Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War

T
Good point, if the Whoever wins in 1880, Garfield can still win in '84 or '88,and that might be for the best. He was elected (by the legislature of course) to the senate in 1880 but instead became President.

Or, and this is pretty far out there, but if the other part ends up being more progressive in some thigns like Civil Service reform, labor, etc.,you * could *have Garfield as the head of the other party. It would take a while to work out the kinks, but you might be able to get the GOP divided along the right lines to do it. You've got 16 years to work with here.
The GOP would split - but IMO it's be better if the splinter group is the conservative one. In this case the progressive faction would be able to retain much of the GOP's party infrastructure.
 
you * could *have Garfield as the head of the other party.
If Garfield is the head of the anti-Republican Party, then this alt-US may have hit the jackpot in terms of potential party systems. It's a shame Garfield served so little time in the presidency, he really strikes me as one of the people with the most potential in the position.
 
Good point, if the Whoever wins in 1880, Garfield can still win in '84 or '88,and that might be for the best. He was elected (by the legislature of course) to the senate in 1880 but instead became President.

Or, and this is pretty far out there, but if the other part ends up being more progressive in some thigns like Civil Service reform, labor, etc.,you * could *have Garfield as the head of the other party. It would take a while to work out the kinks, but you might be able to get the GOP divided along the right lines to do it. You've got 16 years to work with here.

The opposition party is likely to be heavily reliant on labor by the 1880s (I can't see the GOP if this era ever being too friendly to organised labor) and so I could see them drifting towards the Left of the Repubkicans pretty easily.

And so we could have a situation where the GOP is strongly anti-corruption, clean government and pro-Civil Rights (though not IMMIGRANT rights too much. This is still the party of New England and Midwestern former Whigs and Know-Nothinfs after all) But the Opposition being pro-social safety net and labor rights, but also tolerating bossism (with, of course, the usual gradients and variation which was common in political parties of that era). This is broadly similar to the party system which developed in King of Sweden's Cinqo de Mayo timeline, actually.
 
The opposition party is likely to be heavily reliant on labor by the 1880s (I can't see the GOP if this era ever being too friendly to organised labor) and so I could see them drifting towards the Left of the Repubkicans pretty easily.

And so we could have a situation where the GOP is strongly anti-corruption, clean government and pro-Civil Rights (though not IMMIGRANT rights too much. This is still the party of New England and Midwestern former Whigs and Know-Nothinfs after all) But the Opposition being pro-social safety net and labor rights, but also tolerating bossism (with, of course, the usual gradients and variation which was common in political parties of that era). This is broadly similar to the party system which developed in King of Sweden's Cinqo de Mayo timeline, actually.
We could also see a Populist movement that could see both black and white southern farmers join.

Any opposition party is going to require uniting the immigrants, and that might take a while to play out, so there could be briefly some minor local parties and groups focused on getting power towards their people.

Again, the dominant R coalition is going to be comprised of the "good old boys" from the civil war, so anybody outside of that will probably do something else, but uniting them is going to be a tall order and we might see the postbellum R coalition collapse before we see a more unified opposition.

There is also East Asian and Hispanic immigration in the west, which the Western Republicans (and the Irish) will try to block, as they were usually very isolationist and anti-immigration.
 
The opposition party is likely to be heavily reliant on labor by the 1880s (I can't see the GOP if this era ever being too friendly to organised labor) and so I could see them drifting towards the Left of the Repubkicans pretty easily.

And so we could have a situation where the GOP is strongly anti-corruption, clean government and pro-Civil Rights (though not IMMIGRANT rights too much. This is still the party of New England and Midwestern former Whigs and Know-Nothinfs after all) But the Opposition being pro-social safety net and labor rights, but also tolerating bossism (with, of course, the usual gradients and variation which was common in political parties of that era). This is broadly similar to the party system which developed in King of Sweden's Cinqo de Mayo timeline, actually.
Said opposition party might actually style itself as socialist, or at least include open socialists, akin to the Labour Party in the UK. They'd take a strong pro-immigrant stance (albeit with some bossism because socialists are not immune to corruption) and be very pro-labor. The Democrats may ultimately be reduced to a regional party, winning local and occasionally statewide elections in a few areas, but never coming close to challenging the Republicans or the opposition.
 
And I just discovered this TL after I promised myself that I would take a little break from ACW literature. Well done @Red_Galiray, it's the best ACW AH thing I've read since @TheKnightIrish (praise be to him) did A Glorious Union.

