You should've!
My Dad and I already have a plan for doing this to a current political figure, but I'll join you two for that road trip in a heartbeat.
Seriously, fuck Buchanan.
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
Seriously, fuck Buchanan.
Awesome update! Great to see the 54th Massachusetts victories. Almost more fun than the one at Union Mills was their defeat of Beauregard since that was one-on-one. The looks on the rebels faces would have been priceless.
It's great to see that Reynolds pursued, even if he didn't do it totally he definitely got some more defeats of Lee in and quite a few more casualties I'm sure. And it's nice to see Gettysburg get a little something.
Jackson surviving is a good butterfly because when he continues to lose also there'll be no chance of anyone saying that they could have won except for his death.
It's great to see that Reynolds pursued, even if he didn't do it totally he definitely got some more defeats of Lee in and quite a few more casualties I'm sure. And it's nice to see Gettysburg get a little something.
Jackson surviving is a good butterfly because when he continues to lose also there'll be no chance of anyone saying that they could have won except for his death.
Awesome work, glad that my ideas were of use to you. After all this plundering and burning, I get the feeling that Pennsylvania will be a state that's firm on Reconstruction. With how badly smashed Lee is, I doubt he'll be sending any troops to Bragg (or rather Joe Johnston now) anytime soon. Reviewing the strategic situation a bit, we have both Lee and Bragg smashed and on the run. The only army left undefeated is the one in Vicksburg under A.S. Johnston. Once that army is finished, I wonder if Grant will be sent to join Thomas or continue to conduct independent campaigns. One of Grant's more interesting proposals was to launch an amphibious invasion of Mobile (to finally shut the port) and capture Atlanta. Accomplishing the former puts an high-risk threat behind Johnston and accomplishing the former forces him to abandon every inch of Northern Georgia (which is a nightmarish terrain for any attacker-which is why Sherman chose to outflank them).
Just ask the Poles. Or the Greeks. Or the Boers. Or the Communards.
What I want to see is a Second Constitutional Assembly post-war and not just Amendments: things like abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, clearly stating that ALL Humans are equal and that slavery cannot exist in the US, newer vote district laws that favor population and not territory (aka: cities beat countryside), make the Supreme Court Justices being an appointment for 12-16 years, and other things. Removing all things that served mainly as a way for the South to remain relevant in the face of the North LONG after the Suoth should have faded economically and demographically into obscurity.
That's way too far. Not even the most radical of Republicans would agree to this, as the South is still one huge part of the US. A radical reconstruction is okay, but this wouldn't fly.
This is all too anachronistically driven by current concerns - no offense.
New England states are never going to spring for throwing out the Senate or the Electoral College, especially not in the 19th century - and these are states which have been absolute bulwarks of the Union cause and the anti-slavery movement. No Radical Republican government is going to risk even attempting to alienate them.
If you want to really break the back of the slaveocracy, the answer lies in doing something proactive to build up the power of former slaves in the South. Give them land and resources - and guns.
@TastySpam 's Dixieland; the country of tomorrow, everyday timeline has Lee killed about 1862/63, resulting in Bragg of all people becoming the most prominent war hero.
A careful balance has to be struck. If outright exterminating the vanquished population is out of the question (and it is out of the question), then they have to be reintegrated into the country to an extent where they feel like they genuinely are represented in the government. They can, in time, get used to having to share power with Northerners and with African-Americans, but if they are deliberatively and permanently locked out of ever again being part of the ruling coalition, then there is little stopping them from forsaking the ballot box for the bullet box. America has to come of this with its ruling coalition widened, not just having one part of that coalition kicked out to make way for someone else.
Okay for starters I have to say this chapter is brilliant I couldn't stop reading but I guess that's generally true with everything you write. As soon as I started looking up location names I thought I knew what was going to happen, the confederates were going to plunge like a dagger through Pennsylvania and north, until on turning back for more ammunition and recruits (and perhaps food if the union went scorched earth) from the south they would be crushed between two union armies. Turns out I was wrong politics and the fools and Baltimore are what made this defeat so easy allowing the union to dictate the terms of battle and facing the confederate forces to split and be defeated in detail.
However their are a few plot holes I don't like. If Lee was so cocky why didn't he just keep going north? I think maybe this can be explained by the intelligence he had on hand. If I have one complaint it seems like the union victory came too easy. Maybe this can be explained away by the confederate troops essentially making a large loop around union forces to attack them from behind and thus being more fatigued.
However their are a few plot holes I don't like. If Lee was so cocky why didn't he just keep going north? I think maybe this can be explained by the intelligence he had on hand. If I have one complaint it seems like the union victory came too easy. Maybe this can be explained away by the confederate troops essentially making a large loop around union forces to attack them from behind and thus being more fatigued.
This feels like a Dues ex Machina.
Huh?
