Maryland annexes Virginia?!

virginia-map.jpg

"The map is from an 1861 edition of Harper's Weekly, and is based on an idea from federal Secretary of War Simon Cameron. Here's how Harper's Weekly described the idea:
This arrangement would reduce the size of the State of Virginia at least one-half, leaving the name of Virginia to that part only which is now mainly loyal.
The disloyal section, comprising all the great cities of Virginia—Richmond, Norfolk, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, etc.—and all the sea-coast, would be annexed to Maryland, while Delaware would rise, by spreading over the whole peninsula between the Chesapeake and the ocean, to be a State of considerable magnitude. Under this reconstruction Maryland would become one of the three great States of the Union. We need hardly direct attention to the clause in the Secretary's report which hints that emancipation in Maryland must be the price paid for this acquisition of territory.
Alexandria and Arlington would have returned to DC, which would have remained independent of any state." http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/29874/in-1861-maryland-almost-annexed-virginia/ "...In theory, this proposal therefore would have accomplished several goals. It would have:
1. Separated off the loyalist western parts of Virginia, allowing them to be reintroduced to the Union as a northern state.
2. Punished eastern Virginia, the intellectual and economic heart of the Confederacy, by taking away its independence as a state.
3. Rewarded Maryland and Delaware for remaining in the Union. 4. Protected Washington from having a hostile territory directly across the Potomac."

In other words, "Virginia" would cease to exist except as a larger version of what would in OTL become West Virginia--besides OL's West Virginia, it would gain the Shenandoah Valley and southwest Virginia as well as western Maryland. The rest of Virginia would become part of Maryland, except that Delaware would occupy the entire Delmarva peninsula, and DC would regain Alexandria and Arlington.

This has so many problems that I would simply dismiss it as ASB except that it is attributed to Cameron, who after all was Secretary of War. Just to note a couple:

(1) The new "Virginia" is supposed to be a "loyal" state. Yet the notion that southwestern Virginia and the Valley were (as *Harper's Weekly* suggests) "mainly loyal" to the US is just plain wrong. In fact, West Virginia itself in OTL was not purely Unionist, precisely because it included portions of those areas. Richard Curry, *A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia* is good on this; see my post at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/soc.history.what-if/KIEIOUIt-LA/wq4tbxSUPuoJ Even the West Virginia of OTL became heavily Democratic for some decades after the ACW (one the test oaths were repealed) thanks to a coalition between ex-Confederates and Copperheads; the "Virginia" of this map will become part of the Solid South (though it will no doubt have more white Republicans than the Deep South).

(2) An even more serious problem, noted in the article, is that while Maryland and Delaware are supposed to be rewarded for their loyalty by taking pieces of Virginia, Maryland even within its OTL borders had considerable numbers of Confederate sympathizers and of course adding central and eastern Virgnia to it is going to "Confederatize" Maryland far more than it will de-Confederatize eastern and central Virginia. (To get this territory Maryland will have to agree to abolish slavery, but that was something she was not yet willing to do in 1861. And she was hardly likely to do so just to get a huge territory that she didn't want and that would submerge her own identity.) Even Delaware, which had very few secessionists, will now get quite a number...

virginia-map.jpg
 
I presume if this happens it would have to be occur post-whenever the civil war ends ITTL. So that means, presumably, slavery would be abolished anyway, and since the Confederacy had handily lost, the Union would not have to worry about Maryland being "confederatized".
 

TFSmith121

Banned
Exact same subject in a post yesterday

Exact same subject in a post yesterday:

As per the plan laid out in this article.

The proposal is from 1861, so we have a few years of possible PODs to create a more acrimonious post-war Union that might enact this. Delaware and (West) Virginia would probably be totally fine with this, and demographically the parts of Maryland they take would fit better with those two states than Maryland as a whole. Virginia's opinion wouldn't have to matter, if the end of the war has the Union in a black enough mood. Maryland itself might be dubious

Mostly I just wanted to share, and I know the impulse for most people is to spend the rest of the thread talking about plausibility (sigh). Feel free, I guess.

