Is the US destined to go to war with an Independent CSA

mowque

Banned
Do we need to have the word 'Whig' in a debate about American history? Pssh, keep these limeys out of this.
 

Spengler

Banned
I find it funny that you Matt just attacked snake for disagreeing wiht you. It says alot about the kind of person you are.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
And...

That's a yellow card.

CalBear in Mod Mode.
OK, I had to come back for this:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

HAHAH

*breathe breathe breathe*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAhAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

HAHAHAhA

*wheeeeeze*

HAHAHA

HAHAHA


HA

HA

h...

Snake has yet to list a single number of any type. You would think he'd never heard the word 'statistics' before. He has built up a funny little narrative grounded in NO actual evidence except for broad generalizations about the history of the period and you people seem to be intent on pretending that makes him an expert.

This is absolutely sick. Are you people 12? Have you finished high school yet?

I would abandon this topic, but it seems like future discussions about the Civil War period are going to be colored by the outcome here so I just want to get this absolutely, positively straight: Snake does not know a damned thing about the Civil War. I'd be willing to be he hasn't graduated college yet, let alone received a degree in the field like some of the people I've seen him argue against.

I may dislike 67th Tiger, I may KNOW he has a habit of being dishonest, of fudging numbers and outright mis-citing them.

But at least he has had numbers to fudge. He's ten times the Civil War 'expert' Snake could ever be. I would take his word over Snake's any day, even though I would 90% sure he was lying.

This whole thing is one, big, fat joke. Pretending you're being reasonable is not rationality. Logic, reason, the actual discipline of history, is based in evidence a little more nuanced and deep than just asserting that somebody said something somewhere. Like I said earlier, talk is cheap. I want numbers. I want evidence that there would be the votes to deprive millions of men of their hard won votes a decade or more after they won them, especially after they've fought a war for their independence and freedom.

Truth is everything that Snake believes about the Civil War, about the contemporary North and South, smells, no, reeks of bullshit he believes because he buys into the variant of the Just World fallacy known as Whiggish history: Evil people only ever do evil things, in a very incompetent ways, and history always shits on them from great heights. Everything in our history was an inevitable, glorious path towards building what we have today. Blah blah blah etc etc jesus christ do I really have to do this.

Read a fucking book.
 
You are correct. Lincoln, for one. was a Whig before he was a Republican.

The Whigs basically represented the conservative wing of the GOP. Throughout its history, the GOP has had little of a center. Thomas Dewey said as much at a political dinner in which he described that this was why he lost in 1948. He was right.
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
I find it funny that you Matt just attacked snake for disagreeing wiht you. It says alot about the kind of person you are.

I apologize for not having the saintly patience to put up with stubborn idiocy forever.

Like this:

No citations would ever be listened to, they would all be dismissed.

Notice he has NEVER actually posted any actual citations, so he doesn't know this? At worst he's outright dodging, saying this in a slimy little attempt to not have to. At best he's fooling himself, lying to himself so he can be personally convinced he doesn't have to.

ANYTHING to protect his ego and the narrative it made up for itself.
 
MAlexMatt:eek:

Uhh... I tried. I really tried...:(

Personally, I'm guilty of losing my temper often enough, God knows.:eek::eek::eek::eek:

So, please... take it easy.:(
 
Tried what, exactly?

All you've done this entire topic is me-too Snake.

I've tried to suggest that maybe, even from your own POV, you might just find that SF isn't entirely wrong. But the language and tone of your posts suggest otherwise, that's all. Try to be a little less angry. I've gone off kilter with my own temper often enough:eek: to see the signs.:( Please. Your own contributions to the forum are too important to risk getting into trouble over.:)
 
OK, I had to come back for this:

SNIP A CLASSIC RANT

...book.

Classic. I haven't laughed so hard in these forums for a long, long time. Not because I agree with MAlexMatt, but I recently watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles. This reminds of the scene where Steve Martin goes ballistic at the rental car counter. Just a balls out classic rant. Good show, chap.

As for the argument at hand. The disenfranchisement will be more subtle than Snake contends. But it was already occurring to some degree (of course make no mistake about it occurred in spades in the North as well). The art of vote buying has a long a glorious history in this country that continues to this day.

In the antebellum South it worked a by having the wealthy plantation owners loan money, land (in the form of unneeded acreage) or labor (in the form of slaves) to the poorer farmers that neighbored the plantation. Given that banks were scarce in the South these wealthy aristocrats were the only available source of borrowable capital. Also given that immigrants moved far less into the South they were also some of the only sources of extra labor that might be needed during a particularly good harvest. In exchange the small farm holders were expected to defer to the leadership of those who held the land and the wealth. This meant voting to maintain the current system and support the plantation system.

It's one of the reasons why slave owners were so over represented in the governments of the slave states and in the secession conventions.

