So i've noticed a trope on this forum, and point me to contradictions if i'm wrong. It seems as though the Confederacy, if it survives, always allies with either England, Nazi Germany, or South Africa. Once i saw them teamed up with Brazil as pariah slave states. So what i've wondered is, who could the Confederacy align with that is reasonable?
Britain. Just like the hoary old tropes say. They need to be allied with someone strong enough to keep the Union off balance and deter action from the north. We can argue about whether Britain was really a superpower in Europe--but when we factor in ability to project power across the oceans to America, Britain clearly stands alone.
And why then did the British not come down unambiguously and firmly on the Confederate side OTL? Because it was semi-democratic, and while vast categories of people, including all women and most of the working class, had no formal votes, it was still a commonwealth whose elite leaders were well aware of the potential power of all these disfranchised people. It was an empire of consensus, and while they were willing to countenance a lot of hard-headed alliances, jumping in to support the greatest power standing that upheld slavery reeked. A Britain that could maintain an alliance with the Confederacy would be one that turned its back on the democratic trends that characterize the Victorian age; it would IMHO be weaker than OTL for having to stand guard over its own people. Just as the Confederacy would have to. If anything the Confederacy has an easier task maintaining slavery; it is a minority, a distinct and widely despised minority, it has to keep down (though maintaining that order tended to create tensions among whites as well--tensions managed by diverting them against the slaves).
The Confederates cannot afford to be aligned with any power less than Britain's though. Certainly not against them! Seeking out friends in other pariah states won't help them--in real life, most pariah states tend to have great power patrons if only at arm's length. British democracy might square with an alliance with the Confederacy if the latter are kept distant--but they'll be resentful and less secure for that.
...Besides having a defensible river boundary, the loss of Kentucky is psychological blow to the Union. (Lincoln may even refuse to invade there, much like Robert E Lee's refusal to invade Virginia).
What? I don't follow that at all. I don't think Lincoln held the parts of the Union (and Confederacy, which he denied legally existed, and he regarded the South as US soil) that were wracked by war any less than he regarded his onetime home state. He didn't make war to abolish slavery, he made it, in defensive response to secessionist aggression, to hold the Union together, and I think we can dismiss any notion he'd be squeamish about fighting in Kentucky.
You do better to stick to the superior logistics of a more developed part of the South.
But I don't see that as tipping the balance that much. The South had ample opportunity to develop industrial power comparable to the North; the fact that they didn't I think points to the effects of relying on slavery itself. Change the South enough to make it industrially the rival of the northern states and you probably are looking at an earlier, at least partial abolition of slavery, backing away from it anyway--and take away slavery and the reason for the South seceding in the first place fades away to nothing. It wouldn't be the unified section it was OTL then; it would be a bunch of regions some of which would have more in common with others in the north and west, no single cause could tie them together enough to fancy that they ought to be a separate nation.
So--a more industrialized Kentucky that to an extent supplants Yankee and imported industrial products and takes some of the market from both makes the South that much stronger, but it can't tip the balance or we aren't dealing with OTL Dixie at all really.
The war is fought by proxy, with a great deal of blood spilled in an attempt to liberate OTL West Virginia. Meanwhile, John Hunt Morgan, mirroring his Great Ride, sweeps up into Ohio. The north sues for peace, and Ohio is traded for a division of Arizona and New Mexico.
You'd have to dispose of Lincoln--by assassination, impeachment, or just not having him elected President in the first place. And dispose of the Republican party that got him elected, break it up in dissension--if you pre-empt it completely, again the secessionists would not judge the time had come when they'd lost control of the Union and should therefore leave it yet.
There was a lot of controversy about the war, a lot of people in the North who were against it and more who were queasy--but Lincoln would never have been able to direct the Civil War to a victorious conclusion for the Union were there not also a lot of people who for various causes--the importance of preserving the Union, as well as abolition--stood with him. Those people aren't going to give up just because of another secessionist atrocity. They're going to stay in the fight, unless they are beaten. Perhaps killing off Lincoln would break up the coalition, perhaps it would only temper it. A raid on Ohio is not going to bring Lincoln to the table, nor his supporters as long as he's there to rally them and guide them.
