It's unconstitutional iOTL because of the Fourteenth Amendment. Depending on how the equivalent provisions are written ITTL, that could be different.
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
True enough. I'll be interested to see how Kentucky is handled. I suspect that the Union commanders in Kentucky can't go all out as in Missouri and Tennessee because Kentucky is still a Union state. If I had to guess, Kentucky will probably be one of the most conservative states in terms of race relations. I wonder if it's possible to avoid the postwar embrace of the CSA in Kentucky or force it to undergo an internal reconstruction like Missouri and Maryland.
Come to think of it, the methods Burbridge and Paine employed IOTL would be normal ITTL. In fact, Burbridge and Paine might have better reputations ITTL given that they were pretty forward in emancipation, despite the fact that Burbridge was a slaveholder before the war! Though, it seems, at a personal level, most contemporary officials didn't like Burbridge and Paine, Burbridge being a braggart and not very competent and Paine being rather spiteful. Still, they might be rehabilitated (or not needing it at all) sooner than as late as 2021.
I don't see ITTL providing fertile ground for the Lost Cause, thankfully. If I recall, one of the main factors that allowed the Lost Cause to be 'smuggled in' was that Northern audiences were willing to partake in media that treated the Confederates as good and honourable people, whilst Southern audiences weren't willing to reciprocate. I don't really see that happening here.
There's also the fundamental and impossible to overlook change of black empowerment being far more substantial and substantive. Confederate apologetics is inherently rooted in racism and notions of white supremacy/superiority. Rehabilitating the Confederacy necessarily means rehabilitating slavery. I can only imagine that is going to be far more taboo ITTL.
I'd also say events have conspired to sort of make it impossible to ignore how the civil war began.
The South forced through the admittance of Kansas as a slave state by way sheer violence.
Dred Scott was an even more partisan decision than OTL.
They bolted immediately after Lincoln won a very clear and much more decisive election victory, getting ~50 percent of the popular vote.
They then did something only the British had managed, invade and burned down D.C.
Everything after that, be it black empowerment or the assassination attempt against Lincoln during the war, is just more fuel to the fire. Lincoln and Seward's "southern conspiracy" had been proved correct time and time again by events from Lecompton to the ruins of the would be Capitol.
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War spills into north?
Copperheads revolt with Mcclelan as their Military leader and George H. Pendelton as President?
As disastrous that would be for ending the war sooner it would rally all loyal patriots behind Lincoln and further the based cause of the Anti Lost Causers and those fighting for the Union and equality of men and punishing the South like the traitors they are.
While I am inclined to agree that would be the picture in the long-run, my concern is more in the short-run and more-specific to Kentucky. Kentucky, of all the border states, gets away with no internal reconstruction. There was no real anti-slavery cadre in Kentucky as there was in Missouri and Maryland and after the war a Kentucky historian even quipped that Kentucky "waited until the war was over to secede from the Union." It must be understood that slavery was deeply entrenched in the society of Kentuckians of the time and the destruction of institutionalized slavery uprooted the foundations of racial hierarchy and shattered antebellum social structures. Unlike Missouri, Maryland and the Southern states, there's no military government or group of anti-slavery politicians to force Kentucky to undergo Radical Reconstruction.
The majority of white Kentuckians chose to overlook the history of federal support in the state, and rather celebrated the memory of an idealized Confederate past. The idealization of the CSA in Kentucky is best illustrated by the sudden domination of ex-Confederates in elected offices. A candidate's chances of winning an election actually depended on his history with the Confederate armies--being wounded while in the rebel service was a bonus. Likewise, Kentuckians who could not accept the terms of emancipation felt a sense of shame regarding their service in the federal armies. The “politics of readjustment” established an era of violence targeting African Americans and supporters of the Republican Party. There's also the noteable proliferation of Confederate memorabilia and the lack of federal memorials despite the greater proportion of Kentuckian men who served in the Union army.
