I actually began reading EnglishCanuck's Wrapped in Flames before I realized Smith's Burnished Rows of Steel existed; it was the former that led me to the latter. Both struck me as well written in the literary sense, and I have great sympathy for EC's sentiments that Canada would not simply roll over and joyfully embrace Union conquest.
That said, I agree with the skeptics here who point out there is no "settling" the matter; we don't know what would have happened.
What seems to be common ground for most is, that really, the European powers had very little reason to get sucked into intervention on either side. The Union did not need intervention nor were there any strong European tendencies, in terms of the actual ruling class interests anyway, to favor it actively, so speculation is all on the side of British and/or French intervention in favor of the Confederacy. But there were many excellent reasons OTL why this did not happen and trying to set up a scenario where it does is an exercise in absurdity.
This makes the whole question of wargaming it even more problematic than usual. Why do they fight?
It all boils down to morale in my humble opinion. The Union of OTL had no easy time, and I interpret the fact of Republican mid-term strength in 1862 and Lincoln's re-election in 1864 as demonstrations that for a wide variety of somewhat related reasons, pro-Union sentiment was quite strong in the North. It was of course not universal, but it was strong enough to prevail, and I think it is most reasonable to assume that even in the face of worse adversity, such as an unaccountably belligerent British Empire, the Unionists would persevere. Given that, their numbers and location and large internal resources all point to being able to endure quite a lot of redoubled opposition and still prevail.
Unless of course both Britain and the Confederacy showed similar resolve! But OTL the Confederacy was a very rickety structure indeed; huge swathes of slave states whose governments had joined the Confederacy were held by populations with no sympathy for secession and indifferent to hostile toward slavery. (Not in solidarity with the slaves to be sure; they were interested in their interests as plebeian white people who resented the domination of the rich large slaveholding class). Confederate ideology did not help them, not only were they committed formally on paper to maintaining and expanding slavery, their anti-Unionist reasoning led to a weak Confederal government with miserable finances. To unify the Southern whites into the sort of solidarity that prevailed in sentiment among Lost Causers generations hence would require some really massive PODs in the past generations and would probably require ASB intervention. The Confederacy did not have the kind of morale the Union did, and this despite rather inspiring early successes on the battlefield.
And just why is Britain involving itself at all? It is a stretch to get them involved; OTL Abraham Lincoln was smart enough to realize that taking on Britain at the same time as trying to recover control of the South would be very foolish, and getting the British to get so worked up as to go to war requires far-fetched manipulations of both events and personalities.
Having somehow or other jiggered a British declaration of war, just how solid is support for it in Britain? (The question of support elsewhere, in places like Australia, might be somewhat relevant too, but clearly the main thing is views in the British Isles). OTL sentiment was split along class lines. The opportunistic gloating over the dire straits of the Union was evident enough in organs such as The Economist--pretty much as we'd expect that same magazine to take positions today. It was easy enough to write off Union claims of concern for the lot of Southern slaves as hypocrisy; even the Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves Lincoln's forces did not have control over. For the British government and leading economic circles to have contempt for the Union was only to be expected. But in fact, going lower down the class ladder to those who barely could vote and lower still to the masses who could not, the Union and Lincoln were seen as friends of their classes, the Confederate slavocracy their enemies. The upper class position that Northern abolitionism was so much humbug could serve to neutralize their disdain for dealing with avowed, unrepentant slave owners, but down the social ladder, the masses saw it differently--one side might renege but was probably going to emancipate in the end, and in any case stood for comprehensive democracy, while the other was irredeemable and stood for rank reaction.
Britain going to war would probably serve to suppress a certain degree of dissent--it always does, which I view as a major driver of wars. If the war goes sour though and drags on, this effect backfires; people who were fairly conservative before get radicalized.
