How would an ethnically homogeneous US starting in the 1780s evolve?

fashbasher

Banned
Best case scenario--you get banks willing to loan to small-scale yeoman planters of cotton and tobacco, and those small-scale planters dominate the landscape of the South. Organisations of these planters, with the help of powerful bankers, manage to gain the pull which large-scale planters did OTL, which is necessary for internal improvements in parts of the South like the aforementioned Delta region.

How about just increase the fertility rate of white Anglos?
 
How about just increase the fertility rate of white Anglos?

Wouldn't be enough to meet the demand for labour, plus why would you want to work on your older brother's "plantation" (output is much less) your whole life? You wouldn't want that for yourself, your kids, any in-laws, etc.

I think the biggest problem with this model is that the output of tobacco, cotton, and other high-value crops will be less than what OTL's planters produced using slaves and later sharecroppers and peonage. And of course, what happens when you're so successful, you want to buy up other people's farms? Many of the biggest plantation owners weren't many generations removed from random frontiersmen. What could these sort of people do, even without slaves? On the other hand, it would mean that those sort of largescale plantations are much rarer than OTL and only the most successful of planters (which includes significant business acumen) are able to operate in such a manner.
 
I sketched out a scenario in which the US deports its non-Anglo populations to *Liberia in the 1780s in exchange for an earlier abolition of slavery, thus attempting to create a more ethnically and racially homogeneous country similar to those in Europe; it didn't end well for most of the people in that the Southern states needed to find an, ahem, alternate way to keep King Cotton going and wound up enslaving poor whites instead. Could it be possible for a more "European" state (in which there isn't mass slavery, racial or otherwise) to form with roughly the US' borders while retaining the same level of prosperity and similar economic drivers? There is some evidence that areas similar geographically to the American Midwest and South - flat, fertile areas - tend to be more right-wing politically for economic reasons (cheap labor plus larger farm size) in a Europe-wide study.
The founding white population wouldn't consider themselves ethnically homogenous. Get rid of the mixed race, French, Dutch, Germans, and other smaller percentage European populations and the founding British population wouldn't consider themselves ethnically homogenous. Even among the English population you had fairly significant differentiation between them Anglosaxon Yankees and Quakers in the North versus the Anglonorman Cavaliers and Slavelords in the South.
 
The Jeffersonian myth wouldn't exist, at least in the South. You'd have a society that was much more stratified by class, like Britain. King Cotton and cheap land would still probably produce a lot of nouveau riches, but it would be hard to imagine the OTL South where a subsistence farmer with a few acres of rocky hillside was considered equal to a planter, unless small landowners can distinguish sharply between themselves and white laborers. I don't think that can happen while white laborers still have the option of claiming land somewhere.

Maybe sharecropping arises earlier?

The general ideas behind Jeffersonianism weren't rooted in the racial caste system of the South, they were rooted in the classical republicanism that was in vogue in the time period as well as the historical heritage of (somewhat paranoid) defensiveness of liberties in contemporary English-speaking societies. You'd get something similar pretty much any time you threw a bunch of English speakers at the (Recently depopulated, extremely fertile) North American coast. You'd get a cousin thereof with pretty much anyone. Even the French Canadians had their own particular take on what their relative freedom and prosperity meant for what is the right way to order society.

The egalitarianism of the early Republic came about because of physical conditions of life that promoted an egalitarian social system, not because of a racial caste system that was still in the process of crystallizing (and still had a lukewarm-to-hostile relationship with that egalitarianism).


EDIT: And all the people positing Federalist success and even survival in a timeline where African slavery dies out are completely missing how hopeless the Federalist ethos is going to be in a more egalitarian, class-conflict oriented American political scene. The staid elitism of the Federalists will go down like a solid lead ship in stormy seas.
 
Isn't this entire thread based on a premise of ethnic cleansing?
How is it ok to game this shit out?

Also - what of the Native American population? seems to me that an ethnically homogenous USA should be filled with first-nations people and not immigrant whites?

Give 'em their own country with blackjack and hookers...

also wtf?
 
