The Confederate States of America 1862-1872

Thomas

Originally posted elsewhere:


This is a speed TL, so it'll be short on details. Most of this is coming off the top of my head after 7 years of college and graduate school and accompanying degrees in history.



Confederates hold the field after the Battle of Antietam and the Union forces retreat.

European powers including France, Britain, Austria, Spain, and Russia come together and offer a Joint Declaration demanding peace.

The apparent defeat and European pressure results in a Copperhead Congress which seeks peace with the CSA. Despite President Lincoln's efforts to the contrary, Congress signs a peace treaty recognizing the independence of the CSA.

The intervention in the ACW is sufficient to topple the sitting government in London and results in the formation of a new government less antagonistic towards Washington and far less friendly with France or the Confederate States.

With the United States weakened France forms a coalition with Spain and Austria to deploy troops to Mexico and Santo Domingo. The British are not big fans of this and formally protest.

In the United States the peace with the Confederate States is not received well and there are major riots and protests. President Lincoln resigned from office after Peace, leaving Hannibal Hamlin as President of the United States.

The 1864 Congressional Elections sees the rise and election of many anti-Confederate hawks to Congress and a similar candidate to the Presidency. This marks the end of nominal peace along the American-Confederate border and the escalation of border skirmishes, particularly in the West. Concurrently volunteer regiments from the United States are allowed to enter Mexico to fight against the European occupiers.

With the return of a more robust foreign policy, French support for the Confederate States crumbles in an attempt to appease the United States and halt its support for rebels and freedom fighters in Mexico and Santo Domingo.

After achieving independence in 1862, the Confederate States did not become the beacon of liberty, brotherhood and success anticipated by its founders.

Its economy was weak with competition for cotton coming from Egypt and India robbing the nation of its largest crop. A lack of industry forced the nation to import many goods at higher prices than were found before the war. A lack of a national railroad hampered trade across the country. Debts to foreign powers and the over-production currency also added further pressures to the lackluster economy.

Besides the issues with the economy was the fact that the war had never ended in Eastern Tennessee where the fighting had not stopped with the signing of the Peace Treaty. The smoldering conflict had become a bleeding sore for the state government as Unionist and Confederate militias clashed in raids and guerrilla warfare. The continued occupation of Eastern Tennessee by the Confederate Army was a constant drain on funds and resources and suffered regularly from desertion as they maintained Martial Law. Several states, especially South Carolina and Texas, regularly complained of the cost in paying for the occupation and for their young men being sent so far from home. This comes to a head in 1863 when States refuse to send troops for the occupation, forcing the Confederate government to organize heretofore non-existent Regular Army Regiments from among the various State Regiments. Formed entirely of volunteers, the Regular Army of the Confederate States falls short of the numbers listed on paper, with some regiments having battalions with only 150 men in them.

After the 1864 elections in the United States the situation in Tennessee begins to degrade even faster as American support for the Unionists grows to include arms and supplies while American Unionist militias from Kentucky cross the border on raids with increasing regularity.

On the issue of escaped slaves the War and Peace have done little to stem the tide of slaves fleeing North except to totally halt any attempt by the Americans to return slaves that reach the border. While hardly any more welcoming or racially enlightened than the Confederacy, the United States tolerates the arrival of freed slaves as a way to harass the Confederacy. Most freed slaves are shipped North to Canada.

The unstable situation in the Americas is eclipsed by events in Europe in 1866 as the Kingdom of Prussia goes to war with Austria under the political guidance of Otto von Bismarck. This conflict draws in Austria's allies in France and Spain and is mirrored by the entrance of Russia on the side of Prussia against Austria. Britain remains officially neutral in the conflict but favors Russia and Prussia unofficially to maintain the balance on the continent.

The distraction of the war in Europe draws down French, Spanish and Austrian troops from Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Seizing on this weakness, both see a sudden surge in American Volunteer Regiments and supplies to the anti-European rebels. Confederate protests over the flood of American support for the rebels are toothless without a Confederate Navy to give them credence. One exists on paper but not in practice. By 1867 Mexico had again asserted its independence and was followed by the Dominican Republic in 1868.