I suppose it can easily be shown on paper that a united, resolved Confederacy in alliance with a British Empire that is deeply, solidly committed to fighting the Union until they surrender claims to the South (and disgorge any conquests of Canada they may have accomplished in the interim) can break the Union. But I don't think you can show it can do so easily! The cost would be high. If we are realistic about the rottenness of the Confederacy, then it becomes all the harder for the British, who must manage to defend Canada, or else achieve such a crushing victory over the Union that the Yankees yield their conquests back, while doing the slavocrats' work for them in securing the Confederacy in the south. They must do this in the face of the certainty that Lincoln will issue something like the EP eventually, and will seek to mobilize the southern slave population against their criminal masters. The proud British stand for abolition of slavery will be twisted out of all recognition by actively aiding the South. It cannot be a popular war at home and if it becomes costly, the danger of major unrest in Britain itself (not to mention colonies such as Australia, settled in large numbers by radical dissidents and others of questionable political orthodoxy) will limit the ability of Britain to deploy its full power.
The Union has morale, the Confederacy, even allied to Britain, will lack it, and being aligned with the Confederacy will severely poison British interests too.
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This thread began with the premise that, without intervening, mere recognition of the Confederacy and repudiation of Lincoln's claim that the secession was an internal matter of crime and treason but the USA continued to exist in full would be worse for the European powers than OTL non-recognition or perhaps intervening. Immediately someone jumped in to suggest that mere paper recognition of the Confederacy would be a terrible blow to Union morale and of great immediate benefit to the South.
I can agree with Anaxagoras about the general direction of the effect in America, but I think he terribly exaggerates the magnitude. It would be unfortunate for the North and of some help to the South--but nothing like the scale-tipping magnitude he suggests. After all the Union is not being de-recognized, not being threatened with war, and so Lincoln is still able to use the force he could muster OTL. The US Navy may or may not be a match for X number of British warships but that is moot as long as peace, however tense, exists between them. Union ships can still act to blockade the South, and so any purchases Southern agents make in Europe still have to be shipped to Southern ports--attempting to do so is likely to result in either the cargoes going to the bottom in a dead loss, or Union ships actually capturing them--war contraband can of course be used by the Union forces instead, so Southern purchases may wind up giving their foes free gifts. Considering the dire situation the Union faced in 1861 I don't think that Union morale will collapse in whimpers upon getting the news that Her Majesty's Government thinks the Confederacy is a nation.
The mere paper declarations are not going to do all that much. What is serious about them is that either the European great powers reveal their diplomacy to be so much prattle and cant, removed from the realm of reality, or they take steps to demonstrate their belief that the Confederacy is a good faith government. If Parliament's position is that the coastal waters from Virginia on south are no longer US waters, and the Confederacy is a friendly power, then British merchants may trade there freely and therefore any Yankee blockades become acts of piracy, which the RN is honor-bound to intervene against.
Thus, a recognition of the Confederacy is either fanciful, or tantamount to a declaration of war.
If Britain declares war, Canada is forfeit. I don't have to accept TF Smith's view that the British subjects north of the US border were in fact disloyal to Britain and waiting eagerly for the chance to be incorporated into the USA in order to recognize that the Great Lakes region provinces were terribly vulnerable to a much more massive US Midwestern population that was backed up by regional industries and extensive railroad networks. The punch the USA can deliver against Canada in the west is so overwhelming it hardly matters what the local attitudes are--initially anyway. In following both EC and Smith's TLs I urged a policy whereby Lincoln would offer to trade Ontario back to the Crown, with treaty provisions limiting its arms, to buy peace as soon as possible. But I don't think it is a slur on British Canadian patriotism to believe that the Union would indeed prevail there. Farther east in the Maritimes it is a different story since these are accessible by sea, and Quebec is, well, interesting. But it is the western lands that would cost the Empire the most, and contain loyal British subjects under the heel of Yankee dominion.
The conquest of western Canada would indeed tend to solidify support in Britain for defeating the Yankees, but how much this is so depends on details. Again if Lincoln is offering to give it back, that will defuse outrage at least in those classes that were inclined to support the Union anyway, and greatly weaken the impact of bluster of those who were not.
In case of war, despite possible glorious victories at sea and on various fronts, I believe it will be British morale that collapses and seeks a negotiated settlement before the Union does. And if the Union can hold, and prevent wholesale invasion--and only a really massive British army deployment can threaten such a thing--then time is on its side.