I'd suggest some maps if you're interested, but it seems the Union Army is about to have this in the bag. Shame about Reynolds though, I hope Winfield Scott Hancock can recover quickly enough and maybe we can see him get an army command. I will admit the "Army of the Susquehanna" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as the Army of the Potomac.

On the other hand I was extremely amused that McLellan has a permanent spot in the Hall of Shame with the Fitz-John Porter treatment after Maryland (as well as burning in your TL's military hell for all eternity). On the other hand, I think McDowell will go down as a sort of underrated genius (personally I don't consider the OTL versions of either that foolish and I do appreciate McLellan's knack for organizing and logistics. But as Grant and Sherman proved, you can worry about logistics and still find a way to fight well).

Also, please do make this and your future TLs into a book. It deserves that kind of treatment.
 
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Said opposition party might actually style itself as socialist, or at least include open socialists, akin to the Labour Party in the UK. They'd take a strong pro-immigrant stance (albeit with some bossism because socialists are not immune to corruption) and be very pro-labor. The Democrats may ultimately be reduced to a regional party, winning local and occasionally statewide elections in a few areas, but never coming close to challenging the Republicans or the opposition.

Well, if we look at the second half of 19th century politics, we can start to see which groups might coalesce into our opposition party. As stated, labor and and immigrants are almost certainly a given; even liberal members of the GOP were hardly favorable to either group (with the important cavaet that if said immigrants were Protestants, especially Germans or Scandinavians, they were okay). We then can add to this, farmers; though this group is more of a swing constituency, esecially in the Midwest and East. Although we often point to the Populists as the great upswelling of agrarian unrest, it actually started in the 1870s with the organization of the Grange Movement and the rise of the Greenback Party. Now, lets throw dissatisfied Republicans into the mix; the Liberal Republicans were the most obvious example in OTL, but there were ther dissenters from the Republican Party as time moved one. Some of these were moved by a genuine desire to end Reconstruction early because they wished to end the sectional divide in the country, feared the growing power of the federal government and denounced corruption (I'll leave it up to the reader to decide how much they believed this, and how much was antipathy towards Civil Rights), but there were others who opposed the dominant strain of Republican thought at the time which was growing cozier to big business and corruption. Due to the harsher war, the anti-Civil Rights side of thing will be muted, here.

Okay, so that's the North (in a nutshell. One could go into a lot more detail, of course). Now for the South. We know that the planter class is going to be politically decapitated here; as the strongest supporters of the rebellion, they are going to be crushed and there is likely to be some major land redistribution. So lets leave them out for right now. So, who else is left for our opposition party? Well, for the first generation or so, the Freedmen vote is going to be almost exclusively GOP I suspect for a number of fairly obvious reasons. However, white Southron small farmers would be natural allies over time (they will likely lean GOP due to the land distribution at first, but as economic issues grow, I think they will defect enmass), along with laborers in the mining regions as well as the steel production areas.

I think there's every reason to assume that the Bourbon Democrats of OTL could eventually move their way into the GOP of this ATL, as it grows more keen on classical liberalism (well, somewhat. It's hard to fully embrace that notion after your party oversaw land redistribution and the enforcement of Civil Rights; though I suspect many will come to see that as a neccesary war measure and not exactly a precedent for future actions. At least until the Progressive Era). And as such, the New Elite in the South - because there WILL be a new elite; nature abhores a vacuum after all - could potentially follow suite. Hell, a sizable part of the new elite might well start off as Republicans, either because they are some of those farmers who benefited from land redistribution and struck it lucky, or because they are carpetbaggers.

So, basically, we are left with a new opposition party that is most definitely a Farm-Labor Party. It's not Socialist (there are too many constiuencies here that would take an ill look to that), but there are probably many conservative social democrats within it's ranks. In an ATL where Cleveland doesn't go out strike bashing, there's not even any reason to assume that Debbs defects to, first, the Populists and then the Social Democratic Party; and do the world of Until Every Drop of Blood is Paid is one where we could see a Debbs-Bryan ticket in 1892 :) (and yes, THAT would be amazing. Debbs is a sadly under utilized figure on this board).

