Less Racist South in a Confederate Victory

[Copperhead]

So I'm writing a Story where the South wins the Civil war and a group of Confederates travel to Japan on an exchange program in the early 1900s (meji restoration/modernization era) and the story takes place from a Southern perspective so I want the Confederacy to be as not racist as possible.

One thing I thought of was saying there were more black slave owners than IOTL and that there were laws passed to gradually give slaves more rights. I also thought about making a mulatto class so it looked more like Brazil.

Another thing I thought of doing was having the South get more immigrants so that no State was majority black so they wouldnt have as much racial tension.

This is the first novel that I haven't given up on and have seriously put a lot of work into thinking about so any help would be appreciated.

 

[Kerney]

I think such a scenario is more likely in a 'late war' victory scenario. People re assess their views when pressed and there are expressions when the ruling class is weakened.

I think you need the planter class to win the war but loose the peace, with the soliders who make up the bulk of the Confederate army not siding with them at the voting booth. And I do think it needs to be the voting booth, rather than the gun barrel (mostly) and as such a bloody basket case of a nation.

Leaders will not be the founders per se, but more often be from the slightly junior officers, division commanders and brigade commanders and be talented people who rose because of the war or slightly afterwards.

And a less racist CSA will not be a quick thing. It will one faction seeing free blacks as potential voters, that happens and more blacks become free. Since the reforms are internal there will be less opposition rather than opposed by an outside force like damn yankees.

Hope that is helpful.

 

[Don Corleone]

Very late in the war, the Confederate Congress reluctantly approved enlisting slaves. Have them do this a year earlier and drag out the war longer, and Confederate society changes its attitudes. (Obviously no guarantee that would have happened in reality but it's a plausible way to meet your goal.)

 

[Copperhead]

I think such a scenario is more likely in a 'late war' victory scenario. People re assess their views when pressed and there are expressions when the ruling class is weakened.

I think you need the planter class to win the war but loose the peace, with the soliders who make up the bulk of the Confederate army not siding with them at the voting booth. And I do think it needs to be the voting booth, rather than the gun barrel (mostly) and as such a bloody basket case of a nation.

Leaders will not be the founders per se, but more often be from the slightly junior officers, division commanders and brigade commanders and be talented people who rose because of the war or slightly afterwards.

And a less racist CSA will not be a quick thing. It will one faction seeing free blacks as potential voters, that happens and more blacks become free. Since the reforms are internal there will be less opposition rather than opposed by an outside force like damn yankees.

Hope that is helpful.

Very late on the war, the Confederate Congress reluctantly approved enlisting slaves. Have them do this a year earlier and drag out the war longer, and Confederate society changes its attitudes. (Obviously no guarantee that would have happened in reality but it's a plausible way to meet your goal.)

These are both really helpful thanks

 

[Geaux On And On]

Confederates knew long term slavery was not going to continue. I read many memoirs acknowledging this fact. Remember that it was the US Supreme Court that blessed the separate but equal doctrine and other black Jim Crow discriminatory efforts. I think long term a similar segregation would of developed in a Confederate nation. Plus as a Southern I resent the implication that only in the South has there been any racial discrimination. Not a very accurate understanding of American history.

 

[jmc247]

These are both really helpful thanks

In terms of the possible bills for black enlistment there were two bills that made it to the floor.

That body had already defeated a bill calling for the involuntary enlistment of 200,000 black men, and would likely have defeated the Barksdale bill had not Virginia's two senators, R. M. T. Hunter and Allen T. Caperton, changed their votes due to instructions from the General Assembly. The Senate, by a one-vote margin, approved a slightly amended version of the Barksdale bill on March 8; Davis signed it into law on March 13, 1865.

In the intervening days, the [Virginia] General Assembly passed a law explicitly allowing black men to carry rifles, which state law previously had prohibited. North Carolina's elected officials, by contrast, published their objections to the measure in a series of legislative resolutions.