Recognition of the Confederacy being then either an exercise in self-mockery and humiliation if it is not followed up, or sure to lead straight to war and thus being effectively an early declaration of it, it was of course avoided by a rational British government OTL.
That said, I agree with the skeptics here who point out there is no "settling" the matter; we don't know what would have happened.
What seems to be common ground for most is, that really, the European powers had very little reason to get sucked into intervention on either side. The Union did not need intervention nor were there any strong European tendencies, in terms of the actual ruling class interests anyway, to favor it actively, so speculation is all on the side of British and/or French intervention in favor of the Confederacy. But there were many excellent reasons OTL why this did not happen and trying to set up a scenario where it does is an exercise in absurdity.
This makes the whole question of wargaming it even more problematic than usual. Why do they fight?
It all boils down to morale in my humble opinion. The Union of OTL had no easy time, and I interpret the fact of Republican mid-term strength in 1862 and Lincoln's re-election in 1864 as demonstrations that for a wide variety of somewhat related reasons, pro-Union sentiment was quite strong in the North. It was of course not universal, but it was strong enough to prevail, and I think it is most reasonable to assume that even in the face of worse adversity, such as an unaccountably belligerent British Empire, the Unionists would persevere. Given that, their numbers and location and large internal resources all point to being able to endure quite a lot of redoubled opposition and still prevail.
Unless of course both Britain and the Confederacy showed similar resolve! But OTL the Confederacy was a very rickety structure indeed; huge swathes of slave states whose governments had joined the Confederacy were held by populations with no sympathy for secession and indifferent to hostile toward slavery. (Not in solidarity with the slaves to be sure; they were interested in their interests as plebeian white people who resented the domination of the rich large slaveholding class). Confederate ideology did not help them, not only were they committed formally on paper to maintaining and expanding slavery, their anti-Unionist reasoning led to a weak Confederal government with miserable finances. To unify the Southern whites into the sort of solidarity that prevailed in sentiment among Lost Causers generations hence would require some really massive PODs in the past generations and would probably require ASB intervention. The Confederacy did not have the kind of morale the Union did, and this despite rather inspiring early successes on the battlefield.
And just why is Britain involving itself at all? It is a stretch to get them involved; OTL Abraham Lincoln was smart enough to realize that taking on Britain at the same time as trying to recover control of the South would be very foolish, and getting the British to get so worked up as to go to war requires far-fetched manipulations of both events and personalities.
Having somehow or other jiggered a British declaration of war, just how solid is support for it in Britain? (The question of support elsewhere, in places like Australia, might be somewhat relevant too, but clearly the main thing is views in the British Isles). OTL sentiment was split along class lines. The opportunistic gloating over the dire straits of the Union was evident enough in organs such as The Economist--pretty much as we'd expect that same magazine to take positions today. It was easy enough to write off Union claims of concern for the lot of Southern slaves as hypocrisy; even the Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves Lincoln's forces did not have control over. For the British government and leading economic circles to have contempt for the Union was only to be expected. But in fact, going lower down the class ladder to those who barely could vote and lower still to the masses who could not, the Union and Lincoln were seen as friends of their classes, the Confederate slavocracy their enemies. The upper class position that Northern abolitionism was so much humbug could serve to neutralize their disdain for dealing with avowed, unrepentant slave owners, but down the social ladder, the masses saw it differently--one side might renege but was probably going to emancipate in the end, and in any case stood for comprehensive democracy, while the other was irredeemable and stood for rank reaction.
Britain going to war would probably serve to suppress a certain degree of dissent--it always does, which I view as a major driver of wars. If the war goes sour though and drags on, this effect backfires; people who were fairly conservative before get radicalized.
I suppose it can easily be shown on paper that a united, resolved Confederacy in alliance with a British Empire that is deeply, solidly committed to fighting the Union until they surrender claims to the South (and disgorge any conquests of Canada they may have accomplished in the interim) can break the Union. But I don't think you can show it can do so easily! The cost would be high. If we are realistic about the rottenness of the Confederacy, then it becomes all the harder for the British, who must manage to defend Canada, or else achieve such a crushing victory over the Union that the Yankees yield their conquests back, while doing the slavocrats' work for them in securing the Confederacy in the south. They must do this in the face of the certainty that Lincoln will issue something like the EP eventually, and will seek to mobilize the southern slave population against their criminal masters. The proud British stand for abolition of slavery will be twisted out of all recognition by actively aiding the South. It cannot be a popular war at home and if it becomes costly, the danger of major unrest in Britain itself (not to mention colonies such as Australia, settled in large numbers by radical dissidents and others of questionable political orthodoxy) will limit the ability of Britain to deploy its full power.