Which, brings me to one last point I want to make. As I said, the Freedmen are going to be a solid GOP constituency for a number of decades, this is a given. However, it strikes me that one way you make sure that both parties work to secure and maintain civil rights is by making sure that both parties have a vested interest in maintaining them. That means that, at some point, a sizable number of freedmen, or their children, are going to have to go over to the opposition and become an important voting bloc (or even leaders within the opposition). This turns their community into a swing demographic and it means that both parties will have to work to court them; and a party that is courting your community is much less likely to turn around and try to support voting restrictions or the like. Perhaps this could be gained by having a few prominent GOP leaders, who are well respected amongst the Freedmen community, defect to the opposition and bring thier voting base with them.
 
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Which, brings me to one last point I want to make. As I said, the Freedmen are going to be a solid GOP constituency for a number of decades, this is a given. However, is strikes me that one way you make sure that both parties work to secure and maintain civil rights is by making sure that both parties have a vested interest in maintaining them. That means that, at some point, a sizable number of freedmen, or their children, are going to have to go over to the opposition and become an important voting bloc (or even leaders within the opposition). This turns their community into a swing demographic and it means that both parties will have to work to court them; and a part that is courting your community is much less likely to turn around and try to support voting restrictions or the like.
A good way to do this might be to ensure that a number of black communities with heavy industry of the industry and factory owners and things develop quickly.

In our time line, by the time black wall streets and middle class neighborhoods were really starting to flourish, You already had Jim-Crow. But suppose you develop a Tulssa, an Atlanta, and so on into thriving areas by the 1870s. You could even have a New Deal type of program, of course within the context of the 1860s and not the 1930s, which develops such black businesses and neighborhoods.

Suddenly, by the time people are getting tired of tired of trying to build things up in the South, you have solid groups of both richer business owners and working class laborers Among the Friedman. They tend to drift away from each other politically and go into the diverse political camps, and suddenly they have diverse enough enough views that parties are trying to gain their vote not because they are a Freedmen but because they are either pro big business or pro labor, and Parties are trying to gain their vote because they are either pro big business or pro labor, and of course There is the need to keep black voters Rights intact because they need those voters just as much as the other big business or pro labor ones.
 
A good way to do this might be to ensure that a number of black communities with heavy industry of the industry and factory owners and things develop quickly.

In our time line, by the time black wall streets and middle class neighborhoods were really starting to flourish, You already had Jim-Crow. But suppose you develop a Tulssa, an Atlanta, and so on into thriving areas by the 1870s. You could even have a New Deal type of program, of course within the context of the 1860s and not the 1930s, which develops such black businesses and neighborhoods.

Suddenly, by the time people are getting tired of tired of trying to build things up in the South, you have solid groups of both richer business owners and working class laborers Among the Friedman. They tend to drift away from each other politically and go into the diverse political camps, and suddenly they have diverse enough enough views that parties are trying to gain their vote not because they are a Freedmen but because they are either pro big business or pro labor, and Parties are trying to gain their vote because they are either pro big business or pro labor, and of course There is the need to keep black voters Rights intact because they need those voters just as much as the other big business or pro labor ones.

It might also help to have a stronger Exoduster movement; a Freedmen Homesteader Act could help in this regards. Get them mingling and establishing (more) communities on the Plains. And when agrarian discontent begins to build, you could have local black farmers making common cause with their white neighbors and then helping to spread the Grange and its messages back to the South.
 
However, white Southron small farmers would be natural allies over time (they will likely lean GOP due to the land distribution at first, but as economic issues grow, I think they will defect enmass), along with laborers in the mining regions as well as the steel production areas.
I dont see it. Even assuming the Land Redistribution goes through, there is still far too much emnity for them to vote for the party of the Black man and the Union Soldier. Instead, I expect them to stay loyal Democrats or go for a Populist Racist party, the majority at least.

Edit: Especially taking into the context, the More brutal ATL. Yeah, this may make the Union go the whole hog on Occupying them, but it will make resistance to said occupation even more bitter because there has been more blood spilled.
 
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I dont see it. Even assuming the Land Redistribution goes through, there is still far too much emnity for them to vote for the party of the Black man and the Union Soldier. Instead, I expect them to stay loyal Democrats or go for a Populist Racist party, the majority at least.

Edit: Especially taking into the context, the More brutal ATL. Yeah, this may make the Union go the whole hog on Occupying them, but it will make resistance to said occupation even more bitter because there has been more blood spilled.

