And here we have a site cliche - turning every Civil War thread into a discussion of McClellan.
(Non T-191) Cliches to avoid in a CSA timeline?
- Thread starter YourWaifuForLaifu
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And here we have a site cliche - turning every Civil War thread into a discussion of McClellan.
The idea that the Confederacy has any prayer of gaining control of southern California is a cliche to avoid. About 5000 Californians served in the Union Army, while only about 50 joined the Confederacy. Confederate force project was so poor the couldn't take the much closer Colorado Territory (population 34,000), even though half the Union force at Glorietta Pass was territorial militia.
Slaves would never be "committed Confederates" and they made up roughly 40% of the Confederate population.
And here we have a site cliche - turning every Civil War thread into a discussion of McClellan.
I think that's a personal habit rather than a site cliche.
Saphroneth
Banned
They are genuine ways to get a decisive Confederate defeat of the Army of the Potomac, though. It's harder later on because the Union was much more mobilized.
It was for tribes, Kingdoms and even Empires (Opium War) of "Brown and Yellow People", especially uppity ones like the Zulu and the Lakota or white small change people like the Boers. The Confederacy would not be in this catagory.
The worst US/Confederacy outcome would be closer but I know not exactly like France/Germany where post 1870; even though France wants revenge and Germany wouldn't mind taking another bite out of France, neither would consider a full conquest possible or desirable. Even if an established Confederacy was disestablished by invading Yankees, there would much more likely to be a widely supported Confederate Geurilla movement and a lot of Union mothers wondering why their son got killed on the "foreign" soil of Alabama.
Because, unlike a the otl South which had anger at defeat and no responsiblity to the wider world while a victorious Confederacy would have a public image in the world. It would want to attract foreign investment and be seen as a "respectable" member of the family of nations. It also had some leaders capable of understanding this (Breckenridge, Benjamin, Longstreet etc) and the first leader not to fit this paradign would probably be such a failure that they'd be an object lesson to those who followed.
Seriously? As someone pointed out already, slaves cost money. Also it is almost as much a stereotype as the benevolent slaveholder looking out for "his" n----. Those blacks wouldn't be seen as the reason their whole system was overturned and not be as much the objects of hatred they were otl. Yes, they'd be "in their place" but there is a fairly good chance that with the factors I've already cited the position of blacks would gradually improve. There already were black businessmen and entreprenuers (Solomon Luckie, John Dabney for example) whose continued prosperity would gradually undermine slavery.
And yes, it could go bad for them. It could also have gradually improved to the point that in alt-2017 there is a hard won equality before the law, and perhaps without the bitter racial division we have OTL, because the Confederacy had to "Own the problem" rather than having solutions being forced on "the South" by reconstruction, the courts, and other d--m Yankee outsiders.
You might argue that some individual blacks also benefited from Jim Crow and Segregation. But what's your argument? That slavery at its best was a better system for some blacks than Jim Crow/Segregation at its worse? I'm kind of profoundly skeptical of that. But even if we accepted that argument, it's not really meaningful. Slavery at its worse was a heinously awful system and far more appalling than Jim Crow/Segregation, at its best and at its worse. Slavery as an institution was, on average, massively more toxic and destructive than Jim Crow/Segregation on average.
If your argument is entirely about outliers, then its a worthless argument.
Hmmm. I think most human beings would pick the option that didn't include random episodes of rape and brutality, no rights of redress, having your children sold away from you, and a lifelong investment of forced labour. I don't think it takes any special strong will or preference of freedom not to want to be raped by owners.
In any event, the point is that slavery was orders of magnitude worse than Jim Crow/Segregation.
I think you've misunderstood the concept of the banality of evil. It's about the institution itself being evil, and not leavened by the fact that some of the people in that institution might not be evil themselves.