Well if you want to radicalize the northern population that's how you do. If they would have kept this up with the industrial sabotage they might have had a serious effect on the Norths war economy.
Is this supposed to be a riff on a modern politician.
This level of hubris is unbelievable.
Okay this catatonic state I can buy.
Sounds like somebody is projecting. Also this more radical civil war might have a positive effect on the south. We see in America today that a lot of manufacturing has shifted from the rust belt, not only to oversees but to the south where labor is cheaper.
Yes.
It's supposed to be a more radical civil war, not a more rational one.
That, I think, will require a great deal of time and an even greater degree of what I'm afraid can only be called re-education, but there is one thing that is significantly improved from OTL; Black men have proved their worth on the field of battle. Not that they didn't do so in OTL (Fort Wagner alone would have seen to that, if Nashville and the Siege of Petersburg didn't) but not as visibly as ITTL, where they shattered Beauregard's force at Fort Saratoga and broke Jackson's Charge at Union Mills. The myth that Black men won't stand and fight like white men has, I think, been comprehensively exploded, where virtually every major media source in the country could see it happen, and with it one of the main props knocked out from under the racist assumption of Black inferiority. I can imagine Jackson or some other Confederate officer who was at Union Mills saying something along the lines of Richard Ewell's admission in @TheKnightIrish's TL after the Battle of Liberty:
Seems like you want to self-insert yourself into this Civil War story rather than look at the historical perceptions of the time....
Most, if not all of that is not going to happen
Some elements of this are definitely relevant to the fate of Reconstruction. Ensuring districts were drawn by population and not territory, in particular, was a key piece of civil rights "legislation" (it was actually a judicial decision, as I'm sure you know) that disarrayed many subtle elements of Jim Crow disenfranchisement. The Electoral College and Senate were definitely elements that had significantly, if not primarily, benefited the South's ability to hold on to its national power and promote and protect slavery, although that probably wouldn't be enough to get any more than a fringe arguing for their abolishment. Likewise, the Supreme Court had, most infamously in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, been an important bastion of Southern strength. But probably most people will view the war and the 13th-15th Amendments or their equivalents as having been enough to make the Republic's systems work properly, Jim Crow having not happened yet...
Which is too bad, in the case of the Electoral College; it made a certain degree of sense in the 1780s, but by the 1860s it had become a vestigial organ, largely tolerated because of mistaken notions about it inflating the value of "small states" (it does not, but rather inflates the value of competitive states) and the fact that it served in the vast majority of cases as a rubber stamp for the popular vote. Really, it should have been abolished in the 1820s or 1830s, when universal white manhood suffrage was accepted, because the entire complicated system that had been envisaged clearly had no relationship whatsoever with how American politics had actually developed, and the whole exercise was just a waste of time and money to no purpose.
The slave states would not accept that though, especially in the 1820s and 1830s.
Here and now though, in the aftermath of the civil war you have Northerners holding the power, and even if the slave states lose their clause, they are still unlikely to lose or remove their power in the electoral college or senate. Especially if they can use it to their advantage.
Thank you! The fact that it was the bravery of Black troops that caused them to fail must have been a specially hard psychological hit.
It won't be pretty, and the world the war will make will not know true peace for a long time to come. But hopefully a better United States can rise from this.
I wonder if some kind of "Longstreet lost Union Mills" legend can be created. I don't think so, but the slavers never were known for their logical thinking.
The Hero of the Union!
Not the first, not the last, but definitely the most bitter. Some Dixie boys may have undergone some soul searching after this, hopefully.
Out topic, but Downfall is one of my favorite movies. On topic, I could see the Confederate leader ordering troops that don't exist anymore towards the war's end.
A real new birth of freedom.
The propaganda value of this is amplified by the fact that at the same time that the brave Black soldier was saving the Republic at Fort Saratoga and Union Mills, there were White copperheads doing their best to destroy it at New York and Baltimore. How could someone say after this that Lee and his rebels are more deserving of citizenship than Black Americans?
The Union Forever! I did consider killing Reynolds, but thought that would end the triumph in a surly note.
Buchanan is very hated, so he better keep his head down. Stevens is a leading voice of radicalism. When we finally get around to the rehearsals for reconstruction we'll hear more of him.
They must learn that if the South rises again, the North is ready to slap them down again.
I can at the very least say that Lee will not be in command of the Confederate Army at the end of the war. And he may not even be alive.
I seriously should watch the Death of Stalin.
Glory is one of my favorite movies, and there's just something so great about the tragic nature of the 54th's charge. In this case, some glory is mixed in.
Stevens did point out that simple disenfranchisement was the lightest punishment ever inflicted on traitors. Seriously, reading about Reconstruction it's simply disgusting to see how the Southerners treat Black people having rights as some kind of terrible fate, when in other countries rebels like them were literally exterminated.