If the South is going to win this, either the anti-slavery political coalition has to be weaker, more fragmented or less full of conviction, than the OTL Republicans (in which case they probably aren't scary enough to make the South follow the secessionists) or the Confederacy needs to complicate things with a really strong and formidable ally who really gives the Union pause. Say, Great Britain. If and only if the British are in, in enough to wage full scale war on the Union with everything they've got, knowing that Canada stands at risk.
IMHO, even if the Royal Navy came to try to sweep along the coasts raiding and bombarding, and bringing in a huge army (not easy for the British, they didn't maintain a large standing army--maybe an Anglo-French alliance with the French providing mostly boots on the ground) while blockading Union trade to a standstill--the Union would not simply surrender at that point. They'd build up their own navy, they'd sink a lot of RN ships, they'd fight the invaders, and very possibly take Canada--if not all of it, then Quebec and thus cut off points west which they'd gradually take in a long drawn out war, one where the Union gets more and more militarized and more and more autarkic. There's just a lot of territory the USA controlled with a lot of people, less developed per capita than Britain perhaps but close to it and with enormous potential. If they don't take most of Canada (Nova Scotia and the Maritimes would be sheltered behind the concentrated naval power of Britain to be sure) they'd be losing, no doubt--but that's why they'd cut off the west from Britain. Holding it in the future might be problematic and they might negotiate return of western Canada (east of the Rockies that is--west of the Rockies I suppose British Columbia would be in a better position and the Yanks would lose territory on the West coast perhaps--probably not California though, probably not Oregon) if by agreement it isn't too militarized. Quebec, I'm thinking--might stay either Union or an independent Union protected allied Francophone republic.
Any troops the British do raise would tend to be politically unreliable, if the Unionists deliver on abolitionism, which they would tend to do sooner they more desperate they got. They might not be able to control much Southern territory if fighting for their lives against Britain, but they'd promote slave insurrection and remain an inspiration to the slaves, and probably African-American figures would gain much esteem as hard-fighting Unionist soldiers and who knows, before the end, perhaps even officers commanding white soldiers. Under those circumstances Tommies might not be fully reliable, who knows what French soldiers who might, if they defect, settle in Quebec, might do? The intervention could backfire badly on both Britain and France.
Which is why, OTL, their conservative leadership toyed around with the idea of cutting the Union down a few pegs before it was too late--the wiser among them waited to see if the Unionists would embarrass themselves and when they did not, realized it was already too late to play that game without serious risk.
If they can't strangle the Union, even without the specter of stirring up populist revolution in their own homelands, if the Union can rally enough strength from internal sources to hold them at bay and then beat them back at sea enough to open up some channels of communications--they've just provoked their worst potential enemy into becoming an actual one. Canada would be lost; the South might not hold back such a Union army even with all the help the European powers could give them. Particularly not with the slaves helping as they did OTL--spying for the Union, sabotaging things, deserting in droves, fighting in the Union army. They've got nothing to lose and much to gain. Maybe more in such a drawn-out, world-war level conflict. I daresay more of them would wind up dead but so would a lot of white supremacists, and the status of the survivors would be enhanced by their hallowed dead. They'd be considered excellently loyal Union citizens, against a return of slavery in any form--and against the Union's foes overseas.
Well, say instead the British intervention does lead to a draw and a negotiated peace, with Lincoln and the Republicans discredited and out of power...even if the generation of the 1860s quails and calls it quits, the Confederacy, owing its life to European protection, cannot rest easy next to the potential power of the Union right there. If the Union breaks up or recoils from the centralizing trends of the age--well, the British better promote that, but I suspect such a reaction if it happens at all is subject to quick reversals unless the victorious Confederate-Entente alliance can partition the Union immediately. But the point of scaring the northerners into coming to terms is lost if they see the worst predictions of those who like Lincoln prophesied such evils immediately; they'd rally instead. A draw and settlement has to be on terms favorable to the Union, or else the allied powers have to commit enough force to subdue the whole continent.