If you'd like I could site some sources, probably by tomorrow some time. I know John Majewski's A House Dividing: Economic Development in Virginia and Pennsylvania Before the Civil War touches upon this. Other authors may do so as well.

Benjamin
 

MAlexMatt

Banned
Classic. I haven't laughed so hard in these forums for a long, long time. Not because I agree with MAlexMatt, but I recently watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles. This reminds of the scene where Steve Martin goes ballistic at the rental car counter. Just a balls out classic rant. Good show, chap.

As for the argument at hand. The disenfranchisement will be more subtle than Snake contends. But it was already occurring to some degree (of course make no mistake about it occurred in spades in the North as well). The art of vote buying has a long a glorious history in this country that continues to this day.

In the antebellum South it worked a by having the wealthy plantation owners loan money, land (in the form of unneeded acreage) or labor (in the form of slaves) to the poorer farmers that neighbored the plantation. Given that banks were scarce in the South these wealthy aristocrats were the only available source of borrowable capital. Also given that immigrants moved far less into the South they were also some of the only sources of extra labor that might be needed during a particularly good harvest. In exchange the small farm holders were expected to defer to the leadership of those who held the land and the wealth. This meant voting to maintain the current system and support the plantation system.

It's one of the reasons why slave owners were so over represented in the governments of the slave states and in the secession conventions.

If you'd like I could site some sources, probably by tomorrow some time. I know John Majewski's A House Dividing: Economic Development in Virginia and Pennsylvania Before the Civil War touches upon this. Other authors may do so as well.

Benjamin

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the CSA would be a particularly nice place to live, and the planters aren't going to give poorer whites a fair shake where they have the power to do something about it, I just don't buy into Snake's funny little vision of two parts third world hell hole one part Orwellian dystopia. The CSA will quickly turn into a 'gentleman's' playground where society and government are for, by, and of the planters. But it will be of varying degrees: The facts on the ground varied quite a bit from 'plantations as far as the eye can see' all across the South. Vast swathes of land had very few slaves. Not because people were abolitionist there, or anything, but just because that was how settlement patterns worked out.

The South ITTL will certainly be dystopian for some, especially for the slaves themselves, but the funny little idea that the entire planter class is a group of incompetent nincompoops with an irrationally romantic attachment to agrarianism and agriculture matched only by their irrational attachment to being evil and petty. But some areas will closely resemble comparable areas in the North: A mostly free white farming community in Tennessee isn't likely to be too different from a free white farming community in Kentucky (or southern Ohio, if we're talking about a TL where the CSA gets Kentucky). Industrialization will be slower, but I don't see a reason why the free whites in Tennessee or Virginia won't have comparable wealth per capita to free whites in Maryland or Pennsylvania in the long run. While the planter aristocracy will no doubt be all too happy to take and take from the free white underclass they rule, I can't see them being significantly worse than the financier plutocracy that will run the North almost without challenge.

But truth be told, I'm just fascinated by where such a TL would go. Having the whole thing descend into a quaint little morality tale where the evil slavocrats suffer for their sins is satisfying in one way, but really just pretty boring.

EDIT: And I DO agree about planters trying to circumvent the existence of manhood suffrage as much as possible, I just don't think they'll ever have the actual votes or balls to try to actually take that suffrage away de jure. I expect the worst excesses of early British or American 'democracy': Rotten boroughs, political machines, patronage networks, etc etc etc.
 

Spengler

Banned
I apologize for not having the saintly patience to put up with stubborn idiocy forever.

Like this:



Notice he has NEVER actually posted any actual citations, so he doesn't know this? At worst he's outright dodging, saying this in a slimy little attempt to not have to. At best he's fooling himself, lying to himself so he can be personally convinced he doesn't have to.

ANYTHING to protect his ego and the narrative it made up for itself.

Reported fro trolling. Good to see we'll have one less Confederate lover.
 
MAlexMatt

There are some genuine good points you've just made in your last post.

I would only point out that the degree of existent slavery county by county and state by state had nothing to do with "settlement patterns". It was due to the profitability of slavery depending on the region. Areas where large plantations could not be supported due to poorness of soil and difficulty of terrain (hills, mountains, etc) precluded slavery. After all, Georgia was initially settled as a "Free Colony", until the economic advantages of slavery in that then colony made competition by free soil farmers with slave holders impossible.

Spengler

The moderators and the Admin generally do not appreciate it when a poster actively posts that they are reporting someone. Its better to just do the report and leave the matter for them to resolve.
 

NothingNow

Banned
In the antebellum South it worked a by having the wealthy plantation owners loan money, land (in the form of unneeded acreage) or labor (in the form of slaves) to the poorer farmers that neighbored the plantation. Given that banks were scarce in the South these wealthy aristocrats were the only available source of borrowable capital. Also given that immigrants moved far less into the South they were also some of the only sources of extra labor that might be needed during a particularly good harvest. In exchange the small farm holders were expected to defer to the leadership of those who held the land and the wealth. This meant voting to maintain the current system and support the plantation system.