The Union has morale, the Confederacy, even allied to Britain, will lack it, and being aligned with the Confederacy will severely poison British interests too.
------
This thread began with the premise that, without intervening, mere recognition of the Confederacy and repudiation of Lincoln's claim that the secession was an internal matter of crime and treason but the USA continued to exist in full would be worse for the European powers than OTL non-recognition or perhaps intervening. Immediately someone jumped in to suggest that mere paper recognition of the Confederacy would be a terrible blow to Union morale and of great immediate benefit to the South.
I can agree with Anaxagoras about the general direction of the effect in America, but I think he terribly exaggerates the magnitude. It would be unfortunate for the North and of some help to the South--but nothing like the scale-tipping magnitude he suggests. After all the Union is not being de-recognized, not being threatened with war, and so Lincoln is still able to use the force he could muster OTL. The US Navy may or may not be a match for X number of British warships but that is moot as long as peace, however tense, exists between them. Union ships can still act to blockade the South, and so any purchases Southern agents make in Europe still have to be shipped to Southern ports--attempting to do so is likely to result in either the cargoes going to the bottom in a dead loss, or Union ships actually capturing them--war contraband can of course be used by the Union forces instead, so Southern purchases may wind up giving their foes free gifts. Considering the dire situation the Union faced in 1861 I don't think that Union morale will collapse in whimpers upon getting the news that Her Majesty's Government thinks the Confederacy is a nation.
The mere paper declarations are not going to do all that much. What is serious about them is that either the European great powers reveal their diplomacy to be so much prattle and cant, removed from the realm of reality, or they take steps to demonstrate their belief that the Confederacy is a good faith government. If Parliament's position is that the coastal waters from Virginia on south are no longer US waters, and the Confederacy is a friendly power, then British merchants may trade there freely and therefore any Yankee blockades become acts of piracy, which the RN is honor-bound to intervene against.
Thus, a recognition of the Confederacy is either fanciful, or tantamount to a declaration of war.
If Britain declares war, Canada is forfeit. I don't have to accept TF Smith's view that the British subjects north of the US border were in fact disloyal to Britain and waiting eagerly for the chance to be incorporated into the USA in order to recognize that the Great Lakes region provinces were terribly vulnerable to a much more massive US Midwestern population that was backed up by regional industries and extensive railroad networks. The punch the USA can deliver against Canada in the west is so overwhelming it hardly matters what the local attitudes are--initially anyway. In following both EC and Smith's TLs I urged a policy whereby Lincoln would offer to trade Ontario back to the Crown, with treaty provisions limiting its arms, to buy peace as soon as possible. But I don't think it is a slur on British Canadian patriotism to believe that the Union would indeed prevail there. Farther east in the Maritimes it is a different story since these are accessible by sea, and Quebec is, well, interesting. But it is the western lands that would cost the Empire the most, and contain loyal British subjects under the heel of Yankee dominion.
The conquest of western Canada would indeed tend to solidify support in Britain for defeating the Yankees, but how much this is so depends on details. Again if Lincoln is offering to give it back, that will defuse outrage at least in those classes that were inclined to support the Union anyway, and greatly weaken the impact of bluster of those who were not.
In case of war, despite possible glorious victories at sea and on various fronts, I believe it will be British morale that collapses and seeks a negotiated settlement before the Union does. And if the Union can hold, and prevent wholesale invasion--and only a really massive British army deployment can threaten such a thing--then time is on its side.
Recognition of the Confederacy being then either an exercise in self-mockery and humiliation if it is not followed up, or sure to lead straight to war and thus being effectively an early declaration of it, it was of course avoided by a rational British government OTL.
