"Wonderful" wouldn't be how I'd describe a goddamn Confederate Statesman....
Nothing For Which to Apologize: Ambition and Loathing in the New South
- Thread starter dcharles
- Start date
Well I read Will Marvel's first book of his tetralogy and from there I came to Dr. Hummel, who surprisingly for a Misean is not totally miserable. Now he has an argument of his about how a separation between the USA and CSA would doom slavery (he summarizes it well enough here) , which I find logical (not sure I am persuaded). Now in this timeline his argument is undermined by the USA going full racist by essentially prohibiting the entry of Confederate Africans. But it just hit me that things are way darker. I did note in a previous post that the US could treat escaped slaves like cattle stolen over the border and return it, but it hit me that the US could also simply declare them Confederate Nationals that illegally entered and remand them back to the CSA as illegal immigrants. And I fear that this would be highly popular and enforceable. (and I think underestimating northern racism is one of the problems of Hummel's argument, just like Marvel misunderstands Madison's argument about extended republics)
Chapter 4: It's Only a Creole Moon
dcharles
Banned
Chapter 4: It's Only a Creole Moon
“In a note passed to the hangman a moment before his execution, my friend John Brown said that ‘the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.’ I see now he was wrong. For years we swam in oceans of blood, enough to stain us all forever. For once, it seemed you might affirm the liberal course and abjure the mean one. Even in our hopes for that modest singularity, we are disappointed. The bloodshed has cleansed nothing; it has only hardened your hearts. You of this land are guiltier now than you have ever been, for you saw the horror with thine own eyes, yet did not weep. Upon thine own lips you tasted the blood flung from the slaver’s lash, yet you fled like cowards.”
—Frederick Douglass, “A Farewell,” Boston Journal, December 27th, 1868.
To: Mrs. General Thomas J. Jackson, Richmond, VA
From: Lt. General DH Hill, Commandant CSMA, Columbia, SC
Jan 9th, 1880
Dearest Mary Anna,
It is with heavy heart that I received your communication of the 2nd, describing your anxieties with respect to Thomas’ recent ‘fits,’ or so you call them. It is with even greater reluctance that I must demur to your request. Not for any lack of affection–and in this I can provide you no greater assurance than the word of a gentleman and brother, which is to say, the greatest assurance of all–but for fear that it would do no good. It causes me deep sadness to confess it, but the bonds of friendship which once anchored Thomas and I together have thinned. Since his entrance into the Communion of Rome, I have found him to be distant, mystical, and mysterious to my own perception. While I pray nightly to our Savior, beseeching him to deliver Thomas from his misbelief, it seems likely to be a permanent delinquency. I only further pray it is a lapsus mentis and not a lapsus intimus…
…Though it may seem a legal trifle to you, who dwells, as a sister should, so comfortably in the bosom of our family, I assure you, the minor detail that Thomas is my commanding officer would not escape his own notice, nor would he appreciate, I fear, the breach in protocol. Truthfully, sister, I dread his reaction.
Instead, I must take the grave step of moving outside of the chain of command, and that with great haste. There are only two of any consequence who outrank him, the President and the Secretary of War. I shall appeal to Sec. Longstreet before his inauguration. Though, in a few short weeks, none will be able to overrule him, I suspect the politics will become more complex after he is President. At the very least, I am far less perceptive than he in such matters, and I must defer to his superior wisdom in any case. The Secretary has always been a good friend to me, and I have the fullest confidence in his discretion in this matter. It is no secret to you that Thomas and Longstreet have never been friends, but the Secretary holds his abilities and character in the highest esteem. Out of respect for our shared accomplishments, he will handle this with the greatest delicacy….
…banish the notion from your mind. This is meant both as a reassurance and a request. There is, I would say, no true and verified case in all the sciences or histories of a broken engagement driving a father to madness. Julia is a spirited girl, and one I suspect, who is even more than the likes of Buck Duke can tame. If young Mr. Porter thinks he can manage it and Julia’s willing to let him try, the Lord will guide. Besides, I believe Mr. Porter is going places, as they put it. Maybe to no destination as remuneratively satisfying as that of Mr. Duke’s, but to a place of comfort nonetheless. A column at The Dispatch is quite an accomplishment for a young man his age…
…perhaps a happy and commodious retirement in his beloved La Paz, where he can keep both his happiness and his sacred honor.
With all of my love and sympathy,
I remain faithfully, your brother and most obedient servant,
HARVEY HILL
“Just as the bleeding had slowed on the Republican left, the assassination of McClernand by a radical abolitionist opened a gash on the Republican right. The swift exodus began with the Blairs of Maryland and Missouri, who ran a public pronouncement in newspapers in St. Louis and Baltimore two weeks after the murder, signed by all three, disassociating themselves from the party they had helped found. In the Senate, James Doolittle of Wisconsin, Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, James Dixon of Connecticut, and Senators Brown and Henderson of Missouri all bolted for the Democracy at the beginning of the next session.[1]
The chief saviors of the postwar Republican Party were four New Yorkers: on Capitol Hill, Senator Ira Harris and Representative Roscoe Conkling; in the press and the parlors, Thurlow Weed, publisher and all-around Republican fixer, and Henry Jarvis Raymond, owner and editor of The New York Times. There is a small irony in noting that the party’s saviors came from New York, a Democratic stronghold, but perhaps the generally hostile political environment of New York politics allowed them to perceive,[2] if not the political center, then the political tipping point of American politics. In the most salient political initiatives of the postwar period, Republicans were either leading the efforts or crucial coalition partners, including the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Only in the case of the 16th amendment–the guarantee of the right to vote, unimpeded by taxes or considerations of property–did the majority of Republicans find themselves on the losing side.