My own view is very simple. History shows us that when people are given power over others, it is invariably abused. It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Saphroneth
Banned
This hypothesis has a problem with it, which is that slavery continued to exist. I don't mean that slaves wanted slavery, of course, I mean that most slaves considered their "lot" in life to not be worth the risk in rising up against it. Otherwise either there'd be no slaves left or no slavery left.
People exist on a bell curve. It's obviously the case that we hear about the worst of the slavers, and I would hardly argue that the best of the slavers were representative either. I'd just argue that for most slave owners the agenda wasn't basically "whip, rape, torture" - under those circumstances there's nothing to lose by revolting - it was "make money from slaves, treat moderately well so long as it doesn't cost too much so as to get the best return on investment, occasionally sleep with pretty young girl in return for slight better treatment".
It's not the kind of psychotic orgy of violence you intimate, but it is something that's both stable and offers an explanation as to why most slaves did not revolt (the certainty of a known situation rather than the uncertainty of a rising) and it's something which people could actually argue was a positive good for the slaves without massive cognitive dissonance.
And it's still a bad situation, because people are being owned as property. But it's a situation which could honestly persist long-term.
This is also why slavery advocates felt able to make the comparison with "wage slaves" - because they, they said, had a fiscal interest in treating their (slave) workers well, while "yankees" could just work their wage workers into the ground and then have more turn up for free. While this argument has obvious problems to it from our point of view, it's pretty unlikely that genuinely intelligent people would be making an argument which was obviously and totally wrong on all levels. That's why the abolition movement talked about the dignity of man rather than just using "my god, you're raping everyone in sight" and being done with it.
What this also means is that most slave holders could say to themselves "I'm not one of the bad ones, the bad ones like Trev over the other side of the river do terrible things to their slaves. All my slaves are nicely treated, they get enough to eat, I even give them a few cents to get themselves something nice". They could feel progressive, forward-thinking and full of Christian Charity while still owning people. (After all, the bible has laws about it...)
I retire at the point someone literally says slaves are better off as slaves, this conversation no longer has any intellectual meaning or import.
DollopzuMolke
Banned
This is frankly stupid. When the Franco-Prussian war happened, Germany didn't just Annex all of France and tell the rest of Europe that Annexing whole nation's was normal, they would just take a nibble of important territory like Alcase Lorraine that had a plurality of Germans. Likewise the Union would nibble on the Border South that was more ambivalent on slavery than the Lower South. Not annex a whole friggin nation that is Internationally recognized since that would turn it into an international pariah.
In my experience, people who are sore losers in defeat are complete and utter shits in victory. That's how humans are. They aren't any other way. One goes with the other.
As for the south's motivation, you can't maintain slavery and be respectable in the world, and the South wasn't going to give up slavery. What was the South going to do? Pass it off as 'humane' and beneficial? Slavery already had a terrible reputation worldwide by then, and 'pseudo-slave' based enterprises, like King Leopold's operations in Congo would be universally condemned.
Seriously? Benevolent slaveholders aren't really a stereotype so much as a cliché, an ideal or illusion perpetuated by lost cause. Benevolence was actually a fairly relative thing. Benevolent slaveholders like Thomas Jefferson raped their slaves, and benevolent slaveholders like Robert E. Lee had them horsewhipped. A benevolent slaveholder is like a 'kindly old Khmer Rouge.' Sure, they existed, for a certain value of benevolence. A benevolent slaveholder might forego raping his slaves, or selling their children, but they were still slavers. They still perpetuated the system, they still bought and sold, they still used forced labour and they still punitively put down threats or challenges. Their benevolence was only in comparison to the various and endless levels of depravity which were the rule in their society. But they were part and parcel of an evil system built on human oppression.
Look at the entire structure of southern society - the frequency of runaways, the continuing brushfire of rebellions. It was a violent society based on violent oppression. That's how it worked.
Good luck with that.
