The Winds of Fate: A Civil War ATL:

The Austro-Prusso-Piedmontese War:
How Penny-Penching Inadvertently launched the Age of Firepower:

Waged in a relatively short span of time, the Six Weeks' War, also known as the Austro-Prusso-Piedmontese War in Viennese sources, and the Austro-Prussian War in English sources, was a strange conflict. While the war itself both wound up preventing any prospect of Prussia dominating a united Germany by force of arms, the conflict launched the age of modern war only by virtue of a strange set of circumstances. With the Austrian military having adopted the new Gatling Guns, the Austrians were able to save valuable funds that would have otherwise been allotted to raising troops and equipping them. In a practical sense both Archduke Albrecht and Benedek were to command armies whose artillery advantages over both Prussia and Italy were to be enhanced by the presence of the Gatlings.

The war had originated out of its precursor war with the Danes over Schleswig-Holstein, and Otto von Bismarck, in what was evidently intended at the very least to consolidate Prussia's leadership over the German Confederation, was to launch the war via a controversial decision to declare the Confederation ended over the issue of the two duchies. The analyses that expected veteran Austrian troops who had fought, if not successfully, in the war with France in 1859, would triumph over the Prussians were to be validated, but in fashions none expected.

Curiously this war also featured the first clash of ironclad fleets, which produced the Austrian victory in the Battle of Lissa.

In the war with the Italians, the Italians were to find themselves defeated by Archduke Albrecht in a battle where poor tactical handling on the Italian side was magnified by both Austrian superiority in artillery, and by scenes of the Gatlings wreaking the kind of murderous slaughter on the Italians that had characterized the US War of the Rebellion.

In the clashes between Prussia and Austria, the Prussians initially were to prove to have the better of the fighting. The Austrians, whose handling of the earlier battles was marred by poor tactical handling and poor choices, nonetheless were able to exploit both superiority in conventional artillery and in the first uses of concentrated Gatling batteries. It was the Gatlings that permitted the Austrians to gather in an orderly fashion under the command of Feldzugmeister Benedek in the region of Sadowa, albeit in one of the most controversial aspects of the war despite severe maulings of Prussian forces, the Austrians overlooked an opportunity to defeat and destroy an entire Prussian army as both armies were to wind up gathering near Sadowa/Koniggratz. The Austrians, at Trautenau, had however neglected the advantages of their newer weapons to launch an attack that had in another controversial instance taken more casualties than was necessary.

Indeed, the lead-in to the Prussian concentration at Koniggratz was rife with the views of both contemporaries and later historians that without the role of the Gatlings the Austrians in all probability might have actually been defeated by the Prussians, as historians and contemporaries both gave superior points for strategic handling to Moltke, not to Benedek, who was considered to be both lackadaiscal and in general the kind of commander who reigned but did not rule.

Yet in the massive battle between the Prussians and the Austrians, it was to be the Gatlings that proved the decisive factor. The Prussians, whose concept in this largest of all the battles boiled down to attempts to attack with bayonets, in no small part from overall artillery inferiority, were to successively attempt to charge the Gatlings, the product of Moltke's dismissal of the concept that well-trained troops were vulnerable to firepower. This belief reflected Moltke's belief that the Confederate army had been a poorly-led mob of ragamuffins, and a bit of chauvinism in the belief that the heirs of Frederick could not but triumph by willpower alone. To be fair to Moltke, his own doctrines had emphasized a superior concentration of firepower at a small-arms level, and his emphasis on a quick and decisive victory did not permit much in the way of strategic flexibility.

But as it was for the first two days at Koniggratz, the Prussian attacks at the Gatlings were to produce frightful losses, though it would only be on the third day that Benedek, realizing how depleted Prussian forces actually were, attempted what was to be an over-ambitious attempt at a battle of envelopment. What his attempt did produce was the Prussian army, depleted and damaged after heavy losses, retreating in near-rout from the field, but the Prussians managed to retain good order due to the difficulties Austrian cavalry experienced in pressing the retreat.

Sadowa was to be the decisive battle of the war, as Franz Josef, not willing to press his luck in the wake of what was a victory that for the Austrians had been concurrent with heavy losses, poor handling on the field, and was narrower than it might otherwise have been, was to accept the entreaty from the Prussians for a peace, the two sides inaugurating the negotiations that would become the Treaty of Prague.

While indeed an Austrian victory over both Italy and Prussia, the legacy of 1866 would be one that would be complex and multi-faceted, though it was immediately to launch the further growth in all armies of an orientation to ever-more-sophisticated means of increasingly rapid and more lethal firepower......
 
The Munich Peace Conference of 1866:

In the wake of Austria's defeat of Prussia, the two states' war was to lead to one of the first large-scale conferences in European history. In terms of the expansion of Russian power and wealth this conference would prove decisive, while for Austria the over-ambitious overreach of the Austrians in draconian peace terms aimed at Prussia's expense enabled Alexander II to present himself as a moderate, aiming to both ease tension left over from the 1863 Polish Rebellion and aiming to strengthen Russia's reputation as a peacemaker. More to the point Alexander II desired to regain control of Sevastopol again. In the conference the Tsar Liberator would succeed in gaining control of Sevastopol, and negotiated a status quo antebellum peace with the Austrians and the Prussians, while focusing on trying to resolve the issue of the unification of Italy.

Due to the shattering Italian defeats on Land and Sea, the Austrians were to ultimately gain a status quo peace but only after a tense international clash between France and Russia, where Alexander II carefully managed to outmaneuver Napoleon III when the latter showed no inclination to force a war for the House of Savoy, aided in this regard by the tactlessness and incompetence of the Italian Monarch in two sensitive instances.

