The Grand Collaborative Southern Victory Timeline

The ships burned:

USS Pennsylvania (120 gun sailing ship of the line)
USS Delaware (74 gun sailing ship of the line)
USS Merrimack (40 gun screw frigate)
USS Raritan (50 gun sailing frigate)
USS Columbia (50 gun sailing frigate)

Ships captured:
USS United States

Ships escaped:
USS Pawnee (10 modern gun screw sloop)
USS Cumberland (24 modern gun sailing frigate)

This list is incomplete.
 
von Adler, thank you very much! That will come in handy for the Atlantic War.

Now, before we begin this timeline, I think we should come up with some ground rules, so that this timeline doesn't go completely crazy or ASB or both. So, I propose the following rules for posting bits of the timeline:

1. All posts adding to the collaborative timeline will be from excerpts from books. Said books may be from any time period, and may even be memoirs.

2. The post must focus on one subject. For example, if I am going to post an update on the Atlantic Front, I will only post about something happening on the Atlantic Front. I cannot jump from a battle between two ironclads to the Battle of Gettysburg (if there is one ITTL:D)

3. All posts must be chronlogical, though this needs some explaining. If we are working on the year 1900, you can't post something about the year 2000. However, if your post hints at something in the near future, that would be OK. I say near because I don't want one of the first posts, about the beginning of the Civil War, referring to President Villaraigosa's inauguration in 2009. That takes some fun away from everyone else in leading up to our incumbent US President. (Plus, President Villaraigosa may not work out well, because of the next rule...)

4. The Butterfly Effect is in Effect! Now, I understand a few people surviving the effect. Thus, we need to limit the amount of people that are IOTL that would make it into TTL. We can't have, despite all the butterflies, a McCain vs. Obama campaign in 2008. Plus, I'll point out that not all people have to be politicians... You can have Ronald Reagan be the owner of a restaraunt in Los Angeles, if you like.

These rules are probably incomplete, so if you all have any ideas for ground rules for this timeline, please add to it.
 
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Hmmmm, that's interesting! What is your source that the Confederacy was offered the option to purchase the East India Company's navy, and declined it? In all my years of research on the Civil War, I've never run across that particular nugget.

There are allusions to it on-line (nothing on Wiki), but Field Marshall Viscount Wolseley -probably the best English officer of the later Victorian era- commenting on Jefferson Davis in 1880:

"It is with the deepest regret that I feel obliged at this point...to call into question the fitness of Jeffeson Davis for the high position he occupied.,,,he was a third-rate man.... the soi-dissant statesman...who neglected to buy the East Indian fleet, which by happy chance and zeal of subodinates threw his way, who could not see that the one vital necessity for the South was, at all sacrifice and at all hazard to keep the ports open"

The American Civil War: An English View (2002) pages 76-77 Viscount G.Wolseley, James Rawley editor

Wolesely was an upper class British officer who had been sent briefly to Canada to see to Canadian defenses during the Trent Affair. Favoriing the South, he took the opportunity to sneak into Virginia to meet Lee and Stonewall Jackson, both of whom he admired greatly. I definitely recommend this book as a contemporary outsider's view of the ACW
 
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