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

I agree. If the Planters had been willing to coexist with an industrial sector and accept the abolition of slavery in the long term, why did they secede in the first place?

If this question gets a response at all it's usually a non-answer about people who criticize the CSA in this regard believing in US exceptionalism and thus meanie anti-Southerners who don't get the CSA was really not concerned about slavery at all, just states' rights. The record of massacres of blacks by the CSA and the refusal to raise slaves as soldiers when this would have undercut the major US moral advantage over the CSA *and* created a huge manpower source are men behind the curtain to be ignored in favor of the big talking mask. Robert's The Black and the Grey has the simplest general idea for how the CSA could actually win (as opposed to ensuring the USA loses) the war, but a CSA willing to abolish slavery that pragmatically would not have seceded in the first place and instead negotiated gradual emancipation with the abolitionists. It's also worth noting for the "Blame Jeff Davis" crowd's critiques of Davis, he's the only man who would scrap slavery and be POCS if it would help him stay POCS. Toombs, Stephens, Cobb, Breckenridge, and particularly Rhett would never do this. And with the historical CSA unwilling to take a political step that would have let it not merely save itself but outright win the war on its own power, the odds of a victorious CSA in a short or long war doing this are as little as a Nazi Germany that has an Ultra-Orthodox Jew as minister of war and a Russian Communist as minister of the treasury.
 
How? Why? The CSA is deliberately anti-industrial, this will not be a mere economic matter but integrated into the very ideology and legitimacy of the state. The Planters who monopolized power feared industrialism would collapse their unilateral control of what would now be Confederate politics. If the only proper pre-war centers of industry are Nashville and Richmond in a society overwhelmingly agrarian and with a huge slave population it can't simply up and get rid of bar either completely expelling them all or alternately having to cube a circle and emancipate them........

The CSA set a political system as unworkable as South Vietnam without a USA to prop it up.

Damn it, I heard/seen some references to pre-war attempts by the South to industrialize in order for self sufficiency but I can't find anything now.

I have found some stats on rapid increases in rail in the pre-war years.


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Damn it, I heard/seen some references to pre-war attempts by the South to industrialize in order for self sufficiency but I can't find anything now.

I have found some stats on rapid increases in rail in the pre-war years.[FONT=&quot]
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Those attempts were not very strictly pursued during the 1850s and so long as the cotton dollars keep rolling in there's no desire to *ever* actually pursue it. In an independent Confederacy whose mythology of the war will attribute Union defeat to the degrading effects of wage-slavery on Yankee citizenry in a further development/exaggeration of that Cavalier-Roundhead nonsense industrialization will be identified with "Yankeefication" and politically unthinkable no matter the economically rational reasons to do it.
 
Slavery would not end when it was no longer viable any more than the USSR ended Communism in the 1970s when it was clearly falling behind the West. Slavery was not just an economic system, it was enfolded into the ideology of the Confederate state.

Slavery was replaced by Sharecropping after the war that tied people to the land thought credit and kept them in debt and was cheaper that owning slaves. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

I do not remember the US government did anthing to stop expolition under Sharecropping. it seems Sharecropping was not much better than slavery and in some way was worse as the exploitation was hidden.
 
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Slavery was replaced by Sharecropping after the war that tied people to the land thought credit and kept them in debt and was cheaper that owning slaves. Tenants are tied to the landlord through the plantation store. Their work is heavily supervised as slave plantations were.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping

Key point "after the (OTL) war". That's with Confederate defeat and Confederate distintegration. An independent CSA will not act like the OTL defeated South.
 
How? Why? The CSA is deliberately anti-industrial, this will not be a mere economic matter but integrated into the very ideology and legitimacy of the state. The Planters who monopolized power feared industrialism would collapse their unilateral control of what would now be Confederate politics. If the only proper pre-war centers of industry are Nashville and Richmond in a society overwhelmingly agrarian and with a huge slave population it can't simply up and get rid of bar either completely expelling them all or alternately having to cube a circle and emancipate them........

The CSA set a political system as unworkable as South Vietnam without a USA to prop it up.

The CSA was not anti-industrial it did not need industry as industrial good could be traded for from Europe for cotton cheaper that they could be made in the CSA.
 
The CSA was not anti-industrial it did not need industry as industrial good could be traded for from Europe for cotton cheaper that they could be made in the CSA.

It was anti-industry, the whole point of secession was to shore up slavery against the rising industrial class of the North in the first place.
 
Those attempts were not very strictly pursued during the 1850s and so long as the cotton dollars keep rolling in there's no desire to *ever* actually pursue it. In an independent Confederacy whose mythology of the war will attribute Union defeat to the degrading effects of wage-slavery on Yankee citizenry in a further development/exaggeration of that Cavalier-Roundhead nonsense industrialization will be identified with "Yankeefication" and politically unthinkable no matter the economically rational reasons to do it.

I can certainly see that as one school of thought.

But there would be competing schools of thought. Hell, if nothing else would the Confederate military really want to be vunerable to a blockade that cuts them off from resupply?

If there is any fighting, I could see a desire by future Confederates Military leadership not to be outgunned, if there was to be even the potential of a next time.

Hell, if they try to expand into latin American and end up losing, that would be a lesson.
 
I can certainly see that as one school of thought.

But there would be competing schools of thought. Hell, if nothing else would the Confederate military really want to be vunerable to a blockade that cuts them off from resupply?

