Go South, Young Man...

The Sandman

Banned
"I detest your views (that a man can be owned by another man) but I will defend to the death your right to have them...Equally, I cannot accept that others have the right to impose their views on me if my means of providing for my family is damaged thereby...It is best we part as friends before we are torn apart as enemies"---Senator Lincoln's address to Congress before the withdrawal of the seceding states, March 1861

This is my rough vision of a southern Lincoln. You don't really need to change his views on slavery, you just have to make him as detemined to break the union as he was to hold it together in OTL. I see a Lincoln emerging almost against the wishes of the Planter Elites, a backwoodsman with a flair for rhetoric and an innate political understanding of his section of the country and how to play on that understanding.

As an earlier poster noted, it's the idea of Lincoln successfully playing on the sympathies of the border states, waging an entirely defensive war and playing for time until the politics of the north turned in his favour that would be so fascinating in this TL. I think he would understand from the beginning that the Confederacy strategy wasn't to win in stand-up battles against the stronger Union, but to break thier determination to fight to keep the Confederate states.

Would a ATL President Seward go to the constitutionally questionable lengths used by OTL Lincoln? I don't know enough about the period to say...

I have to say I really hope someone does a carefully researched TL on this. Thanks to Robert for the great thread.

David

I like your idea quite a bit; Lincoln as the Andy Jackson of the South, you might say.

The problem is that the Confederacy is ultimately being run by and for the benefit of the planter elite you mention, and they would not be thrilled at having an outsider represent them.

And that I think is also where the slavery thing goes astray. Slavery was seen as the rallying issue not so much because the planters seceded to preserve slavery as it was that the planters seceded to preserve their way of life and personal stature, of which slavery was an integral part.

And the reason why the Confederacy was willing to consider abandoning slavery in mid to late 1864 was out of desperation and common sense. By that point in time, Tennessee was gone, Arkansas was gone, Louisiana was gone, Georgia was going, the economy was falling apart due to the severing of most of the major transportation links by the Union and due to the blockade, and the only intact army in the Confederacy was bottled up just south of Richmond. And slavery was now a dead letter everywhere the Union had occupied.

At that point, getting rid of slavery to save the remaining bits of the plantation system would have been a good trade for the CSA, since a CSA that didn't win until late 1864-early 1865 simply wouldn't have been able to reinstate slavery where the war had ended it.
 
Top