While ex-Confederates would probably be barred from office and voting ITTL, there's still the civilian majority who are resentful of emancipation and a political elite, who are tenuously Unionist, that are also unhappy about emancipation.
Yeah. I try to always treat any kind of violence or atrocity with the appropriate weight. Even if this story is fictional, the fact of the matter is that similar atrocities took place in the real world. To treat it all as a joke would be tasteless.
Under the ITTL 13th amendment the Congress could declare that "feeling safe" is a right of the American people, and given that Confederate symbols make people feel unsafe they could ban them. Really, my version of the amendment opens the door to new realms of legislation, including, for example, anti-hate speech laws. I think such bans are more likely in the aftermath of the war (Missouri banned rebel sympathizers from being lawyers, teachers and priests, so I don't think it's a strength), and then decades in the future.
Unfortunately, you're right that there's bound to be "false positives" and families that just can't forgive the Union. A lot of the second part of the TL will be focusing on these "unreconstructed" people.
Kentucky is at the center of the tensions justly because there's no large White Unionist element and no internal reconstruction process. The regimes in Maryland and Missouri are, if we are frank, pseudo-military, being minority governments propped up by the Union Army. In Kentucky the situation is much different, and tensions have reached an almost critical point as the State authorities try to resists Lincoln's policies, enforced through the Union soldiers. You have surely heard of the incident when a Kentucky jury indicted a Federal officer, General Palmer, for "enticing" slaves to flee. Such incidents have grownth in number and intensity.
And there's more to come
McClellan was ruined by his defeat in the Peninsula, and is right now exiled in Europe because a Military Tribunal ended up sentencing him for cowardice, insubordination and conspiracy (based on the whispers about "intimidating" the President around the time of the Proclamation). I will say, furthermore, that the Copperhead leaders see little reason to try and seize power through a rebellion because it seems that they will be able to be elected through legitimate constitutional means. Lincoln has also backed off somewhat from the repression in the inmediate aftermath of the Month of Blood, both because he holds genuine democratic values (small d) and because he recognizes that further victimizing Copperheads only strengthens their point that he's a tyrant and they are the defenders of constitutional rights.
I will say that we will soon see that within the Union many have come to believe that loyalty to the Union includes fighting for and accepting equality and freedom.
I believe that, unfortunately, it's likely that this resistance will remain ITTL. As the Union and loyalty to it come to be more and more identified with emancipation and equality, more and more Kentuckians will grow bitter and resentful. We could see outright uprisings against Republican policies, and probably there won't be any pro-civil rights measures taken within Kentucky. All progress would depend on Federal enactments and enforcement. Kentucky will, most likely, still be the state that abolishes slavery the latest due to the amendment being ratified.
Speakung of Union politics has lincoln's radicalization than otl effected any policies other than civil war and reconstruction?
You know given how there's going to be continued insurgency from the south even after it surrenders. I wonder if that'll change the US historical attitude of a large army 90 years early. Depending on how bad it gets the Union might just decide the south will always need some military presence in it to keep the racists at bay. That would really have some knock on effects with the rest of the world as a US with even a decent sized army that's competently trained would have to be factored into things.
That seems likely and a US with a powerful military much earlier is going to be reckoned a peer much sooner by the Europeans. They’ll steamroll the Spanish even quicker than OTL here.
And if they intervene in any WW1, it would be in a more military rather than logistical capacity too.
Anglo-Saxon Social Model, which used this US as inspiration, does have America as a great military power much earlier than OTL; it's involved with WWI from the very beginning due to its alliance with France
I wonder if Liberia will have a different fate thanks to a different post-war US.
Also, if this version of the US will be less racist, does that mean the vote to annex the Dominican Republic will pass?
en.wikipedia.org
Also, if this version of the US will be less racist, does that mean the vote to annex the Dominican Republic will pass?
Annexation of Santo Domingo - Wikipedia
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Of course, the United States could instead cast about and create a national police much earlier than OTL. This may converge somewhat, if this is seen as being part of the Army (i.e., a gendarmerie), though I'm not sure a gendarmerie will attract much positive sentiment from Europeans.