For example, the 13th Amendment, which prohibited secession, began life as an editorial in The New York Times. Weed spurred public discussion of the idea, sped along by his own network of publications, and Roscoe Conkling (along with Charles Phelps, a Maryland Democrat and Union war hero) co-sponsored the bill in the House. In the fractious political atmosphere of the early Second Republic, the notion that the Union should thenceforward be permanent–even if it had originally not been–was one of the few propositions that generally united all comers. Seymour had only been Vice President for six months before he assumed the office of President, and understood well his uncertain position as chief executive. Sensing the need for a victory that could bring the country together, he gave his support to the measure shortly after its introduction. With a few notable exceptions from Seymour’s own wing of the Democracy, including Ohio’s Clement Vallandingham and Maryland’s Benjamin Harris, the bill sailed through the House with only a dozen votes against…
The ‘Great Compromise’ leading to the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments–otherwise known as the Free Birth Amendment and the White Immigration Amendment–arose in the Senate, where the President’s fears that fugitive slaves would ‘turn Pennsylvania and Ohio into n—r heaven’ collided with the Radical-Republican Senate majority’s wish, with the South out of the Union, to put the slavery issue to bed once and for all. The enormous Democratic majority in the House–at 113 seats, only two votes shy of two-thirds–gave Seymour a great deal of leverage in negotiations. In Ira Harris, he had a negotiating partner who did not wish to see his party further decimated. With the Senate numbering nineteen Democrats, seventeen Republicans, and eight Radicals, legislation supported by the Democratic caucus would only need ten Republican votes to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to advance an amendment in the Senate. With many Republican Senators–including Harris–rightfully dubious of their reelection by the newly Democratic legislatures in their home states, the time was ripe for deal making…”
— David W. Blight, A Hue and Cry From All Corners: The Painful Birth of the Second Republic, 1865-1876 (New York: Scribner, 2001) 34-35.
[1] The four defections in the House–a smaller number in a larger caucus–are less an indicator of a stronger Republican whip than they are traceable to the fact that most of the Republicans in marginal districts had already lost their seats by 1864-65.
[2] With some trial and error; Jarvis Raymond lost his own Congressional race.
The shabby work of El Verdugo.
“Disgrace that it was, the massacre at Noria was purely attributable to the ill-disciplined bloodlust of the Indian Rifles. It was also fruitless besides, for it allowed Juarez to escape. It took sixty miles of hard pursuit over rough terrain before we could corner Juarez and the last of holdouts in the mountain village of Buenavista…
…The Indian Rifles, back under the command of Chilly M’Intosh, shadowed us on the west bank of the Bavispe, while the rest of us, under Jackson’s direct command, surrounded the village from the east…
…a handkerchief tied to his sword’s scabbard, and he held it above his head as he came from the little adobe church. Blinking in the sunlight, he took a few tentative steps outside. ‘¡No dispare!’ he called. ‘Tengo una oferta,’ said he, showing a folded piece of paper in his other hand. Jackson bade him come forward and the paper was passed from one hand to another until it resided in the General’s. Upon reading it, Jackson strode toward the ragged envoy.
‘¿Habla usted inglés?’ Jackson asked.
The envoy admitted that he did.
‘Very commendable,’ said Jackson. He crumpled the letter in his hand and flicked it over his shoulder as if it were of no more consequence than an old apple core. ‘Tell your master this: You will all answer for your crimes, and you will all surrender at once. If you dawdle, if you delay, I will bathe you all and everything I see in the cleansing flame of the LORD, and I will make unto this country as David made unto the country of Amalek. Now be gone, sir. You have five minutes to present yourselves.’
As the peace envoy passed me, ashen-faced and solemn, I noticed a bullet hole in the crown of his sombrero, doubtless the remnant of a luckier day…
…I do not know if any in the high command tried to dissuade General Jackson from giving his infamous order, but I suspect they did not. Hindman was a known tyrant, Walker a longtime apostle of Jackson, and JO Shelby no great respecter of persons or protocols. Whatever the case, the order was given. All one-hundred six were to be executed; the mode of dispatch, the noose. On this point, he was steadfast–they were bandits, he said, and bandits were to be hanged. Alas, there was not a gallows large enough for them in that piddling pueblo, and so all the mighty thousands of the MVEF were directed to the construction of gallows in order to hang a hundred-odd men loyal to the elected President of Mexico…
… as I looked back up the denuded slope, the cloud of smoke and brown dust blocked out all but the ghastly silhouettes of the hundred and six Condenados, backlit by the glow of the fires, stinking and swaying in the burning air. This side of hell, there has never been a scene of such concentrated wretchedness. In all my years of war, it was one of the shabbiest, most farcical affairs I ever took part in, and I always did regret it. With every tree we felled, every nail we drove, every swing of the hammer, we were saying ‘yes, sir.’ We were just too ignorant to know it.”
—Albert Parsons, A Rebel From Way Back: the Collected Memoirs and Prison Letters of Albert Parsons ed. Lucia Carter and Myra Page (Norfolk: Fortune, 1919) 28.