It's one of the reasons why slave owners were so over represented in the governments of the slave states and in the secession conventions.

Yeah, It'll be more like a Latin American nation politically, as you'll see this more often (there's a name for it, but I forget,) along with Managed voting, blatant electoral fraud, and the occasional bout of Voter intimidation. So, pretty much every election would be considered completely illegitimate today, but it'll keep the Planters from insurrection.

More Rural, and less plantation oriented regions would be different, and either more democratic, or openly autocratic. Unless Cattle, Coal, and Sugar Barrons get in on it as well. Which they probably will.

You'd also see fairly little internal investment, as the planters didn't generally go for things unless it was directly in their own interests, or they could make it a profitable investment quickly. The Mississippi would be utterly vital, and most places further than a few miles from navigable waters, or more rarely a railhead, wouldn't advance much beyond Liquors and other low-volume cash crops for trade by the end of the century.

As for New Orleans and Key West, well, they'll either be free cities, or the US will take them by force if only to ensure the security of goods transiting the Mississippi and the Gulf. But, the US probably will not give up the Dry Tortugas and the Keys. They're far too strategic and OTL held by the Union all the way through.

Sponging and wrecking could get pretty dangerous ITTL.
 
Yeah, It'll be more like a Latin American nation politically, as you'll see this more often (there's a name for it, but I forget,) along with Managed voting, blatant electoral fraud, and the occasional bout of Voter intimidation. So, pretty much every election would be considered completely illegitimate today,(1) but it'll keep the Planters from insurrection.

1) I am not so sure of that. We have Republicans today swearing by the legitimacy of Bush v. Gore, despite the fact that the US Constitution gives ZERO role to the Federal Judiciary in Presidential Elections (They would, after all, being giving themselves a role in who determined their replacements. And they did).

More Rural, and less plantation oriented regions would be different, and either more democratic, or openly autocratic.(2) Unless Cattle, Coal, and Sugar Barrons get in on it as well. Which they probably will.

2) The latter. Based on US history in the South, and other predominantly rural areas like the Rockies, Mid-West, and South-West, you get a "tyranny of the locals" in terms of local authority (towns, county seats) having little oversight by weak state governments, who were often too busy/concerned with enforcing their own rights vis-a-vis Washington. Throw in corruption at all levels, and... One reason why Irish at the time of the ACW identified so much with the CSA was their own history of suffering under a strong centralized government (London). At the very same time the Germans sided with the Federals as they had come from a land where the people were oppressed by unaccountable local barons and princes, while the people identified with a stronger national authority (the Kaiser). Except for those who actually had to enjoy that man's rule.:rolleyes:

You'd also see fairly little internal investment,(3) as the planters didn't generally go for things unless it was directly in their own interests, or they could make it a profitable investment quickly. The Mississippi would be utterly vital, and most places further than a few miles from navigable waters, or more rarely a railhead, wouldn't advance much beyond Liquors and other low-volume cash crops for trade by the end of the century.

3) Big reason why the Southern rail network was such a God awful mess was because it was built to support the planter system. Sometimes whole cities were by-passed, while the biggest plantations were not.
 
Honestly, I'd argue that the planter class basically ran the South in OTL until WWII, the spread of air conditioning, and the movement of factories south to avoid unions/high wages. I see no reason to believe things'd be different TTL.
 
Honestly, I'd argue that the planter class basically ran the South in OTL until WWII, the spread of air conditioning, and the movement of factories south to avoid unions/high wages. I see no reason to believe things'd be different TTL.

I would tack on the boll weevil, nitrogen leeched out of the soil from over-cotton growing + the refusal of the more conservative planters to listen to the US Department of Agriculture, the movement of Blacks north + the US military (post-1948) offering economic opportunities for Southern Black men they'd never had before...
 
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CalBear

Moderator
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Okay...

I warned you about insulting other members (for a post that, in most contexts would have merited a kick, but this thread has been fairly heated on all sides so I gave you the opportunity to back off). THREE HOURS later you post this?

So much for self control, at least in this case. Sad, really.

Lets try a Seven Day major. If you do not take this to heart and modify your posting style upon your return you will not be given additional minors and we will proceed to a Game Misconduct.
I apologize for not having the saintly patience to put up with stubborn idiocy forever.

Like this:



Notice he has NEVER actually posted any actual citations, so he doesn't know this? At worst he's outright dodging, saying this in a slimy little attempt to not have to. At best he's fooling himself, lying to himself so he can be personally convinced he doesn't have to.

ANYTHING to protect his ego and the narrative it made up for itself.
 
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