From: The Black and the Gray
Initial WI: WI the Confederacy lost the War of Secession?
POD: President Davis successfully supresses the Cleburne Memorial.
TL Name: Union and Liberty?
This timeline postulates that President Jefferson Davis successfully suppressed the Cleburne Memorial in January 1864. As a result, the final passage of legislation which allowed the mass recruitment of slaves as soldiers for the Confederacy is delayed until one year later, on March 13, 1865. As a result, the Confederacy loses the War of Secession.
So far, so good. The Confederacy in real history was in pretty dire straights by 1864, and its prospects, without the large infusion of manpower which came as a result of the black recruitment laws of March 1864, were pretty bleak. However, the actual sequence of events which takes place in the timeline is fairly fantastic.
First, after General Joe Johnston fights a brilliant defensive campaign from the borders of Tennessee to the outskirts of Atlanta, preserving his army while inflicting large losses on the enemy in every engagement in which he fought them, suddenly President Davis just removes him from command. And who does he put in his place? Beauregard? No. Bragg? No. Kirby Smith? No again.
He promotes John Bell Hood, whose performance during the campaign up to that time (in the ATL) had been far from spectacular, to the rank of Full General, and places him in command! And Hood, who in real history performed creditably in the 1864 campaign in north Georgia and later in Tennessee, acts like he has no brains at all and basically throws away his army in bloody attacks on Union positions outside Atlanta. Then he allows Sherman to encircle the city, and cut all the railroad lines into it, so it falls in August 1864.
Then, General Sherman burns Atlanta and heads off, with his army, toward Savannah, burning, looting, and raping his way through Georgia. Does Hood try to stop him?
No.
Instead, Hood marches off in the opposite direction and heads into Tennessee! Along the way, he nearly manages to capture a Union Army of 20,000 men at Spring Hill, Tennessee. But his army, for some inexplicable reason, goes into camp for the night leaving the road clear, and the Yankees just march past during the night and get clean away to Franklin, Tennessee, without even being challenged by the Confederates who are camped just a few hundred yards from the road! At that point I almost threw up my hands and quit reading...it was just too fantastic to believe! But I persevered.
Then Hood throws away another 6,000 to 7,000 men attacking the entrenched Yankees at Franklin, then follows them to Nashville, where Union General George Thomas is building an army to oppose him. He then proceeds to entrench himself on top of a ridge outside Nashville...and do nothing. He just waits while Thomas gathers up an overwhelming force and comes out in mid-December and swats his army like a fly.
The pitiful remnants of the once proud Army of Tennessee march to Tupelo, Mississippi, then march all the way, on foot, from there to North Carolina, where they surrender to Sherman on April 26, 1865.
Meanwhile, Sherman captures Savannah, and then proceeds, with virtually no resistance, to burn, loot, and rape his way through South Carolina, where he burns the State Capitol, Columbia, for no apparent reason, until he finally catches up to the Army of Tennessee in North Carolina to accept its surrender.
The course of events in the Eastern Theater is more believable. General Lee is gradually forced back toward Richmond in a series of battles in which he inflicts as many casualties on Union General Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac as Lee had in his entire army at the start of the campaign. The city is placed under siege, and falls, ten months later, in April 1865.
But even here, a fantastic event takes place. In late May 1864, General Lee lures General Grant into a trap at the North Anna River, taking a position which forces the Yankees to divide their army into three parts, each separated from the other by a river. Lee has the opportunity to attack the center of the Union position, which was weakly held by the incompetent Ambrose Burnside, and then turn to savage either the left or right flank of the Union Army before the other flank could intervene. Lee has placed himself in the perfect position to destroy the Army of the Potomac, and possibly end the war.
But then, General Lee gets a stomach virus, is confined to his tent, and his army sits and does NOTHING for a whole day, giving General Grant time to figure out that his army is in a trap and to get out of it. For the lack of a bottle of Pepto Bismol, a nation lost its independence!
I almost gave up on this timeline at that point. But being the glutton for punishment I am, I kept reading.
I found the section on the "Reconstruction" of the South following the failed War of Secession to be rather chilling (by the way, in the ATL, they refer to the conflict as the "Civil War," for some reason, which is stupid, because a civil war is a war fought by two factions for control of the government of a nation, not at all an accurate description of the War of Secession...but I digress). The Yankees free the slaves, and then the Republican Party uses them to establish control over all the Southern State Governments. Their regimes do some good...efforts are made to educate the former slaves in some areas, and to protect their rights...but mostly these governments seem to be interested in raising taxes and looting the State Treasuries as quickly as possible. Most of the white population of the South is disenfranchised, for as much as 12 years in some cases, and in reaction, white Southerners form a vicious terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan (which, by the way, is a REALLY stupid name...seems like the author of this TL could have come up with something better), which engages in a campaign of violence and intimidation which kills thousands of blacks and white carpetbaggers and poisons race relations nearly irreparably.
Finally, Reconstruction ends, but only after a corrupt political deal allows the Republican candidate to steal the Presidency following a disputed 1876 election. Then white supremacist Democrats take power all over the South, and proceed to impose a brutal system of enforced segregation on the black population called "Jim Crow" (Yet ANOTHER stupid name...why did he name this after some second rate minstrel song? Geez!). Segregation is a Northern invention, and did not exist in the South prior to the War of Secession. It never existed in the Confederacy in our own history. One has to wonder why the embittered, defeated Southerners of this ATL would suddenly want to imitate their Yankee oppressors by adopting such a system? But they do. And not only do they adopt it, but the system persists for almost a century...accompanied by a wave of horrific lynchings of mostly innocent black people which kills thousands, mostly during the early 1900s...right up into the 1960s, if you can believe it!
You'd think that a United States which had forcibly reabsorbed the South at gunpoint, treated it like a conquered territory for over a decade afterward, freed millions of slaves and done nothing to see that they could be peacefully integrated into society, and then allowed the horrid "Jim Crow" regime (I still hate that name) to exist in the South for almost a century after the war, would end up as a Third World country, torn apart by racial and sectional strife. But you'd be wrong.
In the ATL, the United States goes on to be the world's only superpower by the end of the twentieth century. The British Empire, the French Empire, and all the others, gone. And even some of the events which lead to this outcome are far-fetched in themselves.
--Germany and Britain fight on opposite sides of the Great War...which takes place a decade later than in our history. And Britain is allied to France...AND RUSSIA! Its two traditional enemies! Against its traditional ally! Just unbelievable.
--Adolf Hitler, who in real history was an Austrian landscape painter living in Vienna, ends up as dictator of Germany??? And he kills 6 million Jews???? And he almost conquers the world???? One has to wonder, what was the author of this piece of garbage smoking when he wrote this?
--The COMMUNISTS end up in control of Russia. In real history, they were a minor movement which never got off the ground and certainly never came close to gaining power in any nation. And then, under their leadership, Russia ends up as one of two superpowers which struggled for dominance for most of the second half of the twentieth century??? PUH-LEASE!!!!
By the time you get to the end of this, you just want to bang your head against the wall. Or stick your head out the window and yell, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore!" It seems like, by then, the author is just making random stuff up as he goes along. It's just bad.
Give this one a miss.