#2 by 1860 according to Battle Cry of Freedom and other sources, a book by the way written originally for Oxford University. It also says that by that time it passed GB in population having the 3rd largest population in the Western world after only Russia and France.
Hispano-Confederate War
- Thread starter Wolfpaw
- Start date
#2 by 1860 according to Battle Cry of Freedom and other sources, a book by the way written originally for Oxford University. It also says that by that time it passed GB in population having the 3rd largest population in the Western world after only Russia and France.
Exactly, the US in 1870 where the South actually wins by some miracle is not the same as the US of OTL.
Hm. The entire pre-war US navy sided with the Union. The mercantile navy was mainly form the New England states, who relied a lot on sea-borne trade. The southern states had no mercantile nor war naval tradition, almost no shipyards and the few blockade breakers and raiders they fielded were usually bought overseas. The coastal ironclads they built were converted existing hulls. The US would also still have the Pacific coast and the US interests in the Pacific (mainly Hawaii and the trade with Japan recently forced through by Perry).
It will take the CSA a long time to build up a blue water navy and the institution and tradition needed for a navy able to take on any European navy.
In the meantime, the Spanish had no problems projecting power in the eastern Pacific in the Chinchila War, sending five large steam frigates and two steam gunboats as well as an armoured steam frigate there.
At least 7 armoured steam frigates entered service in the Spanish navy 1864-1870. If there's a semi-hostile CSA with designs on Cuba, the Spaniards are probably going to be building even more ironclads than the two monitors they built 1874.
CSA would have to build a blue-water navy that could dominate the Caribbean with New Orleans as the only major port and naval base (and that was destroyed during the war OTL, so it would have to be rebuilt) from scratch, which will take a long time. I seriously doubt the CSA will build a bluewater navy quickly, not a mercantile fleet.
Armoured steam frigates and central battery ships (blue water):
Numancia (1865), Tetuan (1866), Arapiles (1868), Vitoria (1868), Zaragoza (1868), Sagunto (1877), Mendez Nuñez (1870).
Monitors:
Puigcerdá (1875), Duque de Tetuán (1874).
Semi-armoured screw corvette:
Tornado (1870)
Spain also had 11 wooden steam frigates and 12 wooden steam corvettes.
Spain had the 4th navy in the world by tle late 1860s and early 1870s. CSA needs to overcome this.
It will take the CSA a long time to build up a blue water navy and the institution and tradition needed for a navy able to take on any European navy.
In the meantime, the Spanish had no problems projecting power in the eastern Pacific in the Chinchila War, sending five large steam frigates and two steam gunboats as well as an armoured steam frigate there.
At least 7 armoured steam frigates entered service in the Spanish navy 1864-1870. If there's a semi-hostile CSA with designs on Cuba, the Spaniards are probably going to be building even more ironclads than the two monitors they built 1874.
CSA would have to build a blue-water navy that could dominate the Caribbean with New Orleans as the only major port and naval base (and that was destroyed during the war OTL, so it would have to be rebuilt) from scratch, which will take a long time. I seriously doubt the CSA will build a bluewater navy quickly, not a mercantile fleet.
Armoured steam frigates and central battery ships (blue water):
Numancia (1865), Tetuan (1866), Arapiles (1868), Vitoria (1868), Zaragoza (1868), Sagunto (1877), Mendez Nuñez (1870).
Monitors:
Puigcerdá (1875), Duque de Tetuán (1874).
Semi-armoured screw corvette:
Tornado (1870)
Spain also had 11 wooden steam frigates and 12 wooden steam corvettes.
Spain had the 4th navy in the world by tle late 1860s and early 1870s. CSA needs to overcome this.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Because the same people that had whined about Lincoln's election refused to even let him on the ballot in the South and had deliberately fractured the Democratic Party to engineer the crisis.
If you secede over losing ONE FAIR ELECTION than you are seceding on a whim! Democracy means accepting the results of a fair election.
Snake Featherston
Banned
More than that, if you deliberately engineer the election to ensure precisely the outcome that without surprising anyone at all is now the coming of the Apocalypse, then any claim of a sincere oppression is so much folderol. The Southern secessionists deliberately engineered the crisis, it was not at all something that most Southerners saw as worth the hysteria. The degree to which even Delaware proved recalcitrant at getting rid of a slavery system that was mostly-moribund offers a hint as to what would have happened had a real abolitionist won the Oval Office, but 1860 was not that.
Actually, the Dred Scott decision showed the South was just fine with Federal interference on the issue of slavery, so long as it interfered to preserve slavery.
Several Confederate states spelled out their reasons in the Declarations of Causes for Secession. I also recommend reading the Cornerstone Speech.
The South had wanted to add Cuba for a significant time before the war. Thomas Jefferson had suggested it in 1820 and the 1854 Ostend Manifesto strongly advocated acquiring Cuba.
During that period of OTL, the US had 25 regiments of infantry and 10 of cavalry. IIRC, that's a paper strength of 35,000 men, but actual field strength would be smaller.
Snake Featherston
Banned
The US Army of the time was also in a transition as the end of the Indian Wars in this timeframe meant it was having to find a new purpose: it no longer had need to maintain frontier garrisons against the ever-shrinking number of independent native polities, but there was also a need to provide a new concept and purpose of what the US Army was *for*. It was, incidentally, around this time that people finally would go into abolishing the position of General-in-Chief and much of the bureaucratic-heavy infrastructure of the army and replacing it with the Chief of Staff system.
