alternatehistory.com

Let's say the CSA gets a quick victory in 1861-62, bad leadership, bad luck, the USA rolls snake eyes over and over again for a year or so and the CSA goes independent. Maybe Washington DC falls before it gets fortified, or maybe a bunch of defeats destroys political will in the north long enough so that a peace is signed.

How likely would it be that the USA domestic political system would, at least for a couple of generations, basically go "good riddance to bad rubbish" and "we never wanted the slavocrats in the union anyway". Maybe some elements of the north are actually secretly relieved that they don't have to deal with freed African-Americans. There's also the advantage that once the southern agarian states are out it's much easier to enact industrialization policies like tariffs favorable to the Republican party's core constituency in the great industrial cities of the Mid-Atlantic and upper Midwest.

So by the early 1900s (when the boll weevil hit the south and their economy tanks when their cotton crop are destroyed) comes around, the USA -could- launch a war to retake the south, they simply decide it's not worth it. Casualties would be high, it would be costly to occupy, and besides: why take over a devastated economically unproductive region with lots of racial problems?

Maybe a few upper southern states secede from the CSA and rejoin the union, or maybe some kind of Confederate nationalism has developed by this point and that's not politically possible for their state governments: let's assume the latter.

Can this happen? What does domestic politics in the US look like?
Top