Independent Deep South

Skallagrim

Banned
@Skallagrim I get your point about apartheid South Africa not being invaded and functioning as an isolated state for a long time however I don't think it's a good analogy. For the South African afrikaaners they viewed that state as literally the only place they could exist as a people with nowhere to move to and surrounded by chaotic black states that expelled whites en mass such as Angola and Zimbabwe. White southerners however would be living in an economic backwater and would easily be able to move north and find better standards of living.

They would also have a good example of a multi racial economic and democratic system that is not threatening to most white people on their border in the way South Africa didn't.

Perhaps the analogy of South Africa is inadequate, to an extent. My main point in any case was to argue against the impossibly optimistic projections of some persons. I don't claim that this alt-CSA would last forever; merely that it may well last longer than some believe. One might well think of other examples. Why does Cuba not collapse? Despite the biased claims of some, it is not a paradise with state-of-the-art healthcare available to all, and many people live in terrible conditions. Same goes for Venezuela, where food shortages are a serious problem at this very moment. North Korea? One would think that kind of regime could not possibly sustain itself. And why did the USSR last so long, while so many people there lived in abject poverty? These nations were/are, by and large, not surrounded by post-colonial chaos and turmoil. And on the flipside... most neighbours were and/or are not eager to accept refugees from such countries at all.

So what would that spell for this alt-CSA? How free would its citizens plausibly be to leave? How educated would they be about the outside world? How repressive would the government be(come)?

Those in power tend to cling to it, with all their might. And the USA may well choose to facilitate the CSA's continued existence. The alternative would be a failed state to the direct south; collapsing, uncontrolled, with hordes of refugees spilling into the USA... Or perhaps a mass slave uprising and something like Zimbabwe coming to be in America? I suspect that most people in the USA would prefer the CSA to continue existing, rather than deal with the fallout of its demise.

Perhaps I am too cynical. The outcome might well be somewhere between my grim view and a more optimistic take. But even that picture is far from a pretty one...
 
Lastly, the above quotation shows you do not know enough about the topic of antebellum slavery. Eugene Genovese convincingly argued that slavery was on its way out due to its economic inefficiencies.
Except that as later authors showed (e.g. Wright, Fogel), Genovese was dead wrong about this. Slavery was thriving all the way up until 1860, and the supposed economic inefficiencies were nothing of the sort. Slavery made a great deal of money for slaveowners, which is precisely why they were so staunchly in favour of it.

THe border states, like Maryland, only had token slave populations.
True of Delaware only. The other border states, Maryland included, still had significant slave populations and thriving economies which included slavery.

Even states like VIrigina were slave exporters, mostly to the deep south. This wasn't because any of these guys had a come to Jesus moment. It was simple economics.
This was due to what was known as "a limited supply of slaves" and the relative profitability of slaves in cotton being higher than in other crops (and manufacturing) - at least, for a few decades. It wasn't because slavery was unprofitable in Virginia or elsewhere. Tobacco and wheat planters in Virginia still made excellent money off slavery; it was just that cotton growers could make even more money.

Even then, it's worth noting that from about 1850 onward, Virginia's slave population began growing again.

THis is why societies like Brazil, which had way more slaves and emancipated them later than the US, still ended up getting rid of slavery. It was economically inefficient. No magic ponies are necessary.
No, Brazil got rid of slavery because Brazil's slave population had always relied on slave imports to maintain its population. Slavery in Brazil was and always had been in natural decrease (more slaves died or were freed than were born), and so as soon as the British forced Brazil to stop slave imports in the early 1850s - by military force - Brazilian slavery was doomed. It was just a matter of time.

In contrast, slavery in the United States had natural increase - the population grew even without any slave imports. Which is why the official abolition of the slave trade in 1808 did not doom US slavery.

It's also incorrect to say that Brazil had way more slaves than the USA. Estimates of the slave population in Brazil vary (they had no official census), but even those at the high end put the number of slaves at 1850 as comparable between Brazil and the USA. After that date, the USA's slave population increased while that of Brazil declined.

IOTL we saw slaves states getting rid of their slaves because the institution economically did not work. It was only a matter of time that this would occur to the deeper south as well.
Not even slightly correct. Slaves were sold south because they were even more profitable in cotton, not because other slaveowners were losing money on their slaves. History demonstrate clearly that US slaveowners made excellent money from slavery in a range of agriculture - cotton, tobacco, sugar, hemp, rice, wheat and small grains, cattle - and in manufacturing.
 
Jared,
I think people jump through hoops to make slavery look bad economically due to its moral repugnance. many of the 'free' people industry practices were also morally repugnant, but that's another story. Whether slavery was best for a region/country overall is questionable, but that it was economically viable is not. It's really quite simple: if it weren't profitable, people would abandon it, but pretty much everywhere it had to be forceably eliminated, mostly over moral issues, not economic.
 
Jared,
I think people jump through hoops to make slavery look bad economically due to its moral repugnance. many of the 'free' people industry practices were also morally repugnant, but that's another story. Whether slavery was best for a region/country overall is questionable, but that it was economically viable is not. It's really quite simple: if it weren't profitable, people would abandon it, but pretty much everywhere it had to be forceably eliminated, mostly over moral issues, not economic.
Indeed; this is an observation I've made several times over the years. And in a similar vein, the idea that an independent CSA would just fall apart within a handful of years is one which gets expressed a lot, even though more or less every thing which could be said about an independent CSA could also be said about the early USA [1], and yet the early USA held together just fine.

[1] Except possibly the war debt, depending on the timing of CS independence. Even then, most of the mega-quotes of CS war debt ignore the fact that the large majority of their war debt was owed to their own citizens. In any case, scenarios like the one in the OP would not have much war debt.
 