Black Confederates - Encyclopedia Virginia

African Americans Respond to the Outbreak of War Pickets of the First Louisiana “Native Guard” Guarding the New Orleans, Opelousas and Great Western Railroad When the state of Louisiana announced its secession on January 26, 1861, a group of free Black men from New Orleans offered their...

www.encyclopediavirginia.org

The version that passed didn't come with the family freedom clause Lee wanted nor clear conscription powers in the area for the army. That meant the Army of Northern Virginia was having a bitch of a time dealing with individual slave holders of estates in Virginia trying to get them to free their slaves who wanted to serve.

In the version of the bill that passed you weren't going to reach anything close to the 200K target the army wanted. Still if passed a year earlier you might have 10 or 20K serving by wars end and the troops making their way around the major cities and towns of the South not just Richmond which would have an impact on post war society.

 

[BELFAST]

That is a hard one making the CSA less racist.
Maybe a mistake by a Union army commander where he thinks slaves or black free men are sabotaging the war effort.
Union army commanders start to hang blacks suspected of stealing union supplies or supplying information to the confederates.
This spreads leading to the union army as seeing blacks in the CSA as hostile.
Maybe a riot among slaves behind Union lines gets out of control leading to an escape by confederate pows who are in the same area.
This gets into the confederate press as a rescue of CSA pows by slaves.
CSA victory would mean no KKK so that helps.
More settlers moving to the CSA is going to be hard until air conditioning.
Same with more industry in the CSA. Factories in the CSA can get very hot in the South in summer with air conditioning.
Without more industry, it is hard to attract settlers. It is cheaper for the CSA to import manufactured goods and export cotton, tobacco, rice, indigo, and naval stores.

 

[Hugh Third of Five]

Even if they become less racist towards the Japanese, I'm not sure how that would make them turn on slavery. Unless you've also made Japan far less racist than it was in OTL. I mean Imperial Japan didn't shy away from enslaving Korean people, both for sex and manual labor.

Confederates knew long term slavery was not going to continue. I read many memoirs acknowledging this fact. Remember that it was the US Supreme Court that blessed the separate but equal doctrine and other black Jim Crow discriminatory efforts. I think long term a similar segregation would of developed in a Confederate nation. Plus as a Southern I resent the implication that only in the South has there been any racial discrimination. Not a very accurate understanding of American history.

The south seceded specifically to protect slavery, that's spelled out in the various states' articles of secession. Acknowledging that fact is not denying racism in the north. Take a look at the Confederate constitution.

Article I Section 9(4)
No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

Article IV Section 2(1)
The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States; and shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired.

Article IV Section 3(3)
The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several states; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form states to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.

 

[Faeelin]

I think the nation that won its war to preserve slavery and refused to arm slaves will probably be more racist.

 

[Agatho]

Even if they become less racist towards the Japanese, I'm not sure how that would make them turn on slavery. Unless you've also made Japan far less racist than it was in OTL. I mean Imperial Japan didn't shy away from enslaving Korean people, both for sex and manual labor.

The south seceded specifically to protect slavery, that's spelled out in the various states' articles of secession. Acknowledging that fact is not denying racism in the north. Take a look at the Confederate constitution.

Lol beat me to it.

I think you'll have to make them less racist towards the Japanese, but the fact remains in any Confederate victory scenario a white Southerner will likely be more racist against black people than their OTL counterpart. The right to own black people is why the South rebelled. It is enshrined in multiple parts of the Confederate Constitution (which repeatedly uses the term "negro slaves"). The Confederate Congress was barred from passing any law that impaired the right to own slaves, which led to the results mentioned above with getting slaves to enlist. The entire Confederate legal system will have to be completely overhauled in order to abolish slavery, and as long as white people see owning black people as their constitutional right they will be as racist (but likely more racist) than OTL Southerners.

Getting black slaves to enlist won't be enough. A victory for the Confederacy, even with black people serving in the Confederate Army, will be a victory for owning black people as property, and it's hard to see how Confederate historians and historiographers won't paint it that way considering that is the main reason for their rebellion. Marginalizing the accomplishments of black veterans in the South was normal in OTL. Black veterans in post-ACW Wars still faced widespread discrimination even after they served, so much so that the housing portions of the GI bill might as well have not applied to black veterans. This will be far worse in a country founded on the principle of white people owning black people as property.