If there is any fighting, I could see a desire by future Confederates Military leadership not to be outgunned, if there was to be even the potential of a next time.

Hell, if they try to expand into latin American and end up losing, that would be a lesson.

In this case it doesn't matter what the Confederate military wants unless it takes over the Confederacy to ensure it damn well gets what it wants. When Confederate military needs and the planters clashed, the planters won always and forever.
 
In this case it doesn't matter what the Confederate military wants unless it takes over the Confederacy to ensure it damn well gets what it wants. When Confederate military needs and the planters clashed, the planters won always and forever.

We only saw the dynamics of a Confederacy for a few years. Making long term predictions like that seems reckless.

And dismisses the possibility of policy change on the part of the planters.
 
We only saw the dynamics of a Confederacy for a few years. Making long term predictions like that seems reckless.

And dismisses the possibility of policy change on the part of the planters.

We saw how a CSA reacts to a terminal political crisis IOTL, and it's safe to assume an independent CSA will not take actions the OTL one would not in order to save itself when it's won its independence on the battlefield. What wasn't even feasible IOTL in the middle of complete political and military disintegration will be utterly, totally, and completely unthinkable in an independent state. And 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of all CSA threads completely handwave, ignore, minimize, and neglect the issues of white supremacy and racism all over the CSA like ugly on a pig.
 
We saw how a CSA reacts to a terminal political crisis IOTL, and it's safe to assume an independent CSA will not take actions the OTL one would not in order to save itself when it's won its independence on the battlefield. What wasn't even feasible IOTL in the middle of complete political and military disintegration will be utterly, totally, and completely unthinkable in an independent state. And 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of all CSA threads completely handwave, ignore, minimize, and neglect the issues of white supremacy and racism all over the CSA like ugly on a pig.

In Snake Featherston's opinion.
 
We saw how a CSA reacts to a terminal political crisis IOTL, and it's safe to assume an independent CSA will not take actions the OTL one would not in order to save itself when it's won its independence on the battlefield. What wasn't even feasible IOTL in the middle of complete political and military disintegration will be utterly, totally, and completely unthinkable in an independent state. And 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of all CSA threads completely handwave, ignore, minimize, and neglect the issues of white supremacy and racism all over the CSA like ugly on a pig.

In the middle of a war for survival, there will be more deference to authority than in peacetime IMO.
 
In Snake Featherston's opinion.

No, in reality. How many CSA threads even bother to note that the CSA is avowedly based on the supremacy of 2/3 of its population by race over the other 1/3, and that this basis of slavery influences what a CSA will or will not do? How many threads actually even acknowledge how deeply in-built racism was in the OTL CSA, let alone in one that has the chance to develop its slavery ideology bereft of abolitionism? How many threads even recognize that black slaves in the CSA are human beings, not abstractions, and that they will not and will never passively accept the slave system as it exists? Instead we see a number of statements about how the CSA didn't really mean anything it said or did about slavery, with no evidence to back them up, and often verging into outright minimizing and negating the vital importance of slavery to the Confederacy. How many CS apologists think The Black and the Grey is a viable TL, as opposed to a well-written ASB dystopian TL?
 
In the middle of a war for survival, there will be more deference to authority than in peacetime IMO.

Actually less so in several ways. The war, after all, degraded institutions the longer it goes on. In peacetime the planters aren't going to accept the meaningful equality of all *white* men, let alone the kind of reforms that would allow the CSA to exist short of a military dictatorship of a vile and repressive kind.
 

Japhy

Banned
No.

It was to preserve their economic advantage over the north which the northern states threatened to remove.

It was only for economic in a very round about way, secession was about a loss of political power and influence, not actually about tariffs.
 
No.

It was to preserve their economic advantage over the north which the northern states threatened to remove.

The south didn't have an economic advantage over the north. During the antebellum era, cotton was easily America's most valuable export but focussing on that one commodity ignores the big picture of America's economy.

1850's America was an extremely prosperous nation whose economy was anchored towards an enormous domestic market. Most American's bought American clothing, tools, machinery, and manufactured goods and most of the firms that produced said objects (as well as those who financed them) were located north of the Mason Dixon line. The wealth disparity between the two regions was enormous. If I recall correctly the north possessed roughly 80% of America's capital, as for the remaining 20% 2/3rds of it was sunk into slaves and land.
 
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No, in reality. How many CSA threads even bother to note that the CSA is avowedly based on the supremacy of 2/3 of its population by race over the other 1/3, and that this basis of slavery influences what a CSA will or will not do? How many threads actually even acknowledge how deeply in-built racism was in the OTL CSA, let alone in one that has the chance to develop its slavery ideology bereft of abolitionism? How many threads even recognize that black slaves in the CSA are human beings, not abstractions, and that they will not and will never passively accept the slave system as it exists? Instead we see a number of statements about how the CSA didn't really mean anything it said or did about slavery, with no evidence to back them up, and often verging into outright minimizing and negating the vital importance of slavery to the Confederacy. How many CS apologists think The Black and the Grey is a viable TL, as opposed to a well-written ASB dystopian TL?

I should have been alot more exact:

What wasn't even feasible IOTL in the middle of complete political and military disintegration will be utterly, totally, and completely unthinkable in an independent state.

That is your opinion.
 
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