Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
Yes, we have proof through the names in the registry that a couple men on my grandfather's side fled from Brooke county which was then in Virginia and fought for Ohio and the Union.
Easy to do in West Virginia. Quite a few people did that before West Virginia split off. A lot harder to do in Mississippi.
But, when word about the proposed state of Nickajack comes out, you will probably see a number of people also saying that they wanted to break off and form their own state but they were prevented from doing so, that West virginians were isolated enough that it was easy for them.
Easy to do in West Virginia. Quite a few people did that before West Virginia split off. A lot harder to do in Mississippi.
But, when word about the proposed state of Nickajack comes out, you will probably see a number of people also saying that they wanted to break off and form their own state but they were prevented from doing so, that West virginians were isolated enough that it was easy for them.
Honestly maybe the best way to prevent that is to have Lee fight to the end.
Maybe Lee catching a bullet or a cannon shell is the final blow to his army. Having Lee get taken down from rallying or even leading a charge and being on the business of a battery of canister would likely cripple his army’s morale.
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It's also a high risk avenue for making the Lost Cause continue on as a long-term insurgency, though.
One of the reasons we didn't see a true insurgency after the OTL Civil War was partially because of the sheer swathe of destruction inflicted by Sherman in his march to the sea after the bisection of the Confederacy at Vicksburg, while the economic collapse of the CSA behind the lines meant that there was no real ability to fight on and many soldiers just wanted to go home. The second most important was the relatively lenient terms of Reconstruction, if their homes and legal rights aren't threatened, many won't have a reason to take up arms.
If the Union arrested or exiled the plantation owners and Southern politicians (usually synonymous) and redistributed their land and cancelled any debts owed to them by other Southern whites, it would hardly be skin off the noses of your average yeoman farmer.
Lee dying in battle is probably the best case scenario. It would demoralize the Southern armies, seriously hamper their leadership, and remove the authority he might have to keep men fighting. On the flip side, he was also firmly against insurgency, so that might cause a problem too.
This conflict is less like Afghanistan and Iraq and more like east front WWII. You do not have soldiers who went in knowing they stood no chance in a stand-up fight, are being fed supplies and taking safety in other countries, and are led by zealots. Any insurgency is going to be led by troops who likely saw battles on a massive scale and were ground down to nothing, seeing their own large armaments overwhelmed by their opponents seemingly endless supplies and men. They’d be trying to fight in areas totally devastated of bereft or war-making material and a population that has seen too much war and just want some peace and quiet (assuming they haven’t left). More than that, it’s not some foreign invader that’s occupying the land, but fellow Americans.
The war has also gotten brutal enough that, if an insurgent cell does make a big enough stink to rouse military action then you’d see boys in blue corralling the insurgents into a swamp or forest before setting the whole thing on fire. Or even like In At The Death by Harry Turtledove where the occupying troops make any town supporting an insurgency pay for it by punishing the whole town until someone comes forward. Perhaps that’s a bit extreme but this is an era where Sherman’s Drive to the Sea is seen as justified and necessary.
I was thinking more like the Boers; but the American Civil War was unique in some ways, and that could be the case here, too. If it happened, it would certainly also vary by region. A place like Missouri might be more fertile given that there was something like low level insurgency underway even *before* the war.
I do think the second factor was the important one - to the extent Sherman had an effect, I think it was localized to south Georgia and South Carolina. In the end, violence happens, I think, to the extent you incentivize it, even for a much beaten down population. Lee surrendered, and urged other officers to accept and abide by their paroles, and his example was enormous in making Confeerate demobilization and Reunion happen; but Lee surrendered because the terms were pretty generous, and the same terms were given to all other CSA forces (except for Josey Wales!), and that made the pill go down easier.
The difficult aspect of all this is the risks of political factionalism and popular rage in the North, or undisciplined vengeance on the part of Union troops and officers occupying the South, sabotaging a perfect plan for Reconstruction: that Lincoln, or whoever succeeds him, could have perfect or even effective control over the whole project. There were Radical Republicans even in OTL urging very Cromwellian treatment for the South, and not just for the slaveocrats. If it gets out of hand and starts hitting the white yeoman class, the best intentions in the world . . . might not count for much.
Anyhow, I'm sure Red has all this worked out, and I'm keen to see where he takes it.
Couldn't have said it better myself!
This little side discussion has me thinking again of that terrific scene in Spielberg's Lincoln (2012) between Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens. "That's the untempered version of Reconstruction."