In short, your scenario will need widespread social, political, and economic turmoil, and possibly a Confederate Civil War, in order to change the legal system and any attitudes associated with race. The post ACW-government will have to be so inept that the planter class will have to be willing to go back to the drawing board. I guess the boll weevil plague could be far worse than OTL, and with no George Washington Carver to suggest new agricultural techniques, the Southern economy could crash, leading to widespread slave revolts. The CSA would probably fall into deep debt, and that would be a good time for its European creditors (likely Britain and France) to collectively put pressure on the Confederates to end slavery. Best case scenario is that this leads to an actual revolution enforced at gunpoint almost like OTL's Reconstruction era. That might get you to a point where the Confederacy is comparably racist to the OTL South.

 

[BELFAST]

When you say less racist what do you mean?
Is slavery still legal, but a less racist view of African Americans?
Slavery goes in to decline for economic reasons while still might be legal.
It would be helpful, if you give some details on what you mean by less racist.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

This is in extremely bad taste, and the proposed solution of 'black slave owners' is even worse.

You could make Nazi Germany 'less anti-semitic' by sending more people to the camps, but it would be an utterly terrible idea. If you want to write about a surviving Confederacy, you need to look it in the face as a society whose every institution was intrinsically bound up with the ownership, exploitation, and infliction of violence upon African-Americans.

 

[Red_Galiray]

Yeah, I don't know if this is even possible. The South was founded on the fundamental belief that Black people are inferior and only fit to be slaves, as shown by their declarations, Alexander Stephen's famous cornerstone speech and, tellingly, the debate around the use of Black soldiers where many openly admitted that their whole raison d'être would be invalidated if they recruited Black men. If victorious, especially after the Emancipation Proclamation and the use of Black Union troops started, the Confederates would believe their victory was a reivindicacion, patent proof that they were right. I can't see them approaching anything like you're describing.

This is in extremely bad taste, and the proposed solution of 'black slave owners' is even worse.

I agree. Seems like a tasteless idea...

 

[CHKeeley]

If you want to write about a surviving Confederacy, you need to look it in the face as a society whose every institution was intrinsically bound up with the ownership, exploitation, and infliction of violence upon African-Americans.

I happen to agree, if you're going to write about a certain timeline I think it's futile to think of PoDs that tone down the horror of the institutions IOTL for the sake of the narrative - it would be much more powerful to instead address them head on instead of just trying to whitewash it in some way through a set of divergences.

Black soldiers and slave owners goes against the fundamental idea of Southern independence: the domination of white over black through economic, political, and social means. Even in the very late war if you can somehow get them to press black men into service (and they don't desert en masse at the first chance), I think it is extremely likely that they are disarmed and subjugated in the post war settlement rather than suddenly integrated into this less racist society that just spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands to preserve slavery.

 

[jmc247]

Getting black slaves to enlist won't be enough. A victory for the Confederacy, even with black people serving in the Confederate Army, will be a victory for owning black people as property, and it's hard to see how Confederate historians and historiographers won't paint it that way considering that is the main reason for their rebellion.

You might have an expanded version of the kind of schizophrenic historiography splitting different states/regions of the South. One only really needed to read the major newspapers of Virginia vs South Carolina to get two separate visions on the why of secession and the justification. For the SC papers it was well...

The Charleston, S.C., Mercury raged on Jan. 13, 1865, “It was on account of encroachments upon the institution of slavery ... that South Carolina seceded from that Union. It is not at this late day, after the loss of thirty thousand of her best and bravest men in battle, that she will suffer it to be bartered away.”

In the regulations that put the new policy into effect, however, Davis and the War Department insisted that slaves who enlisted must be given their freedom. That’s a long way from ending slavery. The goal was to “put some slaves in the army, win the war and maintain a slaveholding society,” said Gary W. Gallagher, the John L. Nau III Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Black soldiers in the Civil War: Who did they fight for and why?

The spectacle would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the Civil War. Black Confederate soldiers were on parade in Capitol Square.

richmond.com

For Virginia papers secession was typically rationalized in terms of Jeffersonian political philosophy on the rights of states, the founders thoughts on the legality of secession, and the need to defend other states when threatened by federal power. The one thing I would say about modern histography is it lumps the southern states into the same mode of thinking on major topics when there was as much variance at times as there was between Unionist states... save perhaps NE and some of the border states like KY.

