Not if they're planning to stay, it isn't. Though I wouldn't expect them to get the chance to do so.
Hispano-Confederate War
- Thread starter Wolfpaw
- Start date
Not if they're planning to stay, it isn't. Though I wouldn't expect them to get the chance to do so.
NothingNow
Banned
Especially since the Dry(er) season in Cuba is right when the Gulf and Florida Strait get nice and rough consistently.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Given the North was the wealthier part of the USA *before* the War broke out, it has a much easier time recovering from the loss of the CSA than the CSA does merely sustaining its own existence.
A 100,000 man army? That isn't exactly huge for 1865+ US. It can easily support an army that size or larger.
Considering that the war-time Union Army reached about 1,000,000, I'd have to agree that 100,000 would be easy to maintain.
Revolutionary Todyo
Banned
Just because it's easy to maintain doesn't mean it won't send American tax payers into shrieks of hysterics that now they have to pay for such a large army all year round.
This is a wild guess, but I think after the CW the US army was down-sized to about 16,000. Enlarge this to 30-40,000 and I think that's a decent size for the Union professional army. It can deal with Indians, bandits etc and it can be enlarged quickly should the damn Rebs try to invade.
The South is even more obsessed over state-rights then OTLs USA, meaning that even if they want a 75,000 strong standing army, they aren't going to fucking get one. As I mentioned before, state run militias would make up for the small size of the standing army to some degree.
Now I may be an ignorant Irishman, but frankly of your country just fought a Civil War over state rights and restricting the power of the Federal government, you would sort of hope the government listen to that.
This is a wild guess, but I think after the CW the US army was down-sized to about 16,000. Enlarge this to 30-40,000 and I think that's a decent size for the Union professional army. It can deal with Indians, bandits etc and it can be enlarged quickly should the damn Rebs try to invade.
The South is even more obsessed over state-rights then OTLs USA, meaning that even if they want a 75,000 strong standing army, they aren't going to fucking get one. As I mentioned before, state run militias would make up for the small size of the standing army to some degree.
Now I may be an ignorant Irishman, but frankly of your country just fought a Civil War over state rights and restricting the power of the Federal government, you would sort of hope the government listen to that.
Snake Featherston
Banned
It's not a question of invasion, nor was the war about states' rights and restricting the power of the government. The Union needs a huge army to prevent slave traders infiltrating the border armed and ready to kidnap US citizens and thereby risk sparking a war.
Too, the CSA will need a much vaster army to forestall such runaways and the planters won't object to an army that keeps their wealth in their hands.
Revolutionary Todyo
Banned
Isn't that what it came down to though? The South seceding because they disagreed with the Supreme Court that the Federal government had a right to end slavery, whereas they believed such a right should rest with the individual states.
And that's also why any centralised CSA is basically an oxymoron, as it's very defining feature is a minimalistic federal government which cannot and does not have authority over key issues which are the responsibility of state government.
I didnt initially bring up invasion myself, Johnrankins did.
To me, it sounds like stopping runaway slaves should be the job of those state militias I mentioned earlier. As large armies are seen as bad in the eyes of traditional liberals, a smaller local force would be better suited, not least because it doesn't look like the Federal government is dicking around trying to force any state to tow a particular line.
I think planters will object to what looks like big government spending their tax money on something they don't think they'll need for whatever reason, far better they look after their own livelihoods out of their own pocket.
I know it's not the most logical thing to do, but the CSA is not fucking logical.
Actually neither side thought the US government had the right to END slavery before the war broke out. The Republicans merely tried to limit it to the areas it already was and keep it out of the Western territories. The South wanted to spread slavery all across the country. When that was prevented they threw a hissy fit and seceded on a whim.
I doubt they would scream that loud. 100,000 men is not that large for a country the size of the US and the US/CSA relationship will be hostile for generations assuming the CSA lasts that long and the CSA is just over the border. It is one thing to have a small army when there isn't a signifigant rival for thousands of miles and another to have a small army with one just next door!
67th Tigers
Banned
How? Income tax? Where are the funds diverted from, bearing in mind that the part of the country that used to provide the bulk of Federal income now has their own, separate, army.
Bearing in mind just how close the OTL US came to going under in the 1870's that doesn't bode well.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Um, what? The OTL USA in the 1870s had as one of its problems holding down a sullen South intent on massacring its way to keeping blacks inferior, as opposed to acting like civilized human beings and doing things like using politics. Nothing says an independent USA that has *all* the financial infrastructure of the pre-war USA, the proto-industrial factories of the North, and most importantly the established trading factories of New York, to say nothing of the ability to begin building the Transcontinental Railroad *and* fight the CSA at the same time, as well as fighting large-scale Indian Wars and the CSA at the same time will go under.
Are you sure you're arguing from economic reality as it existed at the time?
67th Tigers
Banned
Are you sure you haven't missed the second largest depression of all time?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1873
Snake Featherston
Banned
Are you so certain that the precise chain of circumstances creating it would exist if the CSA somehow accomplishes the minor miracle of winning the war against all the odds in the first place? And I repeat the question of why you think that the North is somehow incapable of sustaining itself financially without the trainwreck the CSA would become. And incidentally, if this still happens, butterflies be damned, in the North, why won't it equally affect the CSA when the global economy starts creaking from a credit crunch? Is there some kind of anti-economics field that starts south of the Potomac?
Are you missing the fact that despite all that it was the #2 industrial power on the planet at the time? It can easily afford it.
Income tax is one way and there are others. The US was the #2 industrial power at the time not an economic backwater. Somehow you think the US in 1870 was the same as in 1814!
Snake Featherston
Banned
Income tax is one way and there are others. The US was the #2 industrial power at the time not an economic backwater. Somehow you think the US in 1870 was the same as in 1814!
You're talking to a guy that thinks that razing all of New York City to the ground ala Operation Barbarossa WRT Leningrad is a "moderate" war aim.
67th Tigers
Banned
4th or 5th, lets not conflate later events with the 1870's.
Yes, but how does it gather the money? Direct taxation? Any party imposing this will be out on their arse.
You also have to deal with less long term growth, although it might be beneficial in a perverse way. The corruption in the rail and iron/steel industries might be avoided.
Snake Featherston
Banned
So you assume that with a hostile neighbor to the south and the memory of the 1850s "enforcement" of the Fugitive Slave Law, let alone the CSA's idiocy that will lead to to use that law to justify kidnapping raids into US territory, that the USA will have the same unthinking hostility to a large peacetime army it did IOTL, Butterflies be damned?
I am puzzled at how someone on an alternate history forum seems to forget that the USA's military-strategic requirements changing easily can produce the changes required to get it to accept a large peacetime army. See: post-1945, only in this case the menacing society is not over the Atlantic Ocean but sharing a land border, with a history right up to its carving itself out of the old USA of attempting to destabilize US institutions. The USA won't orient itself solely against the Confederacy, but the prospect of a renewed war over kidnapping/the fugitive slave issue *will* by itself mandate a larger army required to police the border. And 100,000 soldiers will bash the Indian tribes remaining in independence out of existence in five/ten years, meaning most of that army *will* be garrisoned on the CS border.