The war in Europe concluded in 1868 with Prussian and Russian victory over Austria and the creation of a unified Italy in alliance against France. The German Confederation is dominated by Prussia after the dissolution of the Austrian Empire and France's influence in the Western German states is greatly crippled.

In the Americas 1868 presidential elections in the United States and Confederacy take place. The United States sees the re-election of the Hawkish president against weak opposition. In the Confederacy, a Small Government candidate from South Carolina takes the presidency after a harsh campaign and amid accusations of corruption and voting fraud.

The Confederate president, hoping to end the ongoing bloodbath in Tennessee and the border skirmishes invited the American president to negotiate an end to American support for Unionists along the border and in the Confederacy. His counterpart in Washington declines and The American president continues an antagonistic foreign policy with the Confederacy while also focusing on the expansion and modernization of the Army and Navy. Over the last four years the United States military has continued to improve its standards in training and equipment where the Confederacy has not in the face inadequate funding, manpower and industrial strength. Foreign support for the Confederacy had reached an all time low.

By 1871, nearly a decade of terrible performance by the Confederate economy had created serious political divisions inside the country, especially along class lines. The position of the Confederate Army in Eastern Tennessee had declined to such a point that the Unionist-declared state of Franklin is the effective government of the area and foreign support for the Confederacy had become apathy or antipathy. Faced with these facts, the Confederate president proposed a radical measure be introduced to the Confederate Congress to strengthen the power of the National Government so as to pay for the creation of a national railroad and the creation of industry.

The bill proved to be as divisive as feared with Texas and South Carolina opposing it in its entirety. In the end the bill passed by the narrowest of majorities and was immediately rejected by the state governments of South Carolina and Texas who voted to nullify the bill in early 1872.

The brewing Crisis to the South had an important impact on the 1872 election and saw the return of President Hooker to the Army and the election of Roscoe Conklin to the Presidency with General Grant as vice president. The Conklin/Grant campaign was heavy with militaristic rhetoric and thinly veiled promises of war with the Confederacy.

The increasing likelihood of war with their Northern neighbor convinced many Confederate congressmen and the President to introduce and (narrowly) pass a resolution calling for troops to be raised by the Confederate States to enforce compliance with the Infrastructure and Industry Bill so as to leverage a united front against Northern Aggression.

The resolution's immediate effect was rioting and violent protests in many major Confederate cities. Within days the Texas state legislature voted to declare independence from the Confederate States of America and re-form the Republic of Texas. In South Carolina the response was to vote for and form a Provisional Government of the Confederate States in Charleston to restore the Constitution and override the government in Richmond.
 

Thomas

In addition to being massively unpopular with the two states championing small government and low national spending, the new Infrastructure and Industry Bill is very unpopular with the middle and lower classes, on whom the onus of taxation is primarily levered. The Planter class was (and always had been) largely exempted from taxation in the Confederacy and even largely in the pre-war American South through corruption of the political process and gerrymandering that allowed them to dominate the state legislatures and the Confederate Congress.

The combination of political disenfranchisement and economic hardship created deep and lasting rifts in the Confederacy along class lines, with the middle and lower class whites suffering the worst of the effects. Many landowning non-slaveowners lost their land and became sharecroppers on the property they once owned. This was also accompanied by a dramatic drop in their standard of living. The treatment of poorer whites had also declined with vagrancy laws and penal farms being used against those who had become homeless and unemployed.

The resulting outpouring of anger and discontent was due to the fact that support for the War of Separation among the middle and lower class had been bought with promises of economic prosperity and the maintenance of the racial hierarchy over the black slaves. The use of vagrancy laws and penal laws to make use of nearly free labor from the poor whites was seen as a violation of this implicit agreement and the general consensus was that the whites who fell into this system were treated “no better than niggers”.

With the apparent disintegration of the unity of the Confederate States in the fall of 1872, the area of Eastern Tennessee under Unionist control issued an official document of secession from the state of Tennessee and the Confederate States. Calling itself the state of Franklin the Unionists immediately applied for statehood in the United States. The speed with which the application is heard and approved in the US Congress aroused some suspicion that the declarations and applications were organized by American agents. That this happened only a day after the inauguration of President Conklin in 1873 is taken as further evidence of American involvement.