I really feel that is simply another persistent myth of the Lost Cause, and based more in sentimentality than rationality. The real drivers of Jim Crow and Segregation were the requirements of the cotton economy, and the ideological framework that had to be built up to dehumanize and subordinate black people. I don't see Confederate victory changing that. They will still consider blacks subhuman, inferior and deserving of slavery. They will still need to be subjugated for forced labour. You argue that without the resentments produced by defeat, that the slavers might be more just and gentle. I would respond that these same slavers will have all of their opinions, including their most base and vicious impulses confirmed, affirmed and celebrated by victory. They will not be merciful to the people that they oppressed - the hand of God itself has reached down and validated their oppression. They will not lay down the whip or extend the open hand. I will leave you with these thoughts of Doctor Martin Luther King:
The alternative being hanging? Slaves being trapped in a society where they had nowhere to run and nowhere to go, where all the power was in the hands of the white power structure and militias, all of them heavily armed. Where fleeing blacks had to pass through hundreds of miles of enemy territory. Not a lot of options. And yet, thousands upon thousands of slaves fled anyway, and there were hundreds of brushfire rebellions.
They weren't employees. There might be carrots, but the whip was never ever out of sight. The system was not based on consent. It depended on violence and the willingness to use violence to exist.
I'll agree to disagree.
You might argue that people in concentration camps and gulags were relatively content with their lot, and thus most of them did not revolt. The only thing I'll agree with is that it was a situation, one of continuous violence, that would continue to exist long term. It would exist as long as violence was employed.
I"m pretty sure that those sorts of arguments were absolutely and thoroughly discredited over a hundred and fifty years ago.
You realize that your argument "it's pretty unlikely that genuinely intelligent people would be making an argument which was obviously and totally wrong on all levels" can be used as a 'viable' case for the lack of sphericity of the Earth? Or for the proposition that dog headed men and blemmys exist today in Africa?
Well no. Because if they talked about that, this is what happened:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner
But.... we know that Tom Jefferson got a leg over. And I've read somewhere that 90% of American blacks have white DNA in them. So it does seem like the Southern men were a very rapey bunch.
"And I only horsewhip them when I feel they need it, and I don't sell children out from their mothers unless I need the cash, and if I have a teenager pleasure me, well, we don't talk about that stuff." This yardstick where they compare themselves to the worst to establish their benevolence is pretty suspect. Especially since they're more than willing to tolerate the worst.
Frankly, I suspect that many of these slaves might have a different view of their owners benevolence.
You know what, that sounds like a good plan. I think I'll retire as well.
History Learner
Banned
Well, for one, the complete destruction of a Federal Army would probably trigger Anglo-French intervention, given they were already heavily considering such at this time. If it doesn't, the Army of the Potomac is now short around 60,000 troops for Sharpsburg and that just might be enough to allow Lee to pull off a major win as was noted. Lastly, such a major disaster would be a shock to the Northern public, perhaps enough to get the Democrats control of the House in the Midterms and lead to some early Anti-War riots (New York Draft Riots nearly a year early?); increasing Anti-War sentiment and obstructionists in Congress could force Lincoln's hand on making peace.
Just a question, but hundreds? As far as I know there were only three major rebellions in the antebellum South, even going back to the 1700s (absent the Revolution), and then they were comparatively small affairs. There were so few rebellions because the threat of total annihilation and repression was just that omnipresent in the society.
Which ought to tell you exactly what a volatile/violent society it was.
Saphroneth
Banned
I was going to put together a long post about how it's important to make sure we get a proper historical picture so that we don't simplify the matter too much - while still being aware the whole thing was pretty universally bad - but I think instead I'll just put together a very simple construction or two.
People in times past have been willing to put up with quite a lot of bad treatment because of the uncertainty of what a revolt or rebellion would bring (we can tell this by the fact societies with serfdom tended to, um, still exist thirty years after serfdom was introduced). But if their only options are a revolt ("probable death") or an existence of the kind that has been ascribed to most/all slaves in the antebellum south ("rape, torture, hard work and probable death") then we should expect most of them to choose revolt.
