary!) - or colonising Africa, opening Japan and doing other things than caring about what a Moralist in New Jerusalem, D.C. did - and Virginia and Kentucky were "reincorporated" into the Union in 1890. It
was an invasion, but resistance was as token as with
Anschluss. Texas was puppetised, but the Moral States had to promise them independence as otherwise, war would have followed. Britain turned to other things, too, e.g. expanding their Empire, keeping up with the German Empire, hindering the FSRWS as well as possible from acquiring colonies (which didn't work that well as Italians grew quite fond of the FSRWS, too, and built on their example to form the Italian Rational State), and forgot all about supporting Birmingham.
The War of American Reunification was fought as an uprising in Kentucky in support of the CSA - yes, still including the peculiar institution - was supported from Birmingham and the Governor of Kentucky assassinated on July 16, 1906. Another three years of warfare with once again secessions and counter-secessions were necessary to reintegrate the CSA and Deseret. Texas no longer remained independent either after another
Anschluss in 1911-12 (with a bit more than token resistance), and America was united again.
The Moral States were black-friendly (born out of a Union with extremely pronounced rights of every citizen, after all) and generally friendly to devout to fundamentalist religious immigrants, so that devout Christians and devout Jews, Muslims or Hindus, as long as they followed the principles outlined above, could live together.
The Moralist regime lasted now and Europe was stable, too, with the four powers of the ERWS (after having annexed Belgium and Luxembourg, the FSRWS was renamed), the German Empire, the Russian Empire, and the British Empire. In Asia, the Rational Republic of Japan and the Rational Manchukuo State were pitted against the American-leaning Zua Dynasty. However, all was not good in the Moral States: Organised crime grew and grew as not all corners of the country could be controlled and moralism became ever more a double-standard as more and more lives were deemed "irredeemably sinful", ended by an ever stronger secret police and then
Stasi-like system, etc. pp. Elections, by the way, were
still held every four years for the show effect. As a result of more frequent uprisings and demonstrations and, worse, "violating Values of God or the Ten Commandments" becoming more common, the governments became ever more paranoid.
1903-1915: Henré K. Calhoun
1915-1923: Rainer M. Steinschneider
1923-1931: Abraham S. Kaufman
1931-1939: Ibou Janneh
1939-1947: Peter I. Roberts
The Janneh and Roberts presidencies could already be labeled as totalitarian and persecuting anybody who was even
accused of immoral behaviour, but by the beginning of the 1951 term of Jonathan S. Leaven (Peter Roberts resigned de to health reasons), foreign policy came back into the Moral States as a Red regime had taken over in Brazil, even if by more or less democratic means. The European and Italian Rational Workers' States supported the regime in Sao Paulo and the Moralists supported a Moral counterrevolution. For now, it remained a proxy war - and the secret police and secret services became more omnipresent - but soon enough, Colombia and Panama followed. At first, the Moral regime in Panama was restored with the utmost brutality in April 1953, but then, as the ERWS sent their proper navy and army into Panama and fought against the newly imposed Moralists, the Moral States themselves declared war on the European Rational Workers' States on May 25, 1953.
And with this move, World War II started. The Chinese armies of the Zua dynasty proved vastly inferior (though not at all lacking religous zeal and fervor) to the Japanese and Russian modern armies, and so did the Moral American armies as both states wer built on a foundation of pacifism and non-interventionism rather than war (Monroe Doctrine!). The navies and air forces of the two "vast" states could be defeated relatively easily, although not quite as easily as the Allies expected. Despite no navy and air force support, through their extreme religious zeal and fervor (and discipline, even if only enforced through crucifixion and burning at the stake), both of these armies could wreak a lot of havoc before they were beaten. Many cities were damaged or destroyed, about 9 million civilians were killed in the ERWS alone by attacks that rather resemble terrorist attacks than true military, though it all resembled more "Da'esh with a nation" than World War II in OTL.
Nevertheless, the ERWS deemed it necessary to use, on July 4, 1957, the newly-developed nuclear bomb on New Jerusalem to destroy the government of the Moral States as Illarramendi (rename for Paris) believed this the easiest way to break the fundamentalists once and forever.
This could be achieved, and Stephen Crowder had been picked as the one most rational revolutionary (=rebel) leader to lead a new American nation. London, Illarramendi, Milan and Tokyo had agreed to jointly occupy the former USA, while Germany got to occupy the 1861 CSA together with Moscow. And when Stephen Crowder was finally inaugurated as the first Director (
President is now a title as shunned as
Führer in OTL Germany) of the Rational American Workers' Nation, the capital renamed Sisto, D.C. (after a prominent Italian leader of the revolution), he spoke this world-famous quote.
An important thing in the RAWN from the beginning and to this day is the freedom you have, the freedom you have to choose how you want to live your life, who you want to govern you (democracy!),... and this includes the freedom to flunk your life! The most important thing about Rational Workers' Republics/Nations/States distinguishing them from OTL European democracies is their strict atheism (total separation of church and state, no religious holidays etc. - but by the early 1950s, you could enter a church in France without the police getting suspicious), their "checks" on democracy by technocratically selected bodies which have the rights to veto irrational decisions (but rarely have used these powers as of yet), and being governed by a Director, namely the Director of the Convention of the - democratically elected - Syndicate Directors.
A Cold War between Rationalists (Illarramendi, Milan and Tokyo) and Monarchists (Berlin and Moscow), with London more neutral, ensued. Despite the fact that it was not as hot as OTL Cold War and more "fought" on scientific and other fields, in addition to some proxy wars in the Third World, the two nations (the
Königreich Amerika =Kingdom of America and the Rational American Workers' Nation) have not yet managed - and might well never manage - to reunite.
"Yes, the price of freedom
can sometimes be one's life. That 124 people lost their lives is sad, but it was a demonstration of as well as a necessity for freedom, for the Western, especially the American Way of Life! I will see to the preservation of this Liberty, the Liberty that was imagined by the Founding Fathers when they used this word in the Constitution!"