With the impending civil war in the Confederacy, this move is seen in Richmond as an apparent provocation for war. The Congress of the Confederate States followed the only recourse really left to them and declared war on the United States.
 

Thomas

The declaration of war against the United States by the Confederacy was of course, reciprocated by the United States.

The defenses around Washington DC had never been reduced after the War of Separation and in 1873 became a jumping off point for the reinforced garrison to invade Northern Virginia. This push into Virginia was accompanied by a similar invasion by a much smaller force from West Virginia. Without adequate supplies or manpower, the Virginia state militia is no match for the invading Americans who advance almost at will. As the Army of the Potomac advanced into Northern and Western Virginia a second Army buttressed by Unionist militias from Kentucky and Franklin marches into the newest state in the Union and drive out the last holdouts of the Regular Army.

The American advance in equipment from muzzleloading blackpowder weapons to cartridge firing repeaters had not been mirrored in the Confederacy. Instead many of the militia and the Regular Army were armed with the same firearms their older brothers and fathers had used in the War of Separation.

The declaration of war saw a surge of volunteers in the United States, young men fed a daily diet of revanchist propaganda and whipped into a patriotic frenzy by the recent election. The same was not true in the Confederacy where the political divisions of that nation's impending civil war, economic depression and political disenfranchisement actually resulted in a net loss of soldiers as a number men in State Regiments and the Regular Army deserted rather than fight. Many the young men had grown up with brothers and fathers dead or maimed by the war for national independence while at the same time seeing no gain for themselves or for their families. When volunteers fail to materialize while the Americans advance into Virginia and Tennessee the Confederate Congress was quick to pass a conscription bill. The passage of the bill resulted in riots in most of the major cities of the Confederacy outside of South Carolina and Texas.

The Provisional Government of the Confederacy in South Carolina issued a response condemning the conscription bill while at the same time calling for all young men in the Confederacy to volunteer for military service in their state regiments to drive out the invading Yankees, support the Provisional government and bring Texas back into the Confederacy.

At almost the same time the Charleston government called for resistance to the Richmond government, the Provisional government authorized South Carolina State Regiments to prevent non-provisional government forces from transiting through South Carolina. This move resulted in armed showdowns between Georgian state troops and those of South Carolina that devolved into a series of bloody melees that cost a handful of lives.

This action hardened the resolve of both sides and marked the first shots in the Confederate Civil War. It also meant that North Carolina and Virginia were effectively cut off from the rest of the Confederacy as the American Navy once again put the former Southern states under blockade followed swiftly by landings in the coastal regions and several major ports of North Carolina and Virginia.
 

Thomas

The seizure of Nashville by American forces in early summer of 1873 completed the isolation of North Carolina and Virginia from the rest of the Confederate States of America for all real intense and purposes.

The Provisional Government of the Confederate States and State Government of South Carolina in Charleston (essentially one and the same) had closed the borders of the state to any forces or traffic not swearing allegiance to Charleston. After the initial bloodshed that marked the beginning of the Confederate Civil War, both sides had settled into a few hastily erected barricades and trenches to to stare at one another.

The reason for the stalemate was simple: the South Carolinians had no need to go on the offensive while the war with the United States continued as it was their belief that the pressures of the conflict would bring the nation around to their point of view in time to save the country.

For the rest of the Confederacy it was a matter of priorities. North Carolina and Virginia did not have the manpower to spare in order to force South Carolina to allow troops and supplies Northward while Georgia and the rest of the Confederacy was focused either on the massing American army in Franklin or the potential threat of Texas.

With the dire nature of the situation exposed the Confederate government in Richmond began a withdrawal of the State Regiments and handful of Regular Army units in Virginia for the inevitable defense of the Capitol. The withdrawal of army units for the defense of Richmond was hampered when American troops landed along the coast completed the encirclement of Norfolk with the help of the US Navy.

The miniscule Confederate Navy had wisely fled harbor in Norfolk and Charleston rather than face the far superior US Navy and had taken up patrol in the Gulf of Mexico where they hoped the concentration of their numbers would prevent any landings by the US navy along the Southern coast.