I wonder if policing will be way different considering how slavery influenced policing practices. With a better Reconstruction, I suspect that some of the nastiest problems of policing, especially the racism part, might be butterflied. That and people doing forced labor for "crimes" (which was totally not a loophole in the 13th amendment used to continue slavery at all).
Come to think of it, I could see the possibility of Kentucky regiments choosing to lay down their arms and refusing to fight or deserting, much like the 109th Illinois and the 128th Illinois. Both were regiments recruited in Democrat counties and reacted negatively to the Emancipation Proclamation; the former saw Grant arresting the entire regiment for disloyalty and was later disbanded and the latter saw all but 35 men desert.
I'm mixed on this. On one hand, a larger US Army would, in theory, make Emory Upton and Elihu Root's idea of a cadre system work much earlier than OTL (WW2). The efforts to use a cadre system didn't work that great in WW1 owing to last minute preparations and lack of personnel (even finding 961 regulars to train a division of 28,000 men was too difficult). On the other hand, constabulary duties doesn't necessarily translate to a good peer-to-peer army and there are several contemporary and modern examples as to why.
First, constabulary duties don't really teach large-scale tactics. In the Mexican-American War, Grant noted that his regiment, the 4th US Infantry, had never done any regiment-level exercises prior to the war. When his colonel, Josiah Vose, attempted to do the drill, Grant thought the colonel embarrassed himself during the exercise and... the colonel dropped dead at the end of the exercise from a heart attack. This was an endemic problem as constabulary duties mean that the regiment could find itself divided into outposts and unable to operate as a larger body. Moreover, the scattering of troops can hamper the proliferation of new tactics to troops as they are incapable of conducting large scale training/exercises to do so. The Spanish-American War demonstrated how clumsy the US Army still was, but was too brief to really teach any lessons.
Second, constabulary duties risk instilling wrong habits/lessons for a peer-level war. A more modern example is the current US Army reorganization - the US Army is moving way from brigade combat teams (BCT) to division-level units for peer-level conflict. For the past 20 or so years, BCT was used because it was more suited for constabulary duties in certain and distant regions but it lacked sufficient depth to push around peer forces or to sustain a fight against a peer-level foe for very long.
All that said, I thought that the occupation of the South was going to be handled by a newly formed Civil Guard/Gendarmerie rather than the US Army. It will be interesting to see how they handle Southern resentment. On one hand, they eventually have to win over/convince Southerners that cooperating with them is the best bet. On the other hand, they have to have a big enough stick to make good their power. It could end up that the Gendarmerie becomes a pseudo-army or even a National Guard equivalent ITTL.
Unlikely. Racist cops are a global problem, not just an American or even Anglosphere issue.
Yeah I know. Though I want to believe that the problem would be reduced somewhat.
Well, in the mid-19th century they say a third of New York City's police were irish. This won't happen on the national scale but I would think there could be some localities where even a larger percentage of the police force was black. If that was the case then it would at least reduce the problem. Maybe even in the major Northern city. Chicago is still smaller and growing and as a young burgeoning City that might be a solution to keep it from becoming really segregated like it became in our timeline. Make sure that the police were more evenly distributed. Who would be a good Chicago / Illinois leader who could work on that I wonder?
But yes, sadly, this is a global problem because it is a problem of the heart. It is one of those ways in which the verse is so apt that "man's heart is deceitfully wicked; who can know it?"
The best bet is to get the idea across that the police are there to protect and not to enforce. Or something like that. A few years ago I read that this was the difference between the British police and American but I don't remember the exact quote.
The thing is, in a war such as this one, where the survival of the Union itself is at stake, most government policies are almost completely geared towards wartime needs and Reconstruction plans. There's few policies outside of these. I guess the only relevant one is in regards to Native Americans, but I have said little or nothing about their situation due to a lack of knowledge and a lack of sources. The only thing that's been established for sure is that the lamentable Dakota War was mostly averted because Lincoln decided to rush in supplies, afraid to open another front when dealing with a worse situation in the South.