The Confederates eventually acquire a piece of Sonora from Mexico, giving them a tiny pacific Coastline.
Others have addressed that. If the Confederacy is really useful to the British I suppose they might give their blessing to such a project, but the bill would be paid in blood--Dixie blood and Mexican.
I actually think that perhaps they'd have a better chance of acquiring a bit of California, the southern part, by means of pro-Confederate insurrectionists and a supporting expedition across the southern deserts, to secure New Mexico, Arizona and southern California before the war ends. Even that's a long shot, even with the RN Pacific squadrons sowing mayhem along the western US coasts. I can believe the Union can challenge the RN at least in local waters, by sheer shipbuilding output and determination, in the Atlantic. We just didn't have all that much established on the West coast--but enough I suppose to deter a lot of conquest out of BC, which also had limited resources. We might lose Puget Sound and essentially Washington state, but in so doing British forces there would be depleted and Oregon would hold. As would the settled heart of California, around the Bay Area--the mountains and Nevada behind it would be full of people who want to stay out of the war, but nominally hold for the Union. So maybe the Confederates get a Pacific foothold, maybe not; anyway the Union would have one too. The Confederates might possibly aggrandize southward at Mexico's expense, but only if the British think it's a good idea. They'd probably suggest it isn't.
Mexico certainly won't sell any land to them for money, and they'd have the Union as their automatic ally to complicate any filibustering ventures.
Slavery is abolished amicably,
Why? And how? If that were an option there'd have been no reason for secession in the first place!
Under the legal regime that held that human beings, certain races of them anyway, could be property--the market value of the slave population amounted to something like half the total capital of the entire United States. There literally was not enough money in the nation to redeem the slave owners' financial interest, or even come close enough to make the discount small. For the slavery issue to have been settled by a "fair" payment to the slave owners, the owners of every other form of wealth in the nation--individual small farms, blacksmith's forges, every general store, every craftsman's establishment, along with the owners of big farms and big factories, all of them--would have to surrender ownership of the land and every tool they owned to the southern plantation owners and the owners of just a few slaves as well. The old slavocracy would own everything.
And it wouldn't be enough; what those gentlemen knew how to do was command legions of slaves to do their bidding; they knew little or nothing of how to manage free labor. Simply put they would not be able to make the profits they were accustomed to without slaves, and how patiently can we expect either the freed slaves or the dispossessed free workers and their former bosses in the North and West to endure the aristocracy of these people made rich by imprisoning others?
There's no way to end slavery amicably. The southern whites feared the day the slaves would be free to do as they wished--as Jefferson famously said "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
The secessionists split off from a Union they had hitherto done very well to associate with (and dominate) precisely to keep the "right" of slaveholding. The British might pressure them into a very gradual backing away from formal slavery, but only to compromise with nominal freedom that keeps the black underclass still in effective bondage--that's the only way the established ruling class the British cut their deals with would stay in power and stay as prosperous as they were accustomed to. That would also tend to keep the Confederacy backward and subserviently useful to British hegemons, so I don't see Britain twisting the arms of the white Southern elite to do more than a token liberation, and having great patience for even that to take generations.
If the slaves ever get the power to liberate themselves, they won't cut deals with their oppressors if they think they can bring the Union armies in again to liberate them properly. If the white elites can maintain their power enough to hold that nightmare at bay--why should they then be magnanimous to their helots?
with with black and white populations living largely in separate cities. Whites gravitate towards to coast and ex slave populations condense around the western river border.