The encirclement of Norfolk was a major blow for the Confederate government and ended the Confederate government's access to the Virginian coastline for the rest of the war and saw the loss or abandonment of Virginia east of Petersburg and North of Richmond.
 

Thomas

The opening of the second front from Franklin into Georgia was the expected second move on both sides of the war and both sides massed men and materiel in anticipation of a large campaign. In the fall of 1873, for the first time since the War of Separation, American and Confederate armies of nearly equal size clashed near the border. The result was a decidedly one-sided American victory where the combination of newer tactics, arms, supplies and artillery led to a total rout of the Confederate army and high casualties. After this point the Confederacy would only rarely engage in pitched battles against the Americans, preferring a strategy of entrenched defenses and fortified cities under siege.

This strategy of static trench defenses proved effective in bogging down the American drive into Georgia, preventing a swift march on Atlanta.

Behind American lines there was surprisingly little resistance and raiding by Confederate guerrillas. In fact the largest hindrance to the advancing Americans was the overwhelming number of poor whites seeking employment or food. Quick to win some local goodwill many commanders used the plentiful labor to improve roads and lay new railroads to provide easier logistics.

Another fact of life behind American lines was the practice of lynching and violence against large landowners and Planters by the poor and middle class whites for real and perceived faults and injustices. This practice was only half-heartedly discouraged by Americans with few punishments handed out for anyone caught or suspected of involvement. This violence went hand in hand with the "reclamation" of property ownership by those who worked the land they did not own or had owned before falling on hard times.

This enlightened attitude towards property ownership and settling of scores did not extend to the black population in occupied territories. Considered to be freed from slavery by the legal rulings of the United States the former slaves were not greeted with warmth or kindness by American soldiers who treated them little or no better than the Confederate whites.

With the Georgia offensive stalled out in the defenses another venue is chosen by the American War Department to break the Confederacy in two. Going over old proposals and actions from the War of Separation an offensive down the Mississippi was undertaken out of St. Louis with many of the Interior Navy's gunboats in support. Forces and supplies gathered along the Ohio River link up with the St. Louis Force just north of the border.

Almost immediately the advance is stalled by mines and the need to take Forts Donelson and Henry, both of which had been heavily expanded following their return to the Confederacy after the War of Separation. Nonetheless both forts fell to American guns after a week of shelling and attack. After this the American advance down the Mississippi was a slow slog downriver until it came to a halt at Vicksburg and Port Hudson where Confederate defenders had converted both settlements into "Fortress Cities" and blocked the river with debris, mines and emplaced artillery.
 

Thomas

Ten months after the war's beginning the state of the war in Virginia was one of rapid collapse as American armies advanced at the speed their logistics train allowed on three sides towards the defenses erected around Richmond while a strong flanking wing moved around to fully enclose the city and place it under siege.

Faced with the prospect of being trapped inside a city completely cut off from the rest of the country the Confederate government including Congress and the President elected to flee the city via rail and escape Virginia through Petersburg which was still in Confederate hands by the barest of margins.

The flight of the Confederate government from Virginia was intended to be a secret so as to preserve the morale of the defenders, but such an evacuation could never have stayed secret and prompted a huge exodus of the city's civilians who clogged the roads south towards North Carolina.

After escaping Virginia the core of the Confederate government sent representatives to the Governor of North Carolina seeking space for the Confederate Congress to meet and for the President's office as well as housing. The governor did not receive the representative warmly and in fact declined his "offer" to host the government. In this meeting the governor revealed that the arrival of refugees from Virginia and the constant offensives by the American soldiers landed in many of the state's ports had brought his state's military regiments to near collapse. By the best guess of his officers the regiments would no longer be able to offer meaningful resistance within two weeks of their meeting. A lack of arms, supplies and rampant desertion had robbed them of their effectiveness. In the face of such dire facts the Governor admitted to the President's representative that without support from the rest of the Confederacy arriving immediately he would be forced to inform the negotiators he had dispatched to parlay with the ranking American general to accept his terms of unconditional surrender.