This diplomatic triumph for Russia enabled Alexander II to present himself abroad as a peacemaker, even as the legacy of the first assassination attempt on his life marked a new challenge for the Tsars of Russia. Internally while Russian public opinion cheered the return of Sevastopol, the diplomatic triumph did little to affect or alter the Tsar's issues with internal popularity among the Russian intelligentsia.
 
Reconstruction and the Freedmen, 1865-7:

Among the first issues that provoked one of the first crises between President Lincoln and his General-in-Chief was the issue of the Freedmen's Bureau. Itself a product of wartime pressures, the Bureau had begun underfunded and understaffed, and this was a process that continued for all Thomas's vehement advocacy of change. President Lincoln did not believe that the government had any kind of consistent role to play in directing the economic status of anyone, where Thomas viewed such a step as a crucial aspect of changing the South permanently. In the wake of the Black Codes Thomas managed to convince the President and the Congress to expand the Bureau to the largest size it would achieve during Reconstruction, a phase also connected with the hanging of the Bloody 392.

The men hanged were to be subject to some of the only Reconstruction-era experiments with genuine land transfer, the planters seeing the slaves of their plantations allowed to establish claims on the land in question to direct it themselves. Interestingly the very success of the experiment would provoke in the long term the most furious backlash, while in the short term this earned Thomas the undying hatred of the South, which called him Black Tom, and the undying contempt of a good-sized portion of the North, which called him Tom Brown.

However for the Freedmen, the period of 1865-7 would be a period of great, though uneven, progress despite the unwillingness to an extent of President and Congress to finance any long-term government intervention in favor of poverty. It would be when Republicans realized the potential for a powerful constituency arising from these New Men that they were to decide cynically to embrace the issue to the hilt, though the hard core of convinced abolitionists retained their paternalistic attitudes through the entirety of Reconstruction.
 
Ulysses S. Grant and Reconstruction:

For his part the former General in Chief of the Confederate Army would eschew the kind of overtly violent action that had led to the mass hanging of the Bloody 392. While stripped of his citizenship in the United States for the duration of his life, Grant would retire to life in Richmond in a relatively shabby house quietly, staying out of the limelight. In his own lifetime he was less popular as a Confederate hero than General Jackson was, it would be upon the desperate gamble of publishing his Memoirs that he would become one of the great focal points of the Confederate Lost Cause mythology. In the immediate term Grant would set examples by becoming President of a university that would become known as Washington and Grant University, however he would invest his money made in this job poorly, thus necessitating his decision to have General Longstreet write his memoirs as he dictated them.

In the short term General Grant would spend his daily life following a routine, aware that in the course of his military career he had become as anathema in the North as General Thomas was in the South, leading to Grant's famous wry quip "Well, at least we know we can't go home again" toward the end of his life.

Grant would also write in a series of notebooks the drily titled Notes on the Future of Defensive Operations that polished by Longstreet and by General Robert E. Lee would lead to another crucial aspect of the profound revolution in military affairs.......
 
I'm sorry if I couldn't read all of the post in this thread, but did General Grant really defect to the Confederacy?

That's the POD of the thread in question. Essentially he has an argument with his dad that leads to him turning to Colonel Dent, his Father-in-Law, becoming a successful slaveowner, and thus joining the Confederate Army where his native brain and skill promotes him to lead the ATL Confederacy's war effort. It's an attempt to do something genuinely different with the Civil War as opposed to yet another rehash of the cliche OTL scenarios.
 
So Grant and Lee are fighting for the Confederacy. I guess with Grant as a member of the CS Army, the Union is so screwed.

Um, no, at this point in the thread the US Civil War's been over for the first years of Reconstruction. Thomas brings machine guns into the fray and smashes the Union in a bloodier war than IOTL but one that's actually shorter in duration than IOTL. The higher casualties come from things like the CS Army ordering direct frontal assaults on machine guns......
 
The Fall of Bismarck and the Prussian Constitutional Crisis:

The defeat of von Moltke's armies in the Austro-Prussian War at Sadowa would unleash one of the greatest constitutional crises in the history of the Prussian state. Had the Prussian armies won, the degree to which von Bismarck and King Wilhelm I had disregarded the rights of the Prussian legislature in forcing through their military reforms would have been forgiven. But instead of victory, the result had been a catastrophe for Prussia and for her allies, one mitigated only by Alexander II, whose true purpose was evident in his having used the Munich Negotiations to undo the losses Russia had taken in an international sense from the Crimean War.

The result was the slow attenuation of Otto von Bismarck's power and a crisis caused by the right of either the Prussian assembly or the Chancellor to collect taxes. Ironically for all involved, this crisis would make clear at least one principle, namely that King Wilhelm I was a far more decisive and intelligent ruler than generally given credit for. While he engineered the forced retirement of Bismarck at the end of the crisis, he did so by promoting in his stead General von Roon, who would ensure that Prussia would keep its military reforms at the price of sacrificing a Chancellor whose status was unpopular. At the same time King Wilhelm I continued to rely on the pretense that his Chancellor remained his brain trust, even as the King was to slowly amass a growing autocracy that would last until his age led to the ascension of the Friedrich Regency.

More ironically, the defeat of Prussia's armies and the violent backlash against the Crown would sour Crown Prince Friedrich against the more liberal elements of Prussian society, a souring only to degrees and partially counterbalanced by his liberal wife, Crown Princess Victoria.
 
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