Racist Populism is unlikely in this situation. As we've discussed before, you're going to see a more class-based critique of the Rebellion emerge rather than the Lost Cause and Jim Crow scenerios of OTL. Also, my analysis was more in the long term; over the course of two-to-three decades and not in the immediate years after the war. I don't doubt that some form of racial backlash will emerge in the post-war years, but a Union that is more dedicated to Reconstruction and Civil Rights is going to put the kibosh on that right quick; though this will electorally be initially muted because, I suspect, most of those allowed to vote right after the war will be Southron Unionists who learned Republican anyway. Add to this, carpetbaggers of course, but also those who see the writing on the wall, hope to have a career, and so ingratiate themselves with the ruling cliques in the Southern states. So any racial backlash will likely take the form of small rebellions and paramilitary operations; but we also know that brigands and bushwackers are at least partially responsable for the post-war famine in the South and so get disredited.

As for the Southern wing of the opposition party, I think it really matters how long the Northern occupation lasts and what the voting rights are of those in the South. If we see an entire generation more or less disenfranchised due to their support for the rebellion, then this probably puts the growth of a southern wing of the party back until the 1880s when a new generation comes of age (okay, we really need in a standin name for this opposition party. I vote Freedom Party for ironic value, though I could see National Party, People's Party or Farm-Labor as good alternatives). The FP is going to be pushing for the easing of voter restrictions due to this in time, because the Solid South being in the hands of the GOP gives the Republicans too huge of an electoral advantage to overcome, and could be the catalyst for the OTL Liberal Republicans to begin to jump ship over to them - at a certain point draconian restrictions seem to be less about securing civil rights and more about stacking the deck in your party's favor, after all.

But one thing that this does do is puts the nucleus of the FP in the North and allows it to develop a commitment to Civil Rights and Reconstruction which differs from the ruling GOP but is no less sincere. From there, it makes natural alliance with Southron farmers and laborers and folds them into it's base, but at a slow enough rate that they acculturate themselves into the party's philosophy and ethos.

And its important to note that black-white alliances could and did form in the South during this era in OTL. At least a few of the labor unions in the region worked to integrate and accepted both black and white workers into their ranks. Sadly, racial divisions were exploited by the elites in order to break the Unions and this proved successful. However, in this ATL, without the old elite working to undermine the movement (not to say that labor movements in the South won't face opposition, they certainly will. But when the business owners are Republicans dedicated to civil rights, they's one wedge issue they probably won't use; and if they do try it, they will face baclash) you could see unions and the grange actually working to mitigate and heal the racial divide in a manner that they were not allowed to do in OTL.

No one is expecting a utopia right out of the gates in 1865, or even 1880 after all; but we are viewing a world where things do go noticably better. And if that is going to come about, we need political alternatives to the GOP which do not embrace the racial animosity of OTL's Redeemers and Southern Bourbons.
 
The opposition party is likely to be heavily reliant on labor by the 1880s (I can't see the GOP if this era ever being too friendly to organised labor) and so I could see them drifting towards the Left of the Repubkicans pretty easily.
Unless the GOP conservatives are the defectors - similar to what happened to the British Liberals following Irish Home Rule IOTL - depending on who is the President.

And so we could have a situation where the GOP is strongly anti-corruption, clean government and pro-Civil Rights (though not IMMIGRANT rights too much. This is still the party of New England and Midwestern former Whigs and Know-Nothinfs after all)
The GOP holding a strongly anti-corruption position would have driven the big business and the conservative wing away - expect a National Party comprising of the OTL Stalwarts emerging as the main centre-right party. However, the original GOP would have retained its superior party machinery and organization compared to various splinter movements, allowing it to become the main centre-left party under the Electoral College system.

In case the defectors are the anti-corruption liberals, the Freedom Party would have become the main opposition as you mentioned.

I think there's every reason to assume that the Bourbon Democrats of OTL could eventually move their way into the GOP of this ATL, as it grows more keen on classical liberalism
Agree on this one. Further than that, in case conservative Republicans defect, the ATL GOP would be more likely to loosen its stance on immigration than the Stalwarts for pragmatic reasons to expand their voter base - they would have actually replaced the Democrats without being openly racist. By the 1900s, the GOP would resemble the OTL Bull Moose. This would have also applied to the Freedom Party in the opposite scenario - liberal Republicans defect.
 
you're going to see a more class-based critique of the Rebellion emerge rather than the Lost Cause and Jim Crow scenerios of OTL.
Sadly I dont think it could take. Culture ultimately trumps class, and this is before we add years of investment in the war, years of investment which you wont want to throw aside. Also, the basic idea you have of them only letting them vote after a generation, that wont help you. Denying people the ballot for a generation dosent make them come over to your side, it only makes them more angry and more resentful of the people who have the political power.
 