“...and so Wheeler accompanied Villere to New Orleans with the mission to convince Beauregard to run for President in 1867 under the New South ticket. While this was a mission to which the charismatic, carousing young cavalry officer was uncommonly well-suited, it must be said that Beauregard did not take much convincing. Indeed, Villere’s letters to Beauregard in mid-1866 imply that the ambitious Creole had been considering a run, irrespective of any party, even before the Spotswood Conference had been organized. This is not to suggest, as has been posited by Phillips and Owsley, that Beauregard had no preexisting ideological affinity to the New South platform. Though Beauregard was an aristocrat by background, he was a self-described ‘progressive Democrat’ before the war, and saw himself as a Southern synthesis of Bonaparte and Washington, with all the affection for and connection to the common man that implied. He was uniquely positioned to carve out such a role for himself. The hero of Sumter and Manassas, the Liberator of New Orleans, Beauregard had shepherded both the first and the final prominent military successes of the Confederate Revolutionary War. In the minds of the public, few equalled him in military glory, and those that did–such as Jackson and Lee–were uninterested in politics. He was a known rival of the increasingly detested Davis, but not a vocal ally of the obstructionists. Moreover, his personal vision of an ambitious, cosmopolitan, and even imperial South–heavily influenced by the New Orleans school of the prewar Democracy–was at least notionally consistent with the broad demands for strength and prosperity inherent in the New South movement. When compared to the inchoate platform of those who would, in April of 1867, coalesce into the Constitutional Liberal Party, the New South offered the only realistic ideological option for realizing Beauregard’s vision of a strong and ambitious Confederacy…
…seemed to think they had all the time in the world, and put off the nominating convention until May, when they met again in Louisville. In retrospect, it was a curious choice of location for the Liberals. Louisville, the most marginally Confederate of cities in the most marginally Confederate of states, was unlikely to greet the planters and State’s Rights diehards of the Constitutional Liberals with much enthusiasm. Likewise, the Liberals, already being tarred with the brush of obstructionism and Toryism, were hesitant to embrace the sizable community of Kentucky Tories. Several theories have been offered both by participants and historians, none of them entirely convincing on their own, but which hold some explanatory value when taken together. The most widely repeated–that the Liberals hoped to entice Kentucky’s John C. Breckinridge into heading the ticket–is one of the least convincing. For one, in matters of policy and philosophy, prewar and postwar, Breckinridge often found himself at odds with the ultraconservatives who dominated the Constitutional Liberals. Though Breckinridge’s Kentucky based Progress and Regular Democracy never formally affiliated with the New South, whose strident anti-Toryism alienated many Kentucky voters, the PRD caucused with the New South in the Confederate Congress and Breckinridge became a close Beauregard ally in the years to come. Most significantly, the movement to nominate Breckinridge at the Louisville convention mostly lived and died within the Kentucky delegation, with only a handful of Virginia and Tennessee delegates joining in, and then only for a few ballots. It seems likelier that the Liberals, many of whom were former Whigs, sought to appeal to those same sympathies in Kentucky, where they had always been strong. It must be said though, that even this falls short as a unifying theory, for Kentucky was the Southern state which was most hostile to the free-trade ethos that was dominant in the Constitutional Liberal Party. Perhaps the most convincing explanation, albeit the least satisfying, is the one proffered by an embittered Robert Toombs years later, after having failed in his second effort to secure the nomination: ‘there wasn’t a thing to it, except there was a heat wave in Savannah when we met that April, and we thought Louisville’d be cooler.’
…Zebulon Vance faced a dilemma. Vance had attended neither the Spotswood Conference of October nor the Savannah Convention in April, and he was being assiduously courted by both sides. The twelve electoral votes of North Carolina (only three states were larger) would be a sought-after prize in any presidential election, and Vance was by far the most popular politician in North Carolina, out of office for no other reason than being term limited. In him, the Liberals saw a State’s Rights foe of Davis at least as obstreperous as Georgia’s Joe Brown, while the New South saw a governor who had supported industry, progress, and the interests of the common people. In truth, they were both right. Vance was both more libertarian than the New South mainstream and more economically egalitarian than the Liberal mainstream. The Constitutional Liberals sought to nominate him for the presidency, while the New South wanted his endorsement and perhaps to make him Beauregard’s running mate. Vance, who was as astute a politician as any in his era, well perceived the direction the political wind was blowing. In an editorial to Raleigh’s The Daily Confederate penned shortly after the Savannah Convention, Vance, while making no official endorsement, pointedly noted that ‘many of the old gentlemen of the Liberal Party have been in the opposition so long, they can do naught but dissent.’ North Carolina Senator William Dortch, a Spotswood attendee who had often acted as mediator between Vance and Davis during the war, lobbied Vance to allow himself to be considered for Beauregard’s running mate from February onward. Dortch’s theory was that Beauregard’s only true weakness as a candidate was his Roman Catholicism, a minority faith in the South, then as now, a region dominated by the teachings of Calvin and Wesley. Vance, as a former (but reformed) member of the anticatholic Know-Nothing Party, was seen to be a credible spokesman to answer these concerns.
In truth, Dortch’s anxieties (and those of many contemporaries) were probably overblown. While Beauregard’s opponents used both direct and indirect anticatholic rhetoric to smear him, these did not gain much traction, and often provoked furious counterattacks of their own. The old American prejudice against Catholics was largely due to suspicions of dual loyalty–that the Catholic was more loyal to the interests of Rome than to his country. But if anyone’s loyalty to the Confederacy was above suspicion, it was Beauregard’s, who was a hero to the South many times over by 1867. Although Dortch had no way of knowing it would be the case when he began lobbying Vance, the (legitimate) rumors of poor health surrounding the eventual nominee of the Constitutional Liberal Party, Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, probably outweighed any trumped-up concerns about Beauregard’s loyalty…”
—Vann Woodward, War Child: Joe Wheeler, John Gordon, and the Origins of the New South Party. (New Orleans: Free University Press, 1969) 25-31.