Shocked by the state of affairs in North Carolina and by how desperate their situation had become the President, Secretaries of War, State, and the Treasury as well as the Attorney General depart by train from Raleigh with the intent of traveling to Charleston to parlay with the Provisional Government in order to re-open South Carolina's borders and resupply the flagging North Carolina and Virginia regiments.

Upon their arrival at the border of South Carolina however, the President and his staff are arrested and sent to Charleston in chains where they are immediately placed on trial in the most public and bombastic manner possible.The day that news reaches Raleigh the governor surrenders the state, and the Confederate Congress still in the city under his protection, to the Americans.
 

Thomas

The surrender of North Carolina was the beginning of the end for the Confederate war effort as word of the capitulation spread by paper publication and word of mouth. The first and most immediate result was Confederate morale hitting rock bottom, followed swiftly by the state governments of Georgia and Florida declaring themselves for the Provisional Government in Charleston. With morale so low, it was really inevitable that desertion became so endemic that many regiments ceased to exist except on paper. Only harsh measures, fire-breathing rhetoric and reinforcements from Florida held the Georgia front from collapse and shored up the defenses in South Carolina.

The other states and fronts were not as lucky - American theater commanders had been appraised of North Carolina's intent to surrender. General McPherson was the general who took the best advantage of the resulting shock with coordinated offensives in the Mississippi Valley that finally overtook Vicksburg and Port Hudson while completing the Siege of Memphis begun by General Rosecrans prior to his dismissal from the Army.

The American Army was not the only institution to notice and take advantage of the terrible weakness of the Confederacy and its impending demise. The Republic of Texas, heretofore silent and passive in the Confederate Civil War launched their state regiments across their state border into Arkansas and Louisiana while envoys were dispatched to General McPherson seeking recognition of the Republic as a co-belligerent against the Confederacy.

Invaded on several sides and with New Orleans under threat by the American Army, the governor of Louisiana declared the unconditional surrender of his state to General McPherson's Army Corps. The surrender is not as clean as that in North Carolina - Louisiana had large swatches of territory under occupation by the United States Army and the Army of the Republic of Texas, and a significant proportion of the scattered State Regiments refused the order to surrender and continued to resist the advancing Americans and Texans. Tragedy was heaped onto chaos when a fire erupted inside New Orleans as the first elements of McPherson's Corps entered the city. The fire expanded out of control and resulted in accusations from the city's inhabitants against the American troops as well as against the city's blacks blaming both for burning the city while American officers argue that the city was burned by Confederate diehards.

The arguments and accusations came to a head when civilians from New Orleans evicted by the fire confronted an American patrol with hurled rocks and horse manure. After a few minutes of being bombarded by improvised projectiles the American soldiers responded with a volley of rounds into the mob and a bayonet charge that scattered the mob but did nothing to end the anger. The mob scattered and ignited riots across the half-burned city and resulted in violence against American troops and the lynching of man Freedmen. Within a handful of hours American soldiers marched into the city and stomped out the violence with direct force and martial law. In the days the followed a number of perpetrators of the lynching and riots were hung publicly as an example following their conviction before a military court.
 

Thomas

Quick retcon notice - American volunteer regiments helped topple Spanish control of Cuba at the same time that Mexico and the Dominican Republic were liberated from European control. Since that time a weak republic has run the island nation and has failed to abolish slavery.
 

Thomas

The surrender of Louisiana in the fall of 1873 was followed by the collapse of resistance in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama as their state regiments disintegrated. The state governments of each also collapsed with the governors and leading officials fleeing for whatever safe refuge they thought they could find in Texas and the Provisional States.

The total implosion of these states saw American forces advancing through them at speed, and as with everywhere else the US Army went it was followed by the construction of extensive rail lines, road improvements and thorough mapping of all routes of transportation. Also in the wake of the Army came the wave of "Reclamation movements" that lynched or otherwise killed the large-scale landowners, planters and political elites of the Confederacy while dividing land up between the poorer landless whites.

This also brought the US Army under General McPherson's command into direct contact with the regiments of the Army of the Republic of Texas, or as the United States classified them, "Texas state regiments, Army of the Confederate States of America".