The US Army of the 1880s/1890s/1900s still had quite a few Civil War veterans in its higher echelons, and it's partially this that explains the idiot damn fool phenomena of attacking in Spain in 1898 with fossilized Civil War tactics including lines of battle and skirmishers in heavy wool outfits without regard for terrain.
The old Army, incidentally, was as a general rule far smaller than the present-day army was, but its bureaucratic structure was if anything disproportionately far more convoluted. People forget that the existence of somewhere around 5-7 separate Bureaus that did not answer to the General-in-Chief came out of a peacetime army that was in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the larger army of the present day.
Snake Featherston
Banned
The CSA has to have a larger army than the Union does, to continue slave patrols. If it comes to keeping their money intact the planters are just peachy with paying for the army required to sustain that. This means that after the 1860s the CS Army pretty much starts straddling the line between the Republican Guard and a conventional military, and arguably does not see necessarily employment or training in more modern, conventional combat roles even without a CS military putsch.
The US military system of the time was rather wretchedly complex, so it's difficult to provide "actual" numbers. For one thing the US Army of the time had what it called "Volunteer" regiments which were precisely that: mass armies of untrained volunteers. These people were people without any real exposure to Army life whatsoever, and this created major issues of needless casualties in an unvarying, monotonous, and depressing fashion for the United States.
The Union Army of the US Civil War was 1.5 million strong, but in terms of the structure, it was created by convoluted patterns of enlistment, as well as recruiting from both US states and states controlled by the so-called Richmond government, such that the Civil War is one case where numbers can only be estimates. Thus while I say the Union army was 1.5 million strong, it might have been larger at various points, or alternately it might include in several cases counting one person twice or thrice due to multiple enlistments.
Further complicating this was the pattern of Brevet ranking, where people got all the responsibility but none of the extra pay, and which could and did create issues where people who were Brevet Major Generals of Volunteers would be outranked by Brigadier Generals of Regulars, and who controlled what when was a massively convoluted prima donna game.
Thus while the US *Regular* army was tiny, the total mass of the US Army was not entirely so much. The system to me resembles in intention what the Soviets tried to do with their concept of a mass reserve, and like the USA the USSR never really made *that* work either.
The US Army of the antebellum and to some extent the postbellum era was not only tiny, but it was distributed at multiple forts, it was required as well to garrison frontiers next to remaining Indian territory (not by any means easy duty), and it was underpaid and led by old fossils due to absence of a pension plan and the Army providing perhaps the only profession at the time where people could be cared for until they croaked.
It was a very different world for the military then, and the prospect of the 1850s, this time with an actual army behind the slavecatchers is for the USA what Germany defeating France was for the OTL USA in the 1930s: those days are over, a much larger army is *required* to sustain itself. This probably leads to a lot more 1877s and Bonus Army Incidents in the USA, too, as there's more army to throw at those problems and much less fear of having a big peacetime army.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Yes, but the CSA's security requirements are rather different than the USA's. It doesn't have an equally large merchant class intending on trading with the rest of the world, nor does it particularly *need* a big blue-water navy. Its own internal commerce would represent most of its trade, and its very underdevelopment would also mean that it has less money to spend on its military. As a large ground force is much more conducive to the CSA's needs than a Navy is, thus the CSA will spend more on a good Army than it ever would on a good Navy. This I think Turtledove did more or less as accurate as anything in TL-191.
67th Tigers
Banned
When? Estimates are that 1.5 million served in the US military at some point. Usually the US could not get 300,000 into the field.
Also, it was the *south* that traded gregariously with the rest of the world, whilst the north wanted to raise protectionist walls. Pre-1860 commerce is weighted towards the south.
Snake Featherston
Banned
It was not the South that raised the naval commerce, which is what trading with the rest of the world that qualifies. Southern pilots didn't send cotton, Southern pilots imported chattel slaves. The Union army reached its wartime peak in size in 1864, though the total size and those forces engaging in active field operations of course were not all the same. I don't expect you to ever debate in good faith in this Civil War numbers game anyhow so I'm not going to follow this rabbit trail any further than this. At its wartime peak the Union army totalled 1,000,000 troops, but a great deal of these were garrison forces. And of course the total size of the Union army did not equal the total number of troops engaged in offensive operations. In Virginia the Army of the Potomac began with around 118,000 men, the Army of the James totalled 30,000 men, Sigel and Hunter commanded 10,000, for a combat effective total of 148,000. Sherman commanded three armies which totalled 100,000, the largest the Army of the Cumberland with 60,000, then the Armies of the Tennessee and the Ohio between them providing the other 40,000. Banks and and Curtis commanded 40,000 so that leaves us with a total around 288,000 men in active combat operations, this excluding the troops allotted to the various garrisons the Union army manned in places like Ft. Pillow and Ft. Pickens and elsewhere.
But again I hardly expect good faith from someone that claims the CSA had 200,000 men fighting 100,000 in the Army of the Potomac and deliberately and willfully refuses to provide any citations to prove this claim in 1862.
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NothingNow
Banned
So the intent's there, and the political will would likely follow should an opportunity arise. But it's still hilariously infeasable.
Wolfpaw
Banned
IIRC, there were also a handful of abortive filibusters to Cuba pre-war, one of which was led by Confederate Founding Father* John Quitman.
*In the same sense that the CSA considered John C. Calhoun a Founding Father
NothingNow
Banned
Yep. Of course, without local support they would have all ailed as much as Pánfilo de Narváez did. Slightly faster, with a somewhat lower fatality rate though.
Maybe that would have discouraged the idea, but I doubt it.