“Eyes as blue as lightning, beard as white as the playa, what remains of Stonewall Jackson is dressed in a collarless cotton homespun and shod in rude hempen sandals. In one hand he waves a primitive cross, fashioned from driftwood; in the other, a gnarled and polished club of California Sycamore, harvested from what was doubtless the last sycamore ever felled in this sorry, barren scrub. Here on the beach, just across the bay from the Island of the Holy Spirit–a name more along the lines of a plea than a description–the blue-eyed Jeremiah harangues a crowd of around three dozen, mostly Mexicans, but with a smattering of Indians, Confederate dead-enders, and a single family of diminutive free Negroes. Jackson does not speak in the imagined growl that still terrifies every American child within fifty miles of the Ohio, but in a warbling, improvised pidgin of English, Spanish, and Ecclesiastical Latin…”
—Mark Twain, “Tortillas and Fishes at the End of the World,” Harper’s Monthly, April, 1885, 37.
“Some of y’all n— ain’t never worked in no mine, so y’all don’t know what it mean when we say fire boss. All y’all cotton picking n— listen up, you about to learn. Alright now…there’s fumes down in them mines…poison air, y’understand me? And these fumes, y’know, they explode if they ain’t get burned off. So the fire boss, he like the walking boss on a road crew or the driver on a plantation, ‘cept the fire boss go down in the hole with a candle and burn the fumes out the mines. The most dangerous part, see. So in the mine, that fire boss got respect, ‘cause he puttin’ hisself on the line for everybody else.
In this here group, we ain’t in the mines, but the shit we doing still dark and dangerous. More darker. More dangerous.
Now, if’n y’all n— get taken on, and one of these here Firemen put you on a line, we gots to know we can trust you. Ain’t no boys up in here. Y’all s’posed to be hard n—? Y’all tryna put in work? Y’all tryna put the massas in their place? Fine. You get put on a line, first job you do, you gonna be the fire boss on that job. That’s right.
You get yo’self and that line back here alive, and you do right while you out there, well, then you a Fireman. Not before.”
—Bass Reeves, c. 1880, quoted in Carter G. Woodson, Bass Reeves: From Contraband to Fire Boss, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: Dixie Free Press, 1945), 152.
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Man, this timeline keeps getting bleaker and bleaker. Well done!
Chapter 4: It's Only a Creole Moon
“In a note passed to the hangman a moment before his execution, my friend John Brown said that ‘the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.’ I see now he was wrong. For years we swam in oceans of blood, enough to stain us all forever. For once, it seemed you might affirm the liberal course and abjure the mean one. Even in our hopes for that modest singularity, we are disappointed. The bloodshed has cleansed nothing; it has only hardened your hearts. You of this land are guiltier now than you have ever been, for you saw the horror with thine own eyes, yet did not weep. Upon thine own lips you tasted the blood flung from the slaver’s lash, yet you flee like cowards.”
—Frederick Douglass, “A Farewell,” Boston Journal, December 27th, 1867.
To: Mrs. General Thomas J. Jackson, Richmond, VA
From: Lt. General DH Hill, Commandant CSMA, Columbia, SC
Jan 9th, 1880
Dearest Mary Anna,
It is with heavy heart that I received your communication of the 2nd, describing your anxieties with respect to Thomas’ recent ‘fits,’ or so you call them. It is with even greater reluctance that I must demur to your request. Not for any lack of affection–and in this I can provide you no greater assurance than the word of a gentleman and brother, which is to say, the greatest assurance of all–but for fear that it would do no good. It causes me deep sadness to confess it, but the bonds of friendship which once anchored Thomas and I together have thinned. Since his entrance into the Communion of Rome, I have found him to be distant, mystical, and mysterious to my own perception. While I pray nightly to our Savior, beseeching him to deliver Thomas from his misbelief, it seems likely to be a permanent delinquency. I only further pray it is a lapsus mentis and not a lapsus intimus…
…Though it may seem a legal trifle to you, who dwells, as a sister should, so comfortably in the bosom of our family, I assure you, the minor detail that Thomas is my commanding officer would not escape his own notice, nor would he appreciate, I fear, the breach in protocol. Truthfully, sister, I dread his reaction.
Instead, I must take the grave step of moving outside of the chain of command, and that with great haste. There are only two of any consequence who outrank him, the President and the Secretary of War. I shall appeal to Sec. Longstreet before his inauguration. Though, in a few short weeks, none will be able to overrule him, I suspect the politics will become more complex after he is President. At the very least, I am far less perceptive than he in such matters, and I must defer to his superior wisdom in any case. The Secretary has always been a good friend to me, and I have the fullest confidence in his discretion in this matter. It is no secret to you that Thomas and Longstreet have never been friends, but the Secretary holds his abilities and character in the highest esteem. Out of respect for our shared accomplishments, he will handle this with the greatest delicacy….
…banish the notion from your mind. This is meant both as a reassurance and a request. There is, I would say, no true and verified case in all the sciences or histories of a broken engagement driving a father to madness. Julia is a spirited girl, and one I suspect, who is even more than the likes of Buck Duke can tame. If young Mr. Porter thinks he can manage it and Julia’s willing to let him try, the Lord will guide. Besides, I believe Mr. Porter is going places, as they put it. Maybe to no destination as remuneratively satisfying as that of Mr. Duke’s, but to a place of comfort nonetheless. A column at The Dispatch is quite an accomplishment for a young man his age…
…perhaps a happy and commodious retirement in his beloved La Paz, where he can keep both his happiness and his sacred honor.