I want to blow up the Lost Cause into a million atoms, so that Lee, Jackson, and other Confederates will not be seen as great heroes or anything, but simple traitors. Thus, I can't allow an heroic death to any leading Confederate. A pathetic one, on the other hand...
The rebels are lucky the terrain is on their side on Georgia, otherwise Atlanta would easily fall. In the meantime, I think Lee will have to rob the cradle and the grave earlier than OTL.
There are still many difficult days ahead, but eventual victory is now assured.
I do think a Second Constitutional Convention could be called to institute some necessary reforms to break Southern power. I've been especially toying with the idea of abolishing the electoral college (which tends to increase the power of the South) and perhaps mandating by law that states must afford a proportional number of their representatives to Black Americans, thus securing Black representation even if their turnout decreases due to fraud or intimidation. The most important reform, of course, is making it clear that the Constitution is supreme and that the government can enforce it against both states and individuals. However, other posters are quite right that some issues raised here are not proper for the 19th century, such as terms for SCOTUS judges or reforms to weaken the countryside - in fact, since the countryside is heavily Republican that would be completely nonsensical. I do think further reforms can happen in the future, but the reforms of the war must deal with it.
The Senate is especially ASB, since in the aftermath of the Civil War the Senators and their political machines were extremely powerful and they would never yield that.
Bragg? Seriously? How? That guy was so hated by everyone. I recently learned that apparently there were attempts on his life during the Mexican War.
One of my greatest difficulties is remembering that although I know what happens in the future, or rather what might happen, the people ITTL don't. So I have to take off my modern lenses and try to see the situation as the people of the period would have, without the benefit of hindsight.
I'm honestly surprised it wasn't a WEEKLY occurrence during the Civil War. "Gen'l Polk, as you may have heard, someone blew my command tent to smithereens last night with a fused artillery shell. Do you have any witnesses who can testify to your whereabouts at 11:00 pm?"
I mean, the real problem is that there were low population states in the North, too - and ones that were disproportionately influential in Washington.
Radical Republicans seem not to have felt the need for any real tinkering with the actual apparatus of government, feeling confident that they'd be in overwhelming control of all branches anyway.
Thank you!
Breckinridge, being from Kentucky, is desperate to show that the Confederacy will support similar uprisings. He nurses the hope that Kentucky and Tennessee Confederates will rise up, but if they see that Baltimore proclaimed their lot with the Confederacy and was let out in the cold, why would they take the risk? It was mostly a political maneuver, and a bit of strategy as well, since Lee's two main objectives were re-establish Confederate control over Maryland and defeat Reynolds. Taking Pennsylvania supplies and perhaps Harrisburg was secondary. Lee also lacked accurate intelligence of the how many troops Reynolds had and where they were exactly. He thought that a much larger percentage of his army had gone South to pursue Beauregard, and didn't know of the failure at Fort Saratoga and the return of Doubleday. Lee and his soldiers had also marched longer and faster than Reynolds' had, and the Yankees were able to rest and fortify along the Pipe Creek while Lee continued running around Pennsylvania, to Gettysburg and back. And when they finally arrived they found a very strong defensive position that under normal circumstances would be almost impossible to carry. As a last point, Lee had also sent Beauregard south because he needed ammunition, but due to Fort Saratoga Beauregard simply never returned - so he was low on ammo too.
Hill's behaviour is based on OTL and comes from a conversation with @Arnold d.c IOTL, Hill suffered from a grave if unspecified disease that did take him out of fighting several times, most notably at Spotsylvania, when he had to be replaced by Jubal Early. Perhaps "all but useless" is a harsh judgement, but it cannot be denied that Hill's health problems limited his effectiveness at several engagements, and they only worsened once he was promoted to corps commander.
"Red" is a translation problem. You see, my native language is Spanish, and spy network is red de espionaje in Spanish. I got the two of them mixed up.
The Confederates did perform widespread industrial sabotage, but it's for naught since the Union can repair bridges and railroads faster than the rebs can burn them down.
No, it's an OTL quote by Longstreet. Similarly, the quote about "profound contempt" is an OTL observation from a British officer. Here, I think Lee's hubris is somewhat justified by just how massive his victories have been thus far. Think about it, he did not merely repulse the Union, he destroyed two whole corps. Lee's observations regarding how his soldiers could do anything and also how retreating would destroy their morale are also from OTL.
Edit: I have slightly rewritten the update to better explain why Lee turned back to Baltimore, why he was willing to assault the Union, and how the Union cavalry managed to drew Stuart away and thus leave Lee "blind" to the strength, positions and terrain of the Union.
That's a good quote. Damn, I want to ask if I can borrow it.
Abolishing the electoral college is my pet project. One possible angle is how it's, in effect, a way of indirect democracy. Radicalism was in a continuous search for a new definition of what it means to be a citizen, and the Civil War too created a true American nation. Couldn't, then, be argued that a direct vote is more democratic and conductive to a new birth of freedom?
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