Hmmm... true though maybe the ones that would've headed north would head west or perhaps something else of the matter.
Good point though
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
Good point though
White Loyalists are already included in the land redistribution program. There's the implicit hope that giving them land may make Unionists out of them.
Yeah... I think it's very important to emphasize that even if they were capable of horrible racism and terrible deeds, Confederates were human too. I don't want to make them cartoonish villains.
I could also see the ex-guerrilla as the anti-hero protagonist, a la Jossie Wales. Say his family was killed by Union guerrillas and after the war he fled West and realized the error of his ways. Maybe have him meet people who were the victims of Confederate guerrillas, and he realizes the real villain is the war or something.
I'll take that as a compliment!
Yeah, it's pretty terrible. I wonder what the long term demographic effects will be. There surely will be consequences to the fact that the great majority of Southern Whites who died were young males, while deaths among African Americans are more even across the board, so to speak.
Thank you!
Thanks!
Yeah, a measure of charity for all must be given, otherwise there can't be a successful Reconstruction.
Yup.
Thank you very much! I really, really appreciate comments like this one.
Lincoln's preferred method to deal with Confederates is by exiling them. Many low ranking Confederates may be given the choice to go to the West - Uncle Sam leaves you alone, you leave Uncle Sam alone.
There would be a big demographic shift for sure. A larger portion of females making up the population and the males left are either really young or really old. In 20 years (maybe less) many of the older ones would be gone too. Add in those who choose to leave the country or head out west, the South will really need immigrants from the North or abroad. Either way, you will probably be able to see the hit in population even decades later.
I think some cynical and conniving government folks will think more like, “Let the Sioux and Apache deal with them. Maybe they’ll wipe each other out and clear up two problems for us. If not, the remnants will come begging us for help.”
They'd be of relatively little use in Europe, but in places like Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Egypt, even Japan, they'd be extremely sought after commodities. They have experience with modern war, knowledge of less than perfect weapons systems and be useful in commanding men.
Sounds like grounds for the South to become a surprising hotbed for women's suffrage. One might even see white women occupying civil service positions that require literacy, until the African American community catches up in terms of education. Female elected officials at least at the local level, even.
This brings up the question. Is the death total about 10 percent of the whole US population or 10 percent of the South's population. Because if the prior, the death toll is going to lean even harder against the South. I'm thinking of the South looking like post-WW1 France or something, with so much of the male population dead. In that case, then yeah, just out of sheer neccesity you may see states passing women's suffrage laws. Although, its important to remember, that some of the more neffarious elements of Southern society may push hard for women's suffrage - it (to their mind) expands the voting base of their supporters and would help them maintain some level of power. Likewise, they could encourage immigration for some of the same reasons.
So its important that we somehow nip the "us versus them" view of White versus Black Southrons in the bud very quickly (or, at least, make a substantial dent in it) - otherwise these more progressive policies could ge hijacked for something far more sinister.
The target here is not Post-WWI France, but Paraguay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War_casualties).
Killing 69% of the South's population should not be a "target." That would make the Union outright genocidal.
That was more the result of the President fighting literally to the bitter end instead of surrender once the Triple alliance defeated his armies. The man even threw boys into battle because of the lack of manpower by the late stage of the war.
Yeah, that’s North Korea levels of crazy (or I suppose it’s that NK is Paraguay levels of crazy). In any case Red said that casualties are about 10%, I read that as deaths as well as dismemberments/injuries. So a guy who gets his arm mangled by canister shot would be alive but included in the casualty count.
Giving poor whites planter land is a good way to do that - not only is it an effective bribe but it puts a bullseye on their backs for guerillas, forcing them to look to the USCT for protection. Eventually you might see integrated occupation troops forming the backbone of the new order.
Oh boy, time to play the suffragettes against the negroes in hopes of distracting them from opposing us! -Capitalists, probably
Seriously though, this has gotten me curious about what role white women will play in the post-war south, and how well they'll get along with their black counterparts long term.
What was the long-term status of women's rights in post-war Paraguay, anyway?
