Here's a little something different, a party system for a surviving Confederacy inspired by me learning that the Democrats in the Confederate Congress lost seats to Whigs in the second Confederate election cycle and deciding to make one data point a trend 🤔 Color me surprised! In any case, Lincoln is elected but assassinated early, with President Hamlin losing the 1864 election to McClellan and the Confederacy going its own way.
It's not all sunshine and roses for Dixie, with the the collapse of the Northern Democrats in the aftermath leaving a
National Union Party more than willing to use protectionism against the Confederacy and a
Radical Democracy Party that views overt abolitionism (and covert support for slave uprisings) to be a winning strategy. In any case, this post isn't about those parties.
- The Constitutional Union Party has grown in the fertile southern soil and has displaced the Democrats as the natural party of government in the CSA. Declaring that their highest virtue is the defense of the (Confederate) Constitution, the CUP pursues a policy of Whiggish internal improvements in order to simultaneously boost the Southron economy and better centralize the fractured states in the face of lingering Yankee aggression. As the party of the constitutional order any attempt to end the peculiar institution is a nonstarter- it's baked in and not going anywhere. God help us all.
- The Readjuster Party is very much the underdog of Confederate politics- even putting aside the fact that it's the only party that offers membership to nonwhites the whole "form a populist coalition to topple the planter class" doesn't win them any friends from the political establishment. Although constant state suppression has all but transformed the party into a secret society, it has grown slowly but steadily in Appalachia by absorbing the remaining Southern Unionists and appealing to the growing populist tendency rejecting the economic devastation caused by the preservation of slavery.