The founding white population wouldn't consider themselves ethnically homogenous. Get rid of the mixed race, French, Dutch, Germans, and other smaller percentage European populations and the founding British population wouldn't consider themselves ethnically homogenous. Even among the English population you had fairly significant differentiation between them Anglosaxon Yankees and Quakers in the North versus the Anglonorman Cavaliers and Slavelords in the South.

Debatable. Surely the Puritans would've considered themselves ethnically homogenous, and even people the Puritans kicked out were just wayward souls.

And by the end of the 18th century, American identity was much more established. The South had a different culture than the North, based on economic reality. But I wager the North and South had more in common than anything else, and Germans, Dutch, and others were increasingly assimilated to that model. Especially when you get to the poor whites, who got the worst lands (i.e. Appalachia), who the "Cavalier" (an almost entirely fabricated identity) planters tended to ignore except when it was convenient (to fight slaves, to support them, to fight their wars).

Isn't this entire thread based on a premise of ethnic cleansing?
How is it ok to game this shit out?

Also - what of the Native American population? seems to me that an ethnically homogenous USA should be filled with first-nations people and not immigrant whites?

And slavery isn't bad enough?

The immigrant whites were far more ethnically homogenous than the hundreds of First Nations peoples, all culturally, linguistically, and even genetically separate. It took Euro-American oppression to ever forge a First Nations/American Indian identity.
 
seems to me that an ethnically homogenous USA should be filled with first-nations people and not immigrant whites?
Native Americans are not ethnically homogenous themselves.

Give 'em their own country with blackjack and hookers...
also wtf?
This is a jocular reference to an American television comedy called Futurama, where one of the secondary protagonist (a chronically depressed, existentialist, and hedonist artificially intelligent industrial android named Bender) often criticizes the culture or activities around him by suggesting he create his own version with "blackjack and hookers".
 
Isn't this entire thread based on a premise of ethnic cleansing?
How is it ok to game this shit out?

I think this entirely possible and even permissible to talk about, as a dystopia if nothing else. Decades of Darkness is still on here, after all?

Without radical shifts to the nature of the colonial society of the Thirteen Colonies, I think it possible to delay the transition of the United States into a more multicultural society--more multicultural than the United States was at the time of its founding, mind--if the United States is made into a less attractive destination for immigrants. If the United States was politically unstable and/or if it fought multiple costly wars with the United Kingdom (and other powers?) and/or if its expansion was limited, it's conceivable to me that you might make it relatively much less attractive to European immigrants. The big mid-19th century wave of German emigration might well end up in more attractive countries, and subsequent migrations from central and southern Europe might well be significantly delayed and even diminished.
 
Isn't this entire thread based on a premise of ethnic cleansing?
How is it ok to game this shit out?

Also - what of the Native American population? seems to me that an ethnically homogenous USA should be filled with first-nations people and not immigrant whites?



also wtf?

He's obviously not endorsing ethnic cleansing, dude, just trying to figure out how a white America would evolve.
 
Modern borders US would be very hard to make ethnically homogenous. You would have to get rid of slavery in the 1700s or earlier and genocide all the slaves, then also prevent immigration to the US while making it economically strong enough to both become independent and take the west from Britain, France, Spain, and Mexico. Perhaps you could promote the Best thing I can think of would be a PoD during the Commonwealth that makes the Commonwealth permanent. This could promote a more American-focused policy and increase the amount of dissidents to deport there. It's also crazy enough that you could ban slavery very early in the settler colonies. Then America has a much larger Anglo population base. But you'd have to really stretch to get it to have modern borders.

Perhaps you could also promote the invention of a mestizo-based nationality of America, but that would also be hard to do, as the national identity that allowed such aggressive expansion westward was based on the superiority of the white race over the natives.
 
Perhaps you could also promote the invention of a mestizo-based nationality of America, but that would also be hard to do, as the national identity that allowed such aggressive expansion westward was based on the superiority of the white race over the natives.

Not necessarily. You'd just have the superiority of the pre-existing mestizo Americans over non-mestizo natives. The mostly mestizo Chileans didn't think much of the Mapuche, the mostly mestizo Peruvians, Bolivians, etc. didn't think much of the Amazonian natives, etc. The key point is the American Indians are in the way.
 