I envision some sort of permanent Federal presence in the South in the form of a gendarmerie or Army outposts, because undoubtedly some kind of Federal enforcement in the face of the resistance of White Southerners will be necessary for years, if not decades, to come. I don't know what effects it could have in European calculations, however. Some discussions on this thread seem to point towards the experience of this Civil War making the US more isolationist; others believe it could justify more imperialism. I'm not too sure myself, since my focus is on the domestic scene.
I still believe that the greatest contribution of the US to any European war would be, at least at first, logistical and material. Even at its most extreme I don't think the US would keep a standing army of a million men like the European states did. And like @Arnold d.c points out, such a force is bound to be more like a police body than an Army ready for military operations.
Wait a second, how did I just find out about this? A TL based, at least partially, on my vision for the US is a great compliment. And it was made by @Rattigan, who I know followed the TL (not sure if they still do), and I am just learning this now.
The US, in my research, seems to have stopped caring about Liberia after it was concluded that colonization of freedmen was unpracticable. There were some efforts on the part of Black Americans to migrate to Liberia after Reconstruction collapsed, so I guess that will be butterflied, but those efforts never managed to move a truly massive amount of people.I wonder if Liberia will have a different fate thanks to a different post-war US.
Also, if this version of the US will be less racist, does that mean the vote to annex the Dominican Republic will pass?
Annexation of Santo Domingo - Wikipedia
I frankly want to just butterfly the whole mess. I loathe American imperialism in my Latin America, and the fiasco actually helped to revitalize racism somewhat.
Yes! More on that in the next update!
I'll be frank and say that I've always believed that the discourse surrounding the 13th amendment is disingenuous and always translates modern ideas into the past. It is something that frustrates me, because every single time it is mentioned there's someone saying "Oh, they intentionally made prisoners slaves, you see, to continue slavery". But if you think about it, it doesn't make any sense. If the Congressmen who approved the amendment wanted to retain slavery in any way or form, they could have just not passed the amendment at all. If they wanted to continue slavery, why would they do so in a weak, watered-down form instead of simply continuing slavery as it was? Moreover, people act as if the framers of the amendment were the same people who were then down south using prisoners as slaves. No, the Southerners who used prison labor and the provisions of the Black codes to try and approximate slavery did so in defiance of the amendment's spirit and the intentions of its framers. When Congress realized this, they acted by starting Radical Reconstruction, and Southerners only were able to use prison labor in large scale when Reconstruction collapsed altogether. The Republicans in Congress and the Democrats of the South were not in cahoots to continue slavery, they were at odds, and if the Southerners had to recur to the "loophole" it was because the amendment was effective in destroying actual chattel slavery. Finally, I just can't help but feel that saying that prisoners are still slaves minimizes the horros of slavery. Don't get me wrong, prison labor is a horrible practice that should be ended, but there's a great chasm between it and ante-bellum slavery in scope, practice and conception.
Sorry for the rant. There's nothing wrong with your comment, and I appreciate your contribution. This answer isn't meant for you specifically, but it's rather me expressing my view on a relevant issue for the TL - my version of the 13th amendment still includes the "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" part, not as a loophole but rather for the same reasons it was there in OTL: because it was in the Northwest Ordinance and Republicans wanted to harken back to it.
At the end of the day any law enforcement agency is more concerned with the maintenance of order and the defense of the State's interests than with seeking justice or protecting people. As long as racism remains a problem in the US, it will remain a problem in its police. That said, this US is going to be less racist, so the situation should be somewhat better. Obviously not perfect, because things never are.
In many parts of the South, at the height of Reconstruction, entire police departments and its authorities were Black. With a more successful Reconstruction, the view of police could radically shift, from something to "maintain order", to an exercise in community development and protection.