General McPherson, the State Department, and indeed the United States as a whole did not consider Texas an independent nation, separate from the Confederacy. Rather it was seen as simply another malfunctioning limb of a dying, failed experiment that had to be put out of its misery.

So in the early winter of 1873 General Sheridan was placed in command of all Army elements dedicated to the invasion and conquest of Texas. General Sheridan had spent most of the ten years since the War of Separation battling the Indian tribes of the Great Plains and had learned much from the experience. His invasion of Texas was a brilliant example of the new strategic thinking of the United States Army as he systematically dismantled Texas's ability to fight an organized war and occupied all of the state's major cities before New Year's Eve. This occupation did not mean the end of fighting as diehards took to the countryside and hills to carry on a guerrilla campaign.

The American invasions of Mississippi and Alabama on the other hand were quite swift and experienced little immediate resistance before reaching the Georgia and Florida state borders. Once occupation had begun however, limited guerrilla activity began in the wake of the usual wave of "Reclamations". Violence was particularly common against Freedmen who were being ever more commonly used by General George Thomas's Occupation Command that administered all of the conquered Confederacy prior to its formal division into Military Districts. General Thomas's tolerance and appreciation of the Freedmen dated back to the days of the War of Separation and with his Freedmen workers and assistants coming under attack he authorized the creation of Army Auxiliary Militias to defend the areas behind the lines and free up regular Army units for front line service. That many of the AAMs were made up entirely of former slaves and free Blacks from the US Army was purely coincidental, at least according to Thomas's reports to General of the Army Sherman.
 

Thomas

The rapid occupation of the central and western states of the Confederacy by the US Army had rapidly overstretched the American logistics train and required a temporary halt at the state borders of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. This time allows the US Army to build their usual network of railroads, supply stockpiles and forts while continued resistance is stamped out as thoroughly as possible.

While the Army prepared to finish the burial of the essentially dead Confederate States, President Conklin authorized a peace delegation to be sent to Charleston to negotiate the surrender of the Provisional Confederate government and its states.

The arrival of the American representatives was actually less-noted in Charleston than the ongoing trial of the President, Secretaries of War, State, and Treasury and Attorney General of the now defunct Richmond Confederate government by the Provisional Confederate government. The trial had made little actual headway in one direction or the other as it has become bogged down in long-winded bombastic speeches lasting as long as a week for each speaker, especially by the Provisional government's Attorney General who led the prosecution.

The peace negotiations proceeded slowly for the first several months with much back-and-forth but not real progress on terms much to the aggravation of the Confederate President and former Governor of South Carolina. He ordered the negotiating team to put forth a proposal and then take a position of no-further-negotiations for a day until the Americans return with a more acceptable offer.

The President's offer had little to do with the reality of the Confederacy's military situation. It involved convoluted concessions to the United States, handing over all of Tennessee and Texas, army limitations, complete hand over of the navy, occupation of ports on the Mississippi and on the coast and the construction of forts and navy yards therein. In exchange the Provisional government would have gotten internal autonomy on all issues non-military, recognition of slavery and tariffs on goods entering the Confederacy from the United States would have been nearly non-existent.

Obviously the Provisional offer was turned down immediately by the Americans, and with suppressed laughter and a respectable effort at civility and professionalism. The offer was dutifully sent on to Washington for consideration and there it received much the same treatment. The counter-offer was that South Carolina, Georgia and Florida would receive the same treatment as North Carolina.

The rejection of those terms by the Confederacy led to another round of exchanged and rejected proposals that lasted a little longer than a month before the United States ran out of patience and issued an ultimatum. Twenty-four hours to commit to surrender or suffer a recommencement of hostilities. The deadline passed without any surrender and instead saw a half-dozen different Confederate cavalry regiments charge the American trenches rather than wait to be attacked. The return to hostilities also saw massive desertion from Confederate lines in numbers unprecedented from the State Regiments, depleting the already anemic Confederate manpower numbers.