I had a thought about this after hearing the term Manifest Destiny on the radio. I think this particular USA won't be as large as OTL in land area. Getting rid of so many people, and restricting immigration, will slow the need to expand to the west. This US will reach the Mississippi a lot later than in OTL. This scenario actually benefits the natives, I think. Also, native Americans already inside the US wouldn't be sent to Liberia (as I asked about earlier), they would be sent out of the country to "Indian" lands. At least I think so now.
 
I had a thought about this after hearing the term Manifest Destiny on the radio. I think this particular USA won't be as large as OTL in land area. Getting rid of so many people, and restricting immigration, will slow the need to expand to the west. This US will reach the Mississippi a lot later than in OTL. This scenario actually benefits the natives, I think. Also, native Americans already inside the US wouldn't be sent to Liberia (as I asked about earlier), they would be sent out of the country to "Indian" lands. At least I think so now.

By the time immigration exploded in the 1840's, American settlers had already passed the Mississippi and were chomping at the bit to go further.

It would probably be some approximation of as big, but a LOT more sparsely settled.
 
By the time immigration exploded in the 1840's, American settlers had already passed the Mississippi and were chomping at the bit to go further.

It would probably be some approximation of as big, but a LOT more sparsely settled.

The population of the USA would decrease as people are deported, run off, etc. Land and property owned by those being sent off to Liberia would also become available. I think the combination would decrease the pressure for a west-ward expansion.

Hmm, would this USA want to expand into Spanish or French lands? And if this USA does, the locals will likely resist.

How would the British feel about this USA?
 
The population of the USA would decrease as people are deported, run off, etc. Land and property owned by those being sent off to Liberia would also become available. I think the combination would decrease the pressure for a west-ward expansion.

Hmm, would this USA want to expand into Spanish or French lands? And if this USA does, the locals will likely resist.

How would the British feel about this USA?

Why would anyone who owned land be getting deported to Liberia, except for perhaps a few free blacks? And the Indians, of course, who got kicked off their land OTL anyway. In any case, the population would also be rapidly increasing, since fertility rates were high. Presumably there would still also be immigration from Anglo countries as well.

Yes, they absolutely would want French lands, at the very least, since the port of New Orleans is crucial to whoever owns the land beyond the Appalachians.

There weren't particularly many locals to resist in Spanish and especially French lands to begin with.
 

Lusitania

Donor
By 1700 New England had a very large Catholic population and the colonies offered Catholics and other groups in Britain an escape from oppression of Britain. The British government was happy to let them go since immigration to the 13 colonies lessened religious tension in Britain. If your POD is say 1700 then you will not get New England states to join your homogeneous Protestant US. Setting your POD earlier would not work since it would be difficult to stop people from settling in the colonies.

As stated before with slavery the southern states would not be as developed or large.

Not saying this TL is not possible but either it's ASB or only you could get the Colonies to split into several US one of which would be Protestant homogeneous Caucasian.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
As a study, this whole idea is very interesting. Much like the somewhat related "isolationist USA"-idea, this kind of concept allows one to consider in which ways and to what extent a purely-white-(protestant-)from-the-outset USA would differ from the OTL USA. Of course, there's a difference between "ASBs make the Americans decide to deport all non-whites, let's go from there" and an attempt to make a realistic scenario.

Here's the thing: the southern states aren't going for this. Not ever. The idea of supporters of such plans setting up a Colonization Society was all fine and well, but the idea of a the federal government forcing slave-owners to sell their slaves to the state (presumably at a state-determined price) and the taxpayers being forced to pay for the setting up of an African colony just to get rid of the ex-slaves? That's going down like a lead balloon. So if you want to play out a "this just happens, imagine what it'd be like"-scenario, that's fine, but be aware that it's ASB.

That doesn't mean that a USA carrying out this kind of scheme in the 1780s cannot exist. It'll just have to be a USA without the slave states. It is not altogether impossible to imagine a USA with a POD quite shortly before the revolution, which leads to the revolutionaries (or at least those in the north-east) having more of a nativist streak. One can imagine the sudden upsurge of a popular religious movement, based on the actions of some ATL firebrand preacher from New England. Have him fulminate about the protestant destiny of the USA, the danger of foreign evils, the fact that slavery is a sin, and that "America is for the white protestant, just as Africa is for the black man"... etc. etc.