This is why the lot of slaves was probably not quite as bad as people have implied in this thread - because there is a whole ocean of possible "bad" between "slavery" and that level of bad. This does not imply or say that slaves were better off as slaves - it says that people in history have been willing to accept bad things rather than gamble on worse things. It means thinking about the people who were slaves as being people able to make an assessment (whether based on incomplete information or not) about their situation.
Similarly, if one examines what happened during Jim Crow and the like, there were several differences between the lot of an 1850s slave and a post-Reconstruction black man. They are not all positive.
The white people are the same kind of white people with the same kind of attitudes (in many cases, the same people full stop).
They are not any more likely to be punished for mistreating a black person.
They are no longer financially disincentivised from harming a black person.
The black person can arm themselves.
The black person can earn money and own property.
The black person is free and is not owned.
For most people those latter three are probably the ones that are more important. But for some they may not be.
The reason I think this is important in an alternate history context is that it helps to give an accurate portrayal of the South. The South isn't somewhere where every black man is being whipped or tortured - it's more insidious than that, it's somewhere where "troublemakers" are whipped and where other slaves feel grateful they are not being whipped (even as they still hate that they're property). It's somewhere people congratulate themselves on their "enlightened" attitudes while being so wrong to modern eyes it makes your stomach churn, it's somewhere where in Louisiana there were hundreds of black plantation owners and where at least a few black people acted as soldiers - and where there was a genuine operational/strategic benefit to be had for Lee's army that it could rely on a logistics train consisting largely of blacks (free or slave, it's a little hard to determine).
This is more correct than the other approach (or approaches - it should not need to be said at all that the south was not a place where there was "happiness in slavery". It was a place where the majority of people who were slaves considered their lot to be broadly acceptable compared to the risky, bloody alternative). It's also got more scope for interesting scenes and nuance.
I seem to have ended up with a long post anyway.
So, to completely diverge from that, here's something else - consider how the Confederacy wins in your TL, both on land and at sea, and consider what lessons they might draw from that including wrong ones. (e.g. if the CSA wins in an ATL where they win with Picketts Charge or something similar, to use that as an example, they might continue with the cult of cold steel well past the best-before date, whereas if they win by outflanking and destroying McClellan's Army of the Potomac they might focus on manoeuvre at the expense of modernization.) Similarly, consider what lessons the USA might learn. (earlier adoption of quick-firing weapons for the Picketts Charge one, or the need for a single massive army impossible to outflank for the outflanking one.)
People in times past have been willing to put up with quite a lot of bad treatment because of the uncertainty of what a revolt or rebellion would bring (we can tell this by the fact societies with serfdom tended to, um, still exist thirty years after serfdom was introduced). But if their only options are a revolt ("probable death") or an existence of the kind that has been ascribed to most/all slaves in the antebellum south ("rape, torture, hard work and probable death") then we should expect most of them to choose revolt.
This is why the lot of slaves was probably not quite as bad as people have implied in this thread - because there is a whole ocean of possible "bad" between "slavery" and that level of bad. This does not imply or say that slaves were better off as slaves - it says that people in history have been willing to accept bad things rather than gamble on worse things. It means thinking about the people who were slaves as being people able to make an assessment (whether based on incomplete information or not) about their situation.
Similarly, if one examines what happened during Jim Crow and the like, there were several differences between the lot of an 1850s slave and a post-Reconstruction black man. They are not all positive.
The white people are the same kind of white people with the same kind of attitudes (in many cases, the same people full stop).
They are not any more likely to be punished for mistreating a black person.
They are no longer financially disincentivised from harming a black person.
The black person can arm themselves.
The black person can earn money and own property.
The black person is free and is not owned.
For most people those latter three are probably the ones that are more important. But for some they may not be.