Well, if we look at the second half of 19th century politics, we can start to see which groups might coalesce into our opposition party. As stated, labor and and immigrants are almost certainly a given; even liberal members of the GOP were hardly favorable to either group (with the important cavaet that if said immigrants were Protestants, especially Germans or Scandinavians, they were okay). We then can add to this, farmers; though this group is more of a swing constituency, esecially in the Midwest and East. Although we often point to the Populists as the great upswelling of agrarian unrest, it actually started in the 1870s with the organization of the Grange Movement and the rise of the Greenback Party. Now, lets throw dissatisfied Republicans into the mix; the Liberal Republicans were the most obvious example in OTL, but there were ther dissenters from the Republican Party as time moved one. Some of these were moved by a genuine desire to end Reconstruction early because they wished to end the sectional divide in the country, feared the growing power of the federal government and denounced corruption (I'll leave it up to the reader to decide how much they believed this, and how much was antipathy towards Civil Rights), but there were others who opposed the dominant strain of Republican thought at the time which was growing cozier to big business and corruption. Due to the harsher war, the anti-Civil Rights side of thing will be muted, here.

Okay, so that's the North (in a nutshell. One could go into a lot more detail, of course). Now for the South. We know that the planter class is going to be politically decapitated here; as the strongest supporters of the rebellion, they are going to be crushed and there is likely to be some major land redistribution. So lets leave them out for right now. So, who else is left for our opposition party? Well, for the first generation or so, the Freedmen vote is going to be almost exclusively GOP I suspect for a number of fairly obvious reasons. However, white Southron small farmers would be natural allies over time (they will likely lean GOP due to the land distribution at first, but as economic issues grow, I think they will defect enmass), along with laborers in the mining regions as well as the steel production areas.

I think there's every reason to assume that the Bourbon Democrats of OTL could eventually move their way into the GOP of this ATL, as it grows more keen on classical liberalism (well, somewhat. It's hard to fully embrace that notion after your party oversaw land redistribution and the enforcement of Civil Rights; though I suspect many will come to see that as a neccesary war measure and not exactly a precedent for future actions. At least until the Progressive Era). And as such, the New Elite in the South - because there WILL be a new elite; nature abhores a vacuum after all - could potentially follow suite. Hell, a sizable part of the new elite might well start off as Republicans, either because they are some of those farmers who benefited from land redistribution and struck it lucky, or because they are carpetbaggers.

So, basically, we are left with a new opposition party that is most definitely a Farm-Labor Party. It's not Socialist (there are too many constiuencies here that would take an ill look to that), but there are probably many conservative social democrats within it's ranks. In an ATL where Cleveland doesn't go out strike bashing, there's not even any reason to assume that Debbs defects to, first, the Populists and then the Social Democratic Party; and do the world of Until Every Drop of Blood is Paid is one where we could see a Debbs-Bryan ticket in 1892 :) (and yes, THAT would be amazing. Debbs is a sadly under utilized figure on this board).
If Debs comes in, we'd probably see him leading the radical wing of the this Farm-Labor Party. The example I keep coming back to is the British Labour Party, which has included both moderate social democrats and dyed-in-the-wool socialists.
Which, brings me to one last point I want to make. As I said, the Freedmen are going to be a solid GOP constituency for a number of decades, this is a given. However, it strikes me that one way you make sure that both parties work to secure and maintain civil rights is by making sure that both parties have a vested interest in maintaining them. That means that, at some point, a sizable number of freedmen, or their children, are going to have to go over to the opposition and become an important voting bloc (or even leaders within the opposition). This turns their community into a swing demographic and it means that both parties will have to work to court them; and a party that is courting your community is much less likely to turn around and try to support voting restrictions or the like. Perhaps this could be gained by having a few prominent GOP leaders, who are well respected amongst the Freedmen community, defect to the opposition and bring thier voting base with them.
Without Jim Crow keeping almost the entire black community in poverty, we'll probably see a genuine black upper class emerge much sooner. If a black laborer is facing oppression at the hands of his black boss and black factory owner despite them always talking about how they have to stand together against the specter of white oppression, he might decide that the white guy with the funny accent ranting about workers' rights is worth listening to.
 
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