But does anyone want to guess at consequences?

View attachment 271421

"The map is from an 1861 edition of Harper's Weekly, and is based on an idea from federal Secretary of War Simon Cameron. Here's how Harper's Weekly described the idea:
This arrangement would reduce the size of the State of Virginia at least one-half, leaving the name of Virginia to that part only which is now mainly loyal.
The disloyal section, comprising all the great cities of Virginia—Richmond, Norfolk, Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, etc.—and all the sea-coast, would be annexed to Maryland, while Delaware would rise, by spreading over the whole peninsula between the Chesapeake and the ocean, to be a State of considerable magnitude. Under this reconstruction Maryland would become one of the three great States of the Union. We need hardly direct attention to the clause in the Secretary's report which hints that emancipation in Maryland must be the price paid for this acquisition of territory.
Alexandria and Arlington would have returned to DC, which would have remained independent of any state." http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/29874/in-1861-maryland-almost-annexed-virginia/ "...In theory, this proposal therefore would have accomplished several goals. It would have:
1. Separated off the loyalist western parts of Virginia, allowing them to be reintroduced to the Union as a northern state.
2. Punished eastern Virginia, the intellectual and economic heart of the Confederacy, by taking away its independence as a state.
3. Rewarded Maryland and Delaware for remaining in the Union. 4. Protected Washington from having a hostile territory directly across the Potomac."

In other words, "Virginia" would cease to exist except as a larger version of what would in OTL become West Virginia--besides OL's West Virginia, it would gain the Shenandoah Valley and southwest Virginia as well as western Maryland. The rest of Virginia would become part of Maryland, except that Delaware would occupy the entire Delmarva peninsula, and DC would regain Alexandria and Arlington.

This has so many problems that I would simply dismiss it as ASB except that it is attributed to Cameron, who after all was Secretary of War. Just to note a couple:

(1) The new "Virginia" is supposed to be a "loyal" state. Yet the notion that southwestern Virginia and the Valley were (as *Harper's Weekly* suggests) "mainly loyal" to the US is just plain wrong. In fact, West Virginia itself in OTL was not purely Unionist, precisely because it included portions of those areas. Richard Curry, *A House Divided: A Study of Statehood Politics and the Copperhead Movement in West Virginia* is good on this; see my post at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/soc.history.what-if/KIEIOUIt-LA/wq4tbxSUPuoJ Even the West Virginia of OTL became heavily Democratic for some decades after the ACW (one the test oaths were repealed) thanks to a coalition between ex-Confederates and Copperheads; the "Virginia" of this map will become part of the Solid South (though it will no doubt have more white Republicans than the Deep South).

(2) An even more serious problem, noted in the article, is that while Maryland and Delaware are supposed to be rewarded for their loyalty by taking pieces of Virginia, Maryland even within its OTL borders had considerable numbers of Confederate sympathizers and of course adding central and eastern Virgnia to it is going to "Confederatize" Maryland far more than it will de-Confederatize eastern and central Virginia. (To get this territory Maryland will have to agree to abolish slavery, but that was something she was not yet willing to do in 1861. And she was hardly likely to do so just to get a huge territory that she didn't want and that would submerge her own identity.) Even Delaware, which had very few secessionists, will now get quite a number...
 
The map sure looks better than the peculiar shape Maryland has always had in real life. I wonder if that was Cameron's only motivation for this, because I don't know of anything else that would be improved by this.
 
I can't see why Maryland would want this, other than being able to have the word "Maryland" on a larger section of the map. It wouldn't be Virginia that would be losing its independence, it would be Maryland, as the state center of power inevitably moved south.

It would be a convoluted way to accomplish the goals of the splitting off of West Virginia and of abolishing slavery in Virginia, one of which was made unnecessary by the official succession of West Virginia as a new state, and the second of which was made completely unnecessary by the Emancipation Proclamation.
 
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