Assuming such a religious movement gains traction and becomes intwined with the (northeastern) revolutionary movement, you've got your basis for a whole bunch of north-eastern states in a (just slightly) ATL USA wanting to enact policies of nativism, pro-protestantism, anti-slavery and deportation-of-blacks. This will soon clash with southern interests, and one may assume that the USA falls apart into two distinct regions, presumably along a border following the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio river. To the south, you'll see a CSA-avant-la-lettre, although perhaps with a bit more Jeffersonian romanticism and with less fire-eating fanaticism (because the whole conflict with the north is settled with an immediate split, before it has time to fester).

To the north, however, we get the very white alt-USA that this thread is about. It's nativist right from the start, and it has to be, or future immigration will just turn it into... well, into a normal country. Its politics are opposed to immigration, excepting protestants-- so basically, there will only be immigration from Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia. Catholics, Eastern Europeans and non-whites of whatever variety need not apply. Religiously, it's going to be fervently protestant and anti-catholic. Despite some claims that there were many catholics in the northeast at the time, this was decidedly not the case. Anti-catholic policies would only be an extension of exiting pre-revolution norms. Needless to say, slavery is going to be abolished: on the one hand because it's seen as sinful (and one should not be surprised to see usury get outlawed, too), and on the other hand because slavery means there are non-whites, and this alt-USA wants those gone. Fortunately for those who want that, there are rather few blacks in the relevant states. These get bought up by the government, and deported to (alt-)Liberia.

There are two possible futures for the alt-USA I've sketched out here. In one of them, it eventually just mellows out, relaxes its restrictions on immigration and religion, and becomes (as I mentioned before) what we'd call 'a normal country'. In the other scenario (and that's the one we must explore to actually keep it all ethnically white), it keeps itself closed off. It stays fervently protestant. It stays staunchly nativist. It becomes, almost by design, a closed-off and isolated country. It has less manpower, because it has a smaller demographic base to start with with, and (far) less immigration. There's anouther country between it and the mouth of the Mississippi anyway, so the OTL motivations for the Louisiana Purchase (gaitning control of New Orleans) are not present. I doubt this alt-USA is going to expand much, if at all. This is the kind of place that would rather be 'pure' than gobble up lots of lan filled up with dirty foreigners. This alt-USA is more likely to be a hermit kingdom than an expansionist empire.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that you cannot keep a country from changing except by implementing policies that forcibly keep things as they are. This whole ethnically homogeneous 'white USA' doesn't seem at all pleasant to me. There are probably people who imagine that kind of thing all too fondly, of course. Bu what I see is a USA that is smaller, meaner, bleaker-- less in every way. This is a monochrome country. It has no Notre Dame University. No Jazz or Blues. No wildly varied cuisine adopted from dozens of countries. This America will never elect a John F. Kennedy. It celebrates no St. Patrick's Day. Its New York City is utterly devoid of Italian-Americans. We can't really get a feel for its potential socio-economic dimensions, but somehow, I imagine this country's spirit as the malformed spawn of the Salem witch trials and the Great Depression.

Yes, this sort of scenario is very interesting to investigate-- but only in a theoretical way, thank you very much.
 

samcster94

Banned
As a study, this whole idea is very interesting. Much like the somewhat related "isolationist USA"-idea, this kind of concept allows one to consider in which ways and to what extent a purely-white-(protestant-)from-the-outset USA would differ from the OTL USA. Of course, there's a difference between "ASBs make the Americans decide to deport all non-whites, let's go from there" and an attempt to make a realistic scenario.

Here's the thing: the southern states aren't going for this. Not ever. The idea of supporters of such plans setting up a Colonization Society was all fine and well, but the idea of a the federal government forcing slave-owners to sell their slaves to the state (presumably at a state-determined price) and the taxpayers being forced to pay for the setting up of an African colony just to get rid of the ex-slaves? That's going down like a lead balloon. So if you want to play out a "this just happens, imagine what it'd be like"-scenario, that's fine, but be aware that it's ASB.