I'll admit to having waxed a bit enthusiastic and hyperbolic about the unstoppable potential of free people and peoples freeing themselves above.
Will you admit this little demographic miracle of amicable mutual ethnic cleansing is a pure fantasy pulled out of no basis whatsoever? Why would they separate? The whites, the elites especially, owe their wealth, in many forms, to squeezing work out of the subservient African population. Where will they get housekeepers and nannys from, if the blacks just are peacefully allowed to wander off west? Why should they let any of them get any title in any good land, east or west, when white people have designs on that property too?
In modern America, including the south more and more nowadays, the Northern model of segregation does prevail--that separates the populations. The Southern form wasn't like that. Black people lived in plain sight, in the faces of their masters who dealt with them close up, every day. Even if there is a gradual legal emancipation, you can bet the pattern will remain more that of the Jim Crow South and the cities and countryside remain demographically integrated--without to be sure implying any social equality at all. "Keep your friends close--your enemies closer" as the Sicilians say.
In some ASB alternate reality where the freedmen just forget all the injustices and fears the terror of the whites had imposed on them for generations, and the whites forget all about their own fears that the Africans are human enough to want some justice done at long last, why would they separate at all? Given that these mutual resentments are actually simmering, how dare the Confederate whites allow the Africans to just go away to some Bantustan of their own (unless, like the South African Bantustans, these are really reservations under the tight control of the white government) and there contemplate just how far they want to separate from their former oppressors--perhaps, say, take the land they dominate and join the Union with it as a gift? Preliminary to a possible Yankee invasion they will actively support to take as much from the whites as they can as well?
Amicable separation indeed!
Their government, after perhaps a few revolutions, is a combination of autonomous communes, soft fascism and theocracy. There is some much revered Baptist equivalent of the pope, as well as a 'President'. All large plantations were dissolved in the seventies (the Reformation, rather than Reconstruction) into small farms, so their exists a rough analogy of a middle class. The coal from Appalachia fuels their industrial revolution, with populations booming in Atlanta, Galveston Island, and along the Ohio.
Hopefully this Confederacy is believable enough to exist and prosperous enough to stick around.
Um...no. Not to stick around, not to exist for fifteen seconds. Not anything the people who made the secession happen would want, nor anything the British would twist their arms into doing. Nor anything that could stand against the Union unless you also wish the northerners into behaving completely improbably.
What I'm really curious about though, is what would their foreign relations look like? Obviously the butterflies have changed the world significantly already, but not beyond speculation.
With premises like this--nothing is beyond speculation. We might as well suppose they all become Lamaist Buddhists and ally with the Dali Lama.
So, how might they go about making it in the world?
My initial thoughts:
The theme seems to be that the Confederacy and the US are mortal enemies from the beginning However, if American history is any indication, enemies can become friends and visaversa. So i could see them having a "special relationship" the US, with the split being buried in the past. Or west Virginia is one of many proxy wars along the border, A hazy conflict that stretches through generations, from Missouri to California.
Secondly, it seems to be a trope that the Confederacy always tries to just annex Mexico. Couldn't it be possible that they engage diplomatically with central America, because they will be needing to find some friends to provide a counterweight to the US. This may extend to the Caribbean as well. Rather than just annex Cuba as is so common, perhaps the Confederacy provides Spain with some reassurance that their possessions will be protected. Or they help Cuba towards independence, and become the best of friends. I could very much see a southern oriented Confederacy that slowly liberates/purchases the Antilles from their European owners.
Another aspect i wonder about it Russia. First, if the Confederates would find natural allies in the Russians. Both being deeply religious, and both needing an ally in the Pacific, both excluded from European affairs. Likewise, i could see the US being pushed closer towards Russia, perhaps being permanently alienated by the British recognizing the Confederates.
Anyway, i could go on. Didn't even think about Asia, or the Scramble for Africa. Thoughts?