The Southern governments did try to encourage immigration, but they failed because they couldn't get rid of their old mentality, the mentality that had made the great majority of immigrants choose the North in the antebellum. Leaving aside the bitterness against "carpetbaggers", Southerners tried to encourage European immigration, but they went the wrong way about it. They hoped that European immigrants would replace Black labor, with the implicit hope that Black people would be forced to leave or starve, but treated the immigrants as if they were slaves. There's one anecdote about a planter that hired several Swedish laborers and tried to house them in the old slave cabins - they left the next day. Then there's the fact that the South will be imporvishered and devastated, and such areas don't tend to attract many immigrants. The South will probably remain demographically unbalanced for decades to come.
Yeah, I don't think they'd be of much use in Europe. The famous "mobs chasing each other through the countryside" is apocryphal, but it does reflect the prejudices of Europeans against American military prowess, a prejudice that wouldn't entirely vanish until the Spanish-American War. But on the other hand many Confederates around the world would probably end up training foreign armies or working as mercenaries, their experience in modern warfare and irregular warfare invaluable.
Yeah, the push for women's suffrage would probably end up being one to expand the White voter base and counter Black voters. Though suffragettes were traditionally allied with abolitionists, their alliance broke by 1870 and many turned out to be dreadfully racist. There's for example Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said that Black women were better off as the slaves of White men than married to Black men. Yikes.
I do think a possible effect is more acceptance of women in some positions. Historically, the Bureau and the States didn't want to allow women into positions of power in education or healthcare, but that could change.
10% of the population became a casualty of war, which includes the wounded. The actual death toll is some 1.5 million at most (just like estimates OTL vary, estimates ITTL vary, with 1.5 million being the upper limit and 1.1 million the lower one). Dreadfully high, of course, but that's "only" 5% of the US population. Of those, 1,1 million more or less are soldiers - 650,000 Union soldiers and 450,000 Confederates. That takes into account guerrillas and irregulars as well, and Black casualties are taken into account in the Union total. The rest are civilians, which are overwhelmingly Southern civilians. Of the 400k civilian deaths, some 200k are slaves who died of disease and privation, some 150k are White Southern civilians, and 50k are Border South, Northerners and Native Americans. Altogether, the North lost almost 700k people, overwhelmingly young White males, and the South lost some 800k people, 600k of them White people. In percentages, that's just like 4% of the Union's population, like 10.5% of the South's White population, 5% of the Black population, and 8.8% of the South's total population. If we assume males of military age are a quarter of the population, that's 14% of the North's white males and the South lost over 35% of its males of military age. As you can see, that's a simply devastating lost for the South.
I wouldn't talk of "targets". To kill that many people the Union would have to engage in a campaign of extermination. That's not only horrible, but it's also ahistorical, since the Union didn't want to destroy the Confederacy, but to force it back to the Union. Some Unionists by now are willing to hang guerrillas, but no Union politician or general will engage in an actual campaign to kill as many Southerners as they can. By the way, there is some debate about the actual statistics of Paraguay after the Triple Alliance War. The highest number is the one most often cited, but it could be actually anywhere from 30% to 70%.
Southerners and Northerners both must get used to fighting alongside, supporting and being defended by Black troops. This is probably the most important part, because one of the reasons the Reconstruction States fell was because they wouldn't use the Black men to fight the terrorists.
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So, how bad will famines during the Civil War get in the South? How much would the death toll of TTL's ACW be caused by famines?
Most the 500k+ civilian casualties come from famines in the last year of the war plus its immediate aftermath. They are limited somewhat by two factors: the Bureaus are bigger and much more willing to intervene than OTL's Freedmen's Bureau. They will be in the South giving out food and other supplies to struggling Southerners. The second factor is that land redistribution has resulted in a shift from commercial cotton, sugar and rice agriculture to small scale home farms, a lot of them being Black owned farms that prefer to focus on their own subsistence. Of course, the fact that many of the South's yeomen have been reduced to subsistence farming is nothing less than a disaster, but it also means that food production will recover quicker than cotton production, alleviating the famine somewhat. Still, a lot of people will die of hunger and disease, and side effects like malnutrition will remain for many years - I wouldn't be surprised if even in 1900 the average Southerner is shorter than the average Northerner.
I would disagree. American generals have experience with drawn out conflicts versus the short, decisive wars of Europe (Crimea aside). Depending on what nations are looking for, having experience in multi-season campaigns that would be impossible for most European nations to provide.
Of course, the challenge is finding someone who takes “These guys can teach us how to fight long wars” over “These guys can teach us how to end a war quickly.”