Notably, a few State Regiments from Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and even the Old Loyalists (the brigade from Texas that had remained loyal to the Confederacy) that had been pressed into continued service to the Provisional Government deserted to a man and left for their homes. These runaway regiments then had the poor luck to be confronted and then fired upon by diehard Provisional volunteers in a number of running skirmishes. Several American commanders took it upon themselves to intervene on behalf of the deserters and after chasing off the diehards, the American officers provided the former Confederates with safe passage across American lines and back to their homes in exchange for the surrender of their weapons and sworn oaths not to take up arms against the United States.
 

Thomas

The renewal of armed conflict between the Confederacy and the United States saw the inexorable advance of the United States Army in the endgame of the history of the Confederate States of America. The months of negotiations had allowed for an immense expansion of roads, rail lines, manpower and supplies along the American front lines and with the return to warfare the Americans surged forward against the anemic and threadbare Confederate positions.

With the return to open warfare the cities of Richmond and Petersburg one again fell under constant bombardment by superior and potent American artillery. The city of Petersburg, the least defended of the Confederate fortress cities was the first to fall, offering a quick surrender that spared the city the fate that would come to later Fortress Cities.

Richmond, long suffering and mostly ruined was the next to fall. What began as a retreat between trenches along one stretch of defense quickly was turned into a rout and then a sack by the American attackers. The city, already greatly damaged was subjected to the venting of the American soldiers who had fought and bled for the city. The losses had been high and the cost great and the one-time Confederate capital suffered for its history and its resistance. Of the many government buildings, only the Archives survived looting, fire and demolition. The relief at its survival would become a bitter irony for the former officials of the Confederate states as the records contained inside would provide much of the information and evidence used to try former government officials later.

Richmond was the last of the non-Provisional territories to fall to the United States and was soon joined by much of the Provisional territories as the Americans quickly punched through existing Confederate defenses to march all the way to Charleston and Atlanta. Georgia and South Carolina were to provide the most stringent guerrilla resistance and sabotage to the advancing Americans while the Provisional state of Florida was occupied quickly and with relatively little loss of life by virtue of naval invasions and a small population.

The end of the war boiled down to to the Americans laying siege to two cities. Two cities in all of the Provisional Confederacy that stopped the war from ending in a conventional and large-scale sense. Atlanta and Charleston. The resistance and sheer obstinacy of the diehards defending both cities to surrender and end the fight saw the use of American innovations in artillery such as rocketry. These rockets were of limited actual utility but hinted at the great use they would have in future conflicts. Neither city held their defenses as long as Richmond or Petersburg, but both suffered far in excess of either.

When their defenses crumbled under the intense pressure brought to bear both collapsed and were subjected to a sack at least equal to that of Richmond if not worse before catching fire. These fires remain officially mysterious in origin but it is not hard to imagine vengeful Northerners burning these two most hated cities in their quest for revenge. The sack and burning were echoed with the field execution of so-called "diehards", those state and regular Confederate army units that had resisted to the end. These diehards were believed to be totally irredeemable and thus a threat to the occupation and reconstruction of the reclaimed South. These field executions by firing squad remain controversial even today.

Before the fires subsided and the ashes of Charleston and Atlanta were cool President Conklin addressed Congress and declared the War for Reunification a success and the war over and the battle for peace and reconnection beginning.
 

Thomas

Thanks for the compliments one and all.

I am considering the future of this TL now that I've got so much work into it.
 

Thomas

attachment.php



Crude map done on the fly of the prewar situation in 1873
 

Thomas

attachment.php


Map after the surrender of Louisiana & North Carolina
Red Confederate states are loyal to the original Confederate government
Blue Confederate states are loyal to the Provisional Confederate government
Light gray is Republic of Texas
States and areas outlined in US purple are US occupied.
 

mrmandias

--Despite President Lincoln's efforts to the contrary, Congress signs a peace treaty recognizing the independence of the CSA.
--USConst, Art. 2, Sec. 2
The President . . .shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties,
 

Thomas

mrmandias said:
--Despite President Lincoln's efforts to the contrary, Congress signs a peace treaty recognizing the independence of the CSA.
--USConst, Art. 2, Sec. 2
The President . . .shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties,
Click to expand...

You are correct and that was an error on my part. The result of doing entries off the cuff without editing.

I'd assume then that the treaty was signed after a string of defeats, under foreign pressure and with the election of peace democrats to Congress.
 
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