As I said, everything above just goes one way or the other, spanning the entire gamut of possibilities. People assume the slavocrats would remain imperialist and filibustering because OTL a whole lot of the American intervention in the Caribbean and Latin America was done by freebooting Southerners, and because Southern politicians were among the most fire-eating expansionists. They certainly did have their Yankee counterparts, but if you consider as I do the whole United States as one basically integrated people, vice versa there's absolutely no reason to think they'd be less greedy or high-handed than we've been OTL. The institutionalized racism of the South (shared, to be sure, with northerners) gives us no reason to think they'd be diplomatically inclined toward the people of other colors south of them, not when they could fancy they could take what they wanted and rule "lesser" races with a firm hand, as they were accustomed to doing at home.
You want us to imagine a Confederacy with its act together, that isn't crippled by clinging to an outmoded oligarchy, one that is not internationally speaking the mere vassal of a European superpower. Perhaps since the British aren't superhuman they would lose their grip as the white-supremacist South evolves new, modernized forms of exploitation of their black underclass and turns into something as dynamic and expansionist as their northern neighbor (who might conceivably collapse and not develop the OTL potentials it still has). But I see no basis for an amicable resolution of slavery (again, if there were, the South would not have seceded and would not have the unifying identity that made it a potential second nation). No reason to think a triumphant secessionist movement that seceded in the name of slaveholding would evolve to a racially welcoming republic. I certainly don't see Southern Baptist piety being the catalyst of such a transformation! Rightly understood perhaps--but the point is, such churches have only ambiguously been rightly understood, to a limited extent OTL--and if it were the established Church of a Confederate nation--forget it. Real pious Baptists might exist--as despised and persecuted revolutionaries. The
established Church will support the establishment, as they do.
If the Confederate States remain united (dubious; they founded their new constitution on an explicit recognition of the asserted right of states to secede) and develop their potentials (by whatever means, most likely not to pleasantly for the former and perhaps continuing slave population) enough to keep pace with the Union and evolve away from British patronage, they are going to see the lands to the south as their backyard and their field of conquest. Unless long association with the British has accustomed them to accept that it is properly a British sphere of influence, that they have a share of access to and have been rewarded for helping Britain keep it; in which case their relations with their immediate neighbors are going to be shallow and formal, with the British doing the heavy policy lifting.
I don't see it happening because what the secessionists were largely fighting for was the freedom to choose their own patrons, not for a new model of developing the South for themselves. It is hard to adapt the stratified Southern society as the slaveholders wanted it to industrial era flexibility (apartheid South Africa pointed some ways to doing so--though they also failed to remain in power!
) so it seems likely they'd just perpetuate their relationship with centers of industrial power as a plantation hinterland--one with political clout within that relationship, but not on a course where they'd integrate those potentials within their own borders. They aren't going to evolve a kinder racial regime, not without revolution and bloodshed--and who is to say what sort or sorts of regimes would come out of the revolutionary roulette? Well--you did; but what you came up with seems pulled out of a hat on no basis at all. I guess the closest thing to it is what an unreconstructed but highly sentimental nostalgic for imaginary antebellum glories and the noble Lost Cause
imagines the Old South to have been all about, with every myth of nobility of spirit ever invoked in the name of the Battle Banner and Robert E. Lee. If that were the reality--well, those noble Confederates were slaveholders and if they weren't wrong but right in the head, the slaves would be their natural subjects as they alleged at the time. And the Union would not have had the assets to prevail as they did, with their help. All this talk of amicable abolition and separation of the races would be pointless and counterproductive; the South would prevail on the basis of slavery and everyone would like it. The Cubans and others would be the "best of friends" with the Confederacy because the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd recognize their natural and generous masters and submit to their God-given lower place with gratitude that at last they have someone worthy to guide and instruct them. And so on.
If on the other hand the Confederate secessionists wanted to become modern America, or anyway what we aspire to be at our best--they wouldn't have seceded. If they could do any of this other stuff, they'd have best done it within the USA.