In terms of racism.. all the popular messaging in the press across the South was very racist, but it varied between states from accepting no future for blacks other then other slavery to maybe free blacks in some roles might be worth trying.

 

[dieg-ish]

So I'm writing a Story where the South wins the Civil war and a group of Confederates travel to Japan on an exchange program in the early 1900s (meji restoration/modernization era) and the story takes place from a Southern perspective so I want the Confederacy to be as not racist as possible.

This is the first novel that I haven't given up on and have seriously put a lot of work into thinking about so any help would be appreciated.

I've always stayed away from Confederate-related PODs because I haven't figured out something: for how long slavery and racial discrimination could have survived in a country that probably would have had a Black majority by some point of the 20th century? I know that South Africa was awfully sucessful doing that, but the Confederates would have gotten away with it?

Another thing I thought of doing was having the South get more immigrants so that no State was majority black so they wouldnt have as much racial tension.

That's pretty hard. I mean, even IOTL the Northern states always received more European immigration than the South and that probably had something do do with the strong conservatism of the of the Southerners and their rejectment of foreign people. Just look at how they walked away from Al Smith in 1928. If anything, 'winning' the war would have made them feel even more comfortable with their manners.

 

[Copperhead]

Yeah I think that's a good idea to just tackle it head on seems easier to do to tbh

 

[PGSBHurricane]

You might have an expanded version of the kind of schizophrenic historiography splitting different states/regions of the South. One only really needed to read the major newspapers of Virginia vs South Carolina to get two separate visions on the why of secession and the justification. For the SC papers it was well...



For Virginia papers secession was typically rationalized in terms of Jeffersonian political philosophy on the rights of states, the founders thoughts on the legality of secession, and the need to defend other states when threatened by federal power. The one thing I would say about modern histography is it lumps the southern states into the same mode of thinking on major topics when there was as much variance at times as there was between Unionist states... save perhaps NE and some of the border states like KY.

In terms of racism.. all the popular messaging in the press across the South was very racist, but it varied between states from accepting no future for blacks other then other slavery to maybe free blacks in some roles might be worth trying.

I can see that becoming more true as time goes on. By the time Brazil abolishes slavery in 1888 and the Brussels Convention of 1890, I think not only industry could be far enough along in states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia (including Richmond) I think they might even be embarrassed to be associated with such a racist institution. Even more so when the Congo scandal comes out in the first decade of the 1900s. The sheer inhumanity of what happened in the Congo might scandalize the CSA enough to re-evaluate the role of blacks in society if slavery is still going on then.

 

[Copperhead]

So even if I don't make it less racist, is 1910 a good estimate for the abolishment of slavery or would it be 1890 or even earlier? The book will be set in Japan so it wont tackle issues too much, I just want to write my characters accurately to the environment they grew up in

 

[PGSBHurricane]

I've always stayed away from Confederate-related PODs because I haven't figured out something: for how long slavery and racial discrimination could have survived in a country that probably would have had a Black majority by some point of the 20th century? I know that South Africa was awfully sucessful doing that, but the Confederates would have gotten away with it?


That's pretty hard. I mean, even IOTL the Northern states always received more European immigration than the South and that probably had something do do with the strong conservatism of the of the Southerners and their rejectment of foreign people. Just look at how they walked away from Al Smith in 1928. If anything, 'winning' the war would have made them feel even more comfortable with their manners.

Not impossible. There’s one CSA victory timeline on here where there’s even stronger nativist and anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic attitudes in the USA than OTL and causes most Catholic immigrants to go to Canada, Latin America, and Oceania and the Jews to the CSA. Judah Benjamin, a practicing Jew, basically held every cabinet position in the CSA at some point and I’d the CSA lasts long enough then I can see Jews seeing the CSA as more favorable than the USA. Also, Chinese immigrants were actually more welcomed in the Mississippi Delta Region OTL than our west in places like California (doesn’t set a high bar but still) so that could be on the table too.