That doesn't mean that a USA carrying out this kind of scheme in the 1780s cannot exist. It'll just have to be a USA without the slave states. It is not altogether impossible to imagine a USA with a POD quite shortly before the revolution, which leads to the revolutionaries (or at least those in the north-east) having more of a nativist streak. One can imagine the sudden upsurge of a popular religious movement, based on the actions of some ATL firebrand preacher from New England. Have him fulminate about the protestant destiny of the USA, the danger of foreign evils, the fact that slavery is a sin, and that "America is for the white protestant, just as Africa is for the black man"... etc. etc.

Assuming such a religious movement gains traction and becomes intwined with the (northeastern) revolutionary movement, you've got your basis for a whole bunch of north-eastern states in a (just slightly) ATL USA wanting to enact policies of nativism, pro-protestantism, anti-slavery and deportation-of-blacks. This will soon clash with southern interests, and one may assume that the USA falls apart into two distinct regions, presumably along a border following the Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio river. To the south, you'll see a CSA-avant-la-lettre, although perhaps with a bit more Jeffersonian romanticism and with less fire-eating fanaticism (because the whole conflict with the north is settled with an immediate split, before it has time to fester).

To the north, however, we get the very white alt-USA that this thread is about. It's nativist right from the start, and it has to be, or future immigration will just turn it into... well, into a normal country. Its politics are opposed to immigration, excepting protestants-- so basically, there will only be immigration from Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia. Catholics, Eastern Europeans and non-whites of whatever variety need not apply. Religiously, it's going to be fervently protestant and anti-catholic. Despite some claims that there were many catholics in the northeast at the time, this was decidedly not the case. Anti-catholic policies would only be an extension of exiting pre-revolution norms. Needless to say, slavery is going to be abolished: on the one hand because it's seen as sinful (and one should not be surprised to see usury get outlawed, too), and on the other hand because slavery means there are non-whites, and this alt-USA wants those gone. Fortunately for those who want that, there are rather few blacks in the relevant states. These get bought up by the government, and deported to (alt-)Liberia.

There are two possible futures for the alt-USA I've sketched out here. In one of them, it eventually just mellows out, relaxes its restrictions on immigration and religion, and becomes (as I mentioned before) what we'd call 'a normal country'. In the other scenario (and that's the one we must explore to actually keep it all ethnically white), it keeps itself closed off. It stays fervently protestant. It stays staunchly nativist. It becomes, almost by design, a closed-off and isolated country. It has less manpower, because it has a smaller demographic base to start with with, and (far) less immigration. There's anouther country between it and the mouth of the Mississippi anyway, so the OTL motivations for the Louisiana Purchase (gaitning control of New Orleans) are not present. I doubt this alt-USA is going to expand much, if at all. This is the kind of place that would rather be 'pure' than gobble up lots of lan filled up with dirty foreigners. This alt-USA is more likely to be a hermit kingdom than an expansionist empire.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that you cannot keep a country from changing except by implementing policies that forcibly keep things as they are. This whole ethnically homogeneous 'white USA' doesn't seem at all pleasant to me. There are probably people who imagine that kind of thing all too fondly, of course. Bu what I see is a USA that is smaller, meaner, bleaker-- less in every way. This is a monochrome country. It has no Notre Dame University. No Jazz or Blues. No wildly varied cuisine adopted from dozens of countries. This America will never elect a John F. Kennedy. It celebrates no St. Patrick's Day. Its New York City is utterly devoid of Italian-Americans. We can't really get a feel for its potential socio-economic dimensions, but somehow, I imagine this country's spirit as the malformed spawn of the Salem witch trials and the Great Depression.

Yes, this sort of scenario is very interesting to investigate-- but only in a theoretical way, thank you very much.
This U.S. doesn't seem that pleasant except maybe abolishing slavery earlier. I can imagine some kind of nationalism that looks less like OTL U.S. nationalism and more like that in parts of Eastern Europe might develop due to hostility to foreigners and being heavily Protestant.
 
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