The reason I think this is important in an alternate history context is that it helps to give an accurate portrayal of the South. The South isn't somewhere where every black man is being whipped or tortured - it's more insidious than that, it's somewhere where "troublemakers" are whipped and where other slaves feel grateful they are not being whipped (even as they still hate that they're property). It's somewhere people congratulate themselves on their "enlightened" attitudes while being so wrong to modern eyes it makes your stomach churn, it's somewhere where in Louisiana there were hundreds of black plantation owners and where at least a few black people acted as soldiers - and where there was a genuine operational/strategic benefit to be had for Lee's army that it could rely on a logistics train consisting largely of blacks (free or slave, it's a little hard to determine).
This is more correct than the other approach (or approaches - it should not need to be said at all that the south was not a place where there was "happiness in slavery". It was a place where the majority of people who were slaves considered their lot to be broadly acceptable compared to the risky, bloody alternative). It's also got more scope for interesting scenes and nuance.
I seem to have ended up with a long post anyway.
So, to completely diverge from that, here's something else - consider how the Confederacy wins in your TL, both on land and at sea, and consider what lessons they might draw from that including wrong ones. (e.g. if the CSA wins in an ATL where they win with Picketts Charge or something similar, to use that as an example, they might continue with the cult of cold steel well past the best-before date, whereas if they win by outflanking and destroying McClellan's Army of the Potomac they might focus on manoeuvre at the expense of modernization.) Similarly, consider what lessons the USA might learn. (earlier adoption of quick-firing weapons for the Picketts Charge one, or the need for a single massive army impossible to outflank for the outflanking one.)
And here we have a site cliche - turning every Civil War thread into a discussion of McClellan.
It's either that or an argument regarding how long slavery would last in a surviving Confederacy or perhaps how quickly the U.K. would defeat the Union, while being able to keep their war separate from the slavery issue. If we're lucky we'll get all of the above and achieve AH.com Civil War Argument Bingo!
Benjamin
Saphroneth
Banned
Oh, yeah, here's another one to watch out for - seniority. It seems to always catch people out, and you end up with generals in the wrong order (especially as Jefferson Davis was a stickler for seniority)
Lee, for example, was senior to everyone except AS Johnston (and the staff officer Samuel Cooper). OTL Lee wanted to not give DH Hill senior command, but he wasn't allowed to skip him and go down a slot to AP Hill.
Lee, for example, was senior to everyone except AS Johnston (and the staff officer Samuel Cooper). OTL Lee wanted to not give DH Hill senior command, but he wasn't allowed to skip him and go down a slot to AP Hill.
While a second war is not inevitable, there would be tensions between the Union and the Confederacy that could lead to war. The Confederacy clearly considered the Union slaveholding states to be theirs by right - they put stars for Kentucky and Missouri on their flag and both of those states had Senators and Representatives, even though neither state seceded. Confederate attempts to forcibly annex those states failed; plus the Confederacy would probably lose at least West Virginia and part or all of Tennessee and Arkansas to the Union. The Confederacy also appears to have believed they deserved a route for a transcontinental railroad, which, like all Confederate attempt to seize Union territory, ended in abject failure. There's also the problem of who controls the mouth of the Mississippi River. If the Confederacy does, the Union will be very unhappy about the Confederacy being able to block trade. If the Union controls it, the Confederacy is going to be even more unhappy about being split in two.
Where are these "million-plus ideologically committed potential guerillas" coming from? How are they supposed to subsist other than by robbing Confederate civilians? How is the Confederate economy supposed to continue if most of their white work force is off being guerillas? How do they keep the slaves, who were about 40% of the Confederate population, from ratting them out to Union forces?
You overestimate the width of that base. Roughly 10% of draft age white men from Confederate states served in the Union army, plus there are the slaves. In OTL, the Union dealt with guerillas in Missouri by evicting everyone in 4 counties who could not prove their loyalty. Unlike South Africa, 40% of the Confederate population would be be firmly opposed to the Confederate government and the Union would easily be able to identify their friends based on skin color.