Why on earth would the South *want* to secede at this point?

If only due to the fact that New England was seceding. People in the South, instead of trying to keep the country united, decided to unify those people who shared the same culture as they had.
As I said, it would be a longshot.

Regards,
John Braungart
 
I don't think that there's any chance reunification would happen in the case of an independent Confederacy. The Confederacy might not survive, but frankly, we live in a world of whiffly junk states - El Salvador and the rest of Central America, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Uruguary, Paraguay, Liberia.... All relatively tiny impoverished states that have endured for over a century.

So, however much a hellhole it devolved to be, the Confederacy might remain. Alternately, odds are fairly good you might see a Confederacy devolve into two or three micro-confederacies, or a series of independent states.

Even these states would be viable, to a degree of viability. Mostly, they'd just be a cracker version of the third world.

As to reunification.... I don't see El Salvador reunifying with Guatemala, Guatemala reunifying with Mexico, Uruguay rejoining with Brazil, Paraguay getting it on with Argentina.

Once a state devolves it typically stays devolved.
 
I don't think that there's any chance reunification would happen in the case of an independent Confederacy. The Confederacy might not survive, but frankly, we live in a world of whiffly junk states - El Salvador and the rest of Central America, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Uruguary, Paraguay, Liberia.... All relatively tiny impoverished states that have endured for over a century.

So, however much a hellhole it devolved to be, the Confederacy might remain. Alternately, odds are fairly good you might see a Confederacy devolve into two or three micro-confederacies, or a series of independent states.

Even these states would be viable, to a degree of viability. Mostly, they'd just be a cracker version of the third world.

As to reunification.... I don't see El Salvador reunifying with Guatemala, Guatemala reunifying with Mexico, Uruguay rejoining with Brazil, Paraguay getting it on with Argentina.

Once a state devolves it typically stays devolved.

Your point is true, but how is Uruguay a junk state when it leads Latin America in a number of indicators, including GDP per capita (outside of Puerto Rico) and lack of corruption. Sure, it's still Latin America, it's still not "first-world standards" but it's still better off than it's neighbours in some respects.
 
I don't really see how it could have.

As a small splinter state it would have been completely overshadowed by the far larger Union next door, and would have been far too weak to pursue its ambitions in Mexico or the Caribbean. It would face the choice of provoking war in the hope of rallying the other slave states to it, or resigning itself to a sheepish return to the Union as soon as, say, the Corwin Amendment was ratified.

So, Mexico? Mexico remains independent to this day, so I can't see why rump-CSA can't do the same.
 
Your point is true, but how is Uruguay a junk state when it leads Latin America in a number of indicators, including GDP per capita (outside of Puerto Rico) and lack of corruption. Sure, it's still Latin America, it's still not "first-world standards" but it's still better off than it's neighbours in some respects.

Good point, and conceded.

Still, the real expectations here are 1) An independent Confederacy would likely remain independent, either as the Confederacy, mini-confederacies or states. 2) It's probably going to be pretty third world.
 
it's a nitpick, but Uruguay was a spanish colony. Sure, Brazil/Portugal wanted it, and briefly annexed it, but it was spanish culture and people, so it would look to rejoin with Argentina, not Brazil.

I don't think it was at all inevitable that the south reunited with the north, mostly because I think they would be capable of going it alone. However, they differ from the Spanish colonies in that the Spanish ones were only united under Spain. Once independence came, they went their separate ways (for example, Uruguay, Paraguay, and various regions of Argentina all opposed each other. OTL argentina was only held together by force. these regions had no desire to be held together). On the other hand, the British colonies voluntarily banded together. If the south flubs, and the north isn't too onerous, I could easily see some or all of the southern colonies thinking they had it better with the USA and look to rejoin. It's a viable scenario, but far from the only one.
 
Assuming you have the deep south polity in 1860, it is worthwhile noting that Slavery was, for economic reasons in the Upper South. Plantations producing agricultural products were simply less profitable than other means of employing capital. A huge percentage of capital in the OTL CSA was tied up in slaves, the Upper South was selling slaves because getting the cash and investing it elsewhere was a much better deal. There was almost zero heavy industry in the states in this proposed entity, Birmingham's steel industry was entirely postwar. Where will the alt-CSA get the capital to industrialize at all - the USA won't loan it, and foreign loans mean foreign control and why should the UK loan the alt-CSA capital to industrialize, when this would only allow them to produce locally what they are now buying from the UK.

In the states of the alt-CSA prior to the ACW restrictions on free blacks were becoming more and more onerous, even in Louisiana whcih had the large and well established free black population especially around New Orleans. There was essentially no public school system in the deep south and very limited higher education in terms of universities comparable to what there was in the north. Prior to the war for education in engineering or medicine, going north was the route for a large percentage of southerners who wanted such education. OTL the deep south resisted public education for a long time after the ACW, education was for the upper classes who could afford private school not the masses.

All of the above means this alt-CSA is not headed in a positive direction. It will be a long time before slavery goes away, and the way it happens may be very ugly. IMHO if this alt-CSA is ever again part of the USA it won't be "accepted" back in but rather the USA decides it can't afford this mess next to itself, and occupies the deep south...
 
A lot of deep southern intellectuals argued for the enslavement of poor whites. I wonder if the confederacy would turn into some sort of even more brutal feudal system than the middle ages with plantation lords as the aristocrats and everyone else black and white as serf slaves.

I doubt if they'd be as crude as that, but some supposed whites might be conveniently "discovered" to be actually fair-skinned mulattoes. There were quite a lot of these around by the 1850s. See https://chancellorfiles.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/white-slaves-the-mulattoes/
 
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