PC: Black POTCS
- Thread starter Kaiser Tito
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So no one thinks that the CSA electing their first black head of state in the late 50's will have any impact on race relations?
I don't think blacks would even be allowed to vote in the late 50s, so why would they elect their first black head of state then?
My thoughts were that the combined pressure of a 1930's depression and the threat of revolution spreading from a communist North would break the power of the planter class and force political reforms, with a descendent of the old black elite (most likely from New Orleans) being elected 20 years later possibly as a transition between the old and new South.
Why would the North go communist from the Depression unless it were on the losing side of World War I (if it even occurs). If there is no World War 1, then there might be no Great Depression either.
Wasn't an early 20th century war pretty much inevitable? Besides, the North was home to many workers unions otl and for fun maybe Trotsky moved there after falling out with Stalin (don't take that last one too seriously but who knows).
I would say likely but not inevitable. Also, World War 1 may have different alliances as a CSA victory could trigger different global relations between European powers. And neither American state may want to get involved.
The North would have been economically interventionist than OTL America, so it would have weathered the Depression just "fine".
1. A Confederate victory is only feasible with British support. A victorious Confederacy will be implicitly or explicitly dependent on British support.
2. The British working class by and large detested slavery, to the point where IIRC there were strikes against using imported Confederate cotton in the war years.
3. If slavery survives long enough for the Labour Party to emerge, then Labour will therefore be antislavery.
Therefore, slavery in the Confederacy lasts at most until the first British Labour government is elected, at which point Britain will at minimum embargo the CSA, at maximum send the RN to gunboat diplomacy the CSA to end slavery
2. The British working class by and large detested slavery, to the point where IIRC there were strikes against using imported Confederate cotton in the war years.
3. If slavery survives long enough for the Labour Party to emerge, then Labour will therefore be antislavery.
Therefore, slavery in the Confederacy lasts at most until the first British Labour government is elected, at which point Britain will at minimum embargo the CSA, at maximum send the RN to gunboat diplomacy the CSA to end slavery
When would the revolution happen in that case and would that help cause the CSA to liberalize sooner?
I don't think removing the South would make the Gilded Age harder.
It would have strengthened labor/left-leaning movements without Southern anti-unionism. But, that would most likely result in a more industrialized Canada without a Crown.
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dcharleos
Donor
The terminology is crucial.
The CSA, that state actor created in 1861, governed under the 1861 Constitution, was never going to liberalize.
Industrialize? Sure. Definitely way more than the usual speculation allows for.
Militarize? Bet your very last dollar on it.
Liberalize? Never! The CSA was an ideologically racist oligarchic republic by design. Their raison d'etre was a full throated embrace of human slavery, one of the most reactionary ideas ever conceived by mankind. The founders of the CSA even insisted that slavery was not simply a necessary economic and social evil, but a positive good that needed to be preserved and expanded. Evangelized, even. On the Confederate side, the Civil War was less a revolution than a preemptive strike of the counter-revolution.
Trying to shoehorn the CSA into liberal society is like trying to imagine the USA--still governed by the Constitution of 1789--as a Marxist-Leninist People's Republic. It's not that a nation inhabiting the borders of the US could never have gone Red, it's that it wouldn't call itself the US, no one would think about it as the US, and they would probably explicitly disavow a lot of what the US stood for. Like Imperial and Soviet Russia.
I was thinking something like Egypt (minus the democratic theocracy and second coup) where the Planter class is forced to step down yet it remains the same recognizable state.
It would require a total overhaul of what the CSA was, either from outside or inside. This happens (look at OTL Russia, South Africa or even Japan) but it is sort of hard to predict or discuss in the abstract. Just too many diverging and very wild paths.
dcharleos
Donor
Probably the closest you're going to get to a liberal democratic republic in the independent South is a successor state to the CSA where ethnic power sharing is explicitly built into the state apparatus, a la Lebanon or Northern Ireland. And something like that probably won't happen until well after 1950.
N7Buck
Banned
They could do a qualified franchise, literacy, poll taxes, and other rquirements, that would limit poor white and black voters.
The US was not fertile ground for communism.
In the 1880s, Texas and the US was already having to justify it's behaviour towards Amerindians to the press, slavery is not going to survive for very long in the South.
A fundamental reason for secession was maintaining the political dominance of southern elites. They had realised the northern elites had outpaced them in the Senate, Presidency, Supreme Court, Voters and States, so they wished to be kings in their own backyard.
Elements of liberalization is possible, from a Planter perspective as long as it doesn't diminish their power, so sharecropping is an example of that. Or if the Yeomanry attain power.