With all of my love and sympathy,
I remain faithfully, your brother and most obedient servant,
HARVEY HILL
“Just as the bleeding had slowed on the Republican left, the assassination of McClernand by a radical abolitionist opened a gash on the Republican right. The swift exodus began with the Blairs of Maryland and Missouri, who ran a public pronouncement in newspapers in St. Louis and Baltimore two weeks after the murder, signed by all three, disassociating themselves from the party they had helped found. In the Senate, James Doolittle of Wisconsin, Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania, James Dixon of Connecticut, and Senators Brown and Henderson of Missouri all bolted for the Democracy at the beginning of the next session.[1]
The chief saviors of the postwar Republican Party were four New Yorkers: on Capitol Hill, Senator Ira Harris and Representative Roscoe Conkling; in the press and the parlors, Thurlow Weed, publisher and all-around Republican fixer, and Henry Jarvis Raymond, owner and editor of The New York Times. There is a small irony in noting that the party’s saviors came from New York, a Democratic stronghold, but perhaps the generally hostile political environment of New York politics allowed them to perceive,[2] if not the political center, then the political tipping point of American politics. In the most salient political initiatives of the postwar period, Republicans were either leading the efforts or crucial coalition partners, including the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Only in the case of the 16th amendment–the guarantee of the right to vote, unimpeded by taxes or considerations of property–did the majority of Republicans find themselves on the losing side.
For example, the 13th Amendment, which prohibited secession, began life as an editorial in The New York Times. Weed spurred public discussion of the idea, sped along by his own network of publications, and Roscoe Conkling (along with Charles Phelps, a Maryland Democrat and Union war hero) co-sponsored the bill in the House. In the fractious political atmosphere of the early Second Republic, the notion that the Union should thenceforward be permanent–even if it had originally not been–was one of the few propositions that generally united all comers. Seymour had only been Vice President for six months before he assumed the office of President, and understood well his uncertain position as chief executive. Sensing the need for a victory that could bring the country together, he gave his support to the measure shortly after its introduction. With a few notable exceptions from Seymour’s own wing of the Democracy, including Ohio’s Clement Vallandingham and Maryland’s Benjamin Harris, the bill sailed through the House with only a dozen votes against…
The ‘Great Compromise’ leading to the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments–otherwise known as the Free Birth Amendment and the White Immigration Amendment–arose in the Senate, where the President’s fears that fugitive slaves would ‘turn Pennsylvania and Ohio into n—r heaven’ collided with the Radical-Republican Senate majority’s wish, with the South out of the Union, to put the slavery issue to bed once and for all. The enormous Democratic majority in the House–at 113 seats, only two votes shy of two-thirds–gave Seymour a great deal of leverage in negotiations. In Ira Harris, he had a negotiating partner who did not wish to see his party further decimated. With the Senate numbering nineteen Democrats, seventeen Republicans, and eight Radicals, legislation supported by the Democratic caucus would only need ten Republican votes to achieve the two-thirds majority necessary to advance an amendment in the Senate. With many Republican Senators–including Harris–rightfully dubious of their reelection by the newly Democratic legislatures in their home states, the time was ripe for deal making…”
— David W. Blight, A Hue and Cry From All Corners: The Painful Birth of the Second Republic, 1865-1876 (New York: Scribner, 2001) 34-35.
[1] The four defections in the House–a smaller number in a larger caucus–are less an indicator of a stronger Republican whip than they are traceable to the fact that most of the Republicans in marginal districts had already lost their seats by 1864-65.
[2] With some trial and error; Jarvis lost his own Congressional race.
The shabby work of El Verdugo.
“Disgrace that it was, the massacre at Noria was purely attributable to the ill-disciplined bloodlust of the Indian Rifles. It was also fruitless besides, for it allowed Juarez to escape. It took sixty miles of hard pursuit over rough terrain before we could corner Juarez and the last of holdouts in the mountain village of Buenavista…
…The Indian Rifles, back under the command of Chilly M’Intosh, shadowed us on the west bank of the Bavispe, while the rest of us, under Jackson’s direct command, surrounded the village from the east…
…a handkerchief tied to his sword’s scabbard, and he held it above his head as he came from the little adobe church. Blinking in the sunlight, he took a few tentative steps outside. ‘¡No dispare!’ he called. ‘Tengo una oferta,’ said he, showing a folded piece of paper in his other hand. Jackson bade him come forward and the paper was passed from one hand to another until it resided in the General’s. Upon reading it, Jackson strode toward the ragged envoy.
‘¿Habla usted inglés?’ Jackson asked.
The envoy admitted that he did.
‘Very commendable,’ said Jackson. He crumpled the letter in his hand and flicked it over his shoulder as if it were of no more consequence than an old apple core. ‘Tell your master this: You will all answer for your crimes, and you will all surrender at once. If you dawdle, if you delay, I will bathe you all and everything I see in the cleansing flame of the LORD, and I will make unto this country as David made unto the country of Amalek. Now be gone, sir. You have five minutes to present yourselves.’
As the peace envoy passed me, ashen-faced and solemn, I noticed a bullet hole in the crown of his sombrero, doubtless the remnant of a luckier day…
…I do not know if any in the high command tried to dissuade General Jackson from giving his infamous order, but I suspect they did not. Hindman was a known tyrant, Walker a longtime apostle of Jackson, and JO Shelby no great respecter of persons or protocols. Whatever the case, the order was given. All one-hundred six were to be executed; the mode of dispatch, the noose. On this point, he was steadfast–they were bandits, he said, and bandits were to be hanged. Alas, there was not a gallows large enough for them in that piddling pueblo, and so all the mighty thousands of the MVEF were directed to the construction of gallows in order to hang a hundred-odd men loyal to the elected President of Mexico…
… as I looked back up the denuded slope, the cloud of smoke and brown dust blocked out all but the ghastly silhouettes of the hundred and six Condenados, backlit by the glow of the fires, stinking and swaying in the burning air. This side of hell, there has never been a scene of such concentrated wretchedness. In all my years of war, it was one of the shabbiest, most farcical affairs I ever took part in, and I always did regret it. With every tree we felled, every nail we drove, every swing of the hammer, we were saying ‘yes, sir.’ We were just too ignorant to know it.”
—Albert Parsons, A Rebel From Way Back: the Collected Memoirs and Prison Letters of Albert Parsons ed. Lucia Carter and Myra Page (Norfolk: Fortune, 1919) 28.
“...and so Wheeler accompanied Villere to New Orleans with the mission to convince Beauregard to run for President in 1867 under the New South ticket. While this was a mission to which the charismatic, carousing young cavalry officer was uncommonly well-suited, it must be said that Beauregard did not take much convincing. Indeed, Villere’s letters to Beauregard in mid-1866 imply that the ambitious Creole had been considering a run, irrespective of any party, even before the Spotswood Conference had been organized. This is not to suggest, as has been posited by Phillips and Owsley, that Beauregard had no preexisting ideological affinity to the New South platform. Though Beauregard was an aristocrat by background, he was a self-described ‘progressive Democrat’ before the war, and saw himself as a Southern synthesis of Bonaparte and Washington, with all the affection for and connection to the common man that implied. He was uniquely positioned to carve out such a role for himself. The hero of Sumter and Manassas, the Liberator of New Orleans, Beauregard had shepherded both the first and the final prominent military successes of the Confederate Revolutionary War. In the minds of the public, few equalled him in military glory, and those that did–such as Jackson and Lee–were uninterested in politics. He was a known rival of the increasingly detested Davis, but not a vocal ally of the obstructionists. Moreover, his personal vision of an ambitious, cosmopolitan, and even imperial South–heavily influenced by the New Orleans school of the prewar Democracy–was at least notionally consistent with the broad demands for strength and prosperity inherent in the New South movement. When compared to the inchoate platform of those who would, in April of 1867, coalesce into the Constitutional Liberal Party, the New South offered the only realistic ideological option for realizing Beauregard’s vision of a strong and ambitious Confederacy…
…seemed to think they had all the time in the world, and put off the nominating convention until May, when they met again in Louisville. In retrospect, it was a curious choice of location for the Liberals. Louisville, the most marginally Confederate of cities in the most marginally Confederate of states, was unlikely to greet the planters and State’s Rights diehards of the Constitutional Liberals with much enthusiasm. Likewise, the Liberals, already being tarred with the brush of obstructionism and Toryism, were hesitant to embrace the sizable community of Kentucky Tories. Several theories have been offered both by participants and historians, none of them entirely convincing on their own, but which hold some explanatory value when taken together. The most widely repeated–that the Liberals hoped to entice Kentucky’s John C. Breckinridge into heading the ticket–is one of the least convincing. For one, in matters of policy and philosophy, prewar and postwar, Breckinridge often found himself at odds with the ultraconservatives who dominated the Constitutional Liberals. Though Breckinridge’s Kentucky based Progress and Regular Democracy never formally affiliated with the New South, whose strident anti-Toryism alienated many Kentucky voters, the PRD caucused with the New South in the Confederate Congress and Breckinridge became a close Beauregard ally in the years to come. Most significantly, the movement to nominate Breckinridge at the Louisville convention mostly lived and died within the Kentucky delegation, with only a handful of Virginia and Tennessee delegates joining in, and then only for a few ballots. It seems likelier that the Liberals, many of whom were former Whigs, sought to appeal to those same sympathies in Kentucky, where they had always been strong. It must be said though, that even this falls short as a unifying theory, for Kentucky was the Southern state which was most hostile to the free-trade ethos that was dominant in the Constitutional Liberal Party. Perhaps the most convincing explanation, albeit the least satisfying, is the one proffered by an embittered Robert Toombs years later, after having failed in his second effort to secure the nomination: ‘there wasn’t a thing to it, except there was a heat wave in Savannah when we met that April, and we thought Louisville’d be cooler.’
…Zebulon Vance faced a dilemma. Vance had attended neither the Spotswood Conference of October nor the Savannah Convention in April, and he was being assiduously courted by both sides. The twelve electoral votes of North Carolina (only three states were larger) would be a sought-after prize in any presidential election, and Vance was by far the most popular politician in North Carolina, out of office for no other reason than being term limited. In him, the Liberals saw a State’s Rights foe of Davis at least as obstreperous as Georgia’s Joe Brown, while the New South saw a governor who had supported industry, progress, and the interests of the common people. In truth, they were both right. Vance was both more libertarian than the New South mainstream and more economically egalitarian than the Liberal mainstream. The Constitutional Liberals sought to nominate him for the presidency, while the New South wanted his endorsement and perhaps to make him Beauregard’s running mate. Vance, who was as astute a politician as any in his era, well perceived the direction the political wind was blowing. In an editorial to Raleigh’s The Daily Confederate penned shortly after the Savannah Convention, Vance, while making no official endorsement, pointedly noted that ‘many of the old gentlemen of the Liberal Party have been in the opposition so long, they can do naught but dissent.’ North Carolina Senator William Dortch, a Spotswood attendee who had often acted as mediator between Vance and Davis during the war, lobbied Vance to allow himself to be considered for Beauregard’s running mate from February onward. Dortch’s theory was that Beauregard’s only true weakness as a candidate was his Roman Catholicism, a minority faith in the South, then as now, a region dominated by the teachings of Calvin and Wesley. Vance, as a former (but reformed) member of the anticatholic Know-Nothing Party, was seen to be a credible spokesman to answer these concerns.
In truth, Dortch’s anxieties (and those of many contemporaries) were probably overblown. While Beauregard’s opponents used both direct and indirect anticatholic rhetoric to smear him, these did not gain much traction, and often provoked furious counterattacks of their own. The old American prejudice against Catholics was largely due to suspicions of dual loyalty–that the Catholic was more loyal to the interests of Rome than to his country. But if anyone’s loyalty to the Confederacy was above suspicion, it was Beauregard’s, who was a hero to the South many times over by 1867. Although Dortch had no way of knowing it would be the case when he began lobbying Vance, the (legitimate) rumors of poor health surrounding the eventual nominee of the Constitutional Liberal Party, Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, probably outweighed any trumped-up concerns about Beauregard’s loyalty…”
—Vann Woodward, War Child: Joe Wheeler, John Gordon, and the Origins of the New South Party. (New Orleans: Free University Press, 1969) 25-31.
“Eyes as blue as lightning, beard as white as the playa, what remains of Stonewall Jackson is dressed in a collarless cotton homespun and shod in rude hempen sandals. In one hand he waves a primitive cross, fashioned from driftwood; in the other, a gnarled and polished club of California Sycamore, harvested from what was doubtless the last sycamore ever felled in this sorry, barren scrub. Here on the beach, just across the bay from the Island of the Holy Spirit–a name more along the lines of a plea than a description–the blue-eyed Jeremiah harangues a crowd of around three dozen, mostly Mexicans, but with a smattering of Indians, Confederate dead-enders, and a single family of diminutive free Negroes. Jackson does not speak in the imagined growl that still terrifies every American child within fifty miles of the Ohio, but in a warbling, improvised pidgin of English, Spanish, and Ecclesiastical Latin…”
—Mark Twain, “Tortillas and Fishes at the End of the World,” Harper’s Monthly, April, 1885, 37.
“Some of y’all n— ain’t never worked in no mine, so y’all don’t know what it mean when we say fire boss. All y’all cotton picking n— listen up, you about to learn. Alright now…there’s fumes down in them mines…poison air, y’understand me? And these fumes, y’know, they explode if they ain’t get burned off. So the fire boss, he like the walking boss on a road crew or the driver on a plantation, ‘cept the fire boss go down in the hole with a candle and burn the fumes out the mines. The most dangerous part, see. So in the mine, that fire boss got respect, ‘cause he puttin’ hisself on the line for everybody else.
In this here group, we ain’t in the mines, but the shit we doing still dark and dangerous. More darker. More dangerous.
Now, if’n y’all n— get taken on, and one of these here Firemen put you on a line, we gots to know we can trust you. Ain’t no boys up in here. Y’all s’posed to be hard n—? Y’all tryna put in work? Y’all tryna put the massas in their place? Fine. You get put on a line, first job you do, you gonna be the fire boss on that job. That’s right.
You get yo’self and that line back here alive, and you do right while you out there, well, then you a Fireman. Not before.”
—Bass Reeves, c. 1880, quoted in Carter G. Woodson, Bass Reeves: From Contraband to Fire Boss, 2nd ed. (New Orleans: Dixie Free Press, 1945), 152.
What a depressing but great post. So they drove even Frederick Douglas out......
It is clear that Slavery in the South will survive as long as racism in the North does. Which means we are talking even a possibility of things going on to the 1960s. The CSA will do anything to make sure that the North does not open that border. The good news, not much change in interstate history and more focus on social dynamics . The bad news. Slavery well into the 1960s (I cannot see racism abating in the USA before WW2 at least, and at least a generation needs to come for attitudes to change)
It is clear that Slavery in the South will survive as long as racism in the North does. Which means we are talking even a possibility of things going on to the 1960s. The CSA will do anything to make sure that the North does not open that border. The good news, not much change in interstate history and more focus on social dynamics . The bad news. Slavery well into the 1960s (I cannot see racism abating in the USA before WW2 at least, and at least a generation needs to come for attitudes to change)
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Yeah, I can probably imagine there being a Confederate civil war if slavery doesn’t budge after the Congo Affair or the height of the Boll Weevil in the 1920s. By then, I think oil was discovered in Texas and Louisiana so they will definitely want to play into that, especially Texas where a Texan identity separate from the Confederacy will probably start to grow.
Then there’s the Upper South where even by 1860 slavery was merely tolerated and not practiced as if it were religion, or at least less so. Planter’s didn’t really control the governments of those states except maybe Virginia so there’s that. They were starting to industrialize IIRC and the more they industrialize, they are going to start realizing industrial slavery won’t last forever due to probable unrest from the majority poor white population.
If nothing nudges by the 1920s or 1930s, then I suspect the Upper South, and one with WV at that, and Texas will try to split and either try to go independent (more-so Texas) or rejoin the Union (more-so the Upper South). If get reabsorbed into the Union and the blacks engage in a Great Migration analogue then an already extremely racist North may become even more racist, all while leaving the black population of the remnant CSA in indefinite bondage. If Frederick Douglass was driven out of the North ITTL then things are going to be looking very dark all around.
Then there’s the Upper South where even by 1860 slavery was merely tolerated and not practiced as if it were religion, or at least less so. Planter’s didn’t really control the governments of those states except maybe Virginia so there’s that. They were starting to industrialize IIRC and the more they industrialize, they are going to start realizing industrial slavery won’t last forever due to probable unrest from the majority poor white population.
If nothing nudges by the 1920s or 1930s, then I suspect the Upper South, and one with WV at that, and Texas will try to split and either try to go independent (more-so Texas) or rejoin the Union (more-so the Upper South). If get reabsorbed into the Union and the blacks engage in a Great Migration analogue then an already extremely racist North may become even more racist, all while leaving the black population of the remnant CSA in indefinite bondage. If Frederick Douglass was driven out of the North ITTL then things are going to be looking very dark all around.
Deleted member 191087
Well, it seems that this timelines Confederacy will have OTL U.S.A beat by some 90+ years when it comes to having it’s first catholic president. I wonder what this could mean for catholic confederates later down. Yet another fantastic chapter as always of course. Also Poor Douglas, the North did you so dirty man…
I wonder how many European countries will adopt Confederate 'labor management' styles. Also if there will be Confederate veterans appearing in various colonies as private security forces.
mickeymouse
Donor
The Frederick Douglass section of this chapter…man, that’s some powerful, very depressing stuff. I’m curious to find out more about his life TTL now.
As always, lovely chapter! Your writing and worldbuilding continue to astound me, as do your graphics!
As always, lovely chapter! Your writing and worldbuilding continue to astound me, as do your graphics!
Guess the question is where he moves to afterwards.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Russia does so, for starters.
My good fellows
I do not think WW2 is butterflied away. Instead I think the rest of World History goes as OTL (imho the best alternative history does not make huge changes, instead it accentuates trends that were already there historically).
Here is what I see happening
The New South gets broken on some stupid adventure in Central America. There is a incentive to make sure Mexico is either a) as racist as the USA or b) unable to police its border with the CSA so that slave patrols can operate with impunity to make escape to Mexico a hard option for slaves.
The collapse of the New South leads to its most populist elements to seek a Balck-White radical alliance (you had such dynamics OTL in Georgia imho). This will fail due to the power of racism and out of the upheaval I see a Estado Nuovo style regime in the CSA (remember the historical Estado Nuovo lasted into the 1970s).
The USA will be supportive of such a regime because a) its increasing engagement in the Pacific and Atlantic necessitate a quite southern flank b) racism and especially an interest in cutting down the amount of slaves escaping North (illegal immigrants)
The USA as in OTL engages in both WW1 and WW2.
Cold War as OTL. The USA tolerates or supports CSA intervention in Africa as an anti-communist measure. The CSA intervenes to a) support white minority states (Rhodesia, S.Africa) b) to seek to prop up friendly African states as propaganda tools (When African states recongize our need for our peculiar institution who are you to judge us). I can even see it setting up some kind of apprentiship (De-facto slavery) program with friendly African states.
The experience of the Vietnam War leads to a US movement that challenges the racist consensus. CSA adventures in Africa take their toll in the economy.
The USA amends the constitution permitting African emigration (The "No more, not anymore" speech of the US President). The CSA economy collapses.
Like the GDR the CSA goverment tries to stay in power but collapses. Slavery is abolished. The CSA enters a difficult period of economic, social and political transformation.
I do not think WW2 is butterflied away. Instead I think the rest of World History goes as OTL (imho the best alternative history does not make huge changes, instead it accentuates trends that were already there historically).
Here is what I see happening
The New South gets broken on some stupid adventure in Central America. There is a incentive to make sure Mexico is either a) as racist as the USA or b) unable to police its border with the CSA so that slave patrols can operate with impunity to make escape to Mexico a hard option for slaves.
The collapse of the New South leads to its most populist elements to seek a Balck-White radical alliance (you had such dynamics OTL in Georgia imho). This will fail due to the power of racism and out of the upheaval I see a Estado Nuovo style regime in the CSA (remember the historical Estado Nuovo lasted into the 1970s).
The USA will be supportive of such a regime because a) its increasing engagement in the Pacific and Atlantic necessitate a quite southern flank b) racism and especially an interest in cutting down the amount of slaves escaping North (illegal immigrants)
The USA as in OTL engages in both WW1 and WW2.
Cold War as OTL. The USA tolerates or supports CSA intervention in Africa as an anti-communist measure. The CSA intervenes to a) support white minority states (Rhodesia, S.Africa) b) to seek to prop up friendly African states as propaganda tools (When African states recongize our need for our peculiar institution who are you to judge us). I can even see it setting up some kind of apprentiship (De-facto slavery) program with friendly African states.
The experience of the Vietnam War leads to a US movement that challenges the racist consensus. CSA adventures in Africa take their toll in the economy.
The USA amends the constitution permitting African emigration (The "No more, not anymore" speech of the US President). The CSA economy collapses.
Like the GDR the CSA goverment tries to stay in power but collapses. Slavery is abolished. The CSA enters a difficult period of economic, social and political transformation.
As for Douglas. I think he goes to the UK, and is one of the main reasons the UK will keep its involvement with the CSA much smaller than we would expect
I do think the CSA does make some changes to make slavery much more paltable: Some easy ones (prohibiting the separation of families), so more self-serving (maybe a minimum wage that is put in a CSA goverment controlled grant, the Bondsman Bond which the goverment uses as it sees fit in return for funding some minimum welfare state for slaves) etc
The Code Noir did that. Also gave slaves Sunday off. Mainly because Sunday is God's day and marriage is a sacrament.
Might be a harder sell in an Anglo-Protestant country, especially if they feel emboldened by the outcome of the !Civil War.
Seeing as there is a second french empire tag i do not belive that WWI will happen. A surviving 2nd empire begs of what happened in this TLs franco prussian war, germany might not evenbe unified from what we know or a different enough unification that the franco german relations are different, and probably also different franco austrian relations. If WWI happens in this timeline, I dare say it wont be our WWI