If it really gets nasty like the Boer Wars, there would need to be equally dramatic measures on the side of the Union to win it. Remembering it took the Brits using concentration camps (that killed not a insignificant part of the Boer population and were intentionally deprived of food and medicine to a extent), scorched earth tactics as well as overwhelming military force before they were able to defeat the Boer guerrillas, and even then, the war forever scarred the Boer population enough they would distrust the British all the way towards the end of apartheid.
The question is: would the American public, government and army really be ok with doing something like this against fellow Americans? Even if they're justifiable irate against them for many reasons, it's one thing to do it against foreigners you want to defer and conquer and another to do it to your countrymen.
Thing is, you have to ask about Southern participation: It was them accepting defeat and selling a narrative to the north which brought reconciliation. If there is no participation and their still dead hard to make a seperate country... Then I can see the North going Boer Wars by any means nessicarry. After that... The south will have a indepdence movement for generations to come.
Best way to kill an Insurgency is to break up the plantations and parcel them out to freed slaves and poor southern whites. Poor southern whites won’t care about fighting if they got all this new land to cultivate
For me the even bigger question would be: How would the American - Northern - people be changed by doing it, if they did do it?
In the Boer War, these measures were perpetrated by a certain slice of the British Army, without the knowledge of the British public back home; and when awareness of it leaked thanks to Emily Hobhouse's efforts, it provoked Campbell-Bannerman's famous "methods of barbarism" speech, and massive domestic blowback. But it's hard to see how the same compartmentalization could happen in a post-Civil War America...
While Lee's surrender at Appomatax did help pave the way for the military side of the Lost Cause (i.e. the idea that the North only won because numbers and industrial capacity), he was against the sort of memorial glorification of the confederacy that serves as a key part of the lost cause today.
Lee's death shouldn't be relevant either way, really.
The irony of ironies: It happened despite Lee's wishes!
Thinking about Appomattox in this context always brings me back to Jay Winik's April 1865. Winik is making argument that the United States really was reborn in the spring of 1865 at Appomattox, and Durham, and Citronelle, and, well, Lincoln's presidential locus, since that's where the policy that made these amicable surrenders possible was really decided - or, at least, enabled. But more immediately it reads to me like an encomium to Grant and Lee. Grant, for being so generous in offering terms; Lee, for actually accepting them. Because there was nothing inevitable about either. A quick glance around the rest of the western world in the 19th and early 20th centuries will tell you that. And Americans of those generations did the glancing.
Over the past decade, it's come to look like less of a great deal, because the focus now is so often on the price that deal came with, which was a century of Jim Crow, and its attendant legacy. I don't think we should be so ready to accept the argument that that price of Appomattox was inevitable, but I am open to the idea that it became considerably more probable. And I think there's a sense in which @Red_Galiray is taking that...probability as read, which is why I think he's exploring a harder war and a harder termination to increase the probability of getting instead a Reconstruction that's actually worthy of the name, rather than trying to thread some post-Appomattox needle. And I find this project fascinating to watch unfold, because it's seldom been explored.
I think the only concern I have been trying to get at in my last few posts is the risks that come with a hard war/hard peace trajectory like this. It unleashes furies deep in human hearts you may not find so easy to control. And this would be the case not just among southern bitter-enders, but a lot of Northerners, too. You can put yourself in the place of Lincoln, or his successor, and work out the ideal Reconstruction plan, but that doesn't mean you'll be able to keep control of the politics, or the armies, to consummate it. Think about Thaddeus Stevens and his idea of Reconstruction, as laid out in his September 1865 address in Lancaster. He advocated treating the South as conquered provinces, where the Constitution would have no effect; this would make it possible for the government to confiscate the estates of the largest 70,000 landholders there, those who owned more than 200 acres. Most of this property he wanted distributed in plots of 40 acres to the freedmen (no mention of a mule, but maybe that was in the footnotes); other lands would go to reward loyalists. Now, that wouldn't hit too many white yeoman farmers; but maybe it's not so hard to imagine events unfolding such that demands that the confiscations go a lot deeper, maybe to every single property owner who fought for the CSA, and you're unable to stop those demands. Before long, maybe, you've got a Cromwellian resolution dropping in your lap, and even Thaddeus Stevens starts to look like a bleeding heart. Cromwell made his resolution stick, to be sure, but aside from the, uh, immediate genocide, it required the enforcement at bayonet point of an Anglo-Irish military caste habituated into treating the surviving natives as something like vermin for the next 265 years.
Of course, that would be a fascinating timeline to read, too...
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Speaking of Appomattox, smth tells me no general will be able to stop the troops